Kyla Bills’ Everything Dies and I Guess That’s Okay is a collection of poetry that whispers the truth while it screams the emotions. Bills captures a love that pulses from possibilities but bleeds out black with concrete uncertainties. A type of lust and longing that bubbles under too many synonyms and day-old mac n cheese. Her poems chart through the confusion that millennials shift through to find themselves, to find a calling, to find one who they can be swept up by.
Bills is painfully self-aware, a both broken and indestructible woman who continues to fight a battle she knows she will lose. One we will all inevitably lose. She swells up with questions and then pops them with insights only to shatter those with another perspective — a lens smeared with contradicting opinions and she does this effortlessly.
“i like to think that love can’t be bad
but i don’t think that’s true”
She understands the fleeting and romantic aspects of love and bright city lights as well as the anxiousness and confinement of Cul-de-sacs. She is the ode to the non-traumatic adolescents but the overly-emotional childhoods. Her love, her boyfriends, her un-antiquated view of the world shimmers out her poems like crackling light at dawn which never warms what it touches. But it wants to. Her statements are bold and loaded and at the same time easy to digest.
“where are you?”
“somewhere between accepting that you don’t want me
and still being angry at you for it.”
Everything Dies and I guess that’s Okay is the darting screenshots and mirrored aftermaths of a tech savvy girl trying to piece together the unknown that is her life. That is the afterlife. And she is scared of piecing things together too well, fitting the edges without any sort of resistance because if she is good at it — she will get addicted.
“our society is pretty fucked in that way
doing anything well is probably unhealthy
everyone is addicted to something
and we all just pretends it’s okay
usually”
Her poems are the beauty in back alleys and the walks to museums. Never the art. It’s her flaws and the awareness of these flaws that make her words inviting and make her fascinating.
“art is the day that we forget about each other
art is the first day we met”
Her words stand alone because she is alone. When she is with someone else, she still is and when she is truly alone, she is more so. Her blacked vulnerability trails off each phrase with swift cadence and a slow progression to the understanding. Slow but necessary. It is a lingering thought that whips across rooms until it hushes but never leaves. Bills’ poems are drunk stupors right at the beginning of dusk and the day’s weight at 7 a.m. Understanding that only come from living.
It is remarkable the amount of gusto littered in her poetry for a women her age. She is beyond her years while staying relevant and relatable to the millennials. And I am beyond changed after reading.
You can buy a copy of Everything Dies and I Guess That’s Okay from Ghost City Press here.