I went to Target to buy rope

The two employees up front were busy in conversation
and when I spoke, they ignored me, and I stood there, with

the shopping carts like teeth, old teeth, cracked, a woman tugging,
unable to separate one, and I stared, wondering if I should go over,

but she gives up, walks away, and I think about going after her,
realize I should have reacted more quickly, and there is a boy,

so young, up front, and he is on his phone, and has the vest
that shows he works here, except he is not working, instead

texting with a friend and smiling, and I ask him if there is rope,
and he says, Rope? as if I am the first person to ever ask this,

and he says, Rope, like rope? and I nod yes and he changes his phone
for what looks like another phone, a store phone, where he scrolls

through and quickly says, No, and I say, There’s no rope in the entire
store? The store is the size of my hometown. It is the size of night.

It’s the size of God. He says, Well, we got jump rope. And I think
of this and say, Thanks, and I head to the sports equipment and every

time I am around sports equipment, I think of my father. He came home
from school and found his mother dead, on the floor, having drunk herself

to death, and he was too young to understand death and thought she was
sleeping, so he dragged her to her bed, tucked her in, his father gone, so

that the next day he told a neighbor that he couldn’t wake his mother up
and he couldn’t, and he turned to sports, lost himself in them, would

go out and wait at the ballparks and the courts for someone to come
so that he would have a friend and he would play until his feet would

bleed, his hands would bleed, and he’d come home in the night, his
new parents letting him, and he will only talk sports to me, a strange

thing, neuroscience, how he speaks in sports, my calling one time
to let him know my wife told me she wants a divorce and he answered

The Lions won, and the Lions never win and I laughed, because I didn’t
have a father, how he was taken, and I took the jump rope off

the shelf and went up front and bought it and got home and realized
that it just might work and I unwrapped it and it was in my hands

and there was something, maybe magical, maybe just memory, but
it reminded me of being a child, and so I thought I’d try skipping,

before I killed myself, and it came back so quickly, and so I just
started jumping rope, in the night, not caring if the neighbors below

could hear, and I sped up, and I was good and I went fast and kept
going, exhausting myself, completely, so that I collapsed to the floor,

covered in sweat, breathing heavily, and it felt good, transformed me,
so that I wanted to live, and I looked over and the rope was in a circle

like a noose and I took my hand and moved the rope so that it wasn’t
like that anymore, I looked up at the ceiling and God looked down.

Ron Riekki’s books include Blood/Not Blood Then the Gates (Middle West Press, poetry), My Ancestors are Reindeer Herders and I Am Melting in Extinction (Loyola University Maryland’s Apprentice House Press, hybrid), Posttraumatic (Hoot ‘n’ Waddle, nonfiction), and U.P. (Ghost Road Press, fiction). Right now, Ron is listening to Chromatics’ ‘Lady.’ Read more of him here.