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 John Cross are part of her curriculum for Maker, Mentor,Muse and poetry classes at the University of San Francisco, Dominican University, and Saint Mary’s College of California. Thank you for reading.
Ohio haunts me.
Though I’ve lived most of my life in
the Los Angeles area, my formative years unfolded in Northwest Ohio. Strange
dances of dreams and memories aswirl in the pipe smoke horizon mimicking
battlefield haze my dad puffed out as he read to me from books steeped in the
blood of history, much of it local accounts of the War of 1812 (maybe one day
war and destruction won’t define us?) come up for air whenever I hear in the
intimate distance a train, notice the soft golden light on a stand of trees
(the very same light that used to slant through the living room of my childhood
home), or smell fresh cut grass. Much of my poetry broods there.
“Dudley’s Massacre” comes from that
twilit space. The so-called ‘massacre” was actually the defeat of a few hundred
foolhardy Kentucky volunteers who marched into an ambush near the spot where
the Maumee branch of the Lucas County Library now stands. The poem offers some
specific memories from my life – allusions to the library, a nearby ice-cream
place, the beautiful Maumee River, my favorite bass amp, the Ampeg SVT, and one
Saturday morning when my dad and I went to an “Indian Guides” recruiting
effort. White kids and their dads dressed up as stereotypes of Native Americans
and…I’m not sure what they did, Cub Scout-like activities. After an
uncomfortable half-an-hour on rigid chairs, we snuck away from our guides. My
dad suggested we go fishing every Saturday morning instead. We went once.
Anyway. On to the poem.
A bunch of memories along with markers
of loss inspire this piece. The little bit of lost childhood, my amplifier that
someone stole, memories of playing in the countryside while my mom and aunt
gathered wildflowers to dry. These thoughts led me to consider the growing
tally of other living beings we lose, fauna specific to Northwest Ohio and the
larger fabric of our shared world.
At the time, I’d been reading David
Byrne’s beautiful book How Music Works and was struck by the acoustic
qualities of spaces. Having worked in a church as a custodian (in order to eat
and pay rent while playing in bands), I had experienced the uncanny, almost
dizzying physical sensation enveloping me when standing in a particularly
resonant space. Again, there’s that distant train. Cicadas droning on a close
summer evening…In that sacred place, the poem ends on a note of hope. One almost-plea
of a “hello” sent into the abyss.
These hazy ideas join together in the
piece.
Dudley’s Massacre
Everything keeps pulling to the
left margin, toward a point of
origin, a strumming of zithers, a
full stretch of the slingshot not
far from the soft-serve ice-cream
palace. Plumes of summer
clouds, sudden storms,
something cool, sweet, &
fleeting, I went fishing with my
dad once not far from here, near
the library, where the Indian
Guides & the screeches of metal
folding chairs made us
uncomfortable, so we left the
library & fished the Saturday
morning rapids. Later from
garage & basement I Ampegged a
deeper thunder through the
neighborhood, something they
could feel, but someone stole the
amplifier & now the bees have
been Africanized, so they’ll have
to go away too. The big cats in
the zoo still pace their cages.
Someone thought we should call
it the “corrections” system.
Someone else thought we should
trust Exxon. I wonder who will
collect the damage deposit, their
trucks’ rumbles, screes, & back-
up beeps. From this distance I
mistake the wind for voices:
gathering Queen Anne’s lace &
lupines outside the old
workhouse, prying loose the
boarded window with my belt
buckle, Black bear, Graceful
underwing. We didn’t catch
anything that Saturday 40 years
ago. There’s so little left in the
river that metaphors don’t make
sense here anymore. The only
signified is revenant in transport.
I’ll wait here, floating for a
moment, cartoon Coyote over
the abyss, seeking a sacred space
chosen for its echoes. Hello.
Ohio, memory, and all that we’re losing in the name of blindly seeking profit; that’s what beats at the heart of this collection. “A Volcano Half-Consumed Holds Its Crater” deals more explicitly with socio-political strife and struggle. This one was written as we were dragging ourselves our of the pandemic. A time when some of us held fast to a belief that things might change for the better if we made it through alive. In this piece, statues are torn down, a fat-cat rat wallows “stuck in his tub at the edge the edge of the crater”, and then the language slips into a child’s dreamworld. The last three paragraphs offer two clear observations. My partner Christine and I were walking our dog when we ran into a former student. She’s in the poem. The occupier of the White House makes an appearance. Then the poem closes by stepping back into the child’s dream, a frightened, hunkered down, perhaps threatening source of fire peering at us.
a volcano half consumed holds its crater
Windswept world, I watch them pull down the hollow bronze statues; the soldiers crumple, swallowed by the howls of their hats, closing like time-lapse flowers in reverse under the weight of their own plinths. Candles drop like parachutes from the stars through the swirls of dust and smoke, charring Uncle Pennybags stuck in his tub at the edge of the crater.
