One Poem by Molly Brodak

 The Cipher

A nonbeliever accepts
a kind of fog around facts—

believers demand meaning.

Beloved fog forms a tissue between them, like love.
Burns off in bald light, like love.

Nonbelievers just put on their war wigs
and their war gloves
and pick

from a fanned deck of brute facts.
To prove nothingness exists

you’d need just one thing that was not itself,
one x that did not equal x.

One copse of alders in one dim dusk
that was none of the above.
Souls are made up
of such obstacles.

And a nonbeliever accepts
that God is very, very likely.

Because
nothingness is just not
how brute facts work.

A rainstorm, brute fact, shuttles brainlessly towards us,

and our evening is overtaken in rain,
rain and fog, infinity, the opposite of engineering.

I listened to some invisible bird
rattling off the facts of consciousness.

He used that exact word,
cipher.

Via 

Molly Brodak is the author of A Little Middle of the Night (University of Iowa Press, 2010) and Bandit: A Daughter’s Memoir (Grove Atlantic, 2016) along with three chapbooks of poetry.