My Body, My Body, this House
After the seismic shock,
all the pillars in me broke
Doric, Ionic, Corinthian,
and in your honor, Tuscan.
Stacks of vertebrae held
by their own weight
shuddered and fell. My heart,
that furnace, full of mice
instead of heat. They gnaw
at the wires. What’s attached
misfires. All my windows
commandeered, no longer see
what’s before me. Like the phone
camera’s swiveled lens, point
inward where you remain.
I’m sweeping this week instead
of weeping. Shoulder shingles
to patch the roof. Look.
I close off holes where light
might come in or escape.
As if We Tossed Them in a Cup
The sky is full of vertebra.
Overhead, smack between north
and south, human bones
stretched out, scapula to pelvis.
In the west, the snake you feared
as long as I knew you, and before.
The cloud bones elongate,
fly into the setting sun.
Now, your bones — where are they?
Burned? Interred? I dream of a green
burial for myself, sprout of tree
rooting between the ossified parts of me.
Click here to read Subhaga Crystal Bacon on the origin of the poems.
Image by Aleksandr Gorlov on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.
Subhaga Crystal Bacon:
As If We Tossed Them in a Cup
Friendship is one of life’s greatest blessings. I was lucky to have a very dear longtime friend in the late poet Jennifer Martelli, who passed from pancreatic cancer on September 25, 2025. Jenn’s passing was one of the most painful experiences in my life and at the same time inspired me to write for and about her. In the weeks following her death, I wrote a couple of dozen elegies in different forms. This one came to me one morning in the hot tub looking up at the sky and seeing in the clouds, bones. The bones became the central metaphor for the poem. I chose the sonnet form because Jenn and I both love it obsessively. It was a moment of contemplation about our bodies returning to the earth that lent itself well to the sonnet form. It was remarkable how body-like the clouds were, and they brought Jenn to mind, especially once I saw the snake skeleton, as Jenn famously feared them. At the time I wrote this, I didn’t know what had become of Jenn’s bones, and that question came to me as I contemplated the cloud-bones, and connected me to sky and earth, where ultimately, we all end up.
My Body, My Body this House
I’m part of a wonderful writing group that meets on Zoom. During each meeting, a couple of people share poems they’ve been reading. We read them aloud, each person taking a few lines, then we extract writing prompts from the poems. What did we like? What worked best? What was unusual in terms of diction, form, structure and so on. Then we spend half an hour writing our own poem from the draft. This poem came from one of those workshops. I forget what other poems we looked at in addition to May Swenson’s “Question,” which begins with the iconic lines “Body my house / my horse my hound.” There was also a poem about patching up a house. These seemed to be perfect metaphors for the experience and aftermath of grief. My friend Jenn Martelli’s death was seismic for me, shook all the pillars of my foundation, and still, because as Frost says in “Out, Out—,” “And they, since they / Were not the one dead, turned to their affairs,” I must go on with my life, patch it up the best I can. So, through poetry, I shoulder the shingles.
Subhaga Crystal Bacon (they/them) is the author of five collections of poetry, A Brief History of My Sex Life, forthcoming from Lily Poetry Review Books, and the Lambda Literary Award finalist Transitory, from BOA Editions, 2023. A Queer elder, they live in rural Washington on unceded Methow land.
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