I’ve been combing through an exchange I had with a friend / I’ve been trying to understand the feel and thickness of it. After Molly died, my friend, who is also a writer, and I were talking about Bandit, about the power reading the book / being entangled in the book / gave us. Were we on the phone? I feel like we were sitting close to each other or the water, but I know we were not. The sensationalized narrative of what fathers do to daughters, of the pain and grief men bring to those more vulnerable than them was ground to miserable dust in Molly’s hands. “This is about whatever is cut from the frame of narrative,” Molly says. Molly said. The story where the person emerges, stronger and more savory, from their unfathomable suffering / sank back into horrific, murky shithole it came from. Good fucking riddance.

What does the book mean now, though, my friend wondered. What would it mean to read Bandit for the first time now? To give it to someone who was struggling? A question put forth / tenderly / It felt like putting a hand or / the center of a flower / on pain. The trouble with books, to some extent, has always been that we continue / despite them / to spite them. Even while Molly’s book rejects survival as we love to exploit it, survival is still what we wanted. I wanted Molly to survive / to vive / to live / on my terms it would seem. Any terms that mean she is still / here. How / selfish. How / painful.

The trouble with books is that we write other ones. We love the version of us who wrote the book / we hate them / struggle to reckon with the different pieces / with the difference in ourselves / how it bursts / how it hurts. Writing / also allows us to safely fracture and hide our / selves in acceptable pieces / in accepted pieces. Why / do that? For survival / love. To survive or love what remains / what may still get cut from the frame of the narrative. Out of the bounds / the binding of Bandit / a froth of unanswerable questions or lies or unbearable facts / pressed constantly against some / sharp tangle of branches or rock. Molly’s unpublished poetry book, Folk Physics, to some extent, questions or ridicules the person who wrote Bandit / and the person who reads it. “The Palace” / a poem / is a demonstration of this.

I was going to point at us and knock

us down some, real mean,

because we deserve it, I know I almost wouldn’t

get it out, I laugh myself into silence sometimes—

the one about us

existing,

the most evil manifestation

life has ever manifested—it’s so funny, I know

you’d laugh, even just your fake polite laugh.

The poem takes the “I was going to” in the first line and enacts it. Whether you knew Molly or not, you are powerless against / being implicated / feeling a little stupid. Your response to the lines / are selfish / painful.

I do not mourn the boundaries between this and Bandit and Molly. In this small, glittering poem, I feel what could be an acknowledgement of how cycles of familial abuse and trauma may have lived in Molly / how she may have experienced them and, / importantly, how she may have enacted them against herself / others. “I was going to” but then I did. The poem, though, never admits to having done / anything. We just know she / and we deserved it. What was going to be said / is not said / turns into a laugh / that almost / doesn’t get out. When the speaker finally manages to get it out / an immediate threat exists / that it will become silence / it dissolves into another form / of silencing. And you the receiver / because of the silence or because of what did or did not happen or because you are a shitty idiot / a shitty existence / will not ever really get it. There is a lot of nearness and a lot of near missing / that feels dangerous / here. “Actually I have never heard / my own voice,” says Molly in a poem called “Mail.”

Trauma and its aftermath is the subject of so many of the books we write, the books we read, the poems and work that our students turn in. A bold note, an endless lake, bone / blooming in the desert / the parking lot. The impossible floral stench of reaching out / of our desire to speak / on something like our own terms. I think this is part of why / we try to do this / to write what is unspeakable / unquotable. A desire to try to insist on what an event or events cut out / from under us / the possibility of control, of memory, of time, of why. Writing about what happened to you / the happening of you / feels like giving each other / you and a ghost that is also you / fruit.

I’m thinking of Ella Longpre’s writing here / a line that haunts me / that holds me. “I tried to write a lyric essay on abortion and ended up with a collection of vignettes in which women give each other fruit,” says Longpre in an essay about writing the traumatic event called, “The Event Vanishes.” I sit inside this line so often, I think, because it enacts something like the intimacy of being / present for another / being. The scraped out / hope of it. Is this a portrait of listening / through language and outside of language? I want to say, yes. In the giving of fruit I feel there is / also an attempt to share the carrying of an experience that may also be suffering / or, at least, an attempt to carry alongside. An act of writing the details (or refusing to enter the details) / of what happened to you / the happening of you / enacts the impossibility of carrying so much within one body. An act of writing that is / also a question / of who will help you / carry it all.

What Molly makes complex and apparent, though, in Folk Physics is that this intimacy around the sharing and constructing of trauma / of life, in our writing and outside of it, can be as terrifying as it is potentially freeing. “Elaborate / survivors can’t carry everything / in one kind of body, see: coupling, photos,” Molly says in “Mail.” These lines push us to consider how a person makes sense of the fact that the source of their deepest wound, other human beings, are also what they require / to go on. A traumatic event can warp our understandings of the boundaries between me and you and yet, we continue to map those boundaries, understand them, live alongside them. Sometimes it feels like healing and sometimes it feels like fighting and sometimes it feels like nothing. At the bottom of the document I have left myself a note. I see that I have written, “takes a lot of pain to pick me up / it takes a lot of pain / in my cup.” I see that, as per usual, I have written down the lyrics / incorrectly.

