WHITNEY KOO / ELEGY AGAINST

With no form left, the dead come
rushing back in too many.

Projector spokes clipping film reel
to bleeding chimera.

The ceiling fan pulsating how you
ate your blood back up.

Valentines lining the Walgreens’ shelves sweet
as the brain’s red crawling across pink bedding. 

Absence not recovered but dispersed.              Memory

organizing longing into horror;
A chair left in the corner of the room.

A couple downstairs pooling
over the finances until someone’s hands fly up
in exhaustion. The chair where it was reverses

its shape out of sight. Could be
anywhere. Everywhere.

Where she is the ceiling fan beating,
she is still the rain drowning the yard.  

The brown rot cut out of sweet potato
is too the spill, unsweetened Valentine.

Still worse: to reinvent place: thoughts and prayers,
heaven and name to call for—

A telephone ringing

  could be anyone calling
but the dead—

                                    and yet everyone kept calling

  don’t go.

not yet.

come back.

Language an assumed place
makes nowhere a where  

frosted shadow moving across a plane
of winter glass;

Potential for a voice to speak out of vacate.

(makes me suspicious

of everything, boiling

water on low heat while I drink another beer.

                        Dialing             and

                                                            Re        dialing
 

police before anything occurs.)

Nowhere: Throated space singing.

I command your spirit:

be gone or be whole again.

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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.