A Brief Autobiography

I am a red sneaker, a blinking stoplight, Lake Ontario. I was born in a cabin with the roar of buffalo guns filling the room. No curtains. A ship in a bottle. The rains were few and these I carried in a hammock slung beneath the wagon. I have split myself down the middle, hopped in both directions at once, returned, and zipped myself back together. I held the dying light in my trembling hands, ate a burrito for dinner. I purchased the head of an axe, a stringless violin, a pocket watch engraved with a stranger’s name. I tamed a shrew to perch on my shoulder, lifted a boulder to free the blind prospector. He lavished me with televisions, a lion tamer’s gold tooth, a house of gingerbread. I am a phone booth in the desert, a drop from a faucet, the windowless basements of youth. Once, I flapped my arms yet remained landlocked. I am a tackle box at a yard sale, a bucket of rusted nails. I am a fruit fly, an ice skate, the lost highway at midnight twisting through the mountains like smoke rising from my grandfather’s pipe.