When I am newly angry at one person, I forgive
another. Infants divide the good breast from the bad
one, but really, we resent need. On our small,
transactional earth, God promotes a few angels
in the green jungle of wild selves. And the rest?
Thirst at the watering hole. I told you
how this would go. We would have a fight,
and I would become a jaguar, shrug my big
shoulders at your pain. Shrug like an indifferent
cat. You can’t win a fight with a cat, unless
you drown her. When you drown her, she is
resurrected as good. I remove myself from this
balancing act and spare you the labor of buoyancy.
I am not an animal that can be weighed.
Copyright © 2025 by Megan Fernandes. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on January 21, 2025, by the Academy of American Poets.
“One summer, I read a lot of Melanie Klein and her work on splitting and mental compartmentalization. Klein says that when infants are breastfeeding, they divide the good breast from the bad one, a beginning of object-relations theory. They love the ‘good’ breast because it nourishes them, but they also hate the ‘bad’ breast because they resent ‘need’ itself. I was struck by this idea—that we sometimes resent what nourishes us because we resent needing nourishment. Our own vulnerability and interdependence haunts us for the rest of our lives. Also, I’m a jaguar the way Dickinson is a panther.”
—Megan Fernandes