As a child, I left a water bowl inside the door for love when I heard the raptors in my head. Now, I leave the door ajar and a cup of wine set out for the guarded night,
in the shadow of the volcano. Sometimes we forget to say, hello.
A young woman tears up as she recognizes her teacher who’s grown old.
A president’s thrown his people to the wolves.
In the dawnlessness, the sun screws up its eyes to peer through its tiny periscopes.
Form?
Like the volcano half-consumed, two
poems writhe and grapple with their respective forms. There’s a sonnet and a
Sapphic. The Sapphic verse holds itself together until the final stanza, where
it falls apart. This poem was inspired, at least initially by Étienne-Jules
Marey’s photography. The poem tries to slow down the fleeting visuals, to catch
“light’s brief shudder”, to capture simultaneity. The same challenge we
encounter with language.
After Marey’s First Mechanical Bird
o dusk
field panicle of washerwomen
when the eye skerricks to frame light’s brief shudder
birds are a particular problem each surge
brokenly
language
and a northern raven tokking up the spine
of a winter maple (closing of a hand)
wing shards cooked in a star about to happen
first
dazzling slivers
descend descend out of the edgy god-light
you spangly nail studded [missing] black hangar
awned plangent drift
the
disassembling glitters
The sonnet started in my mind at a pizza joint in Iowa City. My friend referred to pepperoni as “the off-scourings of the hog.” The phrase conjured some troubled imagery! The sonnet does its best to hold true to the formal architecture, expanding until bursting and contracting back to the “well behaved” familiar. I love the sparks that shoot out of that tension between form and content.
The Off-Scourings Of The Hog
If I succumb to hunger pouring sand
At my sunken hips
a bow, and arrows made from scratch
Already leaching into leaves poking for small game
Or picking at Jerusalem Crickets behind damp stacks of
plywood
To knock at your house of uncertain aspirins
Strike-anywhere
my feeble reprobate lamps
And all these brittle slivers red with me
And these awkward hard-ons
If I have to ask
what do I know
And who are you
behind this darkling Woolworths
Where the stalking moon fingers us
Through slanted trestle slats
To convince my wracked windows it isn’t time
By screaming out of them it is not time
Mathais sets out.
I learned about Marey while studying Dada. Dada led me
to Fluxus. I’ve been reading Báyò Akómoláfé recently. All of these elements, in
interesting ways, help me to shed light on the Mathias poems that open this
collection. Mathias is a kind of avatar/trickster lost in repetition and
stasis, ending where he begins. He offers no solution to our collective
predicament, but he does invite us to dwell in bewilderment. There we might
reimagine our way of Being. We may never achieve true liberation thinking from
inside any established form. We have to imagine. Akómoláfé writes that
“legibility = incarceration.” Mathias seems to seek illegibility. Some of the
Mathias poems were composed in a more “legible” narrative lyric, inspired by
frayed wires in the sky, a trip home to Ohio in the summer, growing older, but several
were born from the Fluxus artist Emmett Wiliams’ experiments with disrupting
the alphabet. Each letter of the alphabet is replaced by a word or short
phrase. I composed a poem, phrase, or sentence, and replaced each letter
utilizing the new “alphabet.” Then I went back into the piece to revise. The
first summer away from grad school. I needed to play. Mathias satisfied that
itch, and the play turned serious. What might be exposed by cracks in the narrative
framework and associative thought? I’ll close with the poem that opens the
book. Mathias born into a world on fire.
Mathias sets out to study birth
a
hole off center blazing from body to soft ear
dragged on as Mathias could carry gender shriek at
first
he
stood still
a hole off center he thought dark birds
dark birds blazing from body very bareness stripped
tree
a hole off
center braves the debris
at first he stands still blazing from body gathered up
gender shriek
blazing from body as he could carry
like skin sky strands very bareness
like skin stripped trees dark birds
bolts gears twisted wire dark birds dark birds dragged
on
black crayon
to cover dark birds gathered up
as Mathias could carry
John Cross was born and raised in Northwest Ohio and moved to L.A. to play bass guitar in a rock and roll band. He earned a B.A. at UCLA and an MFA at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. He is the author of the chapbook staring at the animal (Tupelo Press), winner of the Snowbound Chapbook Prize, and his work was a finalist for the National Poetry Series. His poetry has appeared in Volt, Lana Turner, Yalobusha Review, New American Writing, among others. His first full-length collection What Bleak Angels Carried Your Bed was published by Omnidawn in May, 2026. He lives with his partner, artist Christine Kiphart, in Los Angeles.
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
