The Rope Remembers

I sleep in coils. I dream of throats I have never seen but know by shape—the particular architecture of air struggling to stay where it belongs.

I was cotton once. I was picked. I was ginned. I was twisted into usefulness by hands that needed me to hold something still while they worked.

She wakes in the shed. Her edge is dull now, her handle smooth from palms that never trembled. She does not dream. She only knows the arc, the clean surrender of weight, the soft resistance before the break.

We worked together once. She opened the wood. I finished what grew from it. We never spoke. What could we say? She believes herself a tool of labour, of firewood and kindling, of honest sweat.

I know better. I felt her first, the way she bit into the grain, the way the tree shuddered and stood still for what came next. I know the sound of her entering is the same sound as me tightening.

He stands in the yard. A fist of wood and accusation. His rings are tight with years she never asked about. He bleeds sap slow as memory, watches us both through the crack in the door.

He held me up. Not by choice. He learned to bear weight he never volunteered for, to make of his highest branch a stage, a witness, a complicit silence. He remembers the angle of her approach, the way she came smiling, how he mistook her gleam for sunlight until he felt me settle against his bark like a necklace he could not refuse.

She will rust. She will dull. Someone will leave her out in rain, and she will not feel it. She will simply stop being sharp and call that peace.

He will stand longer than he should, a monument to the geometry of harm—how three can make a violence so complete even the ground learned to swallow what we left.

I will sleep in my coils, cotton remembering what it was to be held, to be needed, to be the last thing someone felt before the singing stopped.

We three: the one who forgets, the one who cannot, the one who waits to be needed again.