MANILA, Philippines – Renee Nicole Good, who was shot and killed by a US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agent on January 7, was an award-winning poet.

Good received her Creative Writing degree from the Old Dominion University in Norfolk, Virginia. In 2020, as a student, she won an undergraduate poetry prize from the university’s English department for her piece, “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs.”

The poem sees the mother of three dive deep into existential inquiry, life, and death. Back then, judges for the competition had praised Good for her use of imagery and for being able to seamlessly weave in a vast range of memories to get her point across.

“What is the origin story of ‘want;’ the urgency of belief and nonbelief? the first line the poet asks. Through specificity of image and associative leaps from piece to piece emerges a text that in itself becomes a sacred text, a meditation that leads the reader into the unknown,” the judges wrote about her piece.

Below is Good’s poem, originally published under poets.org:

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.

Good was killed just a few blocks away from where she was living with her partner in the Twin Cities. She was shot by an ICE agent while inside her SUV.

She leaves behind her partner and three kids: a 15-year-old daughter, a 12-year-old son, and a six-year-old. She was previously married to Timmy Ray Macklin Jr., who died in 2023 at 36 years old. – Rappler.com