The day after we returned home from Molly’s funeral, the mayor issued a stay-at-home order for Philadelphia. As March progressed, spring blossomed and nature thrived with fewer cars and buses on the roads. Each day, the birds seemed so delighted, wild and raucous outside of our apartment windows. I thought of Molly’s poem, “In the Morning Before Anything Bad Happens,” from her forthcoming collection, The Cipher:
The sky is open
all the way.
Workers upright on the line
like spokes.
I know there is a river somewhere,
lit, fragrant, golden mist, all that,
whose irrepressible birds
can’t believe their luck this morning
and every morning.
I let them riot
in my mind a few more minutes
before the news comes.
Yes, let them riot a few more minutes. I think Molly would have liked seeing nature reasserting itself in those early days of the pandemic. But, then again, what do I know about Molly.
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Shortly after Molly’s death, Carrie Lorig shared a picture of Molly’s copy of Anne Carson’s translation of Sappho with a blue sticky note on one page: “I don’t know what to do / two states of mind in me.”
The next page in the collection reads: “I would not think to touch the sky with two arms.”
I make a note of this in my phone, but mistakenly put down Diane Rayer’s translations of the same lines: “I don’t know what to do—I am of two minds.”
And: “I don’t expect to touch heaven.”
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Less than two weeks before she died, Molly tweeted, “There’s nothing after death and I’ll see you there.” I remember laughing to myself and liking the tweet. I don’t expect to touch heaven.
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I am failing at writing this tribute to Molly. It is 4:42 p.m. and I am technically still on the clock at work. I have been thinking about how to write this essay for weeks—the right way to approach it, what to include, what to leave out. But I still don’t know what to say.
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What is left out: Molly loved basketball and black metal. Neither of these things are mentioned in her New York Times obituary. Instead, so much of what is written is about her dad—he even occupies the headline: “Molly Brodak, Poet and Memoirist of Her Father’s Crimes, Dies at 39.” The lede reads: “Her father robbed 11 banks in and around Detroit when she was a teenager to pay off debts. But his sprees were just the jumping off point for her unsparing memoir.” This disappoints me but I still share the link on social media.
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The problem with a public record is just that—it’s public. It does not include the private things you shared with a person or your personal memories or feelings. Not long after Molly died, my Uncle Tom died. I mostly think about him and my Aunt Jerry, who predeceased him, dancing. They loved to dance. There is no mention of that in his obituary.
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Within the first week of moving to Atlanta in 2011, I met Molly. She had given a poetry reading and afterward a group of us went to Manuel’s Tavern. We sat at a large round table, but also for a period of the night my partner at the time, Molly, Blake Butler, and I sat together at the bar, getting to know each other. Molly was excited that I had moved there from Michigan, and we talked of our love of our home state and what brought us to Atlanta. She had moved there about a month before I did, and we both were starting jobs at Emory University, she as a poetry fellow, me as a communications coordinator. I discovered Molly had gone to graduate school with the poet Kristin Abraham, who I knew from undergrad, and she had studied with Mary Ann Samyn, who I had once taken a workshop with. Recently, while looking back through old emails, I see I briefly mentioned this meeting to Kristin: “I met Molly Brodak last week. She gave a really great reading. I’m looking forward to getting to know more of her work and hanging out with her more.”
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Though we met through poetry, we quickly discovered we had a lot more in common—for starters, our love of Michigan, basketball, the Detroit Pistons, and our favorite player Rasheed Wallace. Neither of us had a traditional route through college. We were both atheists and didn’t want to have children. And we loved cats. We could also both be generous but guarded, somewhat aloof—happy to participate in conversations at a surface level, but also happy to hang back and observe what was happening around us, sometimes shooting each other a smirk and a knowing glance.
It seemed to me that Molly was always the smartest person in the room, and I don’t just mean book smart, which she very much was, but she could read people well and see through bullshit. Her observation skills were next level. She was endlessly curious and incredibly funny—I can still perfectly hear her laugh. She was super kind and generous, but also cynical. She seemed to me very strong, self-reliant, and down-to-earth. Not to mention extremely creative and skilled as a writer, artist, and baker.
