Search Results

Index Previous Next We leave the beaches for the tourists, mostly and the history of tourism, a history of our shadow selves: wing-prints of fallen angels in shimmering sand, flapping, flapping – the soul’s earth mapping or a mating dance. Mouths, an upturned string of shells opening to a vast and mythical sky. These are the things they leave behind. A paddleball court etched in the muddy flats where a ruddy turnstone makes his nest’s scrapes, space for a female’s eggs; and seagulls dive for nacho chips and funnel cake; and the sanderling’s shrill song is the echo of a mother’s plea to her children out too deep. These are the calls we hear in our sleep. Or, the black-bellied plover’s plaintive call as he circles the shore for a sandworm or a crab – or for something, something to eat – and absently darts toward a sand castle made from plastic-cup molds and a child’s empty pail, pink or lime green or gold. And a wave with a biblical thrust catches them off guard: a torrent of coconut oil and ocean spray, a sandal, a drugstore romance – then the bright, shallow meadows and plank. Kitsch in a tide’s eternal crawl and roll and spray. Song and refrain. . Copyright © 2018 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Saw Palm: Florida L iterature and Art , Issue 13. Forthcoming in the anthology Pushpins of Paradise, University Press of Florida.

Index Previous Next 2006 Muriel Craft Bailey Award - Finalist Odalisque Early light, the chill of souls leaving. You draw up the sheet to cover us; the soft of musk, the body's heat from an air pocket, nudged and wayward. The scent of fading bleach. I give you the curl of my back, a nonevent. Yet, all of it art. Ingres and Ingres' Odalisque who drapes a velvet curtain's jeweled sash across her calf; whose hips turn in a wash of Turkish hues. A French settee or this bed: staging we need to fuel our natural lives. To feel the body lift to the extension of a kiss. The temporal shift in calling souls home -- stomach, thighs -- like this. A quickening in canvas or stone: my open mouth and your inarticulate moan. . Copyright © 2006 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award Finalist. Published in The Comstock Review , Fall/Winter 2006.

Index Previous Next First Place - Lazuli Literary Group 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. Other poems in collection: "Ethos, Logos, Pathos" 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

Index Previous Next The Missouri Review - Poem of the Week Full Disclosure World History. What the course title means: Whisperings in Xylography. Gambles and losses—like yearnings in braille— You will be asked to finger, sound out, unveil. No summit, no Zenith, no Alignment of planets guaranteed. Nothing in stone. You are Buying a home someone died in: Curie, Copernicus, El Cid. Chronicles disinterred: The wisdom of the renegade, the rebel kid. Days passed in a Provost’s calendar will be proof you endured. Endurance as in epic songs. Longings, self-makings, upendings. Finishings like beginnings, underdog odds. The heretic, the face of God. . Copyright © 2024 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in The Missouri Review , January 2025. Featured as Poem of the Week , Januarey 13, 2025.

Index Previous Next Pop Quiz Some bow their heads and wait for their pens to move. A ground cloud, like a fog, or an unexpected tide, pulls them away. Through the haze, the quiet one half-raises her hand, asks if – after today – there will be other chances . Today’s exam, I want to tell her, is not today’s exam. It is Everyman ’s call, nothing in stone; a practice run at squaring accounts; at facing what we did not plan; at being alone; a reference to the clock on our wall, whose hands advance with us or without us. I wait for them in the dim, rapt hush. A curtain rises. Scenes – like a showreel – flicker and flash: a hand untangling from a lover’s grasp; a slap for a ranting three-year old; a prayer clasp. As if to find answers, some raise their heads, gaze at a life scene outside: A yellow-breasted blackbird on a branch, savoring a grub in its beak. Other chances . Such a sweet ring. Winter’s buried bulbs; bloom in the next growing season. . Copyright © 2023 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Sky Island Journal , Issue #27, Winter 2024. From the editors: [This poem] is vulnerable, tense, powerful, and so incredibly accurate; it transports and challenges us in ways that poems seldom do. This piece—like so many of our favorite M.B. pieces—is a meditation on the presence of absence and the absence of presence, and it bears fruit in such personal, beautiful, and unexpected ways. Like all great art, “Pop Quiz” sticks its landing and is a gift that keeps on giving; we discover more about it, and ourselves, with every reading.

