Good

 

Shockingly, they assassinated Renee Good In Minneapolis yesterday. She was unarmed and probably in a panic when she tried to drive away from ICE agents approaching her vehicle. They carried guns but did not display identification numbers or names. They hid their faces behind black masks.

You have probably seen the video footage which proves that she did not run over or even clip any ICE agents before they shot her like an enemy soldier in a war. It is outrageous and typical that the US Secretary of Homeland Security, the odious Kristi Noem justified the murder of Renee Good by saying that she had been the perpetrator of 'an act of domestic terrorism'. Utter rubbish.

Far from being a domestic terrorist, Renee Good was a mother, a daughter, a sister and a friend. She was also very much into the written word. In 2020, while studying creative writing at Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia , Renee was awarded the school’s undergraduate poetry prize for her poem, "On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs". Here it is:-

⦿

On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs
by Renée Nicole Macklin (Good)

i want back my rocking chairs,

solipsist sunsets,

& coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of

cockroaches.

i’ve donated bibles to thrift stores

(mashed them in plastic trash bags with an acidic himalayan salt lamp—

the post-baptism bibles, the ones plucked from street corners from the meaty hands of zealots, the

dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic kind):

remember more the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures; they burned the hairs

inside my nostrils,

& salt & ink that rubbed off on my palms.

under clippings of the moon at two forty five AM I study&repeat

    ribosome

    endoplasmic—

    lactic acid

    stamen

at the IHOP on the corner of powers and stetson hills—

i repeated & scribbled until it picked its way & stagnated somewhere i can’t point to anymore, maybe

my gut—

maybe there in-between my pancreas & large intestine is the piddly brook of my soul.

it’s the ruler by which i reduce all things now; hard-edged & splintering from knowledge that

used to sit, a cloth against fevered forehead.

can i let them both be? this fickle faith and this college science that heckles from the back of the

classroom

now i can’t believe—

that the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding long hairs behind my ear like mom

used to & exhaling from their mouths “make room for wonder”—

all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as:

life is merely

    to ovum and sperm

    and where those two meet

    and how often and how well

    and what dies there.

The IHOP (International House of Pancakes)

@ Powers & Stetson Hills junction, Colorado Springs

This what the poetry contest judges said of Renee Good's poem:-

"In “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs” the eye of the poet moves in and out of memory through association that compounds layer after layer, or more appropriately strand after strand. Braiding THE existential question through a zuihitsu form, rumination on object, human body, and wonder all biologize that which defies simple science. What is the origin story of “want;” the urgency of belief and nonbelief? the first line the poet asks. Through specificity of image and associative leaps from piece to piece emerges a text that in itself becomes a sacred text, a meditation that leads the reader into the unknown."

To tell you the truth, that poem would not be my personal cup of tea but that does not matter. Renee Good was a creator, a poet. I wonder how many poems Kristi Noem has ever put out into the world and what about the currently hitherto unnamed ICE agent who, sanctioned by the US president, murdered Renee Good in her own neighbourhood. Why didn't he shoot at the SUV's tyres instead of his unarmed victim's head? Why did he shoot at all and how much is he being paid to create terror on the streets?

There were cuddly toys in Renee Good's glove compartment.