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Award Winning Poetry - 2005 Winner of the Annie Finch Prize On Recognizing Saints As if to find new icons for her life or as if - piece by piece - to dismantle mine she scans our purchases too consciously. Flips through a magazine I'm embarrassed to be buying. Studies its regimen for shapely thighs, asks me - because she's heard - if drinking wine is good for nursing. The shift from idle chitchat to appeal. Camille, her nametag says. Camille of olive skin and violet nails with long metallic tips, who flashes her lover's sucking marks like her stigmata. Camille who isn't showing yet - but like Crivelli's virgin martyr Catherine, peers sidelong at me and leans decoratively against her register as Catherine did against her studded wheel. So clearly Catherine that I want to look away - or kneel. And yet, Crivelli would have framed her differently: a martyr tucked away with other martyrs in a predella of muted colors, quiet suffering. None of this heart-to-heart - this girlfriend talk that brings to mind a string of small petitions and makes me say my part. Copyright © 2004 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Winner of the Annie Finch Prize, 2005. Judge: Margot Schlipp Published in The National Poetry Review , Fall/Winter 2005. Previous Next

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Index Previous Next Oaths, Curses, Blessings As a girl, I learned to hurl a curse so it would hurt. The skill, not in the words but in the work: bringing the self to feel another's precious losses as though they were one's own. And then, like an informer against the heart, delivering the blows: May you wake without air, without light. May you walk with a league of homeless shadows by your side. Although it was play it frightened me to see a hex take hold in a friend's eye, to see the crushing sorrows one can summon with the mind. Tonight, in the ashen shadows of your room those curses seem to linger like stray dogs reminding me, as the unfortunate always do, of our double lives. Our tendency to come to terms too late. Your breadth, like oatmeal's blooming scent, circles them in a breeze. Above us, light that should comfort: glow -in-the-dark stars careen like clockwork through a black sky. For a lamp: a shuttle that turns unceasingly over a dimly-lit earth. I cover you again, although this August night is still and though it's me that's shaking. With a different girl behind us, this stillness might be our grace. Instead it keeps me here tonight not praying really, but pacing. . Copyright © 2007 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in the Georgetown Review , Spring 2008

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Index Previous Next 2012 Winner of the 46er Prize for Poetry Bingo Night for Missing and Exploited Children B efore we went underground. Before you fell through a gyre with no sound. I f one piece were unwound. If you had run. If we had looked for you sooner. If you had screamed. If the gods had intervened. N ascent. Still blooming, the orchid on your window sill. A thrill of color. G one. Gone. Gone. Gone. Gone. Phantom limb. If the soul leaves the body, we did not feel it go. Nothing and everything cloistered in stone. O mens we left for others. Ripples on a resting pond. The whistling of a breeze. The imprint on the ovaries. . Copyright © 2012 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Winner of the 2012 Adirondack Review's 46er Prize for Poetry. Published in The Adirondack Review , Summer 2013. Original version published here . The 46er Prize refers to the forty-six major peaks of the Adirondacks. Hikers who reach all forty-six summits are deemed "Forty-sixers." Also published by Beacon Press in The Blue Room Collective's anthology, Grabbed , Summer 2020.

Award Winning Poetry - 2020 Featured in Verse Daily - 2024 Afterlives Only faces in little boxes now; blinking and peering into a starless space, not knowing what to do except perhaps, wave. Our host asks each box: What’s new with you? We talk, in turns. We share the virtual part – meaning the essence . It’s lovely. How this half-body huddle forces us to talk; how we conform, like grafted stalks, to a new light source. Dante insists our afterlives will be the now eternal. I study my husband’s framed face unselfconsciously. No one can see me gazing at our years. My sons, I see, have become men whose eyes are equable and clear. Time lapses freeze, in pixel images, expressions like true selves they made as toddlers. On TV, the Pope delivers the Mass to empty seats. How alone he looks – in spite of the live stream. No pilgrims, no Vatican City festooned with flowers; only police to hold the barricades. And yet, the numbers say, more watched and listened to the liturgy than ever attended. On sofas that sag, on laptops, in drive-thru caravans for bread and wine. An insistence on right seasons if only to prove we are different from our dogs. We hear a whistle too. Copyright © 2020 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality and the Art s , Issue #1, Fall 2020. Featured in Verse Daily ® with permission, 2024. Previous Next

