"Summer Sleep": A One-Girl Coffin Inside a Placid Summer Morning

JSTOR Daily's roundup of poems about sleep and dreaming includes Marilyn Chin's "Summer Sleep," which opens with a placid image of sleeping in on a summer's day, one filled with "false emergencies," then pivots into a dream in which the speaker sleeps in a claustrophobic "one-girl" coffin, with "death coins on the roof."

In the roundup's reading of the poem, the dream carries the true emotional weight, and the waking world is the part that deceives us.