Running Ink

The city doesn’t wake to the sun; it wakes to the grinding of gears.
January seventh.
Minneapolis is a landscape of salt and exhaust,
and Renee is just a mother in a Honda Pilot,
the ink of her own poems still fresh in her mind,
the warmth of her children still lingering in the car’s upholstery.

Thirty-seven years of breath,
of "US Citizen" stamped on a birthright,
of verses written to heal a neighborhood,
colliding with a policy called a "surge."
They didn't come for a person; they came for a statistic.
They didn't bring a conversation; they brought a tactical vest
and a trigger finger that didn't know how to read her name.

In the textbooks, they call this "the rule of law."
In the street, it looks like shattered safety glass on Portland Avenue.
It looks like a poet silenced while the engine is still idling.
It looks like three shots fired into the heart of a "Great Nation"
by an agent who saw a target where a daughter should be.

We are told the surge is for "safety,"
but the air in Minneapolis has grown thin and jagged.
How do you measure safety in the silence of a mother’s kitchen?
How do you find justice in a 9:30 A.M. funeral?
Renee Nicole Good wasn't a "threat" or an "exception"—
she was the life the city was supposed to protect.

The ink is running now,
not from a pen, but from a wound.
When a government decides that a badge is a blindfold,
the "city on a hill" becomes a watchtower.
And the fire they lit to keep "them" out
is already licking at the wood of your own front door.