“Last Text from Gabby Petito” by Susan Doble Kaluza (original) (raw)

LAST TEXT FROM GABBY PETITO

No service here, but at least I’m free

from the cage bars of my body;

remember what I’d blogged in observation

of birds, chipmunks fattened on the scraps

left in abandoned campsites in the cold

after the fires are snuffed out, and the stars—

oh, these stars—how they’re arranged

without number, and how they disclaim

the disappearances inferred of them,

but instead declare the secrets upon

which all darkness preys. Insects

I doodled on notecards

and sent home already will testify

of my whereabouts—imagine the how,

the when, the why revealed in the

caricature of the dragonfly—

I’ve lain looking up so long,

the windswept grass retains

the shape of my body, moonlights

as my spine; after the rain,

the sky in some parallel agony

soaked out of me some heavier

silence I’d always felt in the earth,

and to it, a kind of mooring far more

real than the live honeysuckle

and wild licorice I could almost

smell; and the caddis with their assorted

thoraxes retract into clipped

thumbnails and cut

grass; their buds—my own

body—are, to the pile of ants,

a worthy and contrite fodder.

What astonishing weight

my own thoughts make

at the moment, the unravelling

of many ropes set to anchor;

think tie-dyed everything,

the clasping peppergrass

and what lies in the green water

under algae, what sloshes through

the culverts mixed with sand

and gravel. Please know I was not

gunned down or knived in half,

but cast on a spit; I was spun

clay on the wheel of a potter.

He created the soul of me.

He loved me, then hated me.

He hated me, then kissed me.

He kissed me, then hit me.

The ocean of him swept

over me, a certain, undocumented

upwelling, of all the places we’d been,

cheap-shotted and piece-mealed out

to sea; and even here I am writing

in my mind that knows nothing but

to feel my heart leap out and breathe

into me everything that had died

in it before.

—from Poets Respond
September 26, 2021

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Susan Doble Kaluza: “This poem is written as though Gabby were texting her mother from where she was left. As we know, her last text was thought not to be from her, and stated merely that there was no service in Yosemite. The poem is, of course, based on the information published, which collectively, through a 911 call and police bodycams, reveal both physical and emotional abuse at the hands of her boyfriend. When her body was identified and her death ruled a homicide, I wrote this poem as if she were writing about her own death and what she was feeling in the end. As a travel blogger, she loved in-depth descriptions, and outside of her blog, social media accounts, and texts to her mother she had no voice in what was happening to her. I believe, as I believe about all victims of domestic and partner abuse, that she was hiding the truth from her family—and is also common in abuse victims—protecting or shielding her abuser. I wrote this poem in the first person to draw close to her in a way that would help me feel what she felt in those last moments. The plants described in the poem are common in western states, including Wyoming, and not necessarily the ones that grow in the specific area where she was found. This poem is also a tool to bring much needed awareness to domestic and partner abuse.”