Sestina for an ill boy Award Winning Poetry - 2016 Robert Frost Award Sugaring Sestina for an ill boy A loyal maple lingers by your bed: nature fiercely altered. Its sugar finds your pulse, then trickles in with a rhythm partly boy, partly tree. For comity we call it Mr. Pipes: a way of making peace with hard adjustments. It takes long freezing nights and thawing days to make the sap come like this -- a big run. Drip after drip, each steadier than the last, run through clear lines. I see, now, nothing’s altered that hadn’t already gone awry. Your limbs, thawing in the afternoon sun. The only rhythm -- rations of sap met evenly, at last, with insulin. The hard trek back from a seizure’s arctic grip: whistling pipes, banks of white cotton; a nurse (too cheerful) pipes up: how brave you are, and you’ll be up and run- ning in no time. A promise? Or a wish for her hard- luck kids? One spring, we got behind; buckets overflowed, altered the ground below to a sticky mat that sounded the rhythm of hard luck in thick, slow plops. The whole world thawing like centuries of ice cracking beneath us, thawing the gummy linings of blackened buckets and pipes – dripping with a precision suggestive of a subterranean rhythm. I read, that spring, that scientists can tell if the sap has run up from the roots or down the bark – but, not why its taste is altered year to year. Always the questions we care about that are hard. And “coming to” always the same: that hard expression sweeps over you. Your eyes, half-frozen pools still thawing: late winter, but late in feeling the seasons altered. Your way of banning ceremony, or welcome-horns, or pipes. Your way of taking back the small reserves that run from you each time you lose this fight. Your fitful rhythm yielding to this old-world, pacing rhythm. And knowing where to greet you, here or there, always so hard to gauge. Which is the place of the senses? Where we out-run our fears? You take us there, each thawing day, it seems. Limbs or pipes? We give up these distinctions. Nothing is altered that wasn’t already granted. Nothing is altered that makes us see things hard to see. Some call it god, others just tendrils thawing. Copyright © 2014 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Naugatuck River Review , Winter/Spring/ 2016. Reprinted with permission from Robert Frost Foundation . Semi-Finalist, Naugatuck River Review's 7th Annual Narrative Poetry Contest Previous Next

Index Previous Next Anthem No one makes love in European cities. Instead of sex, a café con leite in a leaning café, bread and olives like offerings or props between strangers. Between rooftops blank bed sheets wave, flags without countries, on cable lines. Hope for a better life ceased with the people’s resistance. In courtyards, dull statues of poets, cats in heat mime some godless coupling. What made us come here? Films like La Mime, or Il Postino where love is a mailman’s song to a wide-hipped woman and sex is a long suggestion in close-ups of mouths. Courses in college, where olive trees figured fertility and lovers in rivers or on moon-soaked rooftops promised a holy union. How we tracked in tripping rhythms and limping lines, those foreign places, foreign minds. And, your score-catching resistance to seeing a pulse in the poems that I swore was mine – a resistance that divided us then, but steadies us now, where marriage is an ancient, sacred mime: Montana’s native dance, a bushman’s song. In the hotel room next to ours, sex solves a couple’s dispute: breaths in small calls and answers like olive branches; breaths in syllabics that drift over bedsheets and rooftops like rhapsodies the ancients masked and mimed; sighs that recall the faint line between hunger and dying. Their post-coital quiet, like a lingering thought or line, makes us pause. In the quiet, a sheer curtain takes air, a quiet resistance to differences in hotel rooms, in heartaches, in countries, in love’s metered mime. For a few moments, we bathe in it. We are fluent in all languages, fluent in sex. From our window, a row of houses, an etch-a-sketch of intersecting lives, olive- toned children run home. A new moon casts drying bed sheets, quiet rooftops in a truer beige-bone. Below, an elderly pair flirts in open vowels and faint, staccato lines – Whitman’s free verse, Petrarch’s cypress vine. The body’s sung hunger; the soul’s mournful mime. We are almost home, love. For now, this is where god is: desire’s ancient theater, promises, olives. . Copyright © 2018 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Harpur Palate of Binghamton University, Fall 2018, Vol. 18.1.

