34th Street & Portland Avenue
Minneapolis, Minnesota

By Ellen Lansky with Greta Gaard

On Tuesday night, January 6, 2026, the lesson at the Introduction to Judaism class my girlfriend, Greta Gaard, and I are taking was “Antisemitism and the Holocaust.” Before the Tuesday night class at Temple Israel in Minneapolis, Minnesota, we’d started watching Shoah. In the interviews of Polish villagers in Chelmno and Treblinka, we saw that they knew what lay in store for their Jewish neighbors when the gas vans came to take them away. The Polish women spoke openly about their envy of the beautiful Jewish women, of the wealth their families had accumulated, of the homes that they had. After their Jewish neighbors were crammed into gas vans and rolled off to be cremated, the Polish villagers moved into Jewish houses and apartments and took over their businesses.

Greta said, “How is it that the Jewish families out-earned their Polish neighbors? Weren’t they also Polish?”

“I’ve never heard of a Jew described as a Pole.”

“What else would they be?”

The next morning, an ICE agent murdered Renee Good at 34th and Portland Avenue. Portland Avenue is a southbound one-way street with a wide bike lane and on-street parking, that, at 34th Street, features duplexes, apartments, and single-family houses: domiciles, private residences, homes. The people who live in these homes are White, Native, Asian, Latine, Black, LGBTQ, Christian, Jewish, Muslim. They are poets, visual artists, prose writers, sculptors, musicians, political activists, family members, friends, neighbors.

For many years, I lived in this neighborhood, and I still know people who live there. Three miles east, where I live now, everyone was affected by the aftermath of George Floyd’s death by cop-suffocation on the corner of 38th Street and Chicago Avenue—only a few blocks away from 34th Street and Portland Avenue. Less than two miles from my house is the torched police station, still surrounded by a fence festooned with signs promising a new Democracy Center and mocking graffiti next to the signs. When it burned, I could smell it.

What I understand now is that, like my dad’s Jewish family in Eastern Europe, I live in the Bloodlands. Today, the Twin Cities are occupied by federal agents from Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), and Customs and Border Protection (CBP). All that is missing are checkpoints.

When the news and videos began to circulate, especially the video from the poet and musician Lynette Reini-Grandell, a Portland Avenue resident, we learned a more detailed story about the latest murder event in the Minneapolis Bloodlands.  Renee Good’s son is not an orphan, as originally reported. Renee, her wife, Becca, and their dog had just dropped off their son at school and pulled over to check out the commotion caused by ICE vehicles and agents on Portland Avenue.

We also learned that Renee Nicole Macklin Good was a poet. Soon, the link to her award-winning poem, “On Learning to Dissect Fetal Pigs,” was posted everywhere, easily accessible  via “Poem-a-Day” from the Academy of American Poets.

Dissecting fetal pigs is a standard assignment for many high school and college biology students. Beyond the title, fetal pigs do not appear in Good’s poem, but they do not have to. The mere words in the title evoke fear, panic, and revulsion. Fetal pigs stink. What’s the point in cutting them to pieces? I can just hear the students at my big suburban high school complaining and clamoring until the assignment was removed from the curriculum. In my biology lab at the Catholic women’s college in St. Paul, we also didn’t dissect fetal pigs—probably because of the fetal implications. Renee Nicole Macklin did it and wrote a poem about it. In her poem, the consonants hiss and pop-pop-pop like gunshots in phrases such as “tercets from cicadas and pentameter from the hairy legs of cockroaches” and “the slick rubber smell of high gloss biology textbook pictures.”

Now, I’m wondering if there’s anything more traif — more unkosher, more unfit for human consumption— than a fetal pig. Certainly, the ICE agents, with their masks and their guns and their light-brown outfits, are law enforcement traif, outnumbering the police forces of Minneapolis and St. Paul combined.

Even so, in the Minneapolis Bloodlands, people are not looking away. We are not moving into our neighbors’ houses or apartments, taking over their businesses, or turning their places of worship into furniture warehouses. We are blowing whistles, holding up signs, marching, protesting, cussing at the masked thugs in ugly light-brown shirts, witnessing and recording and testifying.

On the Sunday morning after Renee Good was murdered, Greta and I stopped at our neighborhood Target—the one that was looted and rebuilt. We were both trying on sunglasses, looking in the mirror and at each other. Greta found a pair she liked, and we turned toward the store’s main aisle toward the check out.

Then, we heard voices, wafting like plumes of pepper spray, saying, “ICE is here. ICE is here.”

A young person in a red Target T-shirt was pushing a cart down that main aisle. “ICE is here. ICE is here. ICE is here,” she said. She was not shouting; she was not raising her voice, but without being alarming, she was speaking at a pitch that got everybody’s attention.

