Poetry by Kyla Houbolt

              Andrew Bartram CC



Real Ghosts

there's a skinny clown,
or someone in a clown suit,
barely mobile, spied from a 
window, then huddled 
in a doorway under leaves
too sad I thought
so I ignored it until
it faded away

I wondered about F.O.O. D.  
and is the whole universe 
built on one thing 
eating another and does God
eat our pain? Nope, 
way too strange so I 
ignored it gone

so many others
stacks of curled paper 
which I do not regret losing 
though Ab Logan, who wrote
his dissertation on The Faerie Queen
and mentioned it often,
said I was a good poet

I remember sitting in
Elliot's upstairs living room
eating cold borscht he'd made
--we sat on the bare wood floor--
reading Emily Dickinson
that was in Baltimore 
in summer, a good time
for poetry but I never
wrote that poem at all.

all these poems are dead
and haunt me, flutter around
my head and hands but I never
can flesh them back out
that's how I know
they're real ghosts and not
just dead poems.

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Kyla Houbolt (@luaz_poet) has no academic credentials but grew up in a household saturated with poetry and music. This nourished her creativity. She wrote poems early and often, rarely seeking publication until 2019 when she joined Twitter. She was nominated for both Pushcart and Best of the Net, and published in a large number of online journals. She has also shared poetry as the Greenway Poet, in her local walking park, posting poems up on trees. Her chapbook Dawn’s Fool was published in March 2020, and her second chapbook Tuned in November 2020. Her website is kylahoubolt.com.

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