When Grief Learns Origami
Maudie Bryant
She looks up and sees her fingers
dangling from branches,
thighs rustling in the canopy.
The yellow one is her mouth
held in leaves, open mid-yes.
The blue one, her knee
bent into surrender.
She remembers now:
They’re made of pages.
They’re made of her.
She ripped herself into strips
and fed the forest—
a letter here, a vein there,
a whole wrist tucked into a love note
no one returned.
The trees bend like ribs,
wet with light,
pressing wind into a lungful
of limbs. She steps into the throat
of the wood, barefoot,
torn at the edges.
Birds—no—pleated organs flutter
overhead, kidneys creased into flight,
chambers of the heart
doubled over into cranes,
the spleen trembling pink
in a lost apology.
The path becomes a spinal column.
She walks it like memory,
dodging roots resembling her father’s hands,
her mother’s silence, moss growing
on the backs of her legs.
This is not a forest.
This is what happens
when experience folds itself.
Too sharp to carry,
too delicate to throw away.
Maudie Bryant
Maudie Bryant is a poet and multidisciplinary artist whose work explores the complexities of memory and identity. A graduate of the University of Louisiana Monroe (M.A. in English), she creates to unearth the disquiet beneath the surface of human experience. Her poetry has appeared or is forthcoming in Progenitor, Welter, and 3Elements Review. Maudie balances full-time work, motherhood, and her creative practice while living in Shreveport, Louisiana with her husband and two young sons.