Day 21, Poet 21: Megan Fernandes

White People Always Want To Tell Me That They Grew Up Poor

White people don’t like when
you say:
                                    white people.

White people
like to remind you
that you are Indian, not black.

Black people
never say that to you.

They make
a home for you

inside
their archives.

It is like an elegy.

Poverty must be
a color

but color
is like sky.

My daddy is a daddy from Africa.
An Indian boy from Tanga.

He is a papa

who stitches
eyes together––

a doctor, the only
one

of his siblings,

seventeen in all,
to really get out

and climb towards

the lands
that enslaved him.

Only white people

can imagine a past
that was better

than now.

Only white people
have

nostalgia.

You grew up rich, they say.
Your daddy is a doctor.

They want me

to possess
their whiteness, too.

They want to
spread

it
outwards
like the tentacles of

a squid.

What they are really
saying is:

How dare you
have what was rightfully mine.

I want to say:
Squid,

my daddy holds storms
from a world you’ve never seen.

He is a doctor
because being a doctor

was a way to unbury
his dead.

I want to say:
It is not me you hate.

It is that you were
not given what whiteness

promised you–

what your TV said
all white people could have.

My daddy didn’t have a TV.
My daddy is from Africa.

My daddy is not a thing like your daddy.
Our house was not a thing like your house.

Our household was not held by anything

you could name. If you swam in it,
you wouldn’t even know

it was water.


Previously published in The Common. 

Megan Fernandes is an Assistant Professor of English at Lafayette College and lives in NYC. Her work has been published or is forthcoming Rattle, Guernica, Denver Quarterly, Hayden's Ferry Review, The Common, Thrush, The Adroit Journal, The Boston Review, etc. You can find out more about her work here: https://megfernandes.wordpress.com/