Index Previous Next First Place - Lazuli Literary Group Plan B And so, we are not to be concerned about living – but about living well. - Socrates, Dialogue with Crito I watch them settle in. David’s Death of Socrates on the projection screen. Clashes of colors like warring teams: a white toga hanging from a teacher’s shoulder; the blood-red robe of a servant, who holds out the deadly drink. An ancient story, someone else’s fight. And yet, the old man who sits upright to take the servant’s chalice. The absence of malice. Gestures like haunting glyphs. We open ourselves to what ifs. What if someone you love, someone who taught you right from wrong; drew you a map of valleys not yet drawn; rowed with you on a winding river: the labyrinth of your young years. A chance to visualize: a wrestling coach; a theater teacher tirelessly recapturing missed lines. What if this person you love comes under fire. A mob seeds hatred, until – like trees that burn too easily – they are cheering for his demise. Why. Because he is winning in an art his accusers used to prize: logic as leak-proof as a Grecian vase. Because he is gaining fans. Because they can. Suppose, like an extended hand, the mob gives your mentor a choice: Disavow all you ever taught. Apologize – or hemlock. They grasp for the extended hand. Why not sign a pity release? Spare your children and wife. Surrender – just for the moment – what defines your life. The boat for escaping is waiting in the bay. The judges want their take. What will history say if friends do not save a man accused in the wrong? Who will teach virtue if the teacher of virtue is gone? Scales that tip and sway. It must have weighed on Crito’s heart to learn the decision was already made; to arrive in a drafty cell for a teacher- student review – so late. How he misread the old man sitting on his cot: alone and unafraid. The question on his teacher’s face: How much are you willing to trade ? We weave, instructed, heart persuaded. We leave it – not for the Midterm – almost certainly for a later day. . Copyright © 2024 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Azure , Vol. 8, March, 2025. Winner of the Lazuli Literary Group's Fall 2024 Writing Contest. Other poems in collection: "Ethos, Logos, Pathos" and "Is There a Final Exam?". Editor's comment: I enjoyed the steady strain of brilliance and the profound sense of wisdom that runs through each poem, well-delivered through narratively evocative language and clearly intentional choices in poetic form! To cloak modernity in a sense of magic is difficult to do, and yet I feel your poems do so in a very useful way. I hope our readers find in these pieces the impetus for an examined life. - Sakina B. Fakhri

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Videos Videos: Fres h Perspectives in Poetry - Video Series . In partnership with Atlantic Center for the Arts and with sponsorship from The Florida Humanities Council, M.B. hosts a four-part video series on poetry. Join her on a journey of learning from the masters. Intro: How forms liberate the poet The Sonnet: Then and Now The Odyssey & Today’s Returning Veteran Seamus Heaney: Master of the Lyric Book Trailer for Beginner's Mind ( Link ) Vero Beach 2026 Lenten Reading (Link ) Podcasts: Education in Literature Podcast . Listen to M.B. (Beginner's Mind ) and author Kevin McIntosh (Class Dismissed ) discuss the philosophical underpinnings of their new education-themed books with Regal House Publishing's Jaynie Royal and Pam Van Dyk who do a spectacular job of getting to the story behind the stories while also eliciting foundational commentary from these seasoned pros on the challenges and rewards of teaching in today's age. Interviews: Of Poets & Poetry - FSPA How I Write Kickstand Poetry Atlantic Center for the Arts AWP - In the Spotlight NPR (Utah) - Radio with Tom Williams The Authors Guild - Member Spotlight Sequestrum - Contributor Spotlight My Links: My Author's Guild Site My Amazon Author Site My Facebook Site My Linkedin Site My Teaching Philosophy Can Writing Be Taught? What Others are Saying: Florida State Poets Association Poetry Workshop Reviews Seamus Heaney Edward Field Florida Book Review Brad Crenshaw New South: Georgia Spoon River Poetry Review Robert Frost Foundation Sky Island Journal Reviews Salem College Book Reviews by M B: Paradise Drive Accommodations The Clock of the Long Now Dark Card Earthly Freight Selected Essays by MB: Garcia-Aguilera and Barbara Parker Odysseus' Wounded Healer Beginner's Mind in the Classroom Published Chapters from Beginner's Mind : Right Notes Isms The Good Thief A Purple Heart Ex-Patriots Fallen Angels A Good and Simple Meal

