Maw Shein Win
Sleep Log
I talk while I sleep. Sometimes I laugh for a long while.
T tells me that I speak quickly & he can only hear my side
of conversations.
I dream about caves, lakes, drapes.
I flap my arms with much effort. Fly upwards, hit a smooth
white ceiling.
My snores are delicate, T says.
I hear a disembodied voice, snap alert.
For years, nails & shards of glass flew from my mouth.
I imagined this as rage.
Sleep under four heavy blankets.
Dream about losing a purse even though I don’t own one. My
older sister visits me. She died six years ago. She swings a leopard
skin pouch around on a golden chain, she is glowing.
I whisper: everything is going to be okay.
Maw Shein Win reads “Sleep Log”
Maw Shein Win’s latest full-length poetry collection is Percussing the Thinking Jar (Omnidawn, 2024). Her previous full-length collection Storage Unit for the Spirit House (Omnidawn, 2020) was nominated for the Northern California Book Award in Poetry, longlisted for the PEN America Open Book Award, and shortlisted for the Golden Poppy Award for Poetry. Her work has recently been published in The American Poetry Review, The Margins, The Bangalore Review, and other journals. She is the inaugural poet laureate of El Cerrito, CA. She teaches poetry in the MFA Program in Writing at the University of San Francisco. mawsheinwin.com