Queer Poem-a-Day is a program from the Adult Services Department at the Library and may include adult language.
The Antihero
by Megan Fernandes
By accident, I carried around a sweet potato
in my purse for a week. Scurrying for my wallet,
I would toss the hairy rock, pink and bulbous,
a little alien that my cat would pounce on
when it rolled out onto the wooden floor,
before I scooped it, too quickly, back into its
satchel. Cat thought, perhaps, that it was some shelled
sea animal, embryonic and elbowish,
concentrated like a bullet, big enough to cradle.
I felt like Leopold Bloom, secretly caressing
the potato, saying to myself, “Ah, there it is…. po-taa-to”
over and over until it became to clear that Bloom
clutched the little spud to keep
the earth close, so close that when Dublin bloomed bright
with its mass electric trees, he could think,
here is the thing that grew in the ground. At the end
of Nausicaa, there are sweet mulvey lumps, señoritas
and blood flow, breadvans and Rip Van Winkle.
This is my favorite paragraph of six hundred pages.
Half-sleep. Brain fog. The world was mapped in 1904,
it was the end of the frontier. It was the end of boy
adventure novels. It was the beginning of wires.
Here is the thing that grew in the ground.
Here is the thing growing in my purse,
here it is, here.
Copyright © 2015 by Megan Fernandes. This poem received commendation by Don Paterson in the annual Edwin Morgan International Poetry Competition and was published in Fernandes’ first collection The Kingdom and After (2015, Tightrope Books).
About the Author
Megan Fernandes is a poet living in NYC.
Queer Poem a Day
- Day 1: Self Portrait as a Body, a Sea by Donika Kelly
- Day 2: Birthday Suits by Joshua Jennifer Espinoza
- Day 3: Obsessions by Gabriel Ojeda-Sagué
- Day 4: The Baby Inside My Baby by Nomi Stone
- Day 5: To Be Saved by CM Burroughs
- Day 6: At the New York City AIDS Memorial by Stefania Gomez
- Day 7: Love in the Time of PrEP by Jaques Rancourt
- Day 8: The Morning After by Ellen Bass
- Day 9: Argument of Situations by Shangyang Fang
- Day 10: Ode to Sneakers by Tory Adkisson
- Day 11: Boombox Ode: Enjoy the Silence
- Day 12: Soon by Makshya Tolbert
- Day 13: Photograph by Jenny George
- Day 14: Salt Lake City by Christian Gullette
- Day 15: Humpty Dumpty by Spencer Reece
- Day 16: The Antihero by Megan Fernandes
- Day 17: On Growing Bored with Synonyms for the Apocalypse, I Rename It Carl… by C. Russell Price
- Day 18: All My Friends are Sad & Bright by Cameron Awkward-Rich
- Day 19: 2000 miles and this is the love letter I send you over text by Noa/h Fields
- Day 20: Book VI from The Queerness of Eve by Emilia Phillips
- Day 21: Oracle by Ari Banias
- Day 22: gxrl gospel iv: beast of a southern wild by Aurielle Marie
- Day 23: Let There Be Pride by Richard Blanco
- Day 24: Jacob Riis Memorial Beach by Stephen Ira
- Day 25: from Dependence, the Joistrix / How you are made by Emily Martin
- Day 26: The Need for Repitition by Jim Whiteside
- Day 27: Arm’d and Fearless by Julian Gewirtz
- Day 28: Polyamory by Madeleine Cravens
- Day 29: GPOY as Rainbowfrog.gif by Aerik Francis
- Day 30: Gay Epithalamium by Benjamin Garcia
Queer Poem-a-Day is directed by poet and teacher Lisa Hiton and Dylan Zavagno, Adult Services Coordinator at the Deerfield Public Library. Music for this second year of our series is the first movement, Schéhérazade, from Masques, Op. 34, by Karol Szymanowski, performed by pianist Daniel Baer. Queer Poem-a-Day is supported by generous donations from the Friends of the Deerfield Public Library and the Deerfield Fine Arts Commission.
