Taylor Byas

You’re It | Golden Shovel

—after Tamla Horsford

“You are a Black girl, but don't know. you sleep
next to it. crooked bone, split-open head.”
            —Joy Priest, “Nightstick”

The sleepover nettles itself into a frenzy from everyone’s restlessness. You
sleep yet?—tossed like a horseshoe to snag on the poles of your breaths. The birds are

trilling each other into silence to hear the grass sink its blades into the sole of a
bare foot. The soft crunch of lost battle. Outside, you huddle under the black

tarp of night with the others, shock someone with your body’s static. One girl
dares you all into the woods for hide-and-seek. It will be fun, she says. But

the thick foliage of the trees chokes out the moonlight. A voice tells you Don’t
peek as they lead you into the brush, two hands over your eyes. You know

how to play right? And sure you do. You close your eyes and count to 30. You
listen until there is no difference from their clumsy skittering and the sleep-

crossed frisking of squirrels overhead. When you open your eyes, you are next
to nothing, night unfolding like a black hibiscus in each direction. You call out to

the group, Ready or not, here I come. Taunt yourself with the echo. It
takes a while for the eyes to adjust, to unlearn the shape of a killer from the crooked

branches, to hear anything but the papered leaves snapping like bone
beneath your steps. You are a fawn then, your jelly-legged steps testing the soil, the split-

second freeze when suddenly the girls reappear for a different game, yipping into the night open-
mouthed—a flashlight shining into your eyes, your back kissing the ground, a bounty on your head.

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Taylor Byas is a Black poet and essayist from Chicago. She currently lives in Cincinnati, where she is a second year PhD student and Albert C. Yates Scholar at the University of Cincinnati. She is also a reader for both The Rumpus and The Cincinnati Review, and the Poetry Editor for FlyPaper Lit. Her work appears or is forthcoming in New Ohio Review, Borderlands Texas Poetry Review, Hobart, Pidgeonholes, Jellyfish Review and others.