Of Wait
By Elisabeth Preston-Hsu
The coastline paradox is the length of a coastline is not static, and depends on the scale used to measure it. Coasts are not made of straight lines. They cannot be measured definitively.
I.
A reindeer grows antlers in the same pattern year to year. No other mammal can regenerate an organ naturally. The same knob on the left remains lower than the right. The same velvet tissue bleeds ribbons onto snow when injured. It’s the same over and over but the possibilities depend on scale. Dark will find light. Heat will find cold. Water will find salt.
II.
Detours grow fast in the spring. Each place in between
breath drifts a memory and is scribbled with footprints,
and moves to more wait. Syllables of redbud trees
in early spring. It’s the complexity of thistle* growing
next to gorse. The closer you look, the more there is
to measure. Where the river ends and the ocean begins,
that is wait. Is edge edge edge. Where coastline is infinite,
waiting. Mandelbrot’s curve is never a true boundary.
A rubber band twanged between two fingers, a potential.
The angular momentum of a proton.
III.
I sit on the eleventh floor
of the hospital, just below
the level of fog, in an alcove
of windows. The longer I sit,
the longer the string of 5 o’clock
traffic tightens outside, before
I leave work for home. I’ve resigned
myself to this, this worsening
while finding calm, minutes of balm,
before my addition to gridlock.
Patients’ families sit nearby,
humming to music on iPhones,
their whispers woven into mats
of anxious futures. Hints of what
their loved ones could say if not missing
tongues or larynges. Tracheostomies
grow from throats like nascent antlers,
and sutures track these detours.
Expectations must be redrawn.
The city skyline creases into dark
and threads of tail lights thicken.
It’s a slow plod, this inevitable.
How we move into gradual discomfort
of gas fumes, bumper to bumper,
engines’ vibrations keeping us
on track, waiting for something to move,
something concrete to measure.
*“The complexity of thistle” – from Jane Mead’s collection Money Money Money Water Water Water
About the Author
Elisabeth Preston-Hsu (she/her/hers) spent her childhood on Illinois prairie, coastal Maine, and briefly in Cambridgeshire, England. She's published in Bellevue Literary Review, Chicago Quarterly Review, CALYX, West Trade Review, MacQueen’s Quinterly, North American Review, and elsewhere. She won The Healing Muse’s F. Sean Hodge Prize for Poetry in 2024. She’s a physician in Atlanta, Georgia. Follow her on Instagram @writers.eatery and Bluesky @elisabethpreston@bsky.social.
