In January 2025, Junauda Petrus warned, in her inaugural poem as poet laureate of Minneapolis, of residents “getting snatched in the night,” and celebrated a city of “neighbors who traded plates of food….so we could all taste where each other was from.”
The poem, “Ritual on How to Love Minneapolis Again,” has been circulating anew after the fatal shootings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal agents in the midst of a Trump administration immigration crackdown.
Petrus read the poem this past fall at an elementary school poetry workshop. Afterward, a young boy with a blond mullet, who’d impressed her by speaking up in class, came up to her and told her, “This is a loooooong poem.” She told the boy’s mother and her wife “Y’all’s kid is hilarious.” The boy looked just like his mother, Petrus said. That was how she met Renee Good…