“Production Work” by Lynnell Edwards

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what_breaks_cover_smPaperweights, ashtrays, holiday ornaments,
the commissioned array of commemorative
plaque, award, trophy bowl or obelisk.

We rent this space, too. Dinners,
demonstrations, make-your-own
bauble. These are the things

that fire the furnace, that buy the pipes,
that stock the hot shop with color:
cobalt, cadmium, verdigris, purple—
which gets more expensive by the week—
in bars or ground to powder fine
as sugar, pink sand on a Bermuda beach.

This is no cheap proposal: equipment
to grind and polish; furnace, oven, kiln—each
calibrated to degree of heat or cooling.
Never mind the mortgage, glass bills, lights.

So the wine bottles flattened
into novelty trays; souvenir pendants
with the city seal, the work continues:

a hundred forty paperweights
for the leadership club, all green.
Stoke and gather, turn and shape
and breathe. Embrace

the familiar company of heat,
roar and flare of the ordinary

-Lynnell Edwards,
Kings of the Rock and Roll
Hot Shop (or, What Breaks)
(Accents Publishing)

photo by John Nation

Lynnell Edwards is the author of three collections of poetry, most recently Kings of the Rock and Roll Hot Shop (or, What Breaks) (Accents Publishing). Her short fiction and book reviews have also appeared widely in such literary journals as Pleiades, American Book Review, New Madrid, and The Connecticut Review. She is Associate Professor of English at Spalding University, and prior to that, a faculty member at Concordia University in Portland, Oregon. Lynnell is a graduate of Centre College, the center of the glass-blowing universe in Kentucky.

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