Molly Fisk : Process Note #72

The 'process note’ pieces were originally solicited by Maw Shein Win as addendum to her teaching particular poems and poetry collections for various workshops and classes. This process note and poems by Molly Fisk are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor, Muse and poetry classes at the University of San Francisco and Saint Mary’s College of California. Thank you for reading.

 

 

 

 

My interest in “the west” as a fictional place has been pretty steady since I was a little girl, but a couple of pieces caught my eye in adulthood, and I'll bet they were part of the spark for Walking Wheel. One is Molly Gloss's The Jump-Off Creek, about a single woman homesteader in Oregon, which I loved and sold many copies of when I worked in a bookstore in the 1990s.

The other horrified me: Annie Proulx's short story "Them Old Cowboy Songs" (from her book Fine Just the Way It Is), about a young couple who have a baby and every possible disaster occurs, leaving all of them dead at the end. Right from the get-go, I wanted to describe the incredible amount of work it took to stay alive in this kind of rural terrain, and also have nothing bad happen to my characters.

I'm pretty sure I wrote the first poem after a young woman entered my head in 1998 when I was sitting on a sofa in a rented cottage on Cape Cod with some writer friends. Everyone thinks I must have done a lot of research, but most of what's in here I knew about from reading and living and movies. I did have to double check a few things to verify them, though. I'm horribly likely to think I'm always right.

Someone asked me why I wanted to explore this century and these lives. I'm afraid I never consciously think about where a book is going or what it's exploring. I'm not analytical about the process, or trying to steer. I let things unfold and see what happens.
 

I was noticing some of the skills my friends and I have and regularly use, we who are now in our 60s through 80s, that younger people, and especially city-dwellers, don't seem to have. Making fires in a woodstove, cooking things from scratch, putting up jam, sewing and knitting, repairing. One of my grandmothers taught me a lot, when I'd stay with her in the summer, so I was also thinking of the circumstances under which we learn skills and pass them on.

Nevada City, California, where I've lived for 30 years, is a Gold Rush town, so I'm surrounded by buildings and a landscape that refers to the past, not just for tourists but for those of us who've been here a while and watched it change. Many of us know the trees that were imported by early settlers, grown from seeds someone brought west, like Little-Leaf Lindens, and Mirabelle plums. There's an abiding sense of history running beneath everyday life that I think affected me. Not everyone feels this, but a poet's job is to slow down and notice things, and I think I wanted to recreate the pace of life in an unelectrified, uncomputerized world. The pace and also the effort required.

I purposefully didn't set the book here, it's up in Cedarville, in the Surprise Valley, a place I came across on a road trip and feel oddly attached to. And I set the book after the Gold Rush, so this couple is second-generation, their parents crossed the country in covered wagons, but they were born in Oregon. The Gold Rush ushered in a lot of damage to the people and landscape throughout the west, and I discuss my feelings and decisions about that in an afterword to the book. My lineage is white New Englanders from way back, and Walking Wheel is a likely story about those people, but I'm paying attention to colonialism as a background to it, if not mentioning it specifically in the text.

No individual poems were problematic, the big adventure with Walking Wheel was writing poems sporadically over twenty years without realizing I was writing a book. This is so different from my other poems and essays in subject and tone, I didn't take it seriously for a long time. By the time I figured out it was trying to be a whole book, I had a huge continuity problem.

I'd just sort of written each poem by itself, in my mind, without reference. So I had to go back and try to sort them out, not just for meaning in relation to the one before and the one after, but also to not have summer last for two years, and Phoebe's pregnancy stall out so she was in her third month for several months in a row. My early readers helped a lot with this. Weather, crops, and gestation, those were the problem!

