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Index Previous Next The Shadow Maker Our goal is to make it so there's as little friction as possible to having a social experience. – Mark Zuckerberg is the fifth richest man in the world; a harvester of pearls: our small talk like algae-rich waters and tides –new births, divorces, prizes our children acquire – feeding and keeping the oysters alive. is a master of illusion: figures in captioned poses, screen and light; shadows that dance on cave walls. Dramas that make us muse, lean in, post notes like medieval glosses in the margins of someone else’s domestic scenes; illuminators to an epic chant, a rhapsody’s god-dream. is the Ideal Prince, accepting the burden of princedoms, glory, survival, to jettison distinctions: good and depraved; monarch and something human saved. Better to be loved and feared rather than admired, or worse, revered. A lord who understands the desire to acquire. A magician with two hands. is a Philosopher King, able to discourse on goodness, justice, corrupting pride; hold court on high ideas: opinion, false truths, reality– a theory of forms that casts our lives in cycles, fruit and fallow; sinners redeemed. A god’s will altered; a cave master’s dream. . Copyright © 2022 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Sequestrum , Issue 32, June 2022.

The Lame God: Florida Book Review Reviewed by Marci Calabretta Because the adage is true that there are too many books and so little time, I've learned to devour poetry quickly. When I picked up M. B. McLatchey's debut collection of poetry, The Lame God , I expected to breeze through it as easily as any other book. But The Lame God is not like any other book. In fact, it is exactly the sort of book you can only read by pondering slowly. It is also a book that calls readers to action, even before the first poem begins. In the preface, McLatchey writes that roughly 2,000 children "are reported missing daily to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children." An opening epigraph next reads, "Acting quickly is critical. Seventy-four percent of abducted children who are ultimately murdered are dead within three hours of the abduction." In the first section, each poem resonates with the frustration of waiting helplessly for a child to return. The narrator in "1-800-THE-LOST" says, "I want her to discuss you in the present tense. // I want the gods to stop pretending love calls the departed home." Each subsequent section delves deeper into the anguish of loss. First, McLatchey shows the frustration which evolves into real and righteous anger, demanding that the guilty "choke up my child like the Olympians— / a girl, unbruised by her journey down their // throats." Then comes the lashing-out and self-blame. "Apology" is a list poem of regrets that will break your heart: For—trusting your safe return-- not missing you. For trusting the gods. For my second-rate circumspection; for trusting the odds. [...] For teaching you not to shout. For us still uncovering your terror—layer by layer. For this sputtering sound of real prayer. Finally, comes the acceptance—not of absence, or of seeking justice, or even of grief itself. No, these poems finally settle into the acceptance of waiting for news of any kind—good or bad— because either way, these parents will be there when their children come home. "Do not worry, daughter. We are not leaving our watch / or showing our cards—just changing the guard." McLatchey is the poet standing at the gate, holding a torch to keep hope aflame even as the darkness descends. A graduate of Harvard University, Brown University, and Goddard College, McLatchey currently teaches writing and humanities at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona, Florida. Well-versed in Classical mythology, she knows how to grit her teeth and tell the traumatic story in a way that will make people listen. She is the rare poet who looks fearlessly and closely at the terrible actions of which humans are capable, and who tenderly yet artfully tells the true stories of Adam Walsh, Amber Hagerman, Levi Frady, Maile Gilbert, Morgan Chauntel Nick, and Molly Bish, whose mother "encouraged [McLatchey] to 'keep talking about this; keep writing.'" When Edward Field chose The Lame God for the 2013 May Swenson Poetry Award, he wrote, "it takes courage to read this book...In exploring such a grief through the language of poetry, McLatchey makes things happen —she gives a voice to those too grief-stricken to speak, and she refuses to allow us to suffer in silence." This book is not for the faint-hearted, or for the "breezy reader." This book is for those 2,000 children daily reported missing, for their families, and for those moments when poetry alone can break through the grief. "But it is especially for the child who has not yet pried open a bolted door, borrowed a neighbor's phone, and announced to a 911 operator, 'I've been kidnapped and I've been missing...and I'm here.'" Marci Calabretta grew up in Ithaca, NY and is currently earning an MFA at FIU. Her work has appeared in Rainy Day, The Albion Review, and The MacGuffin. She is the co-founder and managing editor for Print Oriented Bastards and a Florida Book Review Contributing Editor. Marci Calabretta grew up in Ithaca, NY and is currently earning an MFA at FIU. Her work has appeared in Rainy Day, The Albion Review, and The MacGuffin. She is the co-founder and managing editor for Print Oriented Bastards and a Florida Book Review Contributing Editor. The original article by Marci Calabretta can be found at: http://www.floridabookreview.net/poetry.html

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Index Previous Next Melville's Reader With an ease that belies his theme my boy slumps into a mold of his own small back. Chair or taffrail? The waves blend with his thoughts. And far, far out of range, I search my heart for a send off: To follow a runaway's lead? His optimism? To see our little horrors and be social with them? A summer breeze. And now the pages turn themselves; he shifts and shifts. Perhaps the helmsman stares now at the flaming try-works, sees the shapes: harpooners poling, pitching that hissing mass -- a reckoning so stark he slips into a soporific dream then suddenly comes to, but dead astern, his mind ignited wondering how to save the ship from being brought to lee. I remember reading that scene until I could recite it. But now, he lays the book like open wings across his lap and basks and basks in summer's luxurious light. I watch him like a swabber come to save a listing ship and keep a kind of vigil while he naps. Was God above young Ishmael as he packed his bag for Cape Horn, the Pacific? Or, in New Bedford, when he read the fate of whale men? An average, good-hearted, dreamer at the masthead. Watcher not watching, chatting with Queequeg. O little dreamer, never in more danger than on your sunny perch, move your foot or hand an inch, loosen your grip and midday, in the fairest weather, with one half-throttled shriek you drop through the transparent air into the summer sea. . Copyright © 2007 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in The Spoon River Poetry Review , Winter/Spring 2008.

Index Previous Next Days Inn Everything about it says Economy: The rattan headboard; the fibrous spread catching us in its threads. The walls: thousands of sherbet-green fronds set against fading mountain ranges like sketches from the notebook of a British colonel drawn and redrawn absent mindedly then posted all around as friendly notice of distant, unattainable exotica. On the television, and perhaps part of the package: Tarzan and His Mate, 1934. The treasure hunters have, at last, dispersed. O'Sullivan and Weissmuller slip - searing and nude - into a jungle pool. So verdant and so bestial a scene that Jane's a body double. Sweet paganism, one critic called it to thrust a man and woman into love like this naive in one another's world until they kiss. Hardly the English Lord fluent in languages this Tarzan smothers upturned panting lips with a desire that covers her like moss. Part ape, Robinson Crusoe, sometimes Moses. His role, in any case, is to save Jane from herself. To teach her how to sail from vine to vine as though standing still. And when it comes to leaving, not to pale from choosing human nature over longing. God knows this kind of choice sees casualties. In Kansas City, in a single day, fifteen children fell from trees while practicing the victory cry of the great ape. In cinematic style, medics healed the noble savages with splints. And young boys cried from their sick beds, all hours, jungle-piercing calls. Noblesse oblige. Cities, of course, have burned to choruses like this. Love wants a jungle shower. . Copyright © 2002 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Published in Shenandoah , Winter 2003.

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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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