"On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs" by Renée Nicole Good

Renée Nicole Good, née Macklin won the Academy of American Poets Prize for a poem called “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs" in 2020.

"On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs"

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.

Renée Nicole Macklin, whose later married named is Renée Nicole Good described herself as a “Poet and writer and wife and mom and shitty guitar strummer from Colorado; experiencing Minneapolis, MN.” 

Good, a 37-year-old U.S. citizen, lived in south Minneapolis with her wife just blocks from where she was shot and killed by an Immigration and Customs Enforcement agent on Jan. 7, 2025, according to the Minnesota Star Tribune. She had three children: a 6-year-old son with her second husband, who died in 2023, and two other children from her first marriage who live with extended family.