Renée Nicole Good was a poet / RIP

Read her Academy of American Poets award-winning poem from 2020

Renee Nicole Good from confirmed socials / her poem, On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs, won the 2020 Academy of American Poets University & College Poetry Prize at Old Dominion University

Jesus Christ, readers. I thought I was on a break, but here we are, with a modern-day gestapo haunting our streets gunning people down and then lying about it, and then feeling excited enough that they got away with it to go and tear gas a school.

What a timeline. It’s great to be alive.

If you’ve been reading here for a bit, it won’t come as a surprise that I’m incandescent with rage, since that’s pretty much been my state since I was able to vote and started paying attention (the 2000 election, actually. Real eye-opener). We plug civic actions regularly at Ass in Chair meetups, and Emily and I have hosted charity workshops and fundraisers for places like 412 Food Rescue and other critical orgs during this fascist nightmare. For the most part, I file these actions under “This Substack is about creativity, which also intersects with being human and fighting alongside other humans for our collective good.” But today… it hits different.

Because this wasn’t just another human gunned down in cold blood by semi-literate thugs. She was a poet human.

She was like us. She made creative work. She might have had fun with us or made something she was proud of at Ass in Chair, if she had lived long enough to find us. She cared about her neighbors and died doing the work of a non-violent witness.

The people who want to kill us all with impunity will try to tell us she deserved it. We’re going to read her poem instead:

On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs

by Renée Nicole Macklin

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.

---

More info about this tragedy, and about Renee and her work on LitHub. Here’s her poem on Poets.org and Porkopolis, both of which have some bio info about her at different points in her life. May her memory be a blessing.