Index Previous Next 2012 Rita Dove Poetry Award - Semi Finalist At the Grieving Parents Meeting In the parish hall of Saint Anthony’s Catholic Church, pictures of murdered children in our hands, we huddle in a sphere of folding chairs and a flickering fluorescent light. Some lean near the coffee and coffee cake that, each week, has the same floury smell of sympathy and each week, the same sour taste. By the tissues, a painted soapstone statuette – our patron saint. O, the watches and keys and gloves that appeared at your feet! A ruse that my mother relied on to make me believe that our smallest petitions are heard, that events, with the proper appeals, can be reversed, that almost anything lost can be retrieved. As a girl I chanted your name while I followed the trail: pockets, under the bed, under the sofa cushions, pockets again. Something's lost and can't be found. Please, St. Anthony, look around. When it didn’t turn up, I brought you coiled vines – like the petals I bring to my daughter’s room as if to stir up stale air – and the search would resume. Look at the priestess of talismans I have become: her saint card from First Communion in my purse; lodestones for paperweights at work. For good luck, a horseshoe-shaped necklace under my shirt: the crescent shape of the sacred moon goddess in Peru or the bow of the Blessed Mother’s cradling arm, arch like the threshold of her sacred vulva, twine like the helix of lovers. Look at the virtuoso that was finally birthed, who would use this ring of linked hands not for fellowship or grace, not to make my peace on earth, not to lay my gifts at your feet and give up the search, but to summon the face she petitioned and conjure a curse. . Copyright © 2011 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. 2012 Rita Dove Poetry Award - Semi Finalist Published in River Styx 87, Spring 2012.

Award Winning Poetry - 2019 Winner of the Folio Editor's Prize Ode for an Ode on a Grecian Urn Ode, let your sorrows go. Let brides be ravished, trees forsake their leaves, let lovers kiss and fade, daughters age. Let loss be the elixir that induces a new legend, new urn-dream: Forests that seed, mature, starve, and reseed without our overtures. Let wanting, waiting, pacing be the rings in carbon dating. A new museum piece. Imagine yearning bigger than an urn, bigger than god; desire out of bounds, desire crowned. Paint it fulfilled, the turning back of hounds. What good is song if not the end of one man’s wish, what-ifs? I died at twenty-five. So many do. Urn, make your story new: Beauty is truth when sung to a priest’s staccato voice and tone near a young marine’s too-heavy, too mature, burial stone; when love betrayed makes lovers stutter phrases – sweet clichés – that they used to say alone. Put it in stone: Beauty is truth when sung to the beat of a child’s quiet feet leaving home; when aging lovers sing to one another: Remember when we used to rock in one another’s arms and we knew god and the devil’s charms? Copyright © 2019 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Winner of the 2019 Folio annual Editor's Prize for Poetry . Published in Folio Volume 34, May 2019. Previous Next

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From the Heroic to the Classical Age Great Works of Ancient Greece by M. B. McLatchey Against a backdrop of economic strife, political unrest and relentless war with neighboring regions, the ancient Greeks give the world philosophy – a preoccupation, as Socrates says, not with simply living, but with living well. As the readings in this text will demonstrate – from the ancient epics of the Warrior Age of heroes to the teachings of the great thinkers in the Golden Age of Athens – living well for the ancient Greeks will mean answering the same question again and again: “What should we call a good life?” For introductory-level students in the Humanities, as for the most accomplished scholars, this is a question for all of us. This collection of ancient writings is intended to expose students to the original voices of the past in “primary source” form. Unlike the historian who summarizes Aristotle’s “Ethics of Happiness”, the primary sources herein give us Aristotle himself – his exact words as they appeared when he etched them into papyrus in the 4th century BC. Because a reading proficiency in the ancient languages is not expected of undergraduate students in the Humanities, the ancient texts translated into English here have been carefully chosen by the author based on their affinity to the original text and their adherence to the true spirit of primary source translation. Available on Amazon Book Details: Paperback: 182 pages Publisher: CreateSpace; 3rd edition (May 26, 2020) Language: English ISBN-13: 978-1724212344 Product Dimensions: 8 x 0.4 x 10 inches Shipping Weight: 1 pound