“ICE is here,” I repeated. I thought, “What are they doing here? They’re not coming after me, but they weren’t going after Renee Good the other day, and they shot her in the face. They’re coming after all of us. Who is ICE targeting in our Target?”

Two of the front-end people were patrolling the area between the self-service section and the check-out lanes. Neither one looked panicked nor even disturbed, but they never, ever do. Nearby, an employee huddled with a Somali dad and a few other nonwhite folks.

 I said to the Somali dad, “Where are they?”

Was ICE was getting ready to nab somebody, or were they in our Target to grab a coffee at Starbucks before they nabbed somebody in the parking lot, as they did the other day at the Target in Richfield, about six miles away? Was somebody going to get killed?

The dad said, “They’re here.”

In that moment, everybody in the store clicked into action mode. We looked at each other, nodded, and moved to the front of the store.

Ellen Lansky lives in Minneapolis and taught literature, composition, and creative writing at Inver Hills Community College.  Her fiction includes Golden Jeep and Suburban Heathens, and her essays on literature and addiction have appeared in a variety of journals and anthologies.

Greta Gaard’s creative and scholarly writing emerges from intersections among ecofeminisms and queer studies. After 35 years in academia, she is completing a creative nonfiction narrative, She UnNames Them: Mindfulness, Ecofeminism, Dementia.

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Black Youth Healing Arts Center
St. Paul, Minnesota

By Chandler Peters-DuRose

It was March 2023, a week after my 19th birthday. We were in the McClinton room of the Black Youth Healing Arts Center (BYHAC), located in the Rondo neighborhood of St. Paul, Minnesota. Even though the building is now home to the BYHAC, it was previously Red School House, a Native American charter school founded in 1972.

That day, we were sitting at one of the grey classroom tables donated to us by the school. Despite it being a classroom table, it lacked the writing left by burnt-out students or the gum underneath that a student couldn’t be bothered to throw away.

Now we sat, the poet Danez Smith, about seven other students, and me, imagining the shape of what we now know as ‘Poetry Lab’.  Danez started the conversation by asking what we wanted to work on. That led to someone asking, “what even is a poem in the first place?” We had no concrete definition. Danez said they didn’t even know, that a poem could be whatever we wanted it to be. I was confused — how could someone who has been writing poetry my entire life not know what constituted a poem?

We dreamed the question that ultimately became the heartbeat of the space: “How do we get people to cross the boundaries of their imagination?” Writers are so often told what should be written, and we did not want to restrict those young writers who engaged in the space. We wanted to address what was possible.

As we talked, we realized we couldn’t do that without remembering where we came from, which prompted the idea of studying the past, present, and future of Black poetic history. Every week we read work from the ancestors who came before us, our contemporaries who were writing into our current conditions, and still others who took it on themselves to write into the possibilities of tomorrow.

I don’t think any of us predicted just how much this would impact the BYHAC community. In the same way the BYHAC started as a twice-a-month program in the basement of a church and grew so much it needed its own building, Poetry Lab became a years-long weekly meeting of poets. Some of them had been writing for decades and some had only written one poem in their life. Then of course there was Danez, the poet who got me into poetry and was my mentor in the craft all the way from first poem to first publication.

For three years Danez showed up weekly with two poems and a writing prompt. The rest of us came with a notebook and the audacity to write vulnerable and healing poems and share them. The core group of poets came regularly despite it being a walk-in class. Trust grew. We would delve deep into the hurt, grief, and healing that make us humans and poets.

Through some of the hardest times in my life, poetry was there. The community was there when my roommate died unexpectedly and there when I was trying to form my own adult identity. When I had to drop out of college, they were supportive. At times when the last thing I wanted to do was write, I showed up. Weekly.

Danez worked to allow us a space to show up as we were, and we held that space sacred.  What is more sacred than artists creating amidst the horrors of the world?

In their most recent book Bluff, Danez writes in the poem “principles,”

Let us not be scared of the work

because its hard

let us move the mountain

because the mountain must move.

After Trump was elected for a second term, the urgency of the poems grew. While watching multiple genocides take place and fascism in this country becoming more and more overt, our poems needed to match that urgency. What was a political pulsing vein turned to a steady heartbeat. I had started by writing extremely personal, heartbreaking, and at times retraumatizing poems but during this time shifted into a political conversation.

As my poems developed, so did my confidence. In the beginning, Poetry Lab felt hard. I could barely read without anxiety and was constantly comparing my work to the poets around me. Then in August 2024, Danez was curating for the Academy of American Poets’ Poem-a-Day. They asked me and a handful of other poets to publish our work. I was honored to say the least, and on August 9, 2024, my poem “Rest Stop” was published. While I believe I would have been published at some point, without BYHAC I don’t think I would have had the opportunity so soon to share my work this widely.

