Patient Zero
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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.
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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