Disruptive
Poets
They tried to blame poetry.
We answered with more of it.
Renee Nicole Good
Yes.
We see the irony.
A white woman is murdered and suddenly poets are building platforms.
Cool.
Not great.
Not lost on us.
Poets of color:
If you want to drag us about that and submit a poem?
Please do both.
Write about Renee.
Write about every name the news skipped.
Write about the hierarchy of grief.
We’re late.
We’re here.
We’re not pretending otherwise.
The Poems
May Her Memory be a Battle Cry
For Renee Nicole Good
By: MG Gainer​
​
How does one be a poet
at the fall of America?
Do we chronicle the crimes—
hold them up to the light of a million screens?
Do we rebuke the criminals, the dictator and the despots?
Do we dare to name the names
in this cyber-connected citadel?
Paper bodies might be traced back to us
hunkering behind these speaking personae.
Do we dare?
Or
Do we put our corporeal selves
On the line
In the street
In the line of fire?
Because our sister has done.
And we are using her blood for our ink,
but our tears will not wash away these sins.
For Renee.
By: Kai Coggin​
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.
Hold the Story
For Renée Nicole Good
By: Tim Conroy
​
Let us not believe goodness will
fail those
who believe in mothers and how
they love
their children more than
themselves, no matter
how much blood flows from their
body and soaks
hands of a soul who fired the
shots, even when
hands are soaped, washed, and
shoved in deep pockets.
Those hands will never lose the
stain of children
who call for their Mom’s hands to
read a book
that can’t return, but will hold
the story
where good will triumph over
icy hands,
though lies are given for
murderous deeds.
She does not grow numb to
heartless actions.
The mother of our
resistance rises,
and children will feel her touch
in darkness.
The News Out Of Minnesota
By: Al Black
an old stump burns,
a rotting hump in our yard,
stubborn old roots
refusing to leave,
lay flat, or conform
to the surrounding topography
I sit in my chair
shovel against the tree
watching a bed of hot coals
as the past ascends in smoke
The Economy of Good
By: Rita D. Costello
How many 3-point turns on ice-y streets become death?
For 30 years, I have had a favorite living religious poet, odd
because religion is not at all my bag, but I remember
fondly the time I got to work with him, who I admired and
immediately offended with a poem. Still,
he worked with me, gave good advice and still
remains a favorite. I wonder sometimes how
I could not have seen it coming. The day Renée
Good died, I thought of him, recognizing
instantly the name of the university where she studied
poetry, won awards, the college where my poet
taught at the time I offended him (a year before
a poem of his offended others and I wondered
Did he see it coming, did he realize it could happen
to me) and so I recognized her
Good roots in her alma mater and the irony of fascist
reframing the young white Christian mother
as terrorist. How many more might wonder now:
It could happen to me. How many now
will find their roots broken, find small pieces
rotting beside them in the soil or nestled in snow
ready to burst forth as fresh untainted seedlings.
Once Named
By: AJ Winters
​
I slip beneath the tongue
of resolve, hoping to hide under her words
and wait for the coast to clear,
the waves to settle into gentle laps
against a pristine shore,
but the world has not stopped—
bullets flying with wings faster
than angels,
fired by masked hate
that pretends it wasn’t born from a womb
and given a name, loved
at some point by arms
made of the same flesh
and blood as our ancestors,
when they first stepped
out of the trees with arms
spread to catch sunlight.
I slip beneath the tongue.
Hoping to hide.
But there is no safe haven
for those with the knowledge of words,
the inextricable need to write,
with the need to hold a mirror
of language
up to the face of anger
and remind them
that they were once named.
But What was He Wearing
By: Rita D. Costello
Fucking bitch
--Ice agent after shooting Renée Good in the
head three times
​
They say to listen to cops.
They say to comply.
She was right to be afraid.
She was right to want to turn away.
He was the threat.
He was the danger.
The fact that he fired
only proves she was right
to feel fear. And still she didn't
flee until shot.
The guy pointing the gun
at your head is always
the bad guy. No matter
what clothes he's wearing.
Good Dies Young
By Julie Snee (she/her)
They killed Good in the dark of day
On a crossroads where the evil prey
Stealing souls for the devil’s due
Perhaps one day they’ll come for you
Will you hide, or will you flee?
Will you fight when they come for me?
They killed Good in the dark of day
When all she did was drive away
Her Last Name Was Good
January 7, 2026
By: Jo Angela Edwins
​
“[S]he was more than the last seconds of her life.”
