“In the Arrowless Season” by Brynn Saito
In the Arrowless Season
Is it wrong to miss the intensity of the pain? Every day now: email after email after text message after email after meeting after meeting after lack of sleep after lack of sleep after spring and hardly noticing: you’re back on the inside. Your mind is taut. You walk around the house with sloped shoulders, sun smearing the succulents, sun knocking its head against the small infinity of your back. Death was something else, wasn’t it? All that Denver snow, crusted and diacritic, the daily hospital trips, the monstrosity of hope, the fertility of despair, your body understood as a garden one day, ruins the next. Now your husband plays video games. He plants himself on the couch with the dogs and the constellations. You tell your friends, I think he’s having a harder time with it, then you read about an infant’s mouth, a mother’s nipple, and night severs your eyelids. There’s a part of me that exists only in you, you want to tell him but you don’t. In the space of your failure: a piano chord. The Kuiper Belt. A cradle of feeling, boat-shaped and plunging the night sky.
Brynn Saito
Brynn Saito’s third book of poems, Under a Future Sky, was published in 2023 by Red Hen Press. A California Arts Council Individual Artist Fellow, Brynn is the recipient of the Benjamin Saltman Award and a nominee for the Northern California Book Award. Her poems have appeared in the New York Times, American Poetry Review, The Rumpus and other journals. Brynn teaches in the MFA program at Fresno State, located on Yokuts and Mono lands, and is co-editing an anthology of poetry written by descendants of the Japanese American / Nikkei incarceration, forthcoming from Haymarket Books.
Photo Credit: Staff