Terri Witek
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Books

  • DOWN WATER STREET
  • #12: copies: I loved you in the hard old way by
  • Newsers
  • SOMETHING’S MISSING IN THIS MUSEUM
  • The Rattle Egg by Terri Witek
  • WAAVe Global Anthology of Women’s Asemic Writing and Visual Poetry
  • Judith: Women Making Visual Poetry
  • Poesia Visual 5
  • The Rape Kit
  • Body Switch
  • First Shot At Fort Sumter / Possum
  • Exit Island
  • The Shipwreck Dress
  • Carnal World
  • Fools & Crows
  • Robert Lowell & Life Studies

Recent Work

  • Teaching with Cyriaco Lopes at the Hand Art Center ( June 2024 MFA residency at Stetson University)
  • Beyond the Illegible on Boundary Ave
  • Exit Island featured at show at The Liminal
  • ARCO Madrid
  • ARCO Madrid
  • Collaboration with Amaranth Borsuk

A Game for Those Abroad at Night

from The Shipwreck Dress

Start with an hour
and circle the village.

Start with a flagpole
at the indigo heart of the square
and circle the village.

Follow a sickle of highway.
Follow one paper route story by story.
Follow a bread truck’s little pillows of air
and circle the village.

Circle the library’s simmering stacks
(there’s no help for you there,
no help for you there).
Circle the duck pond’s panicky flare.

Trail a moon thin or thick
but don’t fall for a fool.
Circle your stagger
then circle the school.

Circle mosquitoes breeding in buckets.
Circle your parents asleep in chairs.
Circle bees trawling the wax museums of heaven.
Circle the honey,
oh, circle the honey.

Circle a wallet’s dream of a gutter.
Circle two silos hungry for summer.
Circle a dish eating waves from the air.
Circle the village.

When you’ve traded your way
through the loop of a locket
and linked the ends of what isn’t there,
as your shadow unfolds again into stairs

dismiss wick and tallow,
rumor and adage.
Hang the circle you’ve circled in air
and kick out the chair,
kick out the chair.

Circle the village.

Buy the Book


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