You have no ghosts in Venice, no heritage, no history. You can tell any story you want, slip into the role of any narrator, stroll down any unfamiliar street. This is not the Holocaust exhibit in Berlin, not Krakow. There is nothing to bear witness here. Nothing displayed behind glass cases. You can choose your life like the carnival masks sold by the old man in an empty shop. Today you are the American tourist. Tomorrow, the plague doctor on the wall, the red devil, the pig, the jester, the fool. You are in the world of Strega Nona. Yesterday you had never seen the possibility of a feather boa, the cat, the draped velvet hat. You can be the cherub on the fresco ceiling of the grocery store inside Teatro Italia, a neo-Gothic theater turned supermarket. You can be the actors, the play, the phantoms of those operas. You can trick yourself into writing about almost anything. You can be a murano glass animal, a pair of nuns, a griffin. You can be a brass door or a magic shop, a lightbulb or a bull head, a canal, a gondola, a god. You can be a little girl or a cross, a poet, a set of keys. You are your mother’s map on the bed, the crumpled notepad, the curtains, the open window. You are the turrets, the statue of a saint, the word untranslated, the pillow case, the stuffed unicorns on a clothesline. You are the New York Yankees cap and the lottery ticket, the Saint Michael figurine and the nosebleed. You are the board walk and the bird, the sunset, the sea, the door of your hotel, a building from the 17th century, the chandelier, the cappuccino cup. You can be a fact or a metaphor, a weapon or a wound, a paint or a brush, a wheel or a lyric. You can be ink pen or empty coffee pot, untied shoelace or faded graffiti spray. You can be the apostle, the spy, the arches. You can be at the start of twenty five, starry eyed, jet lagged and though you can be anyone, you are still a Jew in the Jewish Quarters, the mezuzah on the wall, the kiss of a hand. Still, you can be the church bell, the green clock, the Nirvana shirt, pigeon, the seagull eating a pizza slice, (yes, really, yes, this, too, is impossibly true,) the engine, the coil of rope.