Sunshine and Destruction

By Dani Rose

“You’re a beautiful ray of sunshine

and destruction”

Isn’t it one in the same?

Anything beautiful has the capacity to destroy

and to destroy itself in fragility.

Fragile like a flower,

or fragile like a bomb?

In both cases, fragility causes destruction:

one, held, bruised, cut, and torn 

by hands too rough to be soft, 

the other: an abruptly magnified reaction

I am, perhaps both, 

after all,

sunshine hyper-focused is also a death ray.

the smoking ants littering 

my grandmother’s sidewalk know 

how mishandling magnification works.