Dave Bonta's «The Hollow (22)» sounds like something said quietly and left unfinished. The number in the title hints that it belongs to a longer sequence, but the poem stands on its own. A speaker remembers being five years old and frightened by a neighbor's ghost stories, then admits that something else frightened them more. As an adult, the speaker goes looking for the neighbor's house and finds only a red outhouse. The central idea is that the real loss turns out to be scarier than the invented ghosts. The storyteller has vanished, and what remains is an absence.
The poem begins in a grammatical fog. "not knowing / what's around the next bend" has no subject, and none arrives until the next stanza, where "five-year-old me" stands alone on its line. The syntax mimics the child's position: walking forward blind, with no one yet in the sentence to do the walking. The bend is a real turn in a path, and it is also the whole unknown future. Nothing in the poem is capitalized or ended with a full stop, so the memory never closes. It simply trails from image to image.
The ghost story comes through in fragments. A "headless hunter's / lantern on moonless nights" is a good piece of folklore because it contains a puzzle: who is holding the light, and what can a hunter without a head see by it? Then comes "in her quavery voice." The "her" has no name yet, since the stanza break withholds the teller until the next stanza. That is how a child hears a scary story, with the voice arriving before the person. The word "quavery" lets us hear the trembling of an old voice, which adds to the spookiness even as it hints at fragility.
The turn is the poem's best moment. "more frightening / than our neighbor's ghost stories / those wooden legs." The line break after "stories" lets the wooden legs land like a thud. The poem doesn't say whose legs they are, but judging by "her house" a few lines later, the likeliest reading is that they belong to the storyteller herself. A child's logic is perfectly captured here: a headless hunter is only imagined, but a real body with wooden legs is right there in the room. The scariest thing is not the supernatural but the odd, solid fact of a person.
Once we notice it, a pattern of missing or replaced parts runs through the poem. The hunter lacks a head, the neighbor has substitute legs, and the final image is a "vacant hole." The sounds support this. The h of "headless hunter's" comes back in "her house" and finally in "hole," so the ghostly material seems to bookend the poem. The title gives the same hint, since "hollow" can name a small valley, but it also means empty. The speaker is walking through a landscape that is also a kind of emptiness.
The ending is quiet and a little darkly funny. "I still look for her house" uses the present tense, so the child's curiosity has never stopped. "but there's just the red privy" deflates the search with that small word "just." The privy is the only color in a poem of moonless dark, and it is a humble, even comic survivor. The house, the neighbor and her stories are gone, but the outhouse stays put. The final line, "its vacant hole," stands by itself. Its isolation echoes the lonely line "five-year-old me," so the stanzas run 2-1-3-3-2-1, with a child at one end and a hole at the other.
There is no rhyme here, and the lines are short, between two and six syllables, closer to speech or breath than to metrical verse. The clipped fragments recall the compression of haiku, though the poem never counts syllables or tries to be a perfect miniature. It is a small story about memory in which the roles have swapped. As a child, the speaker feared a ghost who wasn't there. As an adult, the speaker faces a real absence, and the storyteller has become the ghost. The poem never says what happened to her, and that silence leaves the reader staring into the hole too.