For Erik DeLuca
1. You are making a funnel but don’t go in.
2. Roll so one end’s wider.
Do I tape this thing?
3. Yes. Now pierce the small end
w/ your needle.
4. Allow half-an-inch
to stay on the eye side.
5. No, it shouldn’t move.
Tape.
6. Snap a pencil in half.
In half?
7. That’s the tone arm or base
(let’s call it the base).
Are you in a car?
8. Yes.
9. Duct tape one pencil half
(eraser end up)
to the cardboard square.
10. No, so it stays straight up.
Where are you going?
11. OK, take the speaker and pick up the thumbtack
jimmy the thumbtack
fix needle and speaker to base
w/ the thumbtack
push thumbtack through one side of cone
to eraser you want the speaker
to teeter-totter on base
12. What? Needle face down and tilting—
it shouldn’t touch ground.
13. You holding a record?
14. Classical is shabby.
Hip hop or pop.
15. Now, pencil 2.
Insert and shimmy the record up it.
16. Twirl.
17. Clockwise. Guys, keep it down.
17. Clockwise.
18. Well, only if you want to hear
watch the way Missy like to take it backwards
a god with hooves, a god with horns
Continue to At World’s End // Double Album
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, Los Angeles, and elsewhere. A native of northern Ohio, she teaches English at Stetson University, where she holds the Sullivan Chair in Creative Writing.