The sun setting over the Wellsville mountains and the clouds roaring pink.
Tulips unclenching in the bedroom vase.
A hot bowl of cheesy shrimp-n-grits, a taste I almost missed.
The wretched face of the beautiful man who called 9-1-1. 
A beaver dam overflowing with winter run-off.
A surprise bridge in the path.
 
This is how I fall in love with the hard of my life:
With words and a pen. With neither fist raised.
Even if there’s no one to share a poem with, I am saved
By writing it in the first place.
We only ever talk about “taking your life” 
When someone’s taking it away,
 
But have you ever thought of taking your life on a date?
 
Sometimes surviving is beautiful
And sometimes it’s a phantom limb’s ache.
I have punished myself enough for trying
To go away. The body will pick up its pieces
Whether you want it to or not; your body will love
Being alive, whether you want it to or not.
But the soul takes longer to come home.
 
Sometimes she runs up to me with her childish fists scratched,
Full of sunrises and my first nephew laughing, 
Our best friend’s wedding in the woods, 
The bed where, for a year, I’ll wake with a dog under each arm. 
With her freckled nose and busted lip, 
She holds up the places in life 
Where there would be a vacuum without me,
Not just an absence but a life-sized ache. 
Knowing what I do not about living again.

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Brittney Skye is a poet from Cache Valley, Utah. She graduated with her Master’s of Arts degree from Utah State University in 2020. In 2021, her first chapbook, titled Harvest, was published by Finishing Line Press.