Glassblower's Lung

The furnace holds its orange mouth open and you lean in, drawing heat through five feet of hollow steel, your cheeks taut as drumskin, breath becoming the only architecture.

Somewhere between your ribs and the gather the molten glass decides what it wants to be — not vase, not vessel, not the thing you sketched on butcher paper at dawn, but a shape that answers to temperature alone.

You rotate the pipe like a slow planet and the glow at its tip obeys some law older than intention. The glass thins where you breathe too hard, swells where you steady yourself.

All day the annealing oven hums its lullaby of slow cooling, and the finished pieces sit inside learning how to be brittle, learning how to hold the light without breaking.

By evening your lungs taste of silica and spark. You line the day's work on a wooden shelf — each one a frozen breath, each one the exact shape of a moment you couldn't take back.