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Index Previous Next Calendar Plans For Geoffrey In the living room, a standoff – a deadlock between right and wrong side of the law. A boy bellies forward, holster and chaps, motions invisible troops; his silver gun drawn, waving in the morning sun as if to cut a map through ranges unknown: cushions from a worn sofa, sheer cliffs that fold, collapse, take their toll; his brother content in a sheriff’s badge removable for a change of roles. How our memories tell us what we cannot know. How in retrospect, days and months, our calendar plans were a grace. How stars on straw costume cowboy hats return like figures of forgotten clashes, traces of a shimmering now: a new uniform, new boots, new hat, new vows; occasion for the saints to be called by name. St. Michael, patron of the airborne, stay with my boy tonight, tomorrow, all the days. Know the two disparate tones beneath a skein of geese – their flight so fixed, resolved – when a mother prays, and when a mother calls. . Copyright © 2022 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Relief , Spring 2022.

Published Poems Sort by Title Year Title Journal Award 2026 Palinode Neologism Poetry Journal 2025 Illuminator Porcupine Literary 2025 Grading on a Curve Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Art 2025 Last Lecture Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Art 2025 Plan B Azure Lazuli Literary Group - First Place 2025 Academic Calendar The Soliloquist Journal 2025 Is there a Final Exam? Azure Lazuli Literary Group - First Place 2025 Dream Song Teach. Write. 2025 Trojan Horse The Common 2025 Ethos, Logos, Pathos Azure Lazuli Literary Group - First Place 2025 Full Disclosure The Missouri Review Poem of the Week 2024 For a Dying Child International Human Rights Art Movement Rhonda Gail Williford Poetry Prize - 2nd Place 2024 Pop Quiz Sky Island Journal 2024 Invocation Before a Day of Teaching Crab Orchard Review 2023 Rate My Professor: A Rebuttal Sky Island Journal 2023 Balcony House Tampa Review 2023 Morning in Three Movements The Banyan Review 2023 A Drink of Water The Banyan Review 2023 Synonym for Marriage The Banyan Review 2022 The Wisdom of the Cave SWWIM 2022 Inventory Southern Poetry Review 2022 The Shadow Maker Sequestrum 2022 War in Eurasia Sequestrum 2022 Calendar Plans Relief 2021 Ctrl+Z Florida Review 2021 On Forgetting Ash Wednesday Iris Literary Journal 2021 Before the Common Era Quadrant 2021 Aftercare Raintown Review 2021 Invocation Cider Press Review 2021 The End of Knowing The Criterion 2021 Another Inevitable Romance at Olduvai Gorge Avatar Review 2021 Ode for My Department Chair Who Left a Face Shield on My Desk NCTE English Journal 2020 Bingo Night for Missing and Exploited Children Beacon Press Blue Room Collective - "Grabbed Anthology" 2020 Prometheus's Regret Halcyone, Black Mountain Press 2020 Smiling at the Executioner Sky Island Journal Pushcart Prize Nominee 2020; Best of the Net Nominee 2021 2020 Ode for an Absent Student Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Contest - Semi Finalist 2020 Afterlives Pensive: A Global Journal... Featured in Verse Daily - 2024 2020 Cues National Poetry Review 2020 Ode to the Heart Of Poets & Poetry, FSPA 2019 We leave the beaches for the tourists, mostly Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Art 2019 Ode for Amy Smithsonian Arts&Sciences 2019 Ode for an Ode on a Grecian Urn Folio 2019 Folio Editor's Prize - Winner 2019 Where Winter Spends the Summer SWWIM 2018 Anthem Harpur Palate 2018 On Folding a Fitted Sheet Harpur Palate 2018 Learning the Scriptures Naugatuck River Review 2018 Trigger Warning Harpur Palate 2017 Bad Apology SWWIM Narrative Poetry Contest Semi Finalist; also featured in March 2020 #Tbt 2016 Ocracoke Briar Cliff Review 2016 Urban Helicon Cold Mountain Review 2016 Parousia Tar River Poetry 2016 Sugaring Naugatuck River Review Robert Frost Award - Finalist 2015 The Breakfast Piece Drunken Boat 2015 Emperical God Ruminate Magazine 2014 The Bath Naugatuck River Review Narrative Poetry Contest - Semi Finalist 2014 Portable Labyrinth Aurorean 2013 Amber Alert new south: Georgia St. Univ. Journal New South Writing Contest - Winner 2012 The Arrangement Beauty/Truth: Ekphrastic Poetry Robert Frost Award - First Runner Up 2012 At the Grieving Parents Meeting River Styx Rita Dove Poetry Award - Semi Finalist 2012 1-800-THE-LOST American Poetry Journal 2011 American Poet Prize - Winner 2012 Catharsis Smartish Pace Erskine J. Poetry Prize - Finalist 2008 Arcadia Cider Press Review 2008 House on Fire New Formalist 2008 Museum Comstock Review Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award - Special Merit 2008 The Rescue Comstock Review Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award - Special Merit 2008 Melville's Reader Spoon River Poetry Review 2008 The Retrieval Comstock Review Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award - Special Merit 2008 Oaths, Curses, Blessings Georgetown Review 2008 Snow Globe Cider Press Review 2008 The Lame God Spoon River Poetry Review 2007 The Rape of Chryssipus Spoon River Poetry Review Spoon River Editors' Prize - Winner 2006 Odalisque Comstock Review Muriel Craft Bailey Award - Finalist 2006 Girl at Piano Beauty/Truth: Ekphrastic Poetry 2006 Aubade DMQ Review 2006 Washday Ekphrasis 2006 Sanriku Willow Springs Vachel Lindsay Poetry Award - Winner 2005 A Kenning American Poetry Journal 2005 On Recognizing Saints National Poetry Review Annie Finch Prize - Winner 2005 Leaving the Mainland American Poetry Journal 2005 A Glass of Absinthe Anthology of New England Writers 2004 Against Elegies National Poetry Review Featured in Verse Daily 2003 Days Inn Shenandoah 2003 Teaching the Tragedies Southern Poetry Review 1985 The Peculiar Truth Grain 1978 Beginner's Mind Williams College Archives From the book "Advantages of Believing" 1975 On Rewinding Emerson College Review Emerson Original Poetry Award - Winner

