Index Previous Next NRR's 11th Narrative Poetry Contest - Semi Finalist Ode for an Absent Student So many dramas have played themselves out: a girl who saw through us, our Scout’s-honor truths; a girl scribbling her own proofs on the walls of a cell; a girl singing Fado in a tilted café, her star-rise a perfect – a textbook – chandelle; or, a girl whose shrill call feathers the walls of a well. Well of knowledge, coins, half-lives; mortar and water, a god’s paring knife. For his warrior mettle, Aristotle made Alexander recite – not the songs of Ajax – but the chant of his mother’s midwife. How she crooned at the sight of his scalp. Quick breaths, short beats like a cuckoo’s heart in flight; later, a conqueror’s lullaby; an air in clipped verse for his trek across the east, for his rise and fall, for the sound of his troops’ flat feet. Airs like anthems we hear in our sleep; bright conquests or the dull retreat. This morning marks three weeks. Your peers – all of us – proceed because there is a map to walk, countries to Hellenize – or not. Seas, you and Alexander must have known, cannot be crossed with brute force, missiles and stone. There is the compass that is another rower’s heartache for his home; the crow’s nest call that it will not be long. Things you forgot when you set out alone. . Copyright © 2019 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Naugatuck River Review's 11th Narrative Poetry Contest - Semi Finalist Published in the Winter/Spring 2020 issue of Naugatuck River Review .

Index Previous Next A Kenning No room for a bird that sings through her dangling foot. Thus, always leaving always grieving the loss of middle-earth: things given birth then quickly reified: something rising in a corner swelling and lifting its cover - not bread left to it's own. A swan's wake, more shimmering than her plumage - not a monk's glosses. A field burned for grazing - not poetry. The long goodbye. Always counting on some hollow ilex -- a kenning, a beggar, a toddler with one eye up to his knees in water and lye; expectant, big-hearted, and lost - to take us across. . Copyright © 2004 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Published in The American Poetry Journal , Winter/Spring 2005.

Isms Excerpted from the book Beginner's Mind Salem College Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award This is the work of an original, smart, and talented writer. She has a great storehouse of knowledge and a penetrating understanding of many subjects, including human beings. It is wonderful to read someone who knows a capella, Sanctus, and the Agnus Dei, as well as Carol Channing and Hepburn (and knows the difference). When has a school room been given such vivid enunciation -- the dioramas, shoe boxes, sticker-stars, and clay figures, the comfort of “half-truths” for other children, but not for Miss D’s. With a “sideways glance,” they took it all in, and were forgiving, like Miss D (whose door says welcome, an endless acquittal). It is difficult to see any of us “condemned,” and yet, there are standards. Standards! I can’t go on admiring line after line, when I am only on the first two pages in my commentary (and my language is so stupid and pale in comparison), but that’s what this essay does to me; it says look, see, remember. Word for word, sentence by sentence, I am enthralled. Thank God for Miss D, and for being reminded that at least one or two of my own teachers were, if not her equals, close sisters. While the writer appears like a new comet on my horizon, I am wild to know what this writer will do next. Meanwhile, she will be “graded,” though A+ hardly describes my admiration. -- Emily Herring Wilson, Judge 2007 Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award Salem College Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award

Award Winning Poetry - 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. Previous Next

Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears. - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations Award Winning Poetry - 2020 Pushcart Prize Nominee 2020 Best of the Net Nominee 2021 Smiling at the Executioner Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears. - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations As if the open barrel were a lotus; its roots anchored in mud. How undeterred by murky water, it submerges and reblooms: petals like crystal glazed and without residue. As if you never felt something move: no welcome and prescient ache, no sudden flexing, no cycle taking shape. No memory. No calendar. No yield – because you are the bullet’s shield. As if you have nothing to lose. As if all that you have learned to love: the beating heart; the mythic glove of a palm blooming in the womb; the scent that follows touch – is suddenly dust. Just the open-grinned, white-toothed stare down this time; the stayed and steady practice on your knees of mastering someone else’s pleas. Copyright © 2020 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Sky Island Journal , Summer 2020 Pushcart Prize Nominee 2020 Best of the Net Nominee 2021 Editor's comment: ...the epitome of what we consider powerful poetry to be. Vivid, palpable imagery saturates the perfect pacing of this svelte, knife-like piece. Full Review Previous Next

Index Previous Next Grading on a Curve Our cat rolls onto its back in freshly cut grass. A bluejay screeches, swoops down, flaps and flaps at his swatting paws. Above them, nestlings squawk. On the ground, an egg fallen or tossed—unhatched—from the nest inert, and yet, no signs of cracks. Hopeful my hand will not ruffle the jay, I lift the egg to its nest—new life or prey. . Copyright © 2025 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Saw Palm: Florida Literature and Art , Spring 2026, Issue 20.

