Now I Can't Believe

Renée Nicole Good

We didn’t know to whom or precisely where or exactly when this would happen, but we knew it would happen. We didn’t know it would be less than a mile from where Derek Chauvin sat on George Floyd’s neck for nine minutes and twenty-nine seconds while he lay helpless on the Minneapolis pavement in late May of 2020, under a dead-eyed officer’s knee, begging for his breath and calling to his mother. We didn’t know yesterday’s execution would also be conducted in broad daylight or that this time it would be a woman alone in her car.

We didn’t know that she would be 37 or the mother of three children. We didn’t know she’d be white or a citizen. We didn’t know that she would have just dropped her 6-year-old son off at school. We didn’t know that this little boy’s toys would be visible, thrust out from the glove compartment where they were stuffed, next to the air bag that at some point deployed, and which remained after her body was removed from the vehicle. The vehicle driven by a mother ferrying her first-grader. This vehicle, which, hours later, the American government would lie about to the World, calling it the weapon of a terrorist.

We didn’t know a white bag splattered red behind the steering wheel would remain. A bloody phantom. A stained shroud. Silent testimony. Evidence of slaughter.

We could not have known in advance any of the details of the person murdered by ICE on January 7th, 2026, in our streets. We couldn’t have known she would be a wife, or a mother, a guitarist, or a poet.

But we should have known that it could be anyone. And none of the identifiers we choose for her should pre-empt her humanity or innocence. Her innocence and her humanity are the salient features she shares with at least five other people who’ve been killed in the last year under this malignant operation purporting to ‘crack down on immigration’ by nothing more than a rogue paramilitary organization.

Renée Nicole Macklin Good wasn’t their first murder, either.

They fatally shot Silverio Villegas-González at close range during a traffic stop in suburban Chicago four months ago. He was 38 years old and had lived in the United States for two decades. He was a line cook from Mexico with no criminal history who had dropped off one of his two kids earlier that morning at day care.

He, too, was a parent ferrying a child. He, too, was innocent of what the agency claimed. His killing was also justified by our government with unabashed lies.

Renée and Silverio. Both human beings. Both cherished by their loved ones. Both innocent and far too young.

Neither deserved to die.

This is a time of near-constant disassembling. Each day, context is being drained from the truth’s veins. We have to check the pulse of every picture and video our gaze fixates upon to make sure that it’s real, when if we’re honest, really honest, we don’t even know with certainty anymore what that means.

An echo, from not long ago, a hewing to shared perception. Some shadowy sureness loosely stitched in our souls.

The murder of a poet was conducted in broad daylight in cold blood by masked agents of the State. The State, which is now run by a gameshow gangster’s burnt-out id. A Clown-King, whose personal misery has been scaled and deployed by heedless sadists with unchecked power, funded by us, unimaginable sums of money invested in meting out daily doses of suffering and terror. A department of our government dedicated to ripping hard-working people away from their families, from their homes. Masked men who might kill anyone literally in the way of that monstrous mission.

Listen to me carefully:

You are not crazy.

It is all too much.

Too much.

But for those of us who work with words, whose medium is fundamentally making a semblance of sense through language, I believe we owe something particular to the memory of Renee Nicole Macklin Good. I believe we owe her our voices further raised, refusing elucidation’s capture. I believe with every bit of my being that there is a righteous war to be fought against the wanton murder of meaning taking place alongside all the rest. We must make it our mission to stand in solidarity against reality’s hijackers.

We owe it to every stanza they stole yesterday, and every sentence she won’t write tomorrow. To keep our antennae up. To keep our channels clear. To not go numb. To continue feeling what we feel. To keep saying what we see. To wield empathy and insight, with allegiance to the deepest truth, which is our humanness.

Deploy language with the care a poet might.

Hold onto meaning.

Guard the border of what matters. Use your words.

Above all, tell about it.

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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 Good

from Her Award-Winning Poem