Atlantic Center for the Arts An Interview with M.B. McLatchey In her newly appointed role as Arts & Wellness ambassador for the Atlantic Center for the Arts, M.B. was asked to comment on her work, the arts, the community, and her new role with ACA. What do you most love about your work combining health and the arts? For me, creating art has always been a way to care for the heart and mind. Working as an Ambassador for ACA, where we consciously join arts initiatives with an interest in healing, has been some of the most rewarding work in the arts that I have ever done. What inspired you to pursue this field? I think art makes us more human – or at least it reminds us of our humanness. Emily Dickinson once said that she writes poems in order to know what time it is. Making art is a wonderful way for us to value the minutes and days in our lives. How have the arts been transformational in your life? Wonderful shifts in ways of seeing – in ways of being -- have occurred for me through my teaching and through my interacting with other poets in New Smyrna Beach and in Volusia County. What’s special about the people of Volusia County or New Smyrna Beach? People who live in our county – especially artists – truly love our surroundings. The flora and sounds of our county frequently color the poems that people produce in my workshops. There’s a wonderful rhythm that we all march to here – it’s a pace and beat that shows up in our poems and visual art. What is the most rewarding part of your work with ACA? The people whom I have had the chance to come to know and love has been the most rewarding part of my work with ACA. So many talented and generous artists make up the community called “ACA”. I have felt very blessed to have been welcomed into this community. 3/28/2019

Index Previous Next Portable Labyrinth Moved by a quiet cyclone, a tarp set out to dry on our neighbor's lawn lifts itself, gasps and collapses, gasps and collapses. You lightly suggest someone check: perhaps someone's buried alive, or perhaps something's come to mock our little dying acts. Eddies of light drawn to a wayward canvas. Flecks of water surrendering to a draft the way that love surrenders after cruel words – breath by breath. That mechanical grace that filters through the hands and through the air when the self sees it has no choice but to move toward a world of symbols and prayer. In the desert tides of Reno, and under the brooding sky of San Jacinto men barefoot, women in beautiful cotton skirts are laying down tarps like this – portable labyrinths – on which they'll formalize our pilgrimage from kiss to bed to river's edge. For a path, a cruciform quadrant or a six-petal rose that calls up the Heart of Chartres. And, for the blind walk, the on-axis straight approach to the rose's core at the center of the mat: the mantra's mantra. How good they are to make a prayer life of the body's work. Or not goodness, but resolve, perhaps. The same resolve that keeps us at our tasks: Saturdays with our chores, Sundays in garden paths lost in the rhythm of bowing and straightening up assured our small cruelties are absolved from above. . Copyright © 2013 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in the Aurorean , Spring/Summer 2014.

Index Previous Next Teaching the Tragedies They see how lightly tragedies begin: old friends approach, trade jokes, then ask the whereabouts of someone else. Inconsequential chit chat. I know by training what to think: invoking absent ones; that's nature out of balance. But I stay quiet and watch my best take turns reading aloud. Premonitions, prayers, misgivings all uttered much as we ourselves utter such things without implying real belief in astral influence or providence. In the mutilated versions that Restoration audiences knew finding the art in grief was just the same: the principal requirement of loss. Then, all the afterthoughts of obvious but distant analogues. This morning's work is metrics - harmless stuff, except for one: a girl whose lovely throat warbles what ought to be our longest vowels - our sad approach. I make her try again, knowing she'll have to do the rest herself. . Copyright © 2002 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Published in The Southern Poetry Review , Fall/Winter 2003.