‘Letters to L’ and other poems

Maw Shein Win

Letters to L 

Dear L, 
I am here in the kitchen, boiling eggs and chopping ginger. Thinking of my ex & about the time he was obsessed with making kombucha. That huge mother scoby floating in a bowl and all the jars taking up the counter space.  Remembering my dream last night: we were trapped at the bottom of a cave. You were 7 and I was 8. We could see the hole to the sky from below. An occasional hawk would fly over and one night it rained on us. We lived on onions and cabbage.  

Dear L, 
It’s evening. I’m drinking pine needle tea. Have you heard of its curative properties? I thought you might find this amusing especially considering my multiple allergies, but I long to adopt a rabbit, perhaps even two. I want to knit hats and boots for them. Today I walked all the way to the Rose Garden and wrote in my notebook: Windermere, Escapade, Damask. How these names might be suitable for rabbits. 

Dear L, 
Today I left my backyard cottage as the rain had cleared. I needed to breathe, enter the outside. I walked up Spruce to Grizzly Peak. A squirrel dashed across my path, a plum in its paws. I found this comforting. I tied the blue silk scarf you gave me on my birthday.  

— —

Letter to an Unknown Artwork 

Dear Unknown Artwork,  
I don’t know if you’ll be figurative or abstract or a combination of both. Nor am  
I aware of the dimensions, materials, or techniques applied in the making of you. 
I am mystified as to what your underlying themes or subject matter could be:
conflation? intervention? repatriation? surveillance?   
I am unprepared as well for your intended sincerity or irony.  
Equally unpredictable: color, form, texture, surface.  
Will your composition be minimal?   
Will you have a vanishing point on your horizon? 
Will your negative space crowd out your positive? 
In reverie, I have envisioned the boldness of your strokes, thick as matchsticks,  
in counterbalance with an organic shape, the color of fresh limes. 
Perhaps you are a sketch employing sculptural elements. 
Maybe a memento mori reminding us of our impending end. 
Or, simply a landscape with dark green hills and a log cabin in the foreground  
caught on fire. 

— —

Letters From the Waiting Room 

Dear H,  
I’m hanging out in the waiting room. I am blinking into another eye, gold shades, sirens again. Seeing another city through the window of another’s window, I live in a two-second time lapse. 

Dear H,  
I knitted a quilt for you, slivers of green lint throughout. Warmth in the waiting room now, my limbs are soft with pain. Slept last night with ears open. Noted the following: pollen drift, vessel crack, pillar bark.  

Dear H,  
My cat visited me from the otherworld. She witnessed bliss busting from the pockets of houses open once again, bright light from the storehouse, tinny bell tones. She could smell the dirt from behind the shed. 

Dear H,  
Missing your crackling eyes, generous fountains. And this: you were standing on a dock and next to you, a large trunk made of bone. Strangers began to gather. You sunk your hand & lifted a spinning plate from the trunk. Applause & more applause.