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Kyla Houbolt is a poet and gardener living in North Carolina.

“All lives, all dances, and all is loud” from the Gabon Pygmy, is quoted by Jerome Rothenberg in the anthology Technicians of the Sacred. I was pulled to poetry because I wanted to participate in that, in the ways humans create. I grew up with poetry in the household, read aloud, on bookshelves, and immersed myself in it seriously at times, though I never sought a career. That kind of immersion into creation is also why I began gardening. I wanted to participate in the way the earth makes beauty. In this way for me poetry and gardening have shared roots. It has to do with life force and how it manifests all things. My five (so far) chapbooks are children of the internet, when it became relatively easy to find venues and connect with other poets and with publishers of poetry. But my very first published poem appeared in a little newsprint quarterly called Cedar Rock, out of West Texas, sometime in the early 1970s. Neither it nor its editor is with us anymore.

— Kyla Houbolt

Appropriate Drowning Outfit

I'm not sure how to turn this life into a resume.
I don't write that kind of poetry.
I do notice that the cloud
has a bone missing and
I can relate to that. I'll be honest
and say I have learned only one word
of heron language and it may be
that I made it up. It's easy for me to do that
and I hear people lie a lot in resumes
but I can't, not without vomiting the truth
later on. Which defeats the whole purpose.
Meanwhile is a word I use too often.
It's because so much else is also happening
all the time, and I keep noticing it.
For example, the way I continue to, impossibly,
live. Paying close attention
to the wrong things. The boneless cloud.
The inscrutable heron. The abuse of sound.