NVN Extra: WISHING YOU ALL A GOOD DEATH

by Catherine Gonick

Art by Clay Bennett, July 1, 2025

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Millions of low-income Americans could experience staggering financial losses under the domestic policy package that Republicans advanced through the Senate on Tuesday, which reserves its greatest benefits for the rich while threatening to strip health insurance, food stamps and other aid from the poor. —The New York Times, July 1, 2025

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as the deviants' suicide hotline 
goes dead, the bad vaccines
and free food disappear
along with the women
and children, leaving
only one gender 
on the sickly green earth,
and you already too ill
to fill out new forms
are free to drop, already dust
beneath the rug of our law,
as the best deaths are dealt
out casually as cards
by we who can afford
the deep cuts
and consequent
deaths that ensure
 "they'll get over it"
before you can know it
you'll all be bleeding
too fast to know what's coming
for your common-good bodies
already installed in pre-paid
unremarked graves,
wishing you all a good night
and good death

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Catherine Gonick has published poetry in journals including The New Verse News, Beltway Poetry Quarterly, Pedestal, and Orchards Poetry Journal. Her work has also appeared in anthologies including in plein air, Grabbed, Support Ukraine, and Rumors, Secrets & Lies: Poems About Pregnancy, Abortion and Choice. Her first full-length collection, Split Daughter of Eve, is forthcoming in June from Sheila-Na-Gig Editions. She lives in the Hudson Valley, where she works in a company that slows the rate of global warming.