by Madeline Schaeffer

We kept missing the aurora borealis. The once-in-a-lifetime just kept appearing. Like, so what?It-just-so-happened-she-was-alive-and-breathing. The sky gave way to Instagram's more vivid purples. I sent flowers to everyone I was ghosting. Surely you heard their misconceptions falling apart. Spine felt like starlight: vertebral glitter. Light scattered randomly, if not for physics. Your text: Doesn’t matter. Love you. There was a sudden illumination on the camera screen. The it-just-so-happened-I-was-there-to-take-her-pulse. We all believed in the afterlife for 10 seconds. Anyway, then we pulled out our bucket lists and crossed off aurora, even though we never really saw it. It was just the sky, after all. The belief came second: that it all amounted to more than plasma, then pixels, on a phone screen. That if we looked closely enough, we could see who we were becoming.

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Madeline Schaeffer is a poet who lives by the Pacific Ocean in Washington state. She writes about her golden retriever and the sea, climate grief, and biology classes. She is a high school student who spends most of her time in college. She was named a 2023 commended Foyle Young Poet, and her work has appeared in the Tiger Moth Review, amongst others.