It took me about a year of working this out, some charts on the wall, pages of the book hung up in my kitchen on garden twine as if they were laundry... Luckily, my best friend from childhood was a midwife, so she looked at the book once I got it into a basic order. Instead of correcting things, she gave me a timeline of average pregnancies, so I had to do it myself, which was I'm sure the right thing to do but Lord it was hard. I had the baby doing somersaults in utero long before that would be possible. I also blithely mentioned an herb for tea to be drunk during pregnancy because I liked the sound of its name—at this moment I can't recall which one—and another friend who's a nurse told me this herb can cause miscarriages, and I needed something else.
 

As I was finishing the book and the world was starting to feel more uncertain and dangerous, I thought “well, maybe this story and the slower pace can help people escape, be a distraction.” But it's turned into more than that, as I listen to reader reactions. It's comforting, but it also provides a kind of relief, a reminder about the benefits of work and love. It's a vote for humanity in a time when inhumanity is so prevalent. It is also speaking to men in some way. I've never had so many men tell me they felt seen and loved the story.

What people take away after reading a book is so varied and unpredictable. I didn't set out to say this, but now that the book is done, if I have a wish, it's that readers be reminded love is alive, and work is doable, and sometimes nothing goes wrong. That all is not lost.

 

A Fiddle String

 

Dark inside the house,
as black as the stove pipe's
interior and her eyes wide
as though it were noon.
Dark of the moon, no
moving air at this hour,
too early by far for birdsong.
But in her mind's eye
she can see the softness
of his face in sleep,
how his jaw slackens,
the muscles of temple
and cheek relax. Miles
is a calm man, unhurried
and steady but he can
acquire a certain tension
at times, when the weather
shifts to impede or hurry
his work, when a tree
falls off the mark, akimbo,
or one of the mules won't eat.
He doesn't borrow trouble
but he sees its tracks
and knows its scent.
Approaching fatherhood
has sharpened all his senses,
she thinks. More to be done.
More to protect. He isn't afraid
of the new life, just alert
in a different way. Tuned
like a fiddle string to a higher
note. A scatter of stars now,
through the open window.
They are so far from us,
she thinks. And cold. Why
do they bring me comfort?

 

 

Speculation 

 

What are we naming this child?
Her spine against his ribs
as her front needs half the bed now.
His fingers playing through her hair.
Is it silkier? Her skin
is like moonlight.
My favorite cow was called Bess,
he says. A Jersey.
Her laugh shakes them both
and her belly ripples.
Miles! 

That won't do for a boy,
though, I agree. How about Spike,
if it's a boy? 

SPIKE?

Or Aloysius?

Have you been drinking before
breakfast? Be serious. 

You married an unserious man,
as you may remember.
There's no going back now.
She smiles. The dog yawns
and stretches on the rug, dozing
again, dawn just hinting
at the square shapes of the windows.
None of the virtues, she says. 

What? He'd been thinking of something else.

Patience, Prudence, Constance.
I think they chide a baby. 

How about the sins?
Gluttony Imlay has a nice ring. 

Oh, hush!

Maybe we need another songbird
in the family? But not another pilgrim.
Perhaps the wee one will announce
its name on arrival. 

I've always liked Justin, she says,
if it's a boy.

 

 

The Silence 

 

The clouds have been low all day
and the air biting, sometimes wind
careening down the valley, pine cones
and small branches snapped and dropping
in its wake. Sometimes an uncanny
stillness, but not for long, as though
the weather is of two minds, arguing
with itself. They have fed
and bedded the animals early, with extra
hay for warmth. Bright in his stall calmly
chewing, Lion restive, aware of something
at large in the world and not happy
about it, always the more high-strung.
Miles hopes he'll absorb some of Bright's
equanimity over time, though there
is no evidence of that yet. Chickens
roosting, quiet. The goats wide-eyed.
Miles double-checks the door latches
and brings a shovel with him up to the house.
The shutters have been closed for weeks
against the cold — no chinks of light
shine out to greet him, thankfully.
Their first winter here, together, their first
big storm, he hopes there will be no
unlooked for surprises. Plenty of wood.
As he opens the door, warmth and the smell
of supper hitting him full force, and Phoebe's
half-worried smile, the silence falls —
always a wonder to him. Not an absence
of sound but its own living presence.
The first flakes lightly, sparsely, almost
as if they were dancing, drift down.

