Subhaga Crystal Bacon
Winter 2026 | Poetry
Forest Farmers
Today, we own approximately 2.5 million acres of highly productive forests in Oregon and Washington.
- Weyerhauser.com
Across Mineral Lake, a bald hill.
One high-limbed tree on the crest,
a hair overlooked in cutting.
Beneath the hill’s familiar shadow,
cormorants perch on stumps and rocks.
Along the road, signs say No Camp!
on five hundred of the two thousand acres
the YMCA owns. What else to do
to preserve natural resource land?
How to weigh what matters more?
Around the state, slash piles mark
what’s been cut, Doug Fir,
in twenty years tall enough to cull.
But fire does not care about plans.
The Northwest no longer wet enough.
Along the road, acres of pines, de-limbed
higher than a man stand in nightmare fields.
Back home, we bring in spring cones,
sharp spikes on their tips. Each day
they relax their woody scales on the sun-warmed
kitchen table, grow fat seeds we save
for when flames scorch, destroy what’s grown
but gone. In Mineral, logging trucks rattle
windows in the morning hours.
Subhaga Crystal Bacon (they/them) is the author of five collections of poetry including A Brief History of My Sex Life, forthcoming from Lily Poetry Review Books in January of 2026, and Transitory (2023), from BOA Editions, a finalist for a Lambda Literary Award for Transgender Poetry in 2024. They are an AWP Writer to Writer mentor and teaching artist in schools and libraries as well as working with private students individually and in groups, and they are an assistant editor at Unsolicited Press. A Queer elder, they live in rural north central Washington on unceded Methow land.