20260108

Good Angel

We are injected

into the flow of her last breaths

calm within chaos

“That’s fine dude; I’m not mad at you”

Her half smile belays her fear

A shot. Then shot shot.

Followed by an angry male curse.

Images of blood 🩸

snuf porn I refuse to see

but her last words haunt my dreams

Mild as lambs wool

de-escalating evil

“hey dude” like “hey Jude”

a sonnet for safe space

failing

I never knew her

Now, I never will

But I can see her, other poets, me

arguing lines over a gum smeared table

trying to save a final couplet

She turns to us, and just says,

“That’s fine dude; I’m not mad at you”

image modified from:

https://www.freepik.com/free-vector/vintage-angel-with-child-illustration_4062877.htm#fromView=keyword&page=1&position=2&uuid=341a8e8f-a399-4b38-8c74-0f598f0ae6b1&query=Angel+art

POSTSCRIPT

I used Claude Sonnet 4.5 to find her poetry online with the following badly composed prompt (I was crying at the time):

“Can you find me the pubkisged poetry of Renee Good & what awards she won”

It led to this website:

https://poets.org/2020-on-learning-to-dissect-fetal-pigs

There are many exquisite lines here; a couple of stanzas that struck me are highlighted below

I last dissected a fetal pig 45 years ago; and she ably distilled her experience to one that echoed in my memories from 4O years earlier.

“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.”

Both the bibles and biology speak to me.

As does the closing stanza that opens up to take in both the world of faith and the grim reality of how we end .

“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.”

This is simply exquisite, the rose gold standard of poetry humming on all frequencies.

In Hindu culture, we celebrate life rather than mourn death. I can not begin to imagine how her family is grieving given how all us strangers feel our heart stop for a second on hearing of her passing, of listening to her last seconds. I hope more of her poems can be made available to the public with her family’s permission. Her voice was unstrung by an ice bullet. It deserves to be heard, long after the ice is gone.