Today I think of Renée Good

 I have translated the poem. Here it is.

Today I think of Renée Good

 

Today I think of Renée Nicole Good, killed in Minneapolis

on the 7th of January 2026 at 9.37 am by an ICE agent

that the poet Cornelius Eady defines as a “cancellation squad”

Renée –

white, lesbian, mother, neighbor, poet.

Her full face looking out from the SUV, she says

“That's fine dude. I'm not mad at you”, maybe she’s afraid, maybe she remembers

how every woman sooner or later should calm down a brutal man

(decent, respectable community member)

while she clenches her fists in immortal anger.

Her wife looks the agent of nothingness in the eye –

sarcasm against firearm. She is afraid too.

Anger and fear, anger and fear, while we retie the destroyed threads

we weave mutilated the fabric for a time without subjugation.

We women should never speak the truth,

because we are

 

young and inexperienced, old and hunched, black, queer, breastfeeding mothers,

white, hippies, childfree, at work, sisters of the road, hysterical,

uninhibited, foolish, drunk –

but we speak it anyway

 

sharp tongues, bodies that take up space

or reject it

the liquids, the sagging breast, the obnoxious hair, the belly of Asian statuettes,

fertile, relaxed,

or the bones, the blades, the awls that stretch the map of the skin.

We are too much – we live.

 

“Fucking bitch”, answers the man, after shooting her, three times, in the face –

only then he gets back his speech, but, you see, he can’t speak.

That kind of power doesn’t speak.

However, the power of Renée gushes out, while the skull cracks,

it is pain, it is justice, it is flood

people absorb it, translate it, tattoo it close to the names of those

that lacerate the infamy of distance.

Renée writes about the narrow gap between being and dying

never reducible to the aseptic apparatuses of science

or to the soothing lullaby of faiths

the same gap dividing us now –

I point my imaginary finger

United States

Minnesota in the north, nearly in the center

I stretch my arm and an ocean is little more than a stream

of hot water to which I release the body, but this time the water

sticks, thickens

doesn’t flow

it holds onto me so that I may be proud

on the threshold between my house and the empires, between my language

and the other –

 

today I think of Renée Good

I could be her. I think of myself at seven

the braids, the dirty jeans, lecturing a sixteen-year-old bully

so that he stops threatening kids

and my grandma at the window

she doesn’t say anything and watches, she lets me do it

my grandma who believed I should and could always speak

my grandma giving me a snack when I get back in, my mouth tightly shut

no crying, after holding his gaze while he’s hissing: I’ll kill you.

I think about myself thrown on the man I loved

the blows of the night watchman, the cop who is warning:

she has nothing to do with it

still at the mercy of a masculine will that I don't want

or myself in the station underpass, with the usual cops in troops

surrounding a North African boy. Me slowing down, putting my bag on the ground.

“What are you doing?”, one of them asks. “Me? I’m watching”.

“You can't stay here”.

“Me? I can. The underpass is public, yours as much as mine”.

And I shiver, inside my clothes I shiver, I would like to yell at him

how frustrating it must be

to crave a firearm in order to feel safe

from all those women who study or who empty the bins, from the kids

who steal from supermarkets,

from the pigeon who opens its bowels on the passerby, from the soaked butt

of a cigar on the railway track.

Today I think of Renée Good

I think no, we haven’t had enough lessons

we will continue to learn how problematic it is to be good

really good fucking bitches

 

I think of Renée, I think of Rochelle Bilal, sheriff of Philadelphia

woman, black, I think of her velvet voice wrapped around me

repeating –

Renée Good, Renée Good, Renée Good

of those who choose to defend and create, to speak

I think of Renée’s son, her mother, her wife, her dog

 as if they were my sisters, my mothers, my lover, my cats

I think about why we write poems and read them

in the ruthless human industrial denseness, and let others laugh behind our backs

kill those of us who are in the right place at the right time

I think of the hatred that can articulate a language of compassion

on this earth, the only one, of autocrats who massacre peoples

I think of poetry, of the bandit who flees

to be the cause of their death, in the end, at the end

 

under the shower all the poems I will never read to my grandma again

the genocides, the hunted wolves, the handcuffs, the rare earth metals, the explosions

the bullets, the women pulled away by their hair

in police stations, the dust where houses used to be

the fires, the boys throwing stones at snipers, the beasts, the smashed cities

the cars with the dogs inside,

I cling, because none of us want to die

before the fight

a single body overflowing into the words we raise

for days, for years until tomorrow

today I think of Renée Good