My name is Dustin Pearson, I'm the author of Millennial Roost and A Family is a House.  Today I'm going to be reading "Autobiography" from A Family is a House.  I really like this poem.  It's special to me because, as a marginalized ethnic writer writing under the umbrella of identity politics, sometimes you get questions or there's an expectation that everything in your life is up for grabs.  Like, people will ask you anything and I think, like, when you have those two identifications, you don't always pull directly from your life and I think this is one of those poems that subverts your expectations, being called "Autobiography" but operating in a land of almost entirely fantasy.  

Autobiography

I was taken in by two wolves whose whole diet was bacon.
Each morning we shared the nine packs of bacon we fried then ran. 
We ran so fast the woods stretched a band of evergreen.

We ran faster than life.  We watched the nine-year-old flower girls
in the forest live out their whole lives.  Each morning they lived
and before the end of our daily run in the afternoon they died again.

Their hair curled brown to fall flat-white, their skin opaque
before filling with light.  Never mind the things they did.  
I named my favorite Heather.  Her life and death, 

mere markers on the trail.  We ran so fast the fat in our arteries
would expand then explode and collapse, spilling out and over
like liquid cheese.  It smelled like bacon, bacon all fat and no lean:

a treat.  Our hearts came up our throats and out our mouths so tasty
and we kept running.  We were together and happy.  We had everything
and we could keep it.  We ran past our own deaths, and when we came
up on our hearts again we picked them up and swallowed them.