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    Patient Zero
    Patient Zero
    Patient Zero
    Ebook84 pages33 minutes

    Patient Zero

    By Tomás Q. Morín

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    About this ebook

    I will call the voice of this poet a common’ voice a voice a poet could take into an entire lifetime of memorable writing.” Philip Levine, Ploughshares

    This second collection from APR-Honickman winner Tomás Q. Morín explores love gone sideways in the lives of lovers, parents and children, humans and the divine. Patient Zero is filled with voicesof all the people, places, and things that surround a life sick with heartbreak. Doors are the wooden tongues of a house, grocery-store cashiers are gatekeepers to the infinite, and food is the all-powerful life force behind every living thing.

    From Patient Zero

    Love is a worried, old heart
    disease, as Son House once put it, the very stuff
    blues are made of, real blues
    that consist of a male and female, not monkey junk
    like the Okra blues” or Pay Day blues,”
    though I think House would agree
    two hearts of any persuasion are enough for a real blues,
    if one of them is sick, that sickly green of a frog
    bitten in two by the neighbor’s dog, all of which
    makes me wonder about the source of our disease
    and whose teeth first tore the heart after Adam
    and Eve left the garden?...

    Tomás Q. Morín's debut poetry collection A Larger Country was the winner of the APR/Honickman Prize. He is co-editor with Mari L'Esperance of the anthology Coming Close, and translator of The Heights of Macchu Picchu by Pablo Neruda. He teaches at Texas State University and in the low residency MFA program of Vermont College of Fine Arts.


    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherCopper Canyon Press
    Release dateMar 30, 2017
    ISBN9781619321700
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      Book preview

      Patient Zero - Tomás Q. Morín

      NATURE BOY

      If I had enough cages to keep all the birds

      I’ve collected over the years then I would have

      to open a shop because there’s only so much room

      in a two-bedroom walk-up for 48 birds,

      not to mention the dancing bears and the frogs,

      or the different varieties of fish, the one

      species of flea, and I almost forgot the proud

      dogs and the lone mule, the profane one

      who entered my life to curse at scribes and pharisees;

      and maybe he’d let the mouse I found

      forever dying at the end of a poem

      ride on his back like a whiskered Christ

      and if not, maybe my yeti could do it

      when he’s not downtown working

      security at the store or teaching the parrots

      how to say brotherhood in grunt

      and how to comb out the tangles and mud

      from his hair, whose sweat reminds me

      of that bearded collector of beasts

      with the ark who would have no doubt

      understood how I feel, that prophet

      of change under whose spell I want to confess

      that I’m a Christian of the Old Testament,

      that my grandfather hung all his goats

      upside down, their throats over a bucket,

      and slapped their chests like that other Nature Boy

      who strutted around the ring

      like a peacock with his feathered hair

      that stayed immaculate

      even on the nights he lost to our hero

      Wahoo McDaniel who never played the heel,

      he who hailed from the lost tribes

      of Oklahoma, who made us want to be chiefs

      so much we wore pigeon feathers

      and circled each other inside a green square

      of water hose until someone finally rang the bell

      that was never there and we sprang

      toward each other like animals in love or at war.

      SAUDADES

      When that word, one part swine,

      one part evasion, first wobbled into my life

      I was eating pastrami and hiding in my office

      from students and I know Andrade was in the air,

      as was the samba, and how it’s almost impossible

      to translate either one, nor should you

      unless you’ve been a disciple of the rough grief

      that lovingly wraps you in its wings, which is warmer

      than one would expect, so much so that it’s easy

      to forget for a moment something trivial like pigs

      aren’t supposed to fly or that if you say saudades

      with enough pain and heart the pigs of your past will come

      trotting out of the dark, doing their little sideways dance

      around you, shaking their hips to the drum

      in your chest until you forget what a frown is

      or why we need them and oh they will remind you

      how delicious Carnival is, and how glorious

      it is to make the past present, and how

      easily one can sleep dressed in feathers.

      NUDIST COLONY

      Wind-whipped, ear-clapped

      by the rocky thunder of the coast,

      they cross the wet grass

      in burnished loafers, sandals

      twined on the grounds

      to drink and merrymaking.

      Inland, they face the empty

      hour between lunch

      and dinner in a frail

      building with a barking

      door and incandescent

      lighting that wraps the matte

      surface of their trunks

      in an amber glow. Sheets

      of paper shuffle, chalk

      boxes are

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