Whitney Koo
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STILL DURING THE RUSSIAN INVASION
​
My body kills all day.
Its cells. Swallowed parasites.
My body aborts all on its own.
The waste. Unfertilized eggs.
My baby. It didn’t need any help.
My body gets out of bed.
An elegy. A sky knifed in the peach pit.
My elegy holds around my neck.
Has fallen off its bicycle.
Continues to fail what it sets off to do.
Oh, elegy, poor and poor dear.

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ODE TO THE LINE
​
Death is the vision of a line. By way of a cliff as a choice or a push. The landscape from the
perspective of the cliff blooms, hardens, regrets, opens, hardens again to the cliff like
running up to a wall. By way of a cliff, I was thinking through suspension as a risk. A child
fishing Tylenol out one by one from the bottom of their mother’s purse. A little pile on the
table. Finger-slicing white island to form smaller islands. The want to fall. The line sitting in
front of bad television; a solar system diorama hanging on by strings. Death at one end of
the line. Beginning far away at the other end. And the middle, a flat horizon we run to and
fall out of.

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Whitney Koo is the founder and editor-in-chief of Gasher Press and a Ph.D. candidate in English - Creative Writing at Oklahoma State University. Her work has appeared in journals such as Colorado Review, American Literary Review, Heavy Feather Review, Bayou Magazine, Breakwater Review, and others. Originally from Arizona, Whitney currently resides in Lubbock, TX with her husband, Bonhak, and cat, Bunny.