I wanted to see
the world as we knew it break itself
from itself,
icy told-you-so face
collapsing into
its own arms.

I hoped to hear
the crackle and boom, a peeling
unlike bells,
confirmation that
something in us
is broken.

I needed to live
just then, in the crack between
all things and
all things, feel

the space shock
my chest open.

But it’s news I watch:
man on a ledge, heartstruck on

one windowside—
stretched opposite
his ailing wife
on the other.

I feel the gulf
of jammed/empty internet
between me
and twenty souls,
where our class
disappeared.

I hear a lone truck
trundle down the once-thoroughfare:

the sound of being torn

heart from heart,
country from country—

all of us
a slow-calving glacier.

JENNIFER MAGLIANO is a teacher who works with young writers in Bellmore, not far from where she grew up. Now in Long Beach, she is unable to resist ocean metaphors. When Jennifer is not freelancing, she writes and performs wedding and other ceremonies. Her chapbook was published with Alpha Beat Press, and her poem Air and All the Elements was included in Grabbing the Apple: An Anthology of New York Women Poets.