The December 2020 issue of The Volta, out now, includes an “In Memoriam” feature on poet and memoirist Molly Brodak.

The feature includes 20 previously unpublished poems from Brodak’s final decade of life: “A Letter,” “A Meeting,” “Ark,” “Bargain,” “Camp,” “Charnel Ground,” “Conversation,” “Court,” “(Crude Chair,” “Election,” “Mount Yonah,” “Ok,” “Other Peoples’ Lives,” “Specter in Glyph,” “State,” “Vessel,” “Wheel in Air.” It also contains remembrances of Brodak from Caroline Crew, Carrie Lorig, Gina Myers, Nick Sturm, and Blake Butler. Says Blake Butler in his essay “Molly,” “Please speak up. The world is clouded. We must try. Even now, at least at times, I still believe that.”

The feature, “Evening Will Come,” can be accessed here. Below is Brodak’s poem “Ok”:

 

Ok

If you are tied

If you are bitter

If you are overjoyed

If you are lying

what will I know,

after all I have agreed

to hope and the pain of it.

Some doom.

Sweet light fire on the horizon.

This drift grids into a fabric,

a permanent fortune, and I fold it

into a drawer and care for it.

Where I first met you,

here we are. Against cold

and only dead pink branches

left, the fuck it of branches, in a crowd

of iron holly and knife sedge, walk

to the dark. Then walk.

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