This river runs into a bar. I can’t go to bars anymore but this is my favorite kind of bar, like we used to have on the neighborhood streets in Baltimore, where the drinkers mostly all know each other and it’s like your living room only this one has a river and I think the Baltimore bar-goers would be pleasantly surprised by a river in their bar, especially those fellows who sit there every morning around 6 am and hoist a couple before heading to work, because the river can carry them off in boats and they can even take their beers with them and possibly not go to work and because of the river being so kind and full of sweet fish they will not even worry about their families and the river will provide for them also because it is so grateful to be able to visit their bar and watch that special basketball game on television and even buy a pack of smokes from the machine because this river does smoke but only just a little bit not so’s you’d even notice because it is a healthy river and does not want to die and does not want its Baltimore drinkers in the boats to die from secondhand smoke either so it keeps the cigarettes in its car glove compartment and only sneaks one or two on the way home from its shift. There are no river songs on the jukebox. And once again, it did not get a raise.
Kyla Houbolt‘s chapbook, But Then I Thought, is forthcoming from Above/ground Press http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/. Also forthcoming is chapbook Surviving Death, from Broken Spine Arts, https://thebrokenspine.co.uk/ in November, along with a re-release of the chapbook Dawn’s Fool. The chapbook Tuned is currently available from CCCP Chapbooks, here: https://cccpchapbooks.bigcartel.com/product/tuned-selected-poems-by-kyla-houbolt. More of Kyla’s work can be found on her linktree, https://linktr.ee/luaz_poet. She is on Twitter @luaz_poet