Hanging From The Family Tree
Read more poetry by Britt Wolfe
She was not raised.
She was battered.
She was broken.
Her spine was cleaved into,
bent into a question mark—
and they built their crown
from what it cost her to stand.
Fed just enough warmth
to keep the body working.
Starved of truth
until hunger answered
to the name loyalty.
This was a place where children learned
to read faces
the way prey reads treelines—
waiting for danger
to speak softly.
Nothing was louder
than the silence
forced into her mouth.
That is how it survived.
The harm arrived without warning.
Pressed flat.
Wrapped in the promise
of annihilation
if she named it.
A thumb on the pulse.
A hand on the throat.
A voice saying:
You don’t exist.
What hurt her didn’t count.
Her voice was unwelcome.
Only their pain mattered—
an existence carved
out of her spine.
She was trained
to doubt sensation.
To mistrust care.
To suspect herself first.
Every question was turned.
Every fear returned
with her fingerprints on it.
Why is she like this?
Why does she remember wrong?
Why is she trying to destroy us?
As if terror
this precise
appears on its own.
Silence is easier
when the victim enforces it.
Keep her head down.
Maybe it will stop.
It never stops.
They take her slowly.
Never all at once.
Small enough
to be denied.
They swallow her
with practiced smiles.
And with the other hand,
they braid the rope—
carefully,
patiently—
so she never leaves
without carrying them
around her neck.
This wasn’t chaos.
It was design.
A system where harm stays invisible
because everyone eats
at the same table.
They called her unstable.
They called her cruel.
They said,
We did our best.
Which is how executioners
wipe their hands.
They didn’t have to push.
By the time she stood beneath it,
she knew how to hold it steady
herself.
And when she went still,
they called it healing.
But forests like this
don’t grow fruit.
They grow ghosts.
And she is not broken.
She is what remains
when something survives
long enough
to be used
as proof.
The rope is tight.
The tree still stands.
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