--Amanda Lee Myers, “Who Was Renee Nicole Good? What We Know about the Woman Killed by ICE,” USA Today, Jan. 7, 2026
​
and she had a 6-year-old child
and she played guitar
and she was a poet
and, another poet I know tells me,
her glove box was full of stuffies when she died.
and the video I can’t stop watching
shows her waving cars around her SUV
seven seconds before she’s killed.
Her mother said her daughter was “probably terrified.
”The Minneapolis City Council declared
she was “out caring for her neighbors.
”When ICE kept a doctor from checking her pulse,
a woman on the street yelled at the men holding rifles,
“You’re killing my neighbors! You’re stealing my neighbors!
“What the fuck, man?!”
She held no weapon.
The Secretary of Homeland Security—
who famously shot her own dog for no good reason—
called her a domestic terrorist.
She may or may not have worked in real estate
like half a dozen people I know.
She had a lot of stickers on her car
like who knows how many people I know.
I couldn’t tell from the video what they said,
but I’m guessing they might have argued
for freedom and peace. Or else
perhaps they came from every state
her family ever visited on vacation—
“Discover Your Maine Thing,” “Say Yes to Michigan,”
“Virginia is for Lovers.” Or maybe
they were smiley faces, paw prints, a stick figure family
running from a dinosaur, maybe an old
Grateful Dead or Lumineers logo.
(She was from Colorado, the article says.)
She drove the same car my niece drives.
She was four years younger than my niece.
We will learn more soon enough. Right now,
I keep thinking of her 6-year-old child.
I keep thinking of how she was a poet whose one poem
all of us are sharing is called “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs.”
In it, she compares sacred texts to biology books,
admits they both have imprinted her soul,
ends with an image of sperm colliding
with an egg, concludes that all we are boils down to
where those two meet
and how often and how well
​
and what dies there.
Owed to the Poets
By: Bruce Morton
​
So, it has come to this.
This dick, the butcher,
Has decided, let's kill
All the poets. No good
Can come of it. The sound
Of gone resonates, a bang
Bang bang of articulate silence.
Each word absent accentuates
The madness. The sadness.
Things falling apart before us.
No more rhyme--or reason
In this season of our discontent.
For Renee Good
By: Cheryl Smithem
The air is gray.
Suffused with moisture.
The wet air: earth tears.
My tears, too, fall today.
Many cry. All weep.
Jeremiad
By: Arthur Turfa
​
Now is the winter of our discontent
worsened beyond our imagination.
From near and far, shock envelopes our friends,
and on a bright, cold day on snowy streets
three shots ring out, two striking their target:
an example of cold efficiency,
wrenching a life from so many she loved.
Hear this, o foolish and senseless people,
whose eyes look again and again at the
video that shows what they fail to see,
whose ears hear lies on continuous loop,
whose mouths repeat others' mendacities-
if you remain among the scoundrels of
the people, their guilt will be upon you.
Disruptive Poets
By: M. Scott Douglass
​
In the court of Jesse Watters
we are all guilty of something,
guilty of speaking on matters
reserved for he who would be king.I
n the mind of Stephen Miller
we’re all pawns on a checkerboard,
sacrificial pieces, traitors,
defenders of a migrant hoard.
In the chest of Kristi Noem
there’s a cavern without a heart.
We think she’s missing that genome,
and focuses on her cosplay art.
In the streets of Minneapolis
we are all second-class citizens,
extreme domestic terrorists,
revealing how this story ends.
In the room with Donald J. Trump
they label us a rebel mass,
pile praise upon this childish schlump,
and pucker up to kiss his ass.
In moments like these we gather,
share our words, our thoughts, our prayers,
expose the lies that others blather,
undermine their corrupt affairs.
Cacophony
By: Lauren Tivey
​
Hell is empty and all the devils are here. ~William Shakespeare
Forget sleep when you come to our cities and towns to hunt our neighbors, families, and
friends, with your guns, coward-masks, and Kevlar. We will know thee, ICE devils, and we
will discover your nests. We will haunt your hotels. We will carry signs in our hands, and rage
in our throats. We will become noisome devils ourselves, to root you out. Bring on the whistles
and tubas and drums, the trumpets and bugles and pots and pans. Bring on the vuvuzela. Bring
on the megaphone. Bring on the scream. Bring on the wolf howl. Remember how heavy metal
broke Noriega. Let’s salsa you silly. Let’s reggae your brains. Let’s country fry chicken you.
Let’s rotten tomato you. Let’s psyop the psyop. Let’s yell you back to Hell.
