The Glassblower's Breath

She gathers fire on the end of a rod, a wobbling sun, orange and shapeless, and exhales into it the slow secret of her lungs— the way a sentence holds its breath before the word that changes everything.

The molten thing answers her, swells like a syllable becoming a name, turning, always turning, so it will not remember the floor, the cooling, the gravity that wants it back.

What she makes is mostly absence: a vessel is the shape of what it cannot hold, a window the argument light wins against the wall. She blows a little hollow into the heat and calls it a beginning.

By morning it stands on the shelf, cooled to the color of nothing, holding the room inside its curved silence— and somewhere in the clear of it the print of one breath, still warm, still hers.