Opinion: Remembering Renee Good

Before Renee Good became the center of a tragic news story, she was a writer.

She won an Academy of American Poets Prize in 2020, for her poem, On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs.

The poem is wry and funny as she tries to reconcile science and faith and wonders, “Can I let them both be?”

To read it now, you might hear the person remembered tenderly this week as a loving mother and supportive partner, as politicians and online commentators scrutinize the shaky cell phone footage of her final moments.

On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs

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.

The poem On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs by Renee Good, who was shot and killed this week by a federal immigration officer. She was 37 years old. She leaves behind three children, and her wife, who told Minnesota Public Radio that she was, “made of sunshine.”