Brynn Saito is the author of The Palace of Contemplating Departure, winner of the Benjamin Saltman Poetry Award from Red Hen Press and finalist for the 2013 Northern California Book Award. She also co-authored, with Traci Brimhall, Bright Power, Dark Peace, a chapbook of poetry from Diode Editions (2013). Brynn’s work has been anthologized by Helen Vendler and Ishmael Reed; it has also appeared in Virginia Quarterly Review, Ninth Letter, Hayden’s Ferry Review, and Pleiades. Currently, Brynn lives and teaches in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her second book of poems will be published by Red Hen Press in the spring of 2016.---------
No History
No history of suicide or insomnia
in my family Histories
of bottles fermenting blues
No history of oil or industry
in my family No legacy of leaning
over sunlit terraces telling the masses
exactly what to do
History of luck and guns
in my family scribbled in dust
Stone-colored snow-covered countries
in my family Crows fleeing bodies
split into two—
Body-as-country Country-as-promise
Body-as-black-box-carrying-
a-promise I begin like an agent
to get it all down—
Histories of deliverance and delicate
walking around volatile
fathers Histories of altars Histories
of daughters praying in moonlight
playing their hands in the streets
of new cities Cities like saviors
for the bold lucky few
Sanger, CA, 1973
My father’s in the back of a pick up selling fruit
on the roadside with his nephews
in the fire-haze of summer.
Time before I was born, time before all of this
came into being—the kingdom of childhood, the girls’
education, the girls squandering girlhood
on baseball shards and mud gardens.
I want to imagine it all back, walk like a memory
up to the dusty truck, buy forty-five fat
and bloody melons as an act of advanced
apology. Me and the boys would talk about sports,
disparage the heat we love only
in secret. We’d watch my father haul box-loads
of vine fruit into the carriage,
wishing on lightning we could be that strong.
In the Other World
You are young again Your father has not gone
to the bar tonight You do not have to find him You do not
have to call around asking for him You’re a girl-spark firefly
making your rounds across the field at dusk Dark descending
like a pool of freshwater in a foreign country
in summertime You ease into your life You ease into the person
you were born to become The shepherd on tour
with the guest artists The carefree candy collector
The cormorant downriver dipping downstream
I see you in the other world with a small group of citizens
huddled over a candle dreaming wildly eating
strawberries sipping Lucky Strike You pace the night streets
pledging your survival Singing Sweeping away
the fliers after a long night of calling out You called out
for justice You’re fearless as a necklace torn from the body
thrown to the wind
In the other world history has not circumscribed
your spirit You’re so close to freedom
you can taste it on the salt-winds Your spirit is a songstress
occupying the sea
Poem for the Shadow of an American Boy
Never tell a woman you've got murder
inside you, never let the bass overwhelm
the treble, remember how your voice
has a history. Never write the coda
before you find the hook, that is
be as good as you can when standing
by a burning car with a girl inside it
and a boy on the roadside making wishes.
Be good to the doves cooing nocturnes
through your window, though I know
you'll want to kill them, I've seen
that kind of rage, it makes my mouth
fill with ash. One day you'll wake wondering
where your mind went, what it held to
when the body shook, why the body
betrays the spirit's quest over and over.
Swaths of time like cut ribbons of seawater
to thrash around in. Silent sky at dawn.
The muscle in your chest beating
2/4 time against the breath's 4/4.
On such mornings if you're lucky
the one beside you will be breathing
in half-notes, composing with her shoulders
or composing with his shoulders
the prelude to your redemption.
the prelude to your redemption.
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Photo Credit: Kurt Richter