The first bird in the murmuration
A collaboration with my youngest, Tom Lewis supplying the music.
A poet from Colorado
The Fox News host, Jessie Waters said
that the dead woman was a “self-proclaimed poet from Colorado”
and he said, with a sneer, that she had “pronouns in her bio”
and he said that she had children from a previous marriage
but now she had a lesbian wife that she lived with
and he described her as disruptive
and said what happened there was justice
and he chose his words to taint her
and as an explanation
of why a masked man with a handgun
was right to do what he had done
And the way in which he said these things was, itself, an invitation
to define this woman as worthy of the nation’s hatred
and to not have to think about what she was out there doing
and to nullify her actions through the process we call othering
because once you’ve got a “them” and “they”
the rest just tumbles into place
and every single word they say
can be dismissed
she was not a human
but a domestic terrorist
A poet from Colorado,
with pronouns in her bio
who wrote about the interface
between cold science and the Christian faith
and what is left when they collide
and what it means to live a good life
in a fallen world
Tagline
On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs
by Renée Nicole Macklin
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.
Renee Good's prize winning poem and a few notes that helped me understand it
Notes
solipsist sunset
maybe a sunset generatein your own mind- perceptions of a sunset, maybe a perfect sunset?
tercets
like a couplet but three lines of poetry
ribosome, endoplasmic, lactic acid, stamen
words from biology lessons
Ihop
a pancake chain restaurant apparantly!
in this case one at the corner of two roads in Colorado Springs – Powers Boulevard and Stetson Hills Boulevard