Assuming a 1940s tintype’s little deaths: responding to Boris Eldagsen’s “The Electrician” from Pseudomnesia
Elisabeth Preston-Hsu
I’m a deathing, someone captioned the photo, hashtagged
and all one word. Imadeathing.
A label of when a family and the room’s air were sliced
in troubling archive. Its mother must dream cathedrals, wisdom
buttressing ghosts, high ceilings groping hope into her daughter’s shoulder.
This daughter watches the second hand tick its erection. Brass echoes
through the door. Her mother turns her daughter forward to wed.
Or, this daughter looks to her father’s photo on the mantel, her eyes
jellyfish colored. Her mother’s rheumatism pains her. Hunger bites,
a horsefly drawing blood. The fireplace once sounded like an ocean
when her father was alive. She looks for her father across a meadow
and lacuna on the moon. Sweep the floor to stay warm and a human
becomes a radiator. This daughter thins her mother’s grief, is a shield.
Such specific beauty makes her real. A butterfly. A cocoon broken with a pin.
Or, this daughter turns from too many hands. Her father out of frame,
Picassoed face crooked with a grin, home after war. Moves her eyes
toward the clomp of his boots arriving when embers hiss the hour
on the clock. Her eyes are unseeing, scarred by fever. Her mother’s mouth
is unscolexed: the inside rind of a lemon feels like her toothless gums,
yet she hangs like a lamprey, angling her daughter to the arrival,
to the unfamiliar scent of her father.
—————————————-But wait. Their arms misarticulate. Fingers askew,
—————————————-a pupil distorted. Ambitions lit there, all fictions. Blur
—————————————-where a sleeve begins and her skin ends. Suffering
—————————————-disfigures us, them. It must. Unbodies. Light leaks
—————————————-from the left like a neon sign, a peek behind a curtain
—————————————-of algorithm. Reconstitutions not human but moieties
—————————————-of code. Interpretations unable to bleed.
—————————————-I made a thing, the caption reads.
—————————————-Imadeathing.
Author’s note: Poem inspired by “The Electrician” from the Pseudomnesia photo series, Boris Eldagsen (Germany), 2023. See photo here, and click here for more info on the photo.
Elisabeth Preston-Hsu (she/her/hers) has published in 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 and The Common Ground’s annual poetry contest in 2025. She’s a physician in Atlanta, Georgia. Follow her on Instagram @writers.eatery, Facebook, and Bluesky @elisabethpreston@bsky.social.
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