Terri Witek is the author of The Shipwreck Dress, Carnal World, Fools and Crows, Courting Couples
(Winner of the 2000 Center for Book Arts Contest) and Robert Lowell and LIFE STUDIES: Revising the Self . A new book of poems, Exit Island, is forthcoming in 2012. Her collaborations with Brazilian new media artist Cyriaco Lopes have been featured in galleries or site-specific projects in New York City, Sao Paolo, and elsewhere. A native of northern Ohio, she teaches English at Stetson University, where she holds the Sullivan Chair in Creative Writing.
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Three Mutinies
How to Mutiny from the Crow’s Nest
Lay an egg. Holding yourself upright, angle the egg overhead like a third, lidless eye. The crew’s gaze blunders upward. Bastards, bastards. You are the lighthouse keeper now and this is your warning.
How to Mutiny by Hoisting a Sail
Trade out one taffeta petticoat the size of a bos’un’s headache. Cook will pooh-pooh this “dirty rag”; your shipmates ignore another wind-inked cloud. Eyeing from afar what’s aimed at their jetty, shore dwellers will assume black sails mean the end of you and act accordingly.
How to Mutiny Via Peg Leg
1. Fold one of your real legs up like a shorebird does.
2. Whittle a bottle from driftwood; upend and attach.
3. When the watch changes, remove this appendage.
4. Empty into it what you’ve stolen
5. scent of damp hammock
doubloon noon
slop-bucket creak
dolphin snout
6. Drop your real leg back down and bind this to its twin.
7. Hoist the peg leg.
8. Leap overboard, mermaid, your new ship in your arms.