Reinaldo Spitaletta, January
9, 2026
Translated by Tlaxcala
They murdered the poetess, with gunshots, in cold
blood, as if she were a cockroach, or perhaps like a piece of pork that must be
fried in the fat of immigration police. They killed her for no reason, because
women must be killed, women who write, women who raise their voices, who speak
with exploited foreigners, with the persecuted. She had to be killed. And that’s
what the automatic agents did, assassins by nature, trained for that purpose:
to kill and nothing more. Ah, and if the victim is a poetess, even better. We
don’t want anyone to sing, or to tell any truth, in verse, or in prose, to the
little president who looks more and more like Hitler.
They shot and killed Renée Nicole Good, thirty-seven
years old. They say she wrote “like someone opening a window in a besieged
house.” She surely knew, before receiving that hail of bullets in a “country
bathed in blood,” as Paul Auster described it, that she was destined to be a
victim of Trumpesque repression, of the Corollary of the new filibusterer, of
the New National Defense Strategy, of the pedocriminal, reincarnation—so the
bandit president believes—of James Monroe, and who also represents Teddy
Roosevelt’s Big Stick. The poetess knew they were going to kill her.
She has been another victim of the system that has
been bombing for years, sometimes with atomic bombs, sometimes with other
bombs—deadly, indeed—civilian targets, entire populations, that murders people
like those in the village of My Lai, or Iraq, or Syria, or Libya, also
Venezuela. And it kills poets. Just like that. Perhaps as if imitating the one
who murdered García Lorca in Granada, for being a faggot, or a poet, or because
he was against oppression.
They shot her, just like that, at point-blank range
and with confidence, a young girl, yes, she was still a young girl in bloom,
who wrote poems. Her verses had to be erased, the cop, the servant of
the system, the licensed assassin, would think. A voice had to be silenced, a
pencil, some stanzas, some lines... We don’t need poets, but thugs, bombers,
criminals. Such is the vulgar prose of imperialism, of Trump and his henchmen,
of those who applaud not only the bravado of the bloodthirsty pirate, but also
his criminal actions throughout the universe.
Killing a poetess can be insignificant. Besides being
easy, besides everything can remain unpunished. She was just a woman, a young
girl who wrote, who greeted immigrants, who told them how to unite, how to
embrace, how to stay alert in the face of repression. That was it, so
worthless, so meaningless for a subject like the president. Trump’s Gestapo
murdered her.
What can happen to an empire, or to a delinquent who
shelters himself by being president of a superpower (in decline), for the crime
of a woman who wrote, for example, "” want my rocking chairs back” and
knew “cicada tercets” (like the cicada, so many times they killed me, so many
times I died, yet here I am resurrecting...), who had “donated bibles to
second-hand stores,” who knew—she was a poetess—that between her pancreas and
her large intestine, “lies the insignificant stream of my soul.”
The soulless ones disembodied her. The assassins
erased her words, her desire for justice, the irrepressible wishes to sing
against injustice, to bless the encounter between the ovum and the
spermatozoon. They tore out her soul with gunshots.
But the thing, as they say, is that no police officer,
no bullet, no rifle, ends poetry. It continues living beyond the poet. Renée’s
poetry now flies higher, goes from Minneapolis to Chicago, from Los Angeles to
Texas, from the country of dead freedoms, of destroyed democracy, to beyond the
blue planet. It was the afternoon of January 7, 2026, when a police officer
from the United States Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), fired
ferociously at a young girl who wrote verses and who from that moment flies,
like that butterfly which, with its wing flap, is capable of causing an
earthquake in Beijing or bringing forth a tear somewhere in the world where
there are people who sing.
Renée Nicole is now fire. She is not ash. She is a
powerful voice crying out for justice in the world and for utopia to keep
living, or, at least, to keep many people walking.