The Lame God: Book Review Review by Brad Crenshaw The End of the World A dear friend of mine from Holland has a son who, during his latency years, unexpectedly developed a seizure disorder. One evening years ago, after riding yet again in the ambulance to the hospital emergency room, his dazed son in his arms, he blurted out a Dutch proverb: “You’re only as happy as your unhappiest child.” The context added particular weight to the emotional vision. I had come along afterward bringing extra clothing, mainly pajamas and underwear for the hospital stay, and at the moment it seemed possible to me that, given the proverb, no one in that family would be happy ever again. It was a sobering thought, and it put me on alert. I had children too, younger than my friend’s, but they had their vulnerabilities as well–they had desires, and the frustrations to desire. So I hunted around for things to do, clearing a path, smoothing the way toward their futures. My daughter discovered early on that she wanted to play the piano—not a violin, not a keyboard, but a piano. So,well, okay, that was easy enough: we found her a piano. I mean, seriously, I couldn’t even get the instrument out of the truck before she was all over it. My son, for his part, basically needed room, an exit from the strictures of developed social play into the boundlessness of an unconstructed world. From the beginning he has pulled me outdoors, enticed me out from behind my desk and onto frozen dog sleds, into kayaks floating among whales in the Pacific Ocean, on treks in arid Southwestern mountains photographing petroglyphs–and then he has gone to places where I could not follow, so that his safety did not depend on me, but on another father–this one Kenyan, who sat outside his cloth tent at night with a wooden club to whack any marauding hyena that came too close. The lions, apparently, were no problem. I have wanted to risk all this personal detail here in order to bring each of us, in our minds, personally, onto a certain pathway that leads in the end to M.B. McLatchey’s new book, The Lame God . It’s a book that pretty much requires a personal response from us, because the core of its themes centers around a person: 16-year-old Molly Bish. It is possible that some of you may have heard of her, insofar as her plight unfolded for months in the national news. In fact, it is entirely possible that a few of you may actually have known her, the real Molly Bish—maybe as a high school student, maybe as a neighbor— before in June, 2000, she was abducted from her lifeguard tower at Comins Pond in Warren, MA, and subsequently raped, tortured and then murdered. Whether McLatchey herself knew Molly is unclear: she does not disclose what, exactly, her relationship to Molly Bish and her family has been. But she does reveal that she has, at a minimum, spoken with the mother, Maggie Bish, to obtain permission to write explicitly about Molly, and about the attending horrors that ensued after she was found to be missing. McLatchey writes in her Introduction “This book is offered in memory of Molly Bish and in homage to her mother, Maggie Bish, who encouraged me to ‘keep talking about this; keep writing.’” McLatchey adds that “The story that this book tells is true. No names have been changed to protect the innocent—the innocent have already seen the face of evil, smelled its breath, learned its customs.” This is a unique introduction to the poetry. We as readers are explicitly denied the usual aesthetic distances from the events depicted in the stories because the events are not fictionalized. McLatchey’s artistry here is working with brute facts—among which is the troubling recognition that the perpetrator, whoever he is, has not been apprehended. The man is still at large out there. Accordingly, there is no sense of justice in the book, no comfort derived from cosmic symmetries, no vengeance exacted, no eye taken for an eye, no recourse. Just horror. THE RAPE OF CHRYSSIPUS “She came home bone by bone. First her shin bone, then her skull. In the end, 26 of Molly’s bones came home to us.” –Mother of 16-year-old Molly Bish For the rape of Chryssipus, King Laius suffered. The gods saw what he took – a young boy’s chance to play in the Nemean Games, to make his offerings to Zeus, to win his wreath of wild celery leaves, advance the Greek way: piety, honor, and strength. He raided their heaven, not just a small boy’s frame. Their justice was what Laius came to dread: a son that would take his mother to bed, a champion of the gods, an Oedipus. We called on the same gods on your behalf, asked for their twisted best: disease like a Chimera to eat your Laius piece by piece; a Harpie, who