Spin Cycle
By: Janet Kozachek
They put your story
in a machine
and twisted the knob to spin cycle.
The machine, a technological Charybdis,
siphoned in the waters of universal truths
and expelled a flood of falsehoods,
your kind words
jettisoned
then replaced by a white
supremacy washed
narrative.
Your blood was
trampled into the
snow and scattered
like rose petals
torn from their calyx
as the machine rinsed
the blood from their hands
and cleansed the burning hate
from their eyes
They wrung away your domestic life
labeled you a domestic terrorist
leaving your children motherless,
your wife in terror.
Your screaming spouse
was admonished to “just relax,”
Icey words spun like a clinician
about to perform
a procedure invasive
and painful.
They called you “bad mother,”
after you dropped your little
boy off at school
Your lioness spirit
protected
other children from
being torn from the
arms of their parents.
Servant of the poor,
the disenfranchised,
the immigrant,
You were a
church matron
on Christian missions.
You worked like a dog
and they called you “fuckin bitch.”
They washed away your smile
your assurances that you were not angry
They laundered the smudge
of your unconventional,
well-lived presence
and spun it into multitudinous darts
and arrows shot into
the vortex of the clamoring crowd.
Thirsty for blood, they condemned
all things they deemed badly
out of sync with the status quo
when all along we who knew
trusted our eyes and ears,
seeing
that you lived your best life
and that you were Good.
may Good haunt you
By: Heather Emerson
sir, wherever you go,
every step,
every mission,
through corridors
and pathways,
on short
and long distances,
in rooms full of people
and when you are alone,
especially the hours
when you're
bedded down to sleep,
may Good appear before you,
and never set you free.
Rate of Decay For Renée Good, in this year of our Spirits 2026
By: Glenda Bailey-Mershon
Maybe it’s the poets’ burden
to wonder things
no one else has time to face.
For instance, when the baby boy
was born, could his parents see ahead,
be proud of birthing
a soldier for the cause?
When the bride was married,
what if she had known a careless drunk
would smash into her golf cart “carriage”
less than an hour after she stood to pledge
a lifetime of love and duty? Would she have
overthrown it all—familial pride, traditions,
expectations—and gone straight to
the Tuscan honeymoon, or skipped ahead
to hold their firstborn?
What choices we make, blind.
What did the wife think as she stood
on the street and watched the ICE agent
shoot her love, the cherished one she
had begged to drive down this street?
And what did her love think, foot
still on the gas, as heart stopped beating?
Was she guessing who would raise
their young son, or did she simply want
to hear the agent’s stumbling explanation?
Maybe she would have forsworn justice,
to know a heaven where she could watch
over her boy. Chances are, she never considered
we would read her prize-winning poem about science,
biology, the unknowable stuff of life—and weep,
now that her death is a video playing repeatedly
over the soundtrack of politicians dealing
“facts” like drunken card sharks
before her family can hear the news.
Power that concedes nothing—
not citizenship or Constitution,
human decency or kindness, even
the evidence of eyes and ears,
possibilities nestled in every beating heart—
will never build a world we can inhabit
safely or comfortably, or even in sheltered
denial, but will, again and again, show us
how little mean norms or standards, or law,
to ambition, made combustible by greed,
hatred, lust for revenge, recompense
for offenses poured over by
the trolls who climb atop the steaming pile
and scream their hatred to the sky.
Who inundated the forest fire with rain?
Who summons the biology of genes?
Who waits to sing us all to our deaths?
Who, above all, can pick strand from
devastating strand and rebuild a bridge
to sanity and self-regard for a nation
once called the hope of all humankind?
Where did we err? Where did we choose
a path where a man without pity
had authority over a woman’s life and hopes?
Surely one man isn’t the cause.
Don’t many of us pull the trigger in grasping hands?
A fool on a hill,
an oracle in a cave
might tell us the truth.
If they could be bothered
while their eyes train on stars
blinking, birthing, exploding
far beyond our ken. The sky
opens up to swallow us.
Those who have known the cost
for centuries and those only now come
around to truth that blinds.
Do some stars yearn to become
The comet we see
above our limited horizon?
'Facetime'
By: Al Black
​
another routine morning
drop your child off at school
drive home on a residential street
camo dressed, masked men
surround your car,
scream in your face
this ain't no Folgers in your cup
wakeup and face the day
kind of morning greeting
BANG! BANG! BANG!
bullets through the windshield
somehow this is your fault
when domestic terrorists
are given badges
they own the narrative
let the denigration begin
the dead can't speak for themselves
will you, will we?
three bullets in the face
there'll be no recovery
only another coverup
For Good
By: Jude Rittenhouse
Then they came for the poets, bees
already nearing extinction. As if
seeking, sharing, spreading
love’s sweetness could be stopped.
