Subhaga Crystal Bacon
Winter 2025 | Poetry
Pantywaist. He looks like he sits down to pee.
This is what they said, with no name
for me, for what I was. Once, my mother
used the word dyke to describe a woman
with a cigarette dangling from her lips,
like your grandmother, meaning, I think,
a rough kind of woman.
On one pre-pubescent, bicycle riding day I thought,
I’ll probably be a homosexual when I grow up.
Conservatives in their fear believe that,
if we give them language, kids will turn out
Queer, nonbinary, or transgender.
They may as well burn all the dictionaries,
grow kids in silent rooms. Still they’ll
name themselves free.
Subhaga Crystal Bacon (they/them) is the author of four collections of poetry including the Isabella Gardner Award-winning Transitory (2023), from BOA Editions, a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry in 2024, and Surrender of Water in Hidden Places (2023), winner of the Red Flag Poetry Chapbook Prize, recently released in a second edition. They are a teaching artist in schools and libraries as well as working with private students individually and in groups. A Queer elder, they live in rural north central Washington on unceded Methow land.