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
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