Index Previous Next House on Fire Too late to talk of causes. A faulty switch? A pile of letters left in an attic’s heat? Desire unveiled too late to relinquish its sensual trail? All these, and love’s capacity to make a fearful pit, then send a Beatrice to us in Limbo. Protectors of the smiths, patrons of handicrafts; molders of metal dreams. You conceived me: one of your handmaidens forged out of bronze and yellow flames. Beautiful corridor of fire transmuting ordinary days into shimmering reliefs. I was the heat, the blast of stars rooting itself in love’s soft metal. I was the maker of alloys naturally weak. Gifts that I hammered and hammered. I never ran from technique. . Copyright © 2008 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in T he N ew Fo rmalist , Volume VIII, Number I.

Selected Poems of Maria Teresa Horta Translated by: M.B. McLatchey and Edite Cunhã Published in Metamorphoses, 2019 Prev 9 Next DELIRIUMS At first one hears the wings with their veiled whispers then the feathers obscured by pearls and satins Murmurs of silk mutineers in a whirring of desire verses, delights sonnets and deliriums of lilies shattered DELÍRIOS Primeiro escutam-se as asas no seu rumor velado depois as plumas turvas de pérolas e cetins Gemidos de seda amotinados num zunido de desejo estrofes, deleite sonetos e delírios de lírios estilhaçados Copyright © 2019 M. B. McLatchey & Edite Cunha, with permission. All rights reserved. Published in Metamorphoses , Fall 2019. Copyright © 2017 Maria Teresa Horta, from her collection Poesis . Dom Quixote Publisher, Lisbon. Back to List

Index Previous Next Parousia A presence and this morning's shower lingering like jewels between my thighs. As if to flaunt my unpreparedness – towel for a turban; my face, a pale and open sky – I greet them at my door. Picture the scene , they ask, a harlot sitting on the back of a fearsome beast . A terrible waking-dream of a naked whore of false beliefs straddling the back of a wild boar: metaphors for the Parousia. Yet, standing on my porch, I wonder if they are attached, newlyweds perhaps, who fell in love over scripture or perhaps they present themselves like this: a final act to test my interest in the text, or in the man. Sun-bleached hair, finger-combed, his face unexpectedly tanned, the curl of his lip. I tell them to come back – a slip, or another faith talking? I say this squarely looking at him. As for ancient debts, healing, forgiving: I am going – have already gone – toward the living. . Copyright © 2015 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Tar River Poetry , Spring 2016.

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.

Selected Poems of Maria Teresa Horta Translated by: M.B. McLatchey and Edite Cunhã Published in Metamorphoses , 2019 Prev 8 Next FROM MUTINY TO MUTINY From mutiny to mutiny I give myself up to poetry overcoming the hardships of insidious darkness the vertigo of longing in the manacles of passion the loss to my pulse in that singular gift of shock and tumult DE MOTIM EM MOTIM De motim em motim entrego-me à poesia a vencer a escuridade as agruras da insídia a vertigem da saudade na paixão de algemar o perdimento ao meu pulso nessa dádiva singular de sobressalto e tumulto Copyright © 2019 M. B. McLatchey & Edite Cunha, with permission. All rights reserved. Published in Metamorphoses , Fall 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 Metamorphoses, 2019 Prev 10 Next FURTIVE STEPS I feel its traces furtive in the hollow of my hand gaining sudden strangeness luminosities, ravings of my lost senses arresting my heart descending to the bottom by the arm’s attrition until it reaches the slim wrist It is poetry arriving taking form and voice saying what I do not say TRAÇOS FURTIVOS Sinto-lhe os traços furtivos no côncavo da minha mão ganhando estranhezas súbitas agudezas, desvarios dos meus sentidos perdidos a prender-me o coração a descer até ao fundo pela rasura do braço até chegar ao desvão na delgadeza do pulso É a poesia que chega tomando forma e ruído a falar o que eu não digo Copyright © 2019 M. B. McLatchey & Edite Cunha, with permission. All rights reserved. Published in Metamorphoses , Fall 2019. Copyright © 2017 Maria Teresa Horta, from her collection Poesis . Dom Quixote Publisher, Lisbon. Back to List

Index Previous Next Where Winter Spends the Summer On a beach towel print of a bosomy mermaid that reads I ♥ Miami. In an everglade’s wild plan marked with grilles and canopies. Between concrete, leaning towers and a tide meant for healing. In a daze, dreaming, gazing at Odysseus’ wine-dark sea. In the unclothed body’s prescient haze. On the front of a postcard – a postcard painter’s dream – in dabs of yellow and green, intended, as postcard painters will, to make a symphony of bathers between brush marks; map out, in palm-tree fences, a new world – an answer to the sirens call, when all the bathers want is no world at all. . Copyright © 2019 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in SWWIM , September 19, 2019.