I hear you can drown in just an inch of water

I get caught up in my own shit and text my friend
on the anniversary of her rape. She calls immediately.
I answer and she gives me grief. It feels good
to yell at you right now so thanks. My friend has become
a tin can and string. Telephone, telephone. Better this
than a living body. All that voice can pass through.
She says fuck off I’m playing video games today
because they can be won. A body needs to remember
what victory feels like. My friend says I do not
have time for your petty bullcrap when she sees
my litany of paper cuts and office pissing matches,
milk gone bad and who will find time to buy more and
why is it me, the plumber come and gone with expensive
warnings, a literal stubbed toe and my hand out for sympathy.
She says are you fucking kidding me right now?  But also
she will listen if I want to scream into the phone – no words
from me, no reply from her. I shrug and offer the same terms
back, and yes, she wants to wail. To be heard, even
when there is nothing she can say. I take in the scream,
dissolve it into my blood. My heart pumps salt and sour,
like a pickle plugged in and lit up, tinfoil compressing
in your molars as you chew it like gum. She hangs up first.

*

Shana Ross is a recent transplant to Edmonton, Alberta and Treaty Six Territory. Qui transtulit sustinet. Her work has recently appeared in Great Weather for MEDIA, Ilanot Review, Ninth Letter, Quarter After Eight and more. She is the winner of the 2022 Anne C. Barnhill prize and the 2021 Bacopa Literary Review Poetry competition. She prefers walking in the woods to social media, and budgets her time accordingly.