by Julie Shulman

When I was ten and my father was sick we sailed to Alaska, which
only sounds like a heartwarming memoir. We ate spam sandwiches  

and visited canneries and it was almost always cloudy; the sailing  
wasn’t very good. Often I wished I was home, doing normal things like  

seeing my friends or taking a shower. Dolphins and orcas sometimes swam  
right next to the boat. We tried to find somewhere calm to anchor each night.  

We ran aground twice, once on a sandbar with icebergs ominously circling  
in the late summer evening light, once with the rudder clicking Morse code  

into the ragged ridge of reef at morning’s low tide. Those events imprinted 
into me deeply, both the terror of being shipwrecked and sunk but also  

the euphoria of surviving and setting back out. There was a button on the 
coffee thermos my dad brought out on deck on those long, light evenings  

that clicked in the most satisfying way when you opened the spout. Waves  
and wind grew calm as night fell, and I pressed it over and over again,  

my own morse message carrying far as it does across water. Scientists have 
discovered a sun they call the farthest star, halfway across the universe  

and twenty-eight billion light-years away. By the time it was dark enough to see the stars  
I was too tired to remember what my dad told me about them. The farthest star  

burnt out billions of years ago, but its light moves across the empty expanses  
of darkness, still transmitting some kind of message to us through the night. 

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Julie Shulman is a writer and art director who lives outside of Boston with her architect husband, trusty rescue pup, and three very active boys. Her poems have been featured in Mass Poetry, Soul-lit, and Dartmouth-Hitchock’s 2021 anthology, Telling Our Stories Through Word and Image. She is currently working on her first chapbook, Rotten Medicine.