 

 

Bathing 

 

On Saturday nights, Phoebe and Miles
take their weekly bath. This is one of the secret
luxuries of marriage: only two bodies
to be cleaned in the steaming water, rather
than the multitudes at home. Phoebe hauls
the first two buckets and builds the fire up
in the stove. The kettles hiss a little
and the cabin’s air gathers humidity. Miles
hauls the next and strips as Phoebe pours
the hot water into her wash tub and refills
the kettles with what he’s carried. Before he
steps in, his body stark white where his clothes
have covered him and acorn-brown at his neck
and forearms which have been bare, Phoebe
pours in another measure of cold. She hands him
a square of the soap she’s made, scented
with mint from her mother’s garden, a cooling odor.
He rubs its harsh surface down his shins and scrubs
his feet, wets arms and chest, shoulders, lathers
the brown hair of his groin and thighs.
Phoebe pours water from the kettles, not fully
hot yet, over his hair, down his back and soaps
and rinses. Gradually his skin loses its deep brown
as grime and the salts of his body are sluiced away,
and his white parts become rosy with heat.
When he is done, she stands ready in her shift.
She empties the kettles into the tub and steps in,
slipping the cotton over her head. While Miles
dries his back and legs he watches the way
she bends and straightens, attending to toes, heels,
under her arms and breasts, the slight moon-shape
her belly makes now, her long white flanks, her face.
He soaps her back for her and pours the rinse water
over her hair twice, three times, her neck arched
back and her eyes closed. These rituals almost
always end in their bed with tongues and minty
fingertips, but not before she has dried herself,
showing him the apple of her bottom and the dark
vee of hair veiling what’s between her legs.
He almost cannot bear the exquisiteness of waiting
as she dries her hair beside the stove, so he walks out
naked to the porch and hurls the cooling wash-water
over the rail.

 

 

 

 

Molly Fisk sent poets into schools state-wide and edited California Fire & Water, A Climate Crisis Anthology, with a Poets Laureate Fellowship from the Academy of American Poets. She's received support from the National Endowment for the Arts, California Arts Council, and Corporation for Public Broadcasting. Author of The More Difficult Beauty, Listening to Winter, and five volumes of radio commentary, her new collection Walking Wheel, a novel-in-verse, is just out from Red Hen Press. She lives in California's Sierra foothills.

 

 

 

 

 

Maw Shein Win’s most recent full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn) which was shortlisted for the 2025 Northern California Book Award in Poetry. Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn) was longlisted for the PEN America 2021 Open Book Award, and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA, the recipient of the 2026 George Garrett Award for Outstanding Community Service in Literature, 2025 Berkeley Poetry Festival Lifetime Achievement Award, and the 2025 Nomadic/SF Foundation Literary Award for Non-fiction. She is a member of The Writers Grotto and a co-founder of Maker, Mentor, Muse. She teaches poetry in the MFA Programs at the University of San Francisco, Dominican University, and Saint Mary’s College of California. mawsheinwin.com

 

Jake Kennedy : Sonora, by Chus Pato : Translated by Erín Moure

Sonora, Chus Pato
Translated by Erín Moure
Veliz Books, 2026

 

Did you see her fly?
she ascends the steps of the labyrinth
right to the top
where the planks wobble
where empty cages lie in heaps
where the dust and heat are suffocating
or up to the cone of light shining from the garden
She lives in that house
and in that one
and in the apartment
and in the others 

with the wraiths. (13)

 

Please let me reside here a little longer in the productive and wild space called not-knowing knowing. And please let me stay here where it’s the body’s knowing that prevails because (because because) the sparked-up heart or the tingling gut or the keen tongue isn’t fussed at all about contradiction and paradox and ambiguity. One hopes a single poem can create such an effect and yet this whole book—this whole sonorous Sonora—acts as a portal to mysteries that cannot easily be said or shared without ourselves (reader-listeners) resorting to new logics of expression.

