For Renee.

                       By: Kai Coggin

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This morning in Minneapolis ice agents murdered a poet. Renee Nicole Good age 37, a mother, a poet, shot in the face three times at point blank range by an ice agent claiming self defense, and already the propaganda machine spins it into an act of domestic terrorism on the part of GOOD, domestic terrorism on the part of the heart of a poet trying to drive away from an invasion of 2000 ice agents on their city, shot in the face three times in front of her wife, screaming into the brutal cold air.

What has this country come to? How can we keep unbecoming? What is the threshold of violence that will finally beg us to stop? Neighbors standing in the bloodsoaked snow filming the murder of their neighbor, a woman shot in the face. A woman named GOOD shot in the face three times, a woman named GOOD who wrote poems and stood for other peoples lives and blockaded to aid her brown neighbors, protested for democracy, was shot in the face three times at point blank range and the department of homeland security is calling her the terrorist, is taking her name GOOD and rhyming it with dead, shot in the head, execution style in front of her friends and neighbors and wife and dog. Her mother said she was the kindest woman she’d ever known and her blood stains the snow on this January day, a day after the anniversary of the insurrection on our capitol, January 6th five years ago, January 7th today, and those same masked marauders are now given guns, ripping people out of their homes and shooting GOOD poets on the street, blood soaked snow, flowers stuck in the snow, her car driven into a pole. Her body slumped over, 37, Renee Nicole GOOD, age 37, a poet, a wife, a wife to a wife shot dead, shot in the head by our country, by our deadly democracy, by our fascist regime that continues to steal power and colonize our bodies and terrorize our neighbors—when will we reach the end of this nightmare? How much rage can we hold in our cells until we explode? I’ve dissociated from the dismantling of constitutional law, the days and days have faded to grey in my consciousness but this shakes me awake again with the rage of a poet. The rage of a poet who lost her words today, Renee Nicole Good.

I don’t know how to make sense of this news today, Wednesday, a poet named GOOD shot dead, shot three times in the face at point blank range, 4/5 of a mile away from where George Floyd was killed, cycles and geography and tipping points in the eye of a hurricane centered again around Minneapolis, and hopefully a country I once loved will rise again with the same sort of rage and defiance against our own destruction.

Maybe a poet named GOOD, a woman, a mother, a middle-aged gay white woman with stuffies tumbling out of her glove box, who should not have been killed today, will live on just as George Floyd did, as a spark to flame the winds of change

and burn the ICE down.