Selected Poems of Maria Teresa Horta Translated by: M.B. McLatchey and Edite Cunhã Published in Springhouse , Fall 2019 Prev 4 Next POEM This is my epic wrought in poetry wounds and words without gods without battles without heroes or tears without bronze armaments Poem to poem to poem passion after radiance after grace in its truest form POEMA Esta é a minha epopeia feita de poesia perdimentos e palavras sem deuses sem batalhas sem heróis nem lágrimas sem o bronze das armas Poema a poema a poema paixão após fulgor após beleza na sua dimensão mais ávida 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

Florida State Poets Association FROM THE PRESIDENT’S DESK by Al Rocheleau Excerpted from Of Poets & Poetry , Nov/Dec 2020 issue. What a presentation by M.B. McLatchey! Last week I went to M.B.’s superb website at www.mbmclatchey.com to offer some commentary. I thought I’d share that with you: M.B. McLatchey presents herself without fanfare, but certain of what she knows, where she has come from, and where she’s going. As keynote speaker at the Florida State Poets Association’s 2019 Fall Convention, M.B. shared, for the first time in public, her thoughts and feelings for Nobel Laureate Seamus Heaney, her mentor and dear friend of her graduate days at Harvard. Mirroring the self-effacement and common sense that emanated from the icon with whom she not only studied in class and at his home, but also shared Guinness and Porter’s Whiskey at a Harvard Square pub, the simple, elegant wisdom of Heaney’s art and his humanity rung through her with our assembly of poets. Telling aspects of his and their story, along with the kind of seminal advice from a master that working poets yearn for, she managed to reach every heart and mind in the room. A note: when reading M.B.’s own award-winning poetry, I find echoes of Heaney, his blood and his logic, combined with, for me, a kind of simply etched elegance that I once found in the pediments and friezes of Phidias in the British Museum. Even in her work that is contemporary, I get that feel, that clarity. There is timelessness to the work, as there is in that of Heaney, who can as easily reflect the paths of Beowulf as he can the ways of a child in County Derry, or the walks of a beautiful graduate student on the cobbles of Cambridge. M.B. McLatchey knows, and she connected us to Seamus Heaney, and to herself, and for both experiences, we are grateful. Just as you have come to know the poetry of Lee, Peter, and Lola, it’s time set your sights on Carol and M.B. ~ Al Rocheleau, President, Florida State Poets Association Note : M.B.'s keynote speech at the 2020 FSPA annual conference has been adapted into an Atlantic Center for the Arts video which celebrates M.B.'s time with Seamus.

Sestina for an ill boy Award Winning Poetry - 2016 Robert Frost Award Sugaring Sestina for an ill boy A loyal maple lingers by your bed: nature fiercely altered. Its sugar finds your pulse, then trickles in with a rhythm partly boy, partly tree. For comity we call it Mr. Pipes: a way of making peace with hard adjustments. It takes long freezing nights and thawing days to make the sap come like this -- a big run. Drip after drip, each steadier than the last, run through clear lines. I see, now, nothing’s altered that hadn’t already gone awry. Your limbs, thawing in the afternoon sun. The only rhythm -- rations of sap met evenly, at last, with insulin. The hard trek back from a seizure’s arctic grip: whistling pipes, banks of white cotton; a nurse (too cheerful) pipes up: how brave you are, and you’ll be up and run- ning in no time. A promise? Or a wish for her hard- luck kids? One spring, we got behind; buckets overflowed, altered the ground below to a sticky mat that sounded the rhythm of hard luck in thick, slow plops. The whole world thawing like centuries of ice cracking beneath us, thawing the gummy linings of blackened buckets and pipes – dripping with a precision suggestive of a subterranean rhythm. I read, that spring, that scientists can tell if the sap has run up from the roots or down the bark – but, not why its taste is altered year to year. Always the questions we care about that are hard. And “coming to” always the same: that hard expression sweeps over you. Your eyes, half-frozen pools still thawing: late winter, but late in feeling the seasons altered. Your way of banning ceremony, or welcome-horns, or pipes. Your way of taking back the small reserves that run from you each time you lose this fight. Your fitful rhythm yielding to this old-world, pacing rhythm. And knowing where to greet you, here or there, always so hard to gauge. Which is the place of the senses? Where we out-run our fears? You take us there, each thawing day, it seems. Limbs or pipes? We give up these distinctions. Nothing is altered that wasn’t already granted. Nothing is altered that makes us see things hard to see. Some call it god, others just tendrils thawing. Copyright © 2014 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Naugatuck River Review , Winter/Spring/ 2016. Reprinted with permission from Robert Frost Foundation . Semi-Finalist, Naugatuck River Review's 7th Annual Narrative Poetry Contest Previous Next

Award Winning Poetry - 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. Published in River Styx 87, Spring 2012. Previous Next

Published Poems (sorted): Click on column to sort. * publication forthcoming