Tomás Q. Morín is the author of the poetry collections A Larger Country, winner of the APR/Honickman Prize, and Patient Zero (Copper Canyon Press, 2017), and translator of Pablo Neruda’s The Heights of Macchu Picchu. Third Place winner in Narrative’s First Annual Poetry Contest, he is coeditor, with Mari L’Esperance, of the anthology Coming Close: Forty Essays on Philip Levine. Morín lives in Texas.

Photograph by Erin Evans.

Three Poems

by Tomás Q. Morín

British Birds in Manhattan

The horses crossing the cobblestone
             startle the starlings
and as I lift my arms to calm them

             it might as well be 1890
and I might as well be Eugene Schieffelin
             ambling in Central Park


with cages under my arms, my pockets
             full of seed, muttering
my Henry IV. When the flock returns


             it’s for a sandwich,
half-eaten, tossed by a woman
             with bird hips
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