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"The Weight of a Name", "Your Suicide was Searing Steam from a Pressure Valve", & "Driving Home from the Festival" by Maudie Bryant



CW: CSA and suicide. These pieces explore themes of trauma, grief, and the burden of memory, confronting the emotional weight of personal experiences.



The Weight of a Name


It wasn’t the violence depicted

on TV, not bruises, nor scars.

Just fear and shame

of what

I let happen


to my body; I knew

I was wrong. I knew

I’d be in trouble. I knew

I was impure. I knew

I became damaged goods.


At tender six,


I didn’t want to tattle.


I longed to be swallowed 

whole, to be palatable,

ignorable.

There is no beauty in chewing 

childhood wounds.


I never imagined the term.

It only happens one way:

she asked for it.

I felt complicit, burdened.

The burden, complicit, too,

in my silence.


With words on my tongue, the weight 

of expectation presses me 

to cloister pain 

with pretty little words.


I quantify the unspeakable, 

unable to assign a name, even 

though I see an r-word,

as clear as Rumpelstiltskin.


Will speaking it give me power?



Your Suicide was Searing Steam from a Pressure Valve


After you, brother, the constant 

question mark answered.


No more sweating, no more

creaking under your strain, 

no more swinging tightrope

begging, “stop me.”


The news erased you, lifting weight

from my heart, cell by cell,

unloading baggage, beat by beat.


No more conversations

prematurely ended.

Your connection,

a permanent dial tone 

between my ears.

Your line, dead.


No more pleading 

with strangers 

to knock on your door,

to check your breathing,

if you’re still holding on

by that fragile thread.


No more prayers tossed

into the void.


I felt the guilty tingle 

of relief, of no more 

sleepless nights.


I felt the guilty truth

of this final call;

I released a shameful breath

of fear put to bed.



Driving Home from the Festival


While the road stretches ahead

like a silver thread, unspooling

endless veins 

of a sleeping giant, we drive,

headlights seeking to outrun 

the past, 

the present,

the future 

waiting to unfold velvet dark.


In the hush of twilight,

it is not the stars that fail us,

but our internal flames, dimmed

by the weight of living.


Stars cradle moons in lullabies,

a celestial balm while

souls sail on stardust

to escape earthly tides,

this gravity well 

of sorrow. 


A cosmic disappointment drapes over

the rearview: the sky mirrors 

a canvas of unfulfilled 


desires. It is not the stars that fail us,

but the road, ever winding, 

that tethers us to unyielding asphalt,

the here, the now.


A constant movement; this ceaseless 

journey without end.




Maudie Bryant (she/her) is a mother, educator, and multidisciplinary artist living in Shreveport, Louisiana. Her work explores the complexities of memory and identity, often looking into the depths of human experience and surveying the disquiet that lurks beneath the surface. A graduate of the University of Louisiana Monroe with an M.A. in English, Maudie’s poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Anodyne Magazine, Susurrus, and Spellbinder.


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