This is a poem written by Renee Nicole Good. She is dead. She was a mother. She was many things…

 Renee left these words behind. They are for you and I to consider: what manner of person would choose these words, express this description of life. Also for you and I to consider: what manner of person am I the reader.

Renee is dead. Clearly it is too late for her to return to a rocking chair and to everything else. Steel jacketed bullets had nothing in mind when impacting her body. The ICE officer simply expressed the disdain enveloping his body for the anonymous female in front of him – when he pulled the trigger (three times). Every element that I have highlighted is Nature and life and death. Seems to me that Renee would agree. She learned this dissecting fetal pigs.

I have added the colored highlighting for emphasis, as well as the underlining. Otherwise the poem stands as written. We cannot escape the brute physicality of Renee’s words.

On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs

by Renée Nicole Macklin

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.