Poetry Contest Winners

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.



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THIRD PLACE WINNER

A Model for the Priesthood

by Tomás Q. Morín

In thigh-deep water we lashed the air with our rods
and re-examined the eternal questions: tongue, eye, nose—

which one has the shortest route to the brain, the heart:
which nails would you release first if it were given to you,

the feet or the hands: if Chickamauga meant river of the dead
then what were the implications for all bodies of water?

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