Molly was also someone who valued taking care of the things she could be in control of. The chaos of her childhood certainly must have influenced this. In her memoir Bandit, she describes this “internal locus of control” as generally “empowering, certainly, but frustrating when error does happen, when self-discipline breaks down or unlucky events can’t be changed.” And there is so much wrong in the world at large that cannot be controlled, and also so many frustrating personal disappointments—when the baking tv show you were a finalist on is canceled, when your manuscript fails to find a publisher, when you don’t get the job you want, when you lose the family member whose relationship meant the most to you.
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I spent the day before the funeral at Molly and Blake’s house. Everyone had commented how the house was “so Molly,” from the artwork on the walls, the wallpaper in the kitchen, and all the tiny details that go into making a home. A sad smile of recognition came to me when I saw on the wall in her bathroom a blue ceramic tile inscribed with the words: “In Detroit, life is worth living.”
We shared this complicated love for Detroit. In Bandit, Molly describes the fierce defensiveness people feel for the city and its ruins. She writes, “I know it looks from the outside pretty ridiculous—who in their right mind wouldn’t want the ruins torn down and replaced with nice condos and yuppie markets?” She continues:
It’s hard to explain. It’s not as if I like damage exactly, it’s more that damaged things seem truer. The good maintenance of a new or cared-for thing or building is an artifice I want to see past. This isn’t about death. Death is pretty clean, a clicking shut; it’s life rot belongs to, it’s survivors who see and smell the decay—this is living. It’s a radical thing to accept.
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It’s when reading Bandit that I became aware that Molly didn’t believe she deserved good things in her life. She describes the house and neighborhood she moves to with her boyfriend, how each day on her run through a park that contains the Atlanta Zoo, she can stop to see the giraffes through a hole in the fence. She describes this as “too nice” for her, but something she is working on: “Atlanta, risen from the ashes like a phoenix, exactly what my city couldn’t do, and what I can do too if I just let ashes be ashes. Honest job, boyfriend, house, friends, all real: I have it all. Out of nothing.”
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If I just let ashes be ashes—this is something I have trouble with too. Aesthetix, the online poetry journal Molly founded and edited, published poems of one title per issue. For example, the first issue features all poems titled “Red Car in the Future.” The last issue comprised poems titled “800.” The journal had an inclusive vision: “We like the best of every aesthetic intention, and we welcome submissions from new and established writers, and especially welcome long poems, poems by children, and poems by non-poets.”
My work appeared in the third issue, “Household Fires.” I was inspired to write something for this issue because the idea of home is something that I have struggled with. For very different reasons, Molly and I both experienced “home” as a source of pain. In Bandit, Molly writes, “I was always headed away from wherever I was.” My therapist once told me that people were probably not comfortable getting too close to me because I was always leaving—always one foot in the door, one foot out.
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I am stumbling through this remembrance—my prose sloppy, my thoughts all over the place. And I am aware of Molly’s ability to be so precise—her economy of language, her ability to articulate what was unsayable or challenging. Her ability to say the hardest things. To always go for the truth, even—and especially—when it was painful.
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The past few weeks, I have been immersing myself in Molly’s poetry. In her poems, there is darkness, pain, and sadness—nightmarish images of headless doves singing, a tassel of robin’s feet. But there is also frequently wonder, curiosity, astonishment, and mystery. Sometimes something mischievous and playful. Her first collection, A Little Middle of the Night features many poems about sickness, written around the time of her brain tumor diagnosis and treatment. Molly’s forthcoming collection, The Cipher, features poems that seriously engage with art and philosophy. I wouldn’t call Molly’s work surrealist, but there is something deeply strange and otherworldly about many of her poems—how she could be standing in a brook with the dead, walking to meet herself. The poems are at times scientific and exacting—capturing her keen observations and ability to concisely convey details. Her final poems, which make up Folk Physics, completed on the day she died, are both devastating and stunning. And though I only heard them read once, I remember her wry humor showing itself too.