Sonora is tremendous Galician poet Chus Pato’s latest (12^th !) book of poetry and it’s also the winner of both the 2024 National Poetry Prize in Spain and the 2024 Spanish Critics’ Prize for Poetry in Galician. The book is translated by her long-time translator—and fellow astonishing poet—Erín Moure. Importantly, Moure’s own poetry has always understood the book as a world (or worlds), of sorts, in which all physics and ecosystems and experiences within are subject to the love- and play-powered lawlessness of poetry itself. This means that the world of the book—its wild logics—permits of paradox, ambiguity, contradiction, the lateral, the unknown, the feminine, the queer, rather than acting as a container of the linear, the statistical, the macho, the cohered, and the factual. Moure as translator/bringer-overer-into-a-Canadian-English of Pato’s Galician insures that we feel—in our bodies—the granular or (then) granite texture of “the linguistic rock” or “the language rock” (19) of Pato’s world.

So! Sonora. Sonora. Sonora. I know that you can’t hear me speaking aloud the title of this book but I’m doing it… with this Canadian unilingual mouth and—this will be especially hard to prove to you (you are way over there!)—this everyday Canuck mouth (my mouth) that is now made of silica, lagoon water, potato skin, yarn, dirt, bird bones, and asphodels. I’m trying to figure out how poetry—when it communicates as the real-deal stuff—is read more by the stomach or the ear or the fingers or the groin or throat or blood than it is by the brain.

Or I’m not trying to figure it out I’m just trying to stay in the sensation of my body-as-the-mind-that-understands-sounds-and-images-as-truth and then to work up the courage to say it and share it here. Reading César Vallejo has this effect on me and reading Wanda Coleman has this effect on me and reading Pato has this sublime, mysterious effect on me, too: the poems communicate themselves nearly as transfusions—as opposed to static messages—to the heart or mind.

Sonora is comprised of nine waves or nine concentric circles and the force of the book—the singular drop that creates these entrancing soundwaves/gongings—is the death of the poet’s mother. I have a sense, too, from the opening poem, of experiencing each poem as a cascade of images—as if multiple colour slides were overlain in the projector and also as if some of the slides depict deep, European history while others depict more local and immediate moments. The opening poem to Sonora begins with these lines:

There are images that are dikes between the body
and the violence of the body
they’re outside memory
they extend like the strata of an exemplary life (9)

In this way each poem presents multiple slides or strata or “imaxes” (“images” in Galician) that carries historical and personal time. My body receives the poems as utterances of history and of the autobiographical and yet so laminated are these scenes/sonorities that they arrive as harmonious differences not as discrete units. As a reader I love this experience because the sensation is of listening and seeing multiplicities all-at-once. The opening poem ends this way:

nourished by roe deer
in the forests of Brabante /
the bloodbath happens
To stand up in the haze
and go off toward somewhere
interminable
the law traversed by the signs that are time (9)

Are we in the ancient Sonian forest watching deer move through the oaks and beeches? At the same time are we hallucinating (“beyond memory”) an entire other life as an imagined being that moves into unknowable pockets of time? Sonora produces a kind of magic for the reading body where one is not reading to extract a single statement but rather to enter, again, a radiant world of colour slides-upon-slides.

If the core of the book creates a multi-rayed elegy for the death of Pato’s mother this death is tied to the roots and to the stones and to the waters of history and time, too. As Moure says in her afterword, “The sonority of death, for Pato, is indeed geolinguistic. In her poems, the sonority of mountains, of granitic domes, of meadows and vegetation covering these domes, of the Antela lagoon, of prehistories and histories, is the sonority of being born and weathering time. Only when we are beyond consolation, the poet says, are we born.” (221) One of the magics of a poetry that communes with the body is to integrate the body back into history—to allow the body to feel its presence throughout time. Sonora—in this living English—is an astonishing work and a momentous event: a capturing of waves of both lyrical and far-reaching historical time, and an expression of the elegiac that ever lends the reader hope and giddy ongoingness.

