GABY ORTIZ

Phantom

They keep asking me
what pictures live inside me
as if my ribs were a gallery
and admission was free.

Step inside:
on the left, the Malecón at dawn,
Guayaquil’s humidity curling my baby hairs,
vendors selling prayers and green mango
while my grandmother’s voice
is a hymn cracking my first teeth.

On the right, the Okanagan’s dry hills,
sagebrush and sunburnt apples,
me learning a new language of silence
where mountains echo but never answer.
This body is a suitcase
that never gets fully unpacked.
One handle smells like diesel buses and plantains,
the other of orchard dust and Canadian cold.
Every night I sleep between time zones,
ghosts of one country
clinking glasses with ghosts from another.

Who haunts me?
People who left before the picture developed.
An uncle’s laughter fading in the static of a bad connection.
A father shaped like a rumor.
Friends I buried under visas and snow.
They knock around my chest like loose change.
I joke about it—
say my heart’s a border crossing
staffed by underpaid angels
stamping passports on every heartbreak.
Tell people I’m a bilingual séance,
half prayer, half punch line.
But the punch line
is that there isn’t one.

Some nights the Okanagan moon
hangs heavy as a guanábana,
and the hills start sounding like the Guayas River.
Some nights my grandmother’s ghost
braids my hair with orchard twine.
Some nights I stop fighting
and let all my histories crawl into bed with me
like stray dogs that somehow know my name.

And even then—
in the museum of my chest
where Guayaquil’s dawn and Okanagan dusk
bleed into each other—
I’m still here,
still breathing,
still painting new walls
out of every picture
that tried to make me disappear.

Gaby Ortiz is a poet from Ecuador, living in Canada, but forever in a long-distance relationship with New York. Her poetry is what happens whenmemory won’t shut up—part exile, part love letter, part fistfight. She brings Ecuadorian stories, Canadian politeness and NYC street rhythm into her writing, blending English and Spanish in bold, unapologetic verse, continuing to carve space for raw, political, and deeply personal storytelling but mostly she keeps busy turning bruises into metaphors that won’t behave.