4-28-2025
Brynn Saito
LETTER TO MY FATHER
What’s ironic, Brynn—my parents wanted to forget this place—but I want to remember it.
-Gregg Saito
There’s a new way I see the garden now
the one you’ve been tending for decades on Garden Avenue
(of all names)—the street of our family home.
In haiku written by camp prisoners,
days and seasons are tracked by the falling leaves
of the moss rose, petal to earth. Poets in camp
numbered months and years by the memory
of their home gardens left behind on the West Coast:
flowering rhododendrons and peony buds they imagined
as vibrant, the stalks remaining firm. I think of us,
traveling that week in the summer of 2019, away from California,
along the train’s course, through Arizona, and on to Poston
and Gila River. How far I brought you from your garden.
Did you think of the sagos, the summer tomatoes
and basil, the azaleas and red maples, the night-blooming
lantana, trees needing trimming, grass going brown—
all the work awaiting you? Did you imagine
the dog’s chirping, the silent, white bucket, and mom
dragging the hose across the lawn to wake the fountain?
Here in the southwest, I find myself pining
for the Great Central Valley, as I did when I lived in New York
or that decade in the Bay, exhausted from cold bridges
and colder waters, longing with my entire body
for the landscapes of childhood’s kingdom. Smog-dust and all.
I understand now I am nothing. I’m the daughter
of a living father, blessed to be returning to you
after our fire-and-ice travels through North American
landscapes spotted by our elders’ lives, their prison
desert homes, and other jails and prisons—with
and without bars or barbed wire. You were not taken.
In the night and shirtless, you were not captured
or broken by the sentry’s light, despite my nightmares.
You took your time in the summer garden, where Leigh
and I played as the light set, basil-ing our bodies
against mosquitoes, baking mud-sweets in California’s
sugary dusk. Dad, your voice is wise now, beyond kindness.
I’ll see you soon.
June 14, 2019. Santa Fe, NM.
LOVE POEM FROM ANOTHER DIMENSION
If upon waiting you find it
hard to put down your lung
to rest a little and lean into
the sun setting beyond
the bleachers of youth, don’t
worry. If grass turns blue
and bottles start to
reassemble themselves
don’t think too much of math
or gravity. Ten times over
I’ve returned to you wholly
and freely glowing
with the kind of starlight
that takes eons to get here.
I walk to you always
from the other dimension
where we’ve met again
as goldfish, where we’ve
met again as cinquefoil
where, in the waters of sky
our mindless, bodiless
spirits swim in snow.
I believe in a goodness
that will not break
a goodness in your boy hands
a goodness in the letters
that made it to the desert
camp, a sweetness that memory
makes sweeter. If upon waiting
the decades spill out of you
and suddenly you’re 90
and the absent bleachers
and summer fields
of our candied youth
burn circles in your blood
don’t worry. I lived.
LAST LINES (II)
Toothless starlight, sing to me now.
Low moon, skin-swaddled and ancient, speak from the eye of the atmosphere—loosely livid, dropped under.
Carved smoke, red water, neck ache—
Whatever ate their hearts has spared you; start living in reverse.
You are allowed to begin somewhere.
You are allowed to change.
And why not the body? Nipple and hip crease, mountain fibroma, desmoid tumor dance and two hands clasping, unclasping.
Water molecules under anger shape-shift, the past is like that.
A single crane rises from a watery roadside ditch like a letter.
Gnostic in the oak-light, bring me to my senses in the tired dawn.
Pack of dogs, take my palm.
Now you get to believe in God, all of the blessings so unclear.
Now starlings sing verses, cloud-light swells the grape fields.
How long before you give yourself to moonlight fanatical?
How long before you recall the taste of democracy, rock-shore to sea’s rain, the people’s eternal return?
Yellow cedar, un-shard me.
Beautiful prayer animal, rise to the occasion of your living.
-from Under a Future Sky (Red Hen Press), celebrated with the author's permission and selected by PoemoftheWeek.com Spring 2025 Guest Editor, Lee Herrick
Brynn Saito (she/her), MA, MFA, is the author of three books of poetry, most recently Under a Future Sky (Red Hen Press, 2023). A 2023 California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellow, Brynn is the winner of the Benjamin Saltman Award and a finalist for the Northern California Book Award. She coedited with Brandon Shimoda The Gate of Memory: Poems by Descendants of Nikkei Wartime Incarceration (Haymarket Books, April 2025). Brynn also co-authored with Traci Brimhall the poetry chapbook, Bright Power, Dark Peace (Diode Editions, 2016) and co-produced with Koji Lau-Ozawa the short film Cactus Blossoms Revisited. She teaches in the Creative Writing program at California State University, Fresno, located on the traditional lands of the Yokuts and Mono peoples.