 

 

 

 

Jake Kennedy—just this morning—saw the paw-prints of mhúyaʔ in the dusty table-top but he did not see mhúyaʔ itself... So the dusty table-top was and must be and is the brief [rain and wind coming] book of the mhúyaʔ. Yes. Thank you!

 

Laura Kerr : Transcendence

 

 

 

the entirety of a rose
cannot be reached

no introduction—
the work begins
already without permission

 

—

flowers
 not arranged
but handled

—

pressed into light
not photographed
flattened into existence

—

petal
leaf
insect
bruise
no hierarchy

—

the scanner refuses depth
so time enters sideways

—

white: opening too far
green: already compromised
red: continuation within beauty
rose: unreadable

—

nothing symbolizes
everything proceeds

—

system.log:
 loss = distribute (surface = all)

—

yes—
not located
not behind the image
but everywhere at once

—

the garden after
not memory
not before

—

if distance > minimal:
 image.fail ( )

—

you have to stay close
closer than looking allows

—

another register—
collapse without staging

stems crossing
petals folding inward
a structure that cannot
hold its own duration

—

structure.attempt ( )

if structure == stable:
 continue
else:
 collapse ( )

—

it never holds

—

no vase
no vase

no containment
only spill

—

and then—
a body enters
but barely

—

hands only
identity displaced into gesture

—

flowers lifted
placed
removed
replaced

—

this is where I hesitate

—

again

—

again

—

again

—

again

 

 

while True:
 arrange ( )
 observe ( ) 
 fail ( )
 love ( )

 

—

the vase remains
the arrangement does not

—

this is not documentation
this is rehearsal

—

grief as iteration
not event

—

grief.mode = "loop"
grief.resolution = None

—

yes—
that feels right

—

a space fades
into a procession
of hands arranging

after

—

agent.identity = dissolved
agent.action = persistent

—

the loop does not resolve
it maintains

—

not memorial
not tribute

—

practice

—

what can be done
 with what is gone

—

Spence:
 contact
Hickox:
 repetition

—

system.map:
 contact → compression
 repetition → sequence

—

both refuse completion

—

one presses time
flat

the other
returns it
to sequence

—

between them—
no transcendence
(not upward)

—

transcendence = False
direction = None

—

only this:

to remain
 with the flower

long enough
to see
it does not end

—

while observing:
 state.change ( )

—

it changes state
 continuously

—

and the image—
cannot stop it

only
hold

 the interval

—

image.process (time)
return interval

—

yes—
that is what it does

—

the work does not speak—
it continues

—

correction:
no introduction, still

—

Transcendence brings together Sheila Spence’s Lexicon for Loss
and April Hickox’s Observance
at Plug In Institute of Contemporary Art,
on view April 10–May 20, 2026.

it stayed with me

—

correction:

work.execute ( )

yet something still persists

the scent of white roses

 

 

 

 

Laura Kerr is an award-winning Canadian visual artist and poet. In 2012, she was honoured with the Queen Elizabeth II Diamond Jubilee Medal for her contributions to the arts and her long-standing commitment to art education.

She recently sold her art school to devote herself fully to her writing and art practice. Laura currently serves as Vice-President on the executive board of Plug In ICA, a leading contemporary art centre located on Treaty 1 territory in Manitoba, Canada.

For over 30 years, she co-owned and taught at Paradise Art School, specializing in classical and contemporary art education. Throughout her career, she has explored the intersections of traditional mediums and digital technology, increasingly blending painting, drawing, and photography with generative processes.

Her current focus is visual poetry—experimental, image-based works that merge poetic ambiguity with technological play. By using digital tools in process-driven ways, she ensures the artist’s hand remains central—even in collaboration with machines.

She is also developing a body of experimental poetry criticism, written in collaboration with AI trained on her own work. These pieces challenge conventional interpretation and embrace uncertainty, forming a self-reflective loop between maker, machine, and meaning.