Poetry by Subhaga Crystal Bacon

Carl Wycoff CC



I wait and ache. I think I have been healing.

              after Sylvia Plath


Over fifty years since Audrey Hepburn sang Moon River on that fire 
escape, her hair in a towel, I find the sheet music. It’s in The First 
50 Piano Songs You Should Play. I believe that someone would know
what I should play. Or that a girl—as they called her—would sing, wistfully,

from her window. Outside the late winter sun melts the top of the snow--
not warm enough to thaw it all the way through. It’s February, spring 
still weeks away. Nostalgia is an acute homesickness, from the Greek 
words for return and pain.  I don’t know what I’m returning from or to, 

only the sweet pain as I play the melody. I don’t know what waits
round the bend. Could it be that thing that’s missing from myself, rainbow’s gold,
despite the riches of my life here and now. I only know it lures 
like the river of the underworld, that much sought out oblivion. 

It seems to me as real as the river here in this Valley—its fire 
of liquid ice— the way it burns relentlessly its path to the sea.

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Subhaga Crystal Bacon (she/they) is a Queer poet living in rural Washington on unceded Methow land. She is the author of four collections of poetry including Surrender of Water in Hidden Places, Red Flag Poetry, 2022, and the Isabella Gardner Award-winning Transitory, forthcoming in the fall from BOA Editions. Transitory, BOA Editions Surrender of Water PoetryAwakening YouTube