Invasive by Subhaga Crystal Bacon

Invasive

On the split, stacked wood, carvings like music
notes or tattoos. In the long-standing pines
that flank the yard, bore holes I took
for woodpecker marks, fishing for what lives
inside bark. Instead, it is that hunted

thing, pine bark beetle that burrows
deep into soft wood, browns the needles.
There is no cure. The arborist said these two
are non-native species, red pine.
They can’t withstand the attack. Once in Halifax,

a whole park of trees was culled, each
brought down, become timber or fuel for fire, or pulp
for the paper factories. Dumping the two split
cords for this winter, we found beetles dead
in their burrows. The wood cutter pried

one out. Much of the wood is soft at the edges,
bark meets flesh tunneled into lace,
falls off in a puff of dust under my maul.
When I hang my laundry, one red pine blocks
the sun from my eyes. It’s full of Steller’s jays

demanding more seed, more suet.
In its neighbor, a green disk swing
hangs on a rope where a boy whiles away
time, and a windchime made of forks
stirs melodies out of air. The first

dead bundles hang beneath egg-shaped
cones. How long until the chainsaw rends
it into rounds, then half and quarter rounds
to split and burn, messages from years
of invasion up the chimney like lost hope?

*

Subhaga Crystal Bacon (they/them), is the author of four collections of poetry including the Lambda Literary finalist, Transitory, 2023, winner of the BOA Editions, Ltd. Isabella Gardner Award for Poetry; Surrender of Water in Hidden Places, winner of the Red Flag Poetry Chapbook Prize, 2023, released in an expanded second edition in the summer of 2024. A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, Subhaga is a teaching artist working in schools and libraries with youth and adults, as well as private students. Their work appears in a variety of print and online journals including The Diode Poetry Journal, The Bellevue Literary Review, Indianapolis Review, Smartish Pace, and others. A Queer elder, they live in rural north central Washington on unceded Methow land.