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Molly seemed to demand a lot from herself, a certain level of perfection, but she could see the fault in this too. In The Cipher, she has a short poem titled “How to Not Be a Perfectionist”:
People are vivid
and small
and don’t live
very long—
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I think of something Laura Relyea wrote about Molly at ARTS ATL: “Molly Brodak’s perpetual talent was breathtakingly and astoundingly unfathomable. Molly was an anomaly, a miracle. As my friend and fellow poet Carrie Lorig said in her remembrance at Molly’s memorial service, she was the kind of person you were proud to know, that you would show off to other people: Look at this person! She actually exists!”
I don’t know how many times over the years I have shown people the cake I hired her to make for Daniel Beauregard’s going away party, or showed people her Instagram, or told them about her Kookie House blog. When I read her memoir, I immediately thought of three other people to recommend the book to. Molly was endlessly impressive, and it hurts to know how much pain and suffering she was experiencing. It hurts to think that somehow I could have made a difference, I could have been a better friend, even though I know that’s not how these things work.
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The truth is that once I moved away from Atlanta, I wasn’t that close with Molly anymore. We exchanged occasional emails and interacted on social media, and I had the privilege to publish some of her poems in the tiny and Recreation League. I last saw her in person in 2016, when I had traveled to Atlanta to read. The thing is, I felt like I was still close to her because social media can trick you like that—you feel like you have a sense of what is going on in a person’s life, even though those images and stories are obviously curated. And I would reach out when I felt like there was something wrong, but in my own fucked up Midwestern way of not wanting to burden someone: “I saw your post and just want to check in. I’m sure you have closer friends to talk to about this stuff, but I’m here if you ever need someone.” I loved and cared about Molly, and I assumed I would see her again someday. I feel like I failed her.
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One of the things that is making writing this hard is that I want to put everything in. I want to detail the time we traveled to Alabama together, the birthday dinners, and the dreams I had of Molly after her death. I want to include a conversation Sarah Rose Etter, Carrie Lorrig, Jeff T. Johnson, and I had at her table the day before the funeral, and the way the back door suddenly opened as if someone had walked in. I think of Molly’s tweet: There’s nothing after death and I will see you there and the dreams I had in which she was traveling, leaving her current life to start a new one. Have I even mentioned Molly’s love of nature, her chickens, and all animals? The impact she had on her students? Is there anything in this recollection that really shows how wonderful Molly was and how devastating this loss is for those who knew her? I think of Molly’s own take on the way words fail: “Language itself seems to fall to pieces when it touches certain topics.”
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Again, Molly, from Bandit:
Growing up as a voracious reader I found stories of pain and redemption on every library shelf I visited. Pain! Apparently pain, I learned, can be traded in. It is some kind of money, in these stories, traded in for love, or admiration, or credibility, or wisdom. In books and movies and poems and plays, this sort of redemption is only fair to the reader, after all, who is forced to endure along with the hero or sufferer. Sufferers deserve rewards. And it’s so reassuring, the story of redemption.
Isn’t it true?
Maybe it doesn’t matter if it’s true, because the alternative is simply too cruel to accept: that trauma is worthless. Grief has no meaning, it just is. Perhaps we have gained nothing from the psychological rending our dad enacted on my family. What if we aren’t stronger or wiser, just hurt: the end.
Or as she puts it earlier: “[Pain] isn’t shit.”
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I want to end on something light. I’m returning to Molly’s love of basketball. When I spoke at her funeral, I mentioned our shared love of Rasheed Wallace, and I heard someone shout “SHEED!” but I don’t know who said it because I was nervous and trying to keep it together—but thank you, whoever it was. I then read the two poems of Molly’s that I published in Recreation League, “Basketball is Where There is Crying” and “Guard,” the latter included here in its entirety:
Sometimes you never know.
Well, always.
He’s way far away,
In the weeds.
He’s a nugget.
He’s a spur.
He’s as blue
And red
As a hero.
Heat, thunder.
The spectators
Form wild land
Of neighborly hatred,
Barroom hugs,
A mass of loud void
For him, for him,
The open man.
A thing I did not mention at the funeral was that for this issue, which featured all poems by women about basketball, we had a silly contributor note section where we asked the poets to list their names, jersey numbers, team, position, and height. Here is Molly’s bio from the issue:
Molly Brodak, #8
The Florida Horses
Mini Center
5'6"
I now want to have t-shirts that say The Florida Horses printed up.