might wrap her tongue around his neck and play his game of breathing and not-breathing that he made you play. Medusa’s curse in stone – and a Golden Ram to put you back together bone by bone. The quotation alone is hair-raising—though with that said, I am struck by the poet’s lack of overt drama in the poetry that follows. On the one hand we have the sensational, flat enumeration of the number of bones that were, over time, returned one-by one to the grieving mother—and with the manner of that return left unstated. How would you do it? Did they come in a box? Labeled with an evidence tag? Did a policeman ring the doorbell, and hand over her skull? What kind of protocol could even be possible here? However, before we step out into that emotional darkness, we hear the poet’s measured voice avoiding hysteria by invoking a classical myth, and with it organizing a parallel narrative of divine retribution to help her metabolize her raw feeling. Because contemporary explanations just feel petty, just lame excuses offering a simplistic cause-and-effect model to rationalize the behavior— something like ‘bad parenting creates bad boys’, or these days maybe it is a defective neuron causing the problem. Bullshit. It takes the scale of mythology to begin to convey the goliath male evil that descended upon Molly. The poet’s task is, essentially, to figure out how to express the full weight of the violation without screaming. It is a delicate matter. Often in the book McLatchey combines classical figures with traditional poetic forms to allow us perspective with which to view the scope of violence, and the depth of the insult to Molly and her family. In Little Fits, for instance, the poet composes a sequence of Petrarchan sonnets to organize her thoughts and feelings, and to secure a mental space in which to arrive at insight, emotional clarity, and decision. The formal restraints allow the emotional matter to be pitched very high, but without ever sounding bathetic. And look at the graceful formal movement in this sonnet: CATHARSIS A portly man on TV says he’s eating jelly donuts since his doctor recommended more fruit. My head tucked beneath your chin, I feel you grin. A welcome joke— what Aristotle called catharsis: the comedy channel in bed. A piecemeal purging meant to clear our minds, a chance to graft, like patchwork, the wreckage of our lives onto a campy figure, cheer for him; love him for dancing when the gods single him out, pile on the twisted trials. As if—for a few moments—we are watching someone else’s life unfold. Pizza and beer, you my armchair, tucked in our sheets. As if—for a few moments—we have climbed up from some well to lounge on sun-baked stone, take in the Dionysian Mysteries: lore of the vine—seasons, grapes, wine. Nothing ever truly dying. And us, tender initiates, laughing so hard we’re crying. Fortunately for the book—possibly for the poet herself—McLatchey moves from her contemplation of the brutish facts of murder, and toward a reprieve, toward a respite that acknowledges other continuities besides those of abiding anguish. Here we find an intimate pair coupled, which is to say, linked in their common association that, for the moment, includes humor and catharsis. Here we are offered an image of mutual purpose, and shared pleasures, as well as their doubled purgation expelling together the poisonous, unacceptable affects. The purgation signals an emotional transition out of trauma and into sorrow, and to a generalized sense of both vulnerability and promise. The transition is an essential point of the poet’s vision. She discloses that she, too, has children—two sons, we are told—and she has to wonder what she has let herself in for. Having children is a sort of biological vote for continuities, a tacit endorsement of future, continued participation in the social morass. Like it or not, she as a parent is compelled to be party to a world that has its disgusting matters, its truly fearful possibilities, against which she tries to civilize brute desires, and ward off threats to naked innocence. But there is only so much she can do. Always in the distance burnt brown combines sweeping up spools of wheat. My sons sleep in the back seat—the younger one bowed over; the other up straight like a sun-drenched sheaf. Up ahead, one sheer pool after another that the heat lays down. Day stars (the older one calls them) spring up from the pools and usher us on, then flicker and steam. A Dakota we’ve never seen… I reach back to wake the older one: solicitude, or a favoritism that I had thought might pass. Or a reckoning of our lives that comes when the light slants like this, as if we are looking through more than window glass. I pat his leg to comfort, or