Sandra Yannone

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.

Sandra Yannone published her debut collection Boats for Women in 2019 and will publish The Glass Studio in 2022, both with Salmon Poetry in Ireland. Her poems and reviews have appeared in print and online journals including Sweet, Ploughshares, Poetry Ireland Review, Prairie Schooner, Impossible Archetype, The Blue Nib, Live Encounters, Women’s Review of Books, and Lambda Literary Review. She currently hosts Cultivating Voices LIVE Poetry on Facebook via Zoom on Sundays. An old favorite confection of hers which she wishes would return is the Good Humor Chocolate Fudge Cake ice cream bar.

… return to Issue 13.3 Table of Contents.