​​​​​Notes on "Brian Laundrie Told the Police Gabby Petito Was Crazy" by Meggie Royer
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“Brian Laundrie Told the Police Gabby Petito Was Crazy” is a haunting meditation on what it means to speak from the edge of disbelief. I was struck by the booming echo of its first two lines, the speaker’s fate already locked, before it even begins, in the total rhyme of a bludgeon falling twice, as if to remind us of its urgent and prescient warning. The surreality of the piece offers itself as a distorted refuge, how the speaker escapes the horror of her reality—intrusive as it is—within an impossible well “where we put things / that would not be accepted elsewhere,” a deep sanctum of believability, where she will be, finally, held. Royer moves with an unsettling rhythm, mimicking the way trauma can distort time and language. I was especially drawn to how the Royer resists conventional form and grammar, instead capturing the dissociative texture of lived distress. It’s a poem that immerses us in its urgency, leaving behind an uneasy feeling that’s hard to name, but impossible to ignore.
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Notes on "Brian Laundrie Told the Police Gabby Petito Was Crazy" by Meggie Royer
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In this dreamlike poem, vulnerability and violence pulse in each line, unfurling individual stor(ies) within the context of a murder that made nationwide news and opened further dialogue about domestic violence, changing laws. In this poem, the themes of broken trust and suppression are resonant, real, and understated. We don't need to know more than the poem's first sentence to be wise to the infuriatingly common, victim-blaming responses to violence or to emotionally understand the "well" of "things / that would not be accepted elsewhere." My favorite image is that of moonlight slowly dimming in water and stone. My favorite lines are those that show consciousness of the big picture—of tenacity, survival, and endurance—adding an alertness to all that follows, the speaker "a landscape devoted to bringing itself back, / in a world devoted to burning it."
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Gabby Petito's story continues to make a difference.​
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