By John Glowney

Featured Art: Niagara Falls by John Henry Twachtman

Break it, you own it. Honestly,
though, it was always broken,
which is the whole point, that is to say,
when this world first whirled
and popped into existence
out of nothing’s sticky grasp,

the ur-broken thing, when it had wings
that glinted wildly in the suffused
and charged plasma, when it cascaded off
the cliff of itself
a mountain waterfall in native sunlight;
when the newly minted
honeybees, still smoking a little from
the tiny forges that made their immaculate
and fragile bodies, shook the pollen dust
of a violet, left a telltale film
on the velvety atoms of air,

when the first honeybees
so insisted upon new life they went
flower to flower—back when this world wanted
to be called Volcano of the Lilies,
not Rage Monster or Resentful Lover, not Plague Addict or
Reservoir of Ashes, even then, broken, yet fresh
with new blooms,
it was yours.

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John Glowney’s poems have appeared in: Shenandoah, 32 Poems, Tar River Poetry, The American Journal of Poetry, Crab Orchard Review, ZYZZYZA, River Styx, Green Mountains Review, Southeast Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, Nimrod, Mid-American Review, Michigan Quarterly Review, and Poetry Northwest.