The Name She Gave Me

by Alexis Brunstedt

There are stories folded into the names we carry—histories we didn’t choose, inheritances we continue or rewrite. This poem is a meditation on lineage, womanhood, and the quiet power of naming: what we’re given, what we’re denied, and what we reclaim. It’s a love letter to the two women who shaped my name from both ends—my mother, who named me, and my daughter, who renamed me.

Some names carry centuries. Others arrive as whispers. Some come with permission. Others are born in grief and softened, over time, by grace.

May this piece speak to anyone who has ever felt unnamed, misnamed, or renamed—and still found their truth in the sound.

The Name She Gave Me

for my mother, and my daughter

I was named after a Russian prince

whose blood ran like prophecy,

a body that kept speaking

long after silence was required—

a name wrapped in both fragility

and fire.

Mrs. Lambert handed her a book

of names threaded in Cyrillic echoes,

ghosts of cathedrals and czars—

but Marina was already taken.

She turned pages

until one flickered forward,

like memory does—

Alexis.

She pronounces every letter,

each syllable a bead on a string—

A-lek-sis—

as if to say it

is to keep me near.

I think she loves

how my name holds itself.

She gave me that name,

but for a time,

I held another—

a name we do not choose,

but grow into:

Mother.

For nine months

I carried it in the hollow

between heartbeats,

where names grow

but aren’t yet spoken.

And then I placed my daughter

into arms that weren’t mine.

I was not allowed

to give her a name.

But the woman who raised her

named her Joslyn—

and decided what I would be.

She said Joslyn would call me

Lexi.

Perhaps because I arrived

with a camera and a trembling steadiness,

trying to catch joy

frame by frame, like gathering light

through a cracked lens.

Now Joslyn calls me Lexi—

and she smiles.

It might be the way

the name ends in a lifted i,

the sound curling at the corner

of her lips as she says it.

And in that smile

is the first word of a language

only she and I speak.

It settles into the outline of my skin,

a quiet inheritance—

not the kind of blood that breaks,

but something unbroken,

passed on,

held like a crown

in the hidden seams

of my name.

Art and poetry are ways we hold our stories.

Thank you for witnessing mine.