issue 6
// poetry
Renee Nicole Good
by Pip McGough
There are names that sound
like they were meant to be sung at evening,
with a hand on your chest.
There are mornings you wake up American,
and nothing answers to it.
The papers. The prayers.
Children in the kitchen
waiting for buttered bread.
There are short lifetimes you live in a body:
plant crabapple trees,
write poems no one reads,
teach the dog to sleep through thunder.
Renee Nicole Good—
a name the wind should have carried gently,
a milkweed seed lifting from grass,
with nowhere it could not go.
But the wind today is full of guns.
And the air is divided into permissions.
A line is drawn where a woman falls,
and a border closes—
procedurally—
between the living and the dead.
about the author // Pip McGough
| Pip McGough is a UK-based freelance writer whose output explores the uncanny intersections of myth, memory, and the modern world. He blends lyricism and political commentary with dark humour, often drawing on folklore, religion, and metaphysics. At present, his work is necessarily preoccupied with the issue of Palestinian liberation. His writing spans poetry, children’s fiction, and surreal short forms, frequently invoking landscapes as witnesses and the body as metaphor. |
Instagram: @manifest_gothic
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