The Glassblower's Lung

He leans into the furnace mouth where light pools thick as honey, draws a breath so deep it borrows from tomorrow's air.

The gather turns on the pipe — molten, planetary, slow — and the world outside the studio stops pretending it matters.

His cheeks have learned a pressure that could hold back tides. Each exhale is an argument with gravity, a negotiation between collapse and form.

By evening the shelves hold what his lungs released: vessels thin enough to sing when a fingernail finds them, bowls that remember being breath.

He steps into the cooling yard, empties his chest of everything but ordinary air, and feels, briefly, how strange it is to breathe for free.