On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs by Renée Nicole Macklin Good

On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs

by Renée Nicole Macklin Good

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.

This poem can also be found at Poets.org. It won the Academy of American Poets Prize (undergraduate) at Old Dominion University in 2006.

I just love these descriptions: "coastal jungle sounds that are tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches." How imaginative to hear the noise from cicadas as both coastal jungle sounds AND tercets!

The speaker easily moves from the bibles and other things she has donated to thrift stores to science books. The items she studies become a chant: ribosome, endoplasmic—lactic acid, stamen.

She then places the soul (religious) into her body (science), and we learn that she has struggled to keep both faith and fact in her mind and in her life.

But now she cannot keep the faith, no matter what form that faith takes. But there is sorrow here for the speaker; giving up faith has, for her, meant giving up wonder. The poem ends with her current understanding. Life is boiled down by the speaker to pure physicality, from conception to death.

It is a brilliant poem (and by an undergraduate student!) with a great title and I love her use of space. For this speaker, the triumph of science is a bit of a letdown. It's a provocative stance, and also honest and raw.

Renee Good died on January 7, 2026. From a New York Times article:

"Ms. Good, a U.S. citizen, was fatally shot by an ICE agent on Jan. 7 while she was driving in her S.U.V. Her death touched off intense protests in Minneapolis, with demonstrators clashing with federal agents. Federal officials have defended the agent’s actions, saying it was in self-defense, while state and local officials have disputed their account and called for the Trump administration to stop its immigration crackdown."

If you cannot access that article, click here for one from NBC Los Angeles.

And the amazing poet Cornelius Eady has written a poem called, Renee Nicole Good Is Murdered in response. Read that poem here.