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 Ode to the Heart In Memory of Fallen Eagle, Zachary Capra, ERAU 2018 * Heart, do what you do at times like this when all that Daedalus had warned comes true and Icarus goes tumbling to the sea. Plump up your strong defenses against parallels with myths and let a waxed wing disappear, and let his angels sing. * Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University (ERAU) trains hundreds of student pilots each year. A “Fallen Eagle” refers to one who tragically dies in an aircraft accident. . Copyright © 2018 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Of Poets & Poetry , 2020, a publication of The Florida State Poets Association.

Index Previous Next On Folding a Fitted Sheet One eye looks within, the other eye looks without. ― Henri Cartier-Bresson The art, it seems, is in the ease of mirroring what is measured: at once attending to, surrendering to a set of numbers, a fixed but – when you release too tight a grip – supple and scented plane. Tuck the puckered edges back. Give it a thwack. Let it balloon – a goddess-smelted bloom of what remains after ablution: smoke-colored shadows, the stir of a post-coital myrrh. Hold as one holds a picture you would hang or, as in Prokofiev’s ballet: arms bent and raised, palms open-faced. Fold it until the edges meet – repeat, repeat. Walk it upstairs with the reverence you’d have for carrying your country’s flag. . Copyright © 2018 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Harpur Palate of Binghamton University, Fall 2018, Vol. 18.1.

Award Winning Poetry - 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. Previous Next

Index Previous Next 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.

Index Previous Next Ode for My Department Chair Who Left a Face Shield on My Desk For Sally Because all of this is seeing through complex prisms; seeds reconciling to stalks that lean grey-blue instead of the expected, upright green. Because the soil we trusted, turned, and patted on our knees became unresponsive, a sick child’s pale serene. Because birds and song became a dull-working machine. Because this exchange called teaching is more than granting access, pointing to open gates. Because Sophocles portrayed us as we ought to be; but Euripides portrayed us as we are: surprisingly unstayed and dying a happy death in front of them. Breath after breath. Because care in a time like this is not a stockpiling of perfect arguments, pleas and refrains as if part of a lesson plan – or worse, the cliché – something preordained . Because master and apprentice should look the same. Smithies hammering, melding, iron and steel. Because metals, once coupled with the right vistas and bent into shapes – a cruciform, time’s infinite wheel – were in a previous plague, thought to heal. . Copyright © 2020 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in NCTE's 2021 Fall issue of English Journal , National Council of Teachers of English

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Award Winning Poetry - 2025 Winner of the Lazuli Literary Group 2024 Writing Contest - 2 of 3 - Is there a Final Exam? This was always the plan. The day and hour, of course, is out of our hands: Dickinson’s Carriage Man; Shelley’s desert sand. Imagine an untethering, a swansong reckoning. No proofs in stone. Almost certainly, you will be alone. The location, like an envelope you have been carrying, will be unsealed – a wakefulness, or a presence revealed: a man who taught you to field ground balls in the yard; devotions you fought and now whose storied part you want again. Or perhaps in a chance encounter with a schoolyard friend, a companion you abandoned for the faster track, the slap on the back. Our lives a history of what-ifs, lighthouses somehow missed. The final exam will not be timed. It will be scored blind. The final exam will leave you among the living, taking stock. Finishings all around; ashes still simmering – and a threshold to cross. Your gift if you use it, time : Gilgamesh, tunnelling trails to a city wall; Penelope’s loom and an ever- unravelling shawl. As for them, so you: there will be threshold guardians – a forest monster, suitors – reveals of the anima. Look these guardians in the eye. They are barriers to test your stamina. . 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 - First Place. Other poems in collection: "Ethos, Pathos, Logos" and "Plan B". 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 Previous Next

Index Previous Next 2012 Robert Frost Award - First Runner Up The Arrangement I. Because we were getting old enough our instructor took us to look at (not to touch) some pictures grown men drew. We tripped like new recruits through orderly rooms. Some were sternly directed to carry their shoes as we made our hushed advance. In the dim hall we could hear a classmate whimpering as she would whenever she felt too far from home. Her tears a kind of prelude to the work itself: Flowers in a Vase - more paint than flowers whose stems arched away, whose poppies bleated and sprayed yellow tears on our starched uniforms, on the perfect walls. All the way home, the yellow hung on our clothes. The bus took us sluggishly along, and we felt the road under its beefy wheels change to a luminous river of paint and the trees gave up their souls in Autumn's clay glow. II. I knew what it meant but not really. So I took the stairs two by two for you, like any other day. In my pocket, paintings on postcards, a stick of gum. In the kitchen below, Dad had grown small beside the cakes the ladies brought. He would not eat, he would not speak to relatives in the hall, and the relatives awkwardly leaning on end-tables like faded photos of themselves. Mother was proud to find me at my prayers and honoring the adults who were clearly "spent". When she pressed her head to mine, I felt her hair like fingers on my brow: a gesture she'd learned from you, mother to mother, and was teaching me now. And, this was "hard" and "each of us will have his own lament." It took all I had to steady my temple to hers - to keep my sorrow apart - as we planned the next few hours: where the aunts would sleep and who would order the flowers. . Copyright © 2006 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. 2012 Robert Frost Award - First Runner Up, Robert Frost Foundation . Judge's Review