I did not hear Molly use the word “survivor” to describe herself. This does not mean she did not think of herself or refer to herself as such. People who have endured trauma face this word, which is also a social position, and feel a range of emotions. “Survivor” is a word that many find strength and celebration in. Others may feel, in this word, the pressure to be or be seen as a warrior / a champion. They may feel the pressure to tell a story that runs its finger confidently along the arc of / strength, healing, and forgiveness. We often demand that survivors think of us / protect us / give us the details we need / the ones that make us gasp or feel “inspired.” We often demand they perform high levels of achievement, coping, and moving on / in order to be believed, listened to, and respected. I think of those who did not live through the trauma and violence enacted against them and how we draw the line between / those who lived despite / and those who did not / with the word “survivor.” Why draw such a line? I know and I do not. Ghosts twist and sway in the surrounding / anyway.

I do not remember when it was. I am sure I had already gone back to school. Like many poets, I also do something else. Writing / still / when I can. I was helping Molly make cookies. Little cookies shaped and colored like blue jeans. I am telling her about the training I have just finished. A short-term therapeutic intervention for people who’ve been diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and/or complex post-traumatic stress disorder. To be honest, I often had a lot of anxiety prior to being / with Molly. I connected that anxiety to wanting to be / worthy of her love and being consumed with fear / that I never would be. She was extraordinary / and demanded much of / us. We often failed / tremendously. Still, I always felt warm when I was with her. Seen. I trusted her with / what happened to me / the happening of me. I want to say we tried to share the carrying / to carry alongside / to give each other / fruit. While we were cleaning the house after she died, I am sure I saw her / my friend / some sun in the kitchen.

In what is likely the most damning poem of the book, “Medicine,” Molly says, “Men did unspeakable things to women. / Knobs of bones made public.” Molly said. In life and in death / Bandit / Folk Physics / Molly’s work / continues despite / to spite us. It shows us what it can. The work / the books / the poems make public / Molly’s pain / what she risked to try to speak herself on something like her terms. Perhaps even more palpably, Molly’s work shows us how eagerly the world clamors to protect those / who endlessly enact violence and abuse / against people / against animals / against the land and the water. The poem continues:

I remember one so weak he’d

waste quail with a shotgun,

refill fighter jets in his uniform,

hands still sore from strangulation.

One sewed the strap back on his duffle bag.

Others hid him.

Others cheered, among themselves, for the maiming.

Others blamed the women.

It is not just that Molly felt like she did not deserve help and support. She did not seem to believe it existed / at least for her. It is selfish / it is painful. The final lines of “Medicine,” are exhausted / angry. An admission / a sharp accusation. “Others withheld treatment. / Almost everyone withheld treatment.” Almost everything about the way we try to talk about and grapple with trauma and mental health still feels like an uncomfortable secret we would simply prefer not to / acknowledge. Even the fact that we use an umbrella term like “trauma” to represent a huge swath of events, outcomes, and subjective experiences feels, to me, at times, like a turning away from / a kind of burying. It is part of what we do to protect ourselves / from sitting with our own pain and loss / from facing our role in perpetuating the loss and pain of this world. “Some fought for their lives,” says a poem called, of all things, “Fruit.” It continues, “others hid / yet others carried themselves / across the uprising on daylong clouds / of delusion.”

Bandit and Folk Physics are the same world and separate worlds / Folk Physics clearly / a kind of unfolding / of what precedes it / a kind of unfolding / of hell. A poem called, “Nonfiction,” says,

We simply ran past the end of stories.

Our panting, our smiles dropped

to nothing, just staring, hand on hip,

back at the stories gathered at the boundary

which we could no longer cross.

But we were free to go.

Writing can be part of healing and survival but it often is not and maybe cannot be / the sole source of it. That is hard to say as someone who has found / healing and survival in writing / in the sharing of writing / the carrying alongside. Writing is also work. I text Caroline and try to describe how work is also a place to put it / all, / a place where I feel like I can give and give and give. It is good. It is fucked up. Sometimes it feels like healing and sometimes it feels like fighting and sometimes it feels like nothing. Here is Ella Longpre again:

Mostly the revision process has been an act of erasure: scouring each line to make sure any and all identifying information of every real person I have alluded or referred to has been removed, making sure I only include details that could stand trial. Always keeping a box of proof in the closet. This is a common practice in nonfiction writing and for some people in general when speaking, for instance, women. Paring down my own experience to the essentials out of the fear of being so exposed.

What does it mean that writing is sometimes the only place to put it / all? A place where listening can occur / but is always contingent / on something. The evidence / the belief the reader has in / you / the belief you have or don’t have in yourself. People often forget or do not care how difficult it is / belief. The belief in what happened to you / the happening of you.

What would it mean to read Bandit for the first time now? To give it to someone to read / to someone who may be struggling / as Molly did? A question put forth / tenderly / It felt like putting a hand or / the center of a flower / on pain. To this I say / there is not an easy answer. I know, as you may know, that Molly was teacher / a caretaker. A person who tried to put help into the world / wonder for small things and beings. A person who was not perfect / A person who felt she had to be. A person who was loved / is loved. This love for her continues / it goes on / despite / in spite of. In reading / we are not ourselves alone / despite / in spite of. Is this a portrait of listening / through language and outside of language? I want to say, yes. We try to understand the gravity of this. We hope we can / give each other / fruit.