Poem: ICE Killed a Poet—Renee Nicole Good

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.

—Renee Nicole Good, from her poem “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” winner of the 2020 Academy of American Poets Prize

Poets who write of rocking chairs and tercet-singing insects
never shift from reverse to drive, rev their engines, run down ICE.

Too terrified, as her mother said.

Domestic terrorist, Noem said of her without a full investigation.

Domestic terrorist? Then I say back:
the way Garcia Lorca was done away with by Spanish fascists in an undisclosed location
(and Trump is fine with fascist tags, or so he told Mamdani);
the way 13 Jewish poets were shot to death within a Moscow prison’s walls.
(Traitors, so Stalin called them; thinkers, so we recall them.)

So really, she was no domestic terrorist, though maybe she would seize the term, put it to verse,
wryly thanking Noem for inspiration. Poets, you know, do wage wars with pens
and souls and words, bearing witness as legal observers,

observing legally, they see domestic terrorists, as she perhaps did, the ICE man raising his gun to shoot.

That, poets can do.

Killing poets should be a sin, even if you never read them (or even this), for they have much to say and seek new ways to say it. Even when shot and killed, they say it;

memory becomes their ink;
truth becomes their paper;
we (some at least) remain their readers.

Editor’s note: Though the media identifies her as Renee Nicole Good, she signed her prize-winning poem as Renee Nicole Macklin, taking the name of her late second husband.