“Slow Burning Ancestor” by Brynn Saito

Slow Burning Ancestor

In the middle of all of this, the grocery story. The check stand aisle magazines advertising your desires. You buy the one with the atlas of sacred places, and the one with the Colorado hot springs, and the magazine telling you to keep a gratitude journal as your chances for giving birth slip wildly away. You read about celestial nymphs dancing at the gateway of Angkor Wat and kami dwelling in the Kii mountains. You learn about the Sacred Cenote, and memory’s songlines, and the prophet with his followers fleeing Mecca. You think: if I don’t get pregnant this season, this expensive, medicated cycle, then I’ll surrender to my dream of chasing down the holy. Your husband makes the syringes and places them on the medical-grade slab your sister got you for Christmas to help you inject yourself. Sting, burn, release. You hear the dogs dreaming in the next room. You’ve always loved the next room: the comfort of life adjacent and boundaried, while you draw your name a thousand times on black canvas with black paint.

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.

Headshot: Dave Lehl

Photo Credit: Staff