As if any mother’s love
lives solely in her own heart, warm
blood and brains spattered by ICE
now a stain melting snow.
The Oldest Story Revised
By: Jude Rittenhouse
​
We believed creation required annihilation.
More than once he said: I’ll kill you if you tell.
She shrank, obsequious, a paragon of patience.
Survival required: placate his wayward will.
More than once he said: I’ll kill you if you tell.
Earth, water, wind, light—together—a nation.
Survival required: placate his wayward will.
Flesh learned: fight against death’s revelation.
Earth, water, wind, light—together—a nation.
Of these, light braids chords of love that still
flesh’s hunger to defeat death’s revelation.
Red blood roars but light hums the oldest trill.
Survival required: placate his wayward will.
She shrank, obsequious, a paragon of patience.
Flesh had become a war against revelation.
We believed creation required annihilation.
Late to the Party
By: Maria Collum
scroll through their names
to trace
the dark commonality
hers an easy name
to pronounce
and remember
latest
in a riveting flow
of violent atrocity
none more or less heinous
than the other
I am numb
too numb to greet
the peaceful monks
who pass through my town
their saffron-robed presence
alien
amongst our cross-mounted steeples
their quiet resolve
equally so
an indictment
a plea
a fervent witness
starkly juxtaposed to
his cruel "fucking bitch"
Good Citizen
By: Melissa Whiteford St. Clair
"Do all the good you can, by all the means you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, at all the times you can, to all the people you can, as long as ever you can." – John Wesley.
What does it mean to be a good citizen?
Follow the rules, pay your taxes
Then you die
What does it mean to have good character?
Exude honesty and integrity
Not even little white lies
What does it mean to be a good neighbor?
Be respectful, be of service
Every community needs allies
What does it mean to be a good human?
Act with kindness and empathy
The Golden Rule applies
Good night, Irene
Good night, John Boy
Goodnight Moon
Good night, Good citizen.
A Good Day
By: Allen Miller
​
Wake up sweetheart,
it’s time to get dressed
You’ve got school today
Feel the chill in the air
It pinks your cheeks
It’s gonna be a good day
I know you’re sleepy,
and it’s still dark
But the sun is coming up
And you can bring your bear
Here’s your hot chocolate
Oh, it’s gonna be a good day
Let’s all go today,
the car will be full
We’ll take Mom and the dog!
Zip up your coat,
pull on your mittens
Bring your homework
It’s gonna be a good day
The sun shines off the snow
Even where streets are black with ice
Your friends are all here
We love you, don’t worry
It’s gonna be a good day
We are helping some nice people
We’ll pick you up tonight
Tomorrow I’ll make pancakes
I’m not mad at anyone
It’s gonna be a good day.
MANS/LAUGHTER
after Olivia Gatwood
By: Airea Johnson​
After school, on the bus,
I sit next to a boy from class.
Dorito dust covers his fingers
when he shoves his hands down my shirt,
the crimson sand stains my training bra.
He laughs, wipes his hands
on his pants.
That same year,
I listen to a lot of Eminem,
his silly skits about killing
his ex-wife Kim. In one song,
he pulls her out of the house
by her hair, throws her in a trunk,
leaves her to die, laughs so hard
her screams white noise, break lights.
Men invent new ways, new places
to murder women every week.
This time, a woman observes
an enforcement operation
from her car, smiles at the man
holding the gun, tries to leave
he shoots her three times:
her arm
her heart
her head
Fucking Bitch
he says, wipes the blood
from his face
Renee Good in her van, backing away
By: Rochelle Jewel Shapiro
​
She had seen, as we all had, how ICE grabs you,
citizen or not, throws you down, twists your arms
behind your back, handcuffs your wrists to lock
your arms in an impossible position, taser you,
spray tear gas in your eyes.
How could Renee risk being maimed
with three children to raise?
All she could do was what she did.
Pull away with the stuffed animals in her van.
Pull away before…
Her last words to the masked man who shot her three times
in the face—
I’m not mad at you.
A sob sticks in my throat, bulges beneath my tongue.
A noose tightens in the night, when dreams of her come.
(Renee Good, 4/88-1/2026, murdered
by ICE in the streets of Minneapolis)