WISHING YOU ALL A GOOD DEATH

by Catherine Gonick

Art by Clay Bennett, July 1, 2025

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

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

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.