to bless him, or to brush some divination off. But he is already looking out…. from Joseph Dreams Two Dreams There is only so much any of us can do, and who knows if it is ever enough? POSTSCRIPT : It occurs to me that an interesting mirror image to McLatchey’s book —or at least to the events composing the detonating first cause of the book—is a poem found in Frank Bidart’s first poetry collection, Golden State . I’m thinking of Herbert White , which is the first of Bidart’s poetic attempts to inhabit the psyche of various historical persons—Vaslav Nijinsky, for example, the anorectic Ellen West—and convey through them his own matching torments. Herbert White is, or was, a convicted murderer, child molester, and necrophiliac. Bidart’s poem, with its monstrosity, can be read as a companion piece to McLatchey’s traumatic abhorrence. I have written about Herbert White elsewhere: http://www.bradcrenshaw.com/sin-body-frank-bidarts-human-bondage Brad Crenshaw April, 2014. The original article can be found at: http://bradcrenshaw.me/tag/m-b-mclatchey/

Index Previous Next Balcony House Mesa Verde We huddle beneath a sandstone roof afraid of dream-like depths. All around: a cave metropolis. Two hundred homes piled story upon story, rise to a mezzanine of slick adobe tiles. Impregnable Balcony House. Its builders crossed a narrow ledge, then threaded a small entry that tests our king-size son and draws us to the same high wall the same sheer cliff that others slipped – or leaped from – seven hundred feet, seven centuries ago. They bartered goods, but had a taste for gambling. As here, a charming reconstruction: talus of tiny arrowheads, string of indigenous berries draped, with surprising grace, by an open pit. Exchanges we recognize: ritual gifts for the chance of a woman's forgiveness – and not – as our guide would have it – for the chance of crops. Seasonal beads for an earlier season's omissions. Shimmering talus, like the memory of a kiss. Plucked berries for a city whose heights must have made them light-headed, somehow unable to turn the earth back to life. A stirring pool of cold, clear water is all we hear today. Or perhaps, not water, but the buried tones of chanting priests in kivas underground. How could they not have heard the pools receding? How did they miss the cracking clay below? Perhaps it was our same habit of being: an ever-promising season – men trotting up toe-holds cut in stone to tend crops on a lush green mesa: a vigilance they must have thought unrivalled, while their babies swung from the ends of roof poles below, to a rhythm sung from above – quietly taking in the canyon’s toll on love. . Copyright © 2001 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Tampa Review , Fall 2023.

Index Previous Next Palinode for a Grade Seeker So much dwelling on the cusp. A crescent moon assuring us there will be change and flux; the promise of new quarters and new moons. I looked for these moons in you. But now, I want those lunar phases back, the waning and waxing, not apparently for journey – a new satellite – but intake added to a static average. I regret, I retract, if teachers and poets can, my nod on your behalf. Poor Stesichorus given back his sight – only after the lie. Yet Helen was an imposter. He had it right. Spinner of truths. Heartsick. What he had to divine: The fullness of life, the peace in being blind. . Copyright © 2025 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in N eologism Poetry Journal , Issue #104, January 2026.

Index Previous Next The Wisdom of the Cave If you’re always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden. – Mark Zuckerberg In the cave, our histories are shadows on a wall; our memories rote lessons that flicker and mutate. Fall and spring, then and now, captured and interchanged. Friezes like post cards sculpted to ornament the grotto, endure, resist decay. When the shadows dance, we point, open our mouths, as if for a split second, something shifts, recalibrates. A glimpse of fire and lathe – and shadow makers. Forms beyond hope. Ideas like sirens singing. Cracks in a wall that luminate, hint at another source: rivers, flora and bursts of color, starlings with iridescent wings, shrubs whose roots finger through mud for something to drink. A world too fluid to dangle from rod and string. How could we want its ranges, moon, its chorus marking dawn, its feathered swirl confusing predators, its messenger’s glad song? Why should we mind the tether anchoring us; the flame that fixes seasons, stages night and day, that orients us frontward, ever frontward, and keeps the constellations in their place? . Copyright © 2021 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in SWWIM , January 2022.