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Award Winning Poetry - 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. Pubished in SWWIM , December 2017. Previous Next

Award Winning Poetry - 2011 Winner of the 2011 American Poet Prize 1-800-THE-LOST The weight of the receiver in my hand: the down bird in my palm first lifting you. The counselor’s words: rehearsed, a burlesque bland. The shift in time, the shift to looking through her lens: today you are just one of two hundred lost. My eyes fix on our bright fence. I say your name, but you are no one new – caught in an ancient book that she’ll condense. I want her to discuss you in the present tense. I want the gods to stop pretending love calls the departed home. We called you with our various loves, had hope, hovered over still fields; made wind like the gods do before they come unhinged, let their rage loose on an unresponsive yield. Fields gone deaf and dumb; unshaken, fruitless ground, unmoved by a neighborhood of mothers who left their own to find you – tables, like mine, set. I want the gods to swallow their prayers whole. Choke up my child like the Olympians – a girl, unbruised by her journey down their throats. I want her at my table: fruit, alms that the gods, I see, can give or take – balm for the irritations I caused, or they caused; gifts between us or perhaps among themselves – a girl that they’ll barter away. I’m here. And I’m willing to talk, or trade. Copyright © 2011 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Winner of the American Poet Prize for 2011 Published in The American Poetry Journal , Spring 2012. Previous Next

Index Previous Next Emperical God So the unmovable mover is one both in definition and in number; therefore there is one god and one heaven alone. ― Aristotle Start with the known, the way a child begins. A child begins by calling all men father . Then, later on distinguishes. Father : burrower, planter of unharvestable spring. Mother , first rope and ring tossed to a budding glove – a sustenance, like air or love. Love, that triggering nerve that in the Greek origin myth substitutes touch for a god’s imperative: union of sky and sea, sea and earth. Luminous bodies coupling like first birds. Call it one god, one heaven when learned through its carcass and seed – Palm. Milk. Soul. Wing. Palm, fallow field surrendering its feed. Milk, an ancient man’s mother’s plan. Soul, a rusted bell ringing, striped buoy bobbing, bobbing. Wing, a triumph and sudden cold. . Published in Beauty/Truth: A Journal of Ekphrastic Poetry, Fall/Winter 2006.

Award Winning Poetry - 2004 Featured in Verse Daily Against Elegies What if we let you sing first? What if we look for you with Mallarme’s blank stare: birds round an empty dish, stony limbs? To tell the history of our grief we settle for an empty doorway and a maple leaf or a woman with neckcurls, named Jane, changed by her poetry teacher’s love to a wren wound in light. Shimmering anodyne. Elegies so resolute in wood or wings that we forget the truer measurements of unfinished things: the distance between two disappearing habits; the echo of a promise lodged in a warbler’s throat; the length of a dreamy boy swinging from his favorite limb; the ragged patch below — our ground for spotting him. If grieving is a way of working wood, building thresholds, wrapping birds — then hands will keep us tending things too near. What if this June air should circle, not fall on, our copper chimes with the passiveness of prayer? What if the breeze that would carry a bird’s perfect sorrow were to kneel at the base of an oak, and refuse to rise? Copyright © 2004 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in National Poetry Review , Fall/Winter 2004. Featured in Verse Daily ® with permission, 2004. Previous Next

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.

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 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 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

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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