Thursday, September 10, 2026: GOODW.Y.N.'s "Ode to Tent Cities"

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Nicole Goodwin aka GOODW.Y.N. They are longlisted for The Pulitzer Prize in Poetry for 2023, the 2023 RWW Creative Nonfiction Fellow, as well as the 2018 Ragdale Alice Judson Hayes Fellowship Recipient, while advancing to the 2nd Round of the 2018 Creative Capital Awards. They published the articles “Talking with My Daughter…” and “Why is this Happening in Your Life…” in the New York Times’ parent blog Motherlode. Additionally, their work “Ain’t I a Woman (?/!): Poems,” was longlisted for The Black Spring Press Group’s The Christopher Smart-Joan Alice Prize for 2020.


Ode to Tent Cities


Too many tents, harboring

The unwanted.

Haunted housing,

With no walls, bedding, or door mats

To bid you welcome and farewell.

It’s as if evolution has gone mad,

And forgotten who made it so.

That the trees did cry wolf; and wind

Blows harshly, without even baring a sound.

I wonder when we are all left upon the street,

Will those whose greedy little thumbs, forefingers,

Pinkies, nail-bitten and prints abashed and slayed—

Would have killed the hunger within their monster bellies?

That swallowed, without chewing, tasted and yet, never cherished

Any blessing gifted to them in the first place.


© GOODW.Y.N

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