A Time Of Consequences

We seem to have arrived.

My retirement from conflict duties, conceived in the fall of 2024, then implemented during the election to inauguration period, has stuck. Red Sparrow Reality did get me up off the couch in mid-2025, but that process has run to completion. I am well and truly done; things that would have formerly demanded weeks of my time now leave hardly a trace in their passing.

Done, but not struck blind and deaf. Good was murdered last Wednesday, an event that must be memorialized here.

Attention Conservation Notice:

Our civil war takes another lurching step on the path from “cold” to “hot”. If you can’t stand to look, then don’t.

Murder Most Foul:

Prize winning poet Renee Nicole Good was murdered by an ICE agent. The video is graphic.

A native born blond mother of three died in the manner favored by all civilians who die in wartime. She was in the wrong place at the wrong time, just trying to get away.

Poem:

Her prize came thanks to On Learning To Dissect Fetal Pigs, which she won under what I believe to be her prior married name, Renée Nicole Macklin. I’ve reproduced it in full here:

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.

Conclusion:

This event immediately called up a famous and eternally misquoted 1936 quote from Winston Churchill. Not a time of consequences, as in the title, but a period.

The era of procrastination, of half-measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays is coming to its close. In its place we are entering a period of consequences.

We’ve half-measured and expedited and delayed ourselves to the point where this happened. What consequences will the United States face for the murder of Renee Nicole Good?

I’d prefer to not find out, and yet here we are …