new from above/ground press: DOWN WATER STREET, by Terri Witek

DOWN WATER STREET
Terri Witek
$6

Vessel 1


After river-gathering elsewhere, a vessel arrives, catches. The story may be different where you are, but this time it was dipped then dropped by a stoop-weary nun. Lucky you who found it anyway, wet glint in sand. Now take out the people. A shard meshed in a river god's hair slowly reaches the lap of a waiting cypress. Nicks until sap beads but stays. Now X the gods. River touches sea and can’t return.

I say this because my sister’s not tight with her neighbor, who thinks birds queue for my sister’s bird feeder on her very own clothesline and shit shit shit. My sister neither moves the feeder nor declines to let her dog dig while the neighbor hisses.

But of course the neighbor’s lover passes and the woman turns poorly. Tears do something to proximities and it should have come as no surprise though it did that the neighbor’s legs begin to weep. Only the backs, so she both feels and imagines drops dragging down to gold carpet. My sister starts dressing her neighbor’s wounds. Yellow serum, she says, a pattern of holes. And     , who is, as they say, terminal, helps my sister back to her feet after my sister dresses the last little red weeper near her neighbor’s heel

published in Ottawa by above/ground press
May 2025
a/g subscribers receive a complimentary copy

Terri Witek is the author of 8 previous full-length books of poems and many chapbooks: the most recent, Something’s Missing in This Museum, was published by Anhinga Press in 2023.  Exit Island was a Florida Book Award medalist; The Rape Kit was the Slope Editions Prize 2018 winner, judged by Dawn Lundy Martin. Martin calls The Rape Kit “ a grand success, the best we’ll get. Fresh, relevant, and heartbreaking” and “a fire in the throat of a culture that has no appropriate language for rape and its aftermath…”

Witek’s visual poetics work is featured in JUDITH: Women Making Visual Poetry (2021), and in the WAAVe Global Gallery of Women’s Asemic Writing and Visual Poetry (2021) as well as in arts venues.  The poet’s collaborations with Brazilian visual artist Cyriaco Lopes (cyriacolopes.com) have, since 2005, been shown nationally and internationally: in New York, Seoul, Miami, Lisbon, Valencia (Spain) and Rio de Janeiro. The duo have been represented by The Liminal gallery in Valencia: their most recent collaboration was featured at ARCO, Madrid (2023) where the Liminal won special jury mention. Since 2011, collaborations with new media artist Matt Roberts (mattroberts.com) often use augmented reality technology and have been featured in Matanza (Colombia), Lisbon, Glasgow, Vancouver, and Miami.  Recent collaborative work with poet Amaranth Borsuk loops the pandemic and the eco-crisis as a crisis of rain and smoke between worlds; that with weaver Paula Damm combines text/textile. Individual and collaborative work has been featured in a wide variety of text venues, including Fence, The Colorado Review, Hampden-Sydney Poetry Review, American Poetry Review, Poetry, Slate, Hudson Review, Lana Turner, The New Republic, and many other journals and anthologies.

With Cyriaco Lopes, Witek team-teaches Poetry in the Expanded Field in Stetson University’s low-residency MFA of the Americas; they also run The Fernando Pessoa Game as faculty in the summer Disquiet International Literary Program in Lisbon. Witek holds the university’s Sullivan Chair in Creative Writing and is the recipient of both the McInery Award and the John Hague Award for teaching.  terriwitek.com

This is Witek’s second above/ground press title, after the collaborative W / \ S H: INITIAL CONTACT (2021), with Amaranth Borsuk.

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