> ## Content Index
> Fetch the complete content index at: https://hyperallergic.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover other available public pages before exploring further.

# One Poem by Molly Brodak
- URL: https://hyperallergic.com/one-poem-by-molly-brodak/
- Published: 2017-10-18T11:05:00.000Z
- Updated: 2025-11-24T16:47:01.000Z
- Description: Our poetry editor, Wendy Xu, has selected one poem by Molly Brodak for her monthly series that brings original poetry to the screens of Hyperallergic readers.
- Author: Wendy Xu
- Tags: Poetry, #wp, #wp-post, #image-position-hidden, #Import 2025-11-24 07:30(2016, 2017, part 3)

![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/51/f8/51f871d8-b6be-4a73-b958-0ca4fff0110a/content/images/hyperallergic-newspack-s3-amazonaws-com/uploads/2017/10/4263771385_65f06893c1_o.jpg)

Olafur Eliasson, “Beauty” (1993), at the MCA (Museum of Contemporary Art) Sydney, Australia (photo via Sarah\_Ackerman on Flickr)

## 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.

\* \* \*

Molly Brodak is the author of [*A Little Middle of the Night*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/1587298589/?tag=hyperallergic-20&ref=hyperallergic.com) (University of Iowa Press, 2010) and [*Bandit: A Daughter’s Memoir*](https://www.amazon.com/dp/B01DUNXW7G/?tag=hyperallergic-20&ref=hyperallergic.com) (Grove Atlantic, 2016) along with three chapbooks of poetry.

*Readers are encouraged to submit 3–5 poems as a PDF to Wendy Xu for consideration at* [*poetry@hyperallergic.com.*](mailto:poetry@hyperallergic.com)