The year prior, Danez had helped me put together my first zine, titled Transplant after a poem I had written and edited in that space. A few months after the book came out, Danez and I were in the car, and they asked if I could read the poem. I thought they meant as an artist share. But no, they wanted to teach it. In that moment, I was no longer in their car. I was 16 finding poetry for the first time, 18 meeting Danez at a coffee shop for the first time. Back in the car, at 20, I said yes.

Later, at the center, I was reading, expecting feedback. I got nothing but praise for my work and the book. A week later, a poet from the space came back to me and said they wrote a poem after “Transplant.” I had felt like I had succeeded as a writer, in every way.

Now, I’m 21 and have three publications. I’m working with Cave Canem and writing my second play. I attribute a lot of my success to not only Danez’s mentorship but also the work I and other poets have put into making the BYHAC a space for poets — especially poets of color — to thrive. Danez and I talked extensively about how spaces for poets don’t exist like they used to, especially after lockdown, when everything moved online. While we have a robust poetry scene in the Twin Cities, opportunities for community are few and far between. The places that do exist are often inaccessible financially.

Poetry weaves metaphor with meaning to create art. I have learned to make poetry a place where my politics and ethics can grow. I’ve learned the ways in which words and images work together to create something nothing less than magic. I’ve seen poems manifest into my daily life. I have built community around writing. I have felt my words resonate with people in ways I never would have imagined. Sometimes, all it takes is a moment in a coffee shop with a good mentor to show what is possible. That possibility can lead to enough audacity to ask, no really, what if…

Chandler Peters-DuRose (they/them) is a Black Queer adoptee poet and the author of Transplant (2024). Their work appears in Poem-a-Day, from the Academy of American Poets. They reside in the Twin Cities.

Photo courtesy of Irreducible Grace Foundation and the Black Youth Healing Arts Center

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599 Summit Avenue
St. Paul, Minnesota

By Ross K. Tangedal

In fall 2016, my wife, CJ, was four months pregnant, and we decided to visit the Minnesota State Fair at the insistence of my cousin Michael, a Minneapolis resident and state fair aficionado. After meandering through the massive beehive exhibit, CJ and I peeled away to take a quick walking tour of old St. Paul. I was excited to explore Summit Avenue, which is known for its Victorian rowhouses, including the birthplace of F. Scott Fitzgerald, whose work I’d been studying for the past five years.

599 Summit Avenue is not all that different from the houses around it, fitting into the line of its Victorian neighbors: two stories, with an arched entryway, a rounded bay window, and a stately turret topping the unit. One expects to be wowed when witnessing the domicile of genius, but this unimpressive house did little for my enthusiasm. We could not go inside, nor were there any definable features of the home to suggest anything but mundanity. The plaque out front says nothing about the home either, other than “F. Scott Fitzgerald House.” On Summit Avenue in the early twentieth century, people dreamt of their money aging. But now, more in line with Fitzgerald’s fears than his parents’ dreams, this home is a broken-down shell of Romanesque revival and mediocrity.

Rarely has there been a more complicated “favorite son” than Scott. He spent his childhood in Buffalo, Hackensack, and St. Paul, wanting so much to be more than he was, more than his disappointing father had become, more than a Midwestern nobody with glittering things in his heart. After completing his military service he drank himself into such depression that in 1919 he moved home to the last place he wanted to be, St. Paul, and lived in the house he least wanted to live in, 599 Summit Avenue, with the people he least wanted to live with, his parents. If he got his first book published, Zelda Sayre, a judge’s daughter, the rich girl that poor boys like him never marry, would marry him.

I know now why I felt that way about 599 Summit Avenue during fall 2016: we don’t appreciate transitions, not like we do beginnings or endings. The F. Scott Fitzgerald House in St. Paul is a transition cloaked in a beginning, a place he never cared to live in, and a place to which he never returned once he published This Side of Paradise. There was more for him, he thought, than a rowhouse rented with his mother’s money and populated by his father’s letdowns. He was always moving away from St. Paul and the Midwest, even when he wrote about them. Fitzgerald’s Midwest was behind him. His future was glittering things and people. Like his character Dexter Green in the short story “Winter Dreams,” Fitzgerald was all potential.

As for CJ and I, our trip to St. Paul that summer was a beginning too, with a pregnancy and a new job leading toward our unknowable future. Like Fitzgerald, I had a hard time appreciating the transition. Then my daughter Adeline Rose arrived just five months later, glittering with the newness of life.

Ross K. Tangedal is assistant professor of English and director of the Cornerstone Press at the University of Wisconsin-Stevens Point. He specializes in American print culture and publishing studies, textual editing, and book history, with emphasis in Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Midwestern literature. His first book, The Preface: American Authorship in the Twentieth Century, will be released in 2021 by Palgrave Macmillan.

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