I began “she testifies” after Tina Fontaine’s body was pulled from the Red River in 2014. In the poem, water itself speaks back on behalf of womxn/girls about the multiple violences done to them, and on behalf of Emmett Till, whose black body was at the centre of a 1955 racially-motivated murder in Mississippi. Water refuses to collude with these killers or to participate in their heinous settler-colonial/patriarchal attempts at silencing: “like glass, I drove her fragments to shore.”

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