Minneapolis shooting: The heart-rending poem that ICE victim Renee Nicole Good wrote

Renee Nicole Good, a 37-year-old mother and poet, was shot and killed on January 7 during a federal immigration enforcement operation in south Minneapolis. She was fatally shot while seated inside her car by an officer from the US Immigration and Customs Enforcement. Within hours, federal officials said the shooting was justified. An investigation was announced, even as authorities publicly outlined their account of the incident.

Good was also an award-winning writer. In 2020, writing under the name Renee Nicole Macklin, she received the Academy of American Poets Prize for her poem “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs.” An excerpt from the poem appears below.




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.