Search Results

Index Previous Next 2017 Narrative Poetry Contest - Semi-Finalist Bad Apology As if in an endless rehearsal, I packed and unpacked. The challenge, you said, was to take no more than I’d need. Tenderly, you followed the track of a storm moving in from the east. In bed, a wrinkled map across our laps; you circled a town and highlighted a road. A yellow, satiny, path. When we slept, you tried the path, left markers you had kept for days like these. And the markers were keys. Clues in a moonscape of dust-covered things – a pair of gloves with suede tips; a scarf; a ring. Ruins like proof of a marriage, a story’s skeletal sheen, small deaths, small victories. Maestro, my mourning dove, another chance? Put me back in that place with its signals and gestures and promise of more mistakes. And I’ll show you the hurtful lessons lovers make. . Copyright © 2017 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. 2017 Narrative Poetry Contest - Semi Finalist Pubished in SWWIM , December 2017. Also featured in SWWIM March 2020 #TBT

We Are Coming Soon Sign up to be the first to know when we go live. Notify Me Thanks for submitting!

Index Previous Next Arcadia Hear the songs you crave. You shall have your songs, she another kind of reward. ― Virgil, Eclogue VI The city is sleeping in. Their breaths rise and part. Here at my desk and on a kind of wing, I slip into a dream that you seem to deliver: hips lifting and rocking, heels digging in. O, what kind of play is this? Is it what is real and what is not? What clarity it brings about the mind's cool refusal to over-script the heart's sense of time; about the body's urge to live its life. Pulled from one place, how naturally it grafts itself onto another; how, even in the driest season, we look for yield: shocking pink blossoms from clay earth or lilies from the dry cross-weave in a chair of forgetfulness. Or, about love's need to perform what it knows -- as in Rodin's artful unfinishedness: a passionate kiss, a woman's hips turning on a mass of roughhewn marble to which lovers are always attached. . Copyright © 2007 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Cider Press Review , Vol. 9, Spring 2008.

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

Selected Poems of Maria Teresa Horta Translated by: M.B. McLatchey and Edite Cunhã Published in Ezra , Spring 2019 Prev 1 Next LITTLE BY LITTLE I begin by writing at first one word only immaterial and deadly right away another then another, then another little by little a poem drinking up ravenously and madly the very poison to the flower of my mouth A POUCO E POUCO Começo por escrever primeiro uma palavra apenas mínima e fatal logo depois outra após outra, após outra a pouco e pouco poema indo beber voraz e louca o próprio veneno à flor da minha boca Copyright © 2019 M. B. McLatchey & Edite Cunha, with permission. All rights reserved. Published in Ezra , Spring 2019. Copyright © 2017 Maria Teresa Horta, from her collection Poesis . Dom Quixote Publisher, Lisbon. Back to List

Selected Poems of Maria Teresa Horta Translated by: M.B. McLatchey and Edite Cunhã Published in Springhouse , Fall 2019 Prev 5 Next FROM THE BEGINNING At first I wrote in brief mutterings and the halting service of a wing unaccustomed to the flight of words Then I found my footing in the very depths of myself in the courage of the verses where one reaps raptures from the body of the writing Next I began to haunt verbs and to reinvent metaphors the syntax of passion the icons of time the doubts, the dilemmas In writing poems AB INITIO Primeiro escrevi com breves murmurações e lentos cuidados de asa desabituada do voo das palavras Depois ganhei pé na fundura de mim mesma na ousadia dos versos onde se colhem os êxtases no corpo da escrita Em seguida comecei a assombrar os verbos e a reinventar metáforas a sintaxe de fogo os ícones do tempo as dúvidas, os dilemas Escrevendo poemas Copyright © 2019 M. B. McLatchey & Edite Cunha, with permission. All rights reserved. Published in Springhouse , Fall 2019. Copyright © 2017 Maria Teresa Horta, from her collection Poesis . Dom Quixote Publisher, Lisbon. Back to List

People use the word 'closure.' It's not about closure, it's more about justice. ― John Walsh, father to Adam Walsh. Award Winning Poetry - 2008 Muriel Craft Bailey Award The Rescue People use the word 'closure.' It's not about closure, it's more about justice. ― John Walsh, father to Adam Walsh. Today in the news: Miraculous Rescue An uncle drags a shark to shore to save his near-dead nephew. A bull of a shark, the arm that it tore from the boy when he waved for help fueled the beast's palate; its tail in the uncle's grip, a blur of blood claret and kelp; the husks from his palms, a grim and edible kale. I want a shark that I can wrestle and make it spit you out. To make it yearn for its strength, to thrash about as I nestle its nose in my grip. I want to turn you loose from a palpable place: a well, a shed, a jaw. I want the monster to face me and beg for the law. Copyright © 2007 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award Special Merit. Published in The Comstock Review , January 2008. Previous Next

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

We Are Coming Soon Sign up to be the first to know when we go live. Notify Me Thanks for submitting!

Index Previous Next Winner of the 2019 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.