On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs – by Renee 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.
January 10, 2026. – When I first read three days ago of the ICE shooting on a south Minneapolis neighborhood street of Renee Nicole Good, I noted she was described as, among other things, a 37-year-old mom, wife, “made of sunshine,” recently-relocated “shitty guitar strummer from Colorado” — and, almost parenthetically, a poet.
Then I learned that she had written this 2020 Academy of American Poets Award-winning poem as an undergraduate at Old Dominion University. Prof. Kent Wascom, Director of the Creative Writing Program, remembered her as “a writer trying to illuminate the lives of others.”
A pungent quote leapt out of my literary memory from the late 1960s when I was a Modern American Poetry grad student at SUNY/Buffalo writing my PhD dissertation on William Carlos Williams; it is from his late-life masterpiece, Asphodel, That Greeny Flower:
It is difficult
to get the news from poems
yet men die miserably
every day
for lack
of what is found there.
Now go back and re-read Renee Good’s poem and discover what you have “found there” – what she has generously delivered to us: Nostalgia for a past unglamorous life by someone who notices the little things with acute eyes and ears, a learner from experience who does not take anything for granted, so in love with the outside world that she is able to craft her profound, blessed inner one with blatant honesty.
Renee Good had the sensibility to draw richnesses from a cultural life inordinately threatened these days,
According to the relentlessness of our “news,” she may have died; but her words survive.