Elisabeth Preston-Hsu
Find Elisabeth Preston-Hsu’s work in Bellevue Literary Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, CALYX, The Sun, MacQueen’s Quinterly, North American Review, and elsewhere. She’s a physician in Atlanta, Georgia. Follow her on Instagram @writers.eatery.​

I am the nuisance beaver


​you slaughtered one Christmas. 
My flat tail disarticulated before you 
splayed open my rib cage like a quilt. 
The deep maroon of intercostals connecting 
bone. I’ve become an apron of animal, all grass 
and reed and nut in flesh, the brilliant chlorophylls 
ground up with my yellow teeth magnificent. 

You remember me marooned and recall the novel 
where its characters eat dessert of snapping-turtle blood 
and chocolate. The nitrogen and urea gave it depth 
like the waters I dammed. It all comes back 
to animal. It all comes down to the small hours 
of night when I bundled myself, my tenacity rising 
with dawn. I took down tree after tree, pushing the stink

of human run-off away. 
Unfair advantage: buckshot. 
You took me out with a bullet under my left eye. 
Pan-fried, I evaporate musk. 
It is oil and urine and vanilla and tungsten, 
the taste of river and resin of the north woods. 
You make a fajita dinner of me, your family complicit

in their bites. You become tail-slap loud 
and toe-webbed. Fragmented, I weave 
into your cells. All I wanted was to be close 
to water, the heart of the world near mine. 
Listen with me now, how it cracks 
and crumbles, your hands damning the earth, 
our ribs flattened against soil.




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