Renee Nicole Good, murdered by ICE, was a prize-winning poet. Here’s that poem.

Renee Nicole Good, 37, mother to a six-year-old boy, was murdered earlier today by an ICE agent in Minneapolis, a few blocks from her home. According to the Minnesota Star Tribune:

[An ICE agent] shot and killed a woman in south Minneapolis during a morning confrontation between community members and federal officers […] Several residents of the area who witnessed the scene said agents were ordering the woman out of the vehicle. A video showed agents around the vehicle as the driver reversed and then pulled forward. One agent appeared to fire multiple rounds into the car.

The bio from a now-private Instagram account belonging to Good describes her as a “Poet and writer and wife and mom and shitty guitar strummer from Colorado; experiencing Minneapolis, MN.” In 2020, when she went by Renée Nicole Macklin, she won the prestigious Academy of American Poets Prize for a poem called “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” which begins:

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.

[READ THE FULL POEM HERE]

This is murder in broad daylight by the Trump administration, obvious and brutal. And though each senseless act of violence committed by the state upon its citizens echoes the thousands that have gone before, we cannot become numb to the particular (and intensifying) depravities of this administration.

So if the violence of the deportations, and the crackdowns, and the cuts, and the raids, and the air strikes, haven’t been enough for you, let something so simple and evil as the daytime execution of a poet move you to action.

UPDATE: Head here to donate in support of Renee’s wife and son.