The Glass Studio
I must go back
to that photograph of me, fourteen,
on an early morning in my father’s makeshift sweatshop
on the unfinished second floor of my grandparents’ house,
leaning over beige glass squares arranged
in a plaster-poured mold, my Red Sox cap
cocked backwards like a trigger
waiting for release, my left hand
steadying the burning soldering iron
while my right pushes coiled snakes of lead
into the iron’s hot tip to melt them
into quicksilver seams, fusing
those cut-glass squares
into translucently beautiful panes
if I hold them up to the light
breaking through the second floor
window. I sweat through this labor.
I breathe in the noxious fumes.
I wear no protective mask. My hot pink
lungs slow burn towards death. Hour
after hour, I run my hands over glass like this, iron
and lead, like over the seams of women’s bodies
it will take years for me to touch.
I use the same precision to bring them
full circle, to when they become
translucent.
My father teaches me all this
with squares of cut glass, not ever
saying the word sex, without ever
claiming to transfer the knowledge of how
he broke into my mother’s body
to create something sacred
akin to a family. Downstairs, my grandfather
returns from hours emptying glasses
filled with Kentucky bourbon and ice, brings home
his daily ragings like newspaper headlines
and smashes everything on the first floor to tiny bits.
I sit up here on a metal stool in the glass studio, mute
like a bird who has lost faith in song, soldering
everything back into place.
At the height of these humid,
summer afternoons, my father disappears
after his initial instructions and before my grandfather
returns. He teaches me not to press the iron
against any glass square in the mold for too long;
he shows me how the iron-willed iron
desires nothing beautiful in its intention to burn,
so if left resting on the glass’s skin,
it will provoke an irrevocable wound.
After hours inside of this sweat and burn,
heat from the tip of the iron threatening
to welt my skin with each beaded line, the fumes
filling my lungs like my grandfather’s cigarette smoke
overtakes the living room where my grandparents sit ruined
downstairs, I close up the studio, pressing the sashes down
hard and drawing the curtains closed like stitches,
turn off my iron, clean the tip in toxic flux until it smokes,
whip down the staircase, where on the other side
of the wall, my grandparents smolder
in today’s aftermath of broken glass.
I pull the door tight to keep them inside,
turn the brass doorknob hot in my palm.
and run next door, up the stairs to my bedroom,
strip — my skin now a mix of sweat
from lead and labor and fear —
and I pull on my one-piece bathing suit,
ride my bike fast away to the beach,
lay down on the hot sand next to the beautiful girls
on their backs on their striped towels, tanning themselves
into womanhood, their new breasts coming in
like delicate blown glass floats adrift
from the sea, landing
on the creamy skin of the shore, miraculously
whole, like art, like the glass-infused light
the hanging lamps I assemble
through my teenage years
in the illegal glass studio casts
against the walls of my family’s naïve making.