Anna Donigan protests throughout a rally for Renee Good, who was fatally shot by an ICE officer in Minneapolis the day earlier than, Thursday, Jan. 8, 2026, in Kansas Metropolis, Mo.
Charlie Riedel/AP
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Charlie Riedel/AP
Earlier than Renee Good turned the middle of a tragic information story, she was a author.
She gained an Academy of American Poets Prize in 2020, for her poem, On Studying to Dissect Fetal Pigs.
The poem is wry and humorous as she tries to reconcile science and religion and wonders, “Can I allow them to each be?”
To learn it now, you would possibly hear the individual remembered tenderly this week as a loving mom and supportive companion, as politicians and on-line commentators scrutinize the shaky mobile phone footage of her ultimate moments.
On Studying to Dissect Fetal Pigs
i would like again my rocking chairs,
solipsist sunsets,
& coastal jungle sounds which can be tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the furry legs of cockroaches.
i’ve donated bibles to thrift shops
(mashed them in plastic trash baggage with an acidic himalayan salt lamp—
the post-baptism bibles, those plucked from avenue corners from the meaty arms of zealots, the dumbed-down, easy-to-read, parasitic variety):
keep in mind extra the slick rubber odor of excessive gloss biology textbook footage; they burned the hairs inside my nostrils,
& salt & ink that rubbed off on my palms.
below clippings of the moon at two 45 AM I examine&repeat
ribosome
endoplasmic—
lactic acid
stamen
on the IHOP on the nook of powers and stetson hills—
i repeated & scribbled till it picked its approach & stagnated someplace i am unable to level to anymore, possibly my intestine—
possibly there in-between my pancreas & massive gut is the piddly brook of my soul.
it is the ruler by which i cut back all issues now; hard-edged & splintering from information that used to take a seat, a material towards fevered brow.
am i able to allow them to each be? this fickle religion and this school science that heckles from the again of the classroom
now i am unable to imagine—
that the bible and qur’an and bhagavad gita are sliding lengthy hairs behind my ear like mother used to & exhaling from their mouths “make room for marvel”—
all my understanding dribbles down the chin onto the chest & is summarized as:
life is merely
to ovum and sperm
and the place these two meet
and the way typically and the way properly
and what dies there.
The poem On Studying to Dissect Fetal Pigs by Renee Good, who was shot and killed this week by a federal immigration officer. She was 37 years outdated. She leaves behind three kids, and her spouse, who instructed Minnesota Public Radio that she was, “manufactured from sunshine.”
