First Tick of the Season
Shana Ross
After that my skin crawls no matter what I am
trying to do but most particularly at the edge
of sleep. This is a lot like love. Always the feeling is
real. Sometimes it makes you leap up and bare
your whole self because you urgently need
to know, to know, to know for sure if this sensation is
a) a living thing, small feet and a seeking mouth
about to bite down and feed infectiously
b) your brain, fucking with you, your mind
whispering its own unsettledness and fears into
sensation. Your skin is the most suggestible
of organs, falls prey to lies, even the well-intentioned.
I choose to slow my breathing and refuse
frantic checking after I have slipped under the covers,
after the lights are off; we all need a line to cross
and say done. Done. That is my kind of protection,
knowing when I will indulge my fears, when I won’t.
Once, just once, I woke up to find a tick still attached
to my hip, below the elastic of my pajamas, felt
and resolutely undiscovered the night before. It takes
longer than you imagine for the thing to become
dangerous. Up to the tipping point of engorgement,
there is little difference between learning now and later
you have been bitten. A curious friend asks me – how
are you guys, I mean, as a couple. We make a good team
I say, not knowing how to explain the ways my body and brain
take turns telling scary stories when I am alone, laid flat,
eyes closed in the dark. Next to me, a snore so regular
it could be a purr. The roiling comes and goes - so too
the contentment. In the morning I search for bullseyes.
Shana Ross is a recent transplant to Edmonton, Alberta and Treaty Six Territory. Qui transtulit sustinet. Her work has recently appeared in Cutbank Literary Journal, Laurel Review, Canthius, Meetinghouse Magazine and more. She is the winner of the 2022 Anne C. Barnhill prize and the 2021 Bacopa Literary Review Poetry competition, as well as a 2019 Parent-Writer Fellowship to Martha’s Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing. She serves as an editor for Luna Station Quarterly and a critic for Pencilhouse.