Poetry By ​Elisabeth Preston-Hsu

Christian Collins CC




She cleans her dead parents’ home, her fatigue 

strung on a loom. She twangs a thread & waits 
for a wail. Instead, the thread hums an insect’s outro, 
finished in a grave. Chitin segments & barbed legs crunch 

into the space. Every morning’s humidity wakes her 
with the flies’ drone serving empty breakfasts. She 
revisits her family’s warp & weft. Each box 

rattles with shuttles, plaited fibers, argots 
from ancestors wrapped in worry’s threads. 
Puckered & stiff, a reservoir that cannot unravel. 

It takes time to undo the uneven weave 
of ghosts; no one person can untangle it. Port to port, 
a coracle insists on passage through this past. 

Place her hands on another mooring 
next to the banyan tree. Wait 
for the mycelium to gather.

​




Separate Territory

I'm out of the city's cist, into a widening syrinx beyond. I drive 
along the folded edge of farmgrid as sky turns into the bluest jar.

I've left the end rows of corn, the ones farmers plant to guide 
wanderers out of the fields. Neon sun tightens into dusk. 

Headed to rock and algae along glacial erratics 
and striped feldspar, serrations of trees revel in wind 

and stand straight in every season. DNA is impossible 
to destroy completely. I shed fragments of it everywhere, 

base-pairs in attraction. The trees know this, their roots burying 
bits of me for safekeeping. Fifty-six vertebrae are scattered

along the fenestrations of sandbar and forest. An animal 
with such significance should forever haunt me embalmed 

by torn greys, everywhere. Nature isn't human-drawn. 
It's whole, each foramen a portal for the next field.

​


​Elisabeth Preston-Hsu has published in CALYX, West Trade Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, North American Review, Poetry Northwest, and elsewhere. She won The Healing Muse’s F. Sean Hodge Poetry Prize in 2024 and Common Ground Review’s poetry contest in 2025. Follow her on Instagram @writers.e