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Selected Poems of Maria Teresa Horta Translated by: M.B. McLatchey and Edite Cunhã Published in SWWIM , 2020 Prev 17 Next VERSES They’re the verses the twilight they’re the days they’re the seas the saliva the open hand in the back-light at noon they’re the abyssal gestures, the uncertain pain They’re the verbs the secrets the alchemy they’re the sweet lips and their excess the impulses of the gesture where rose up the contour of the body most perverse They’re the voices singular the melodies they’re the rigors of the forms most diverse inventing themselves simply because they prevented an anxious possession so uncertain They’re the syllables intact the utopias the clumsy the past the nightmare dreamt during the dawn the sweat drenching my hair They’re the doubts, possibly the night in the labor of unfettered writing everything that is tactile and internal entwines itself in the thread of dawn Sometimes an even more thirsty gesture surges and then the flight, the stroke of a knife to the voracious side of reflection when love has nothing more to say VERSOS São os versos os crepúsculos são os dias são os mares a saliva a mão aberta na luz de bruços ao meio-dia são os gestos abissais, a dor incerta São os verbos os segredos a alquimia são os doces lábios e o seu excesso os impulsos do gesto onde se erguia o contorno do corpo mais perverso São as vozes singulares as melodias são os rigores das formas mais diversas a inventarem-se só porque impediam uma ansiosa posse tão incerta São as sílabas intactas as utopias o torpe o passado o pesadelo sonhado durante a alvorada o suor alagando o meu cabelo São as dúvidas, possivelmente a noite no labor da escrita desatada tudo aquilo que é táctil e por dentro se enovela no fio da madrugada Por vezes surge ainda um gesto mais sedento e em seguida o voo, o golpe de uma faca no lado voraz do pensamento quando o amor não quer dizer mais nada Copyright © 2019 M. B. McLatchey & Edite Cunha, with permission. All rights reserved. Published in SWWIM (Supporting Women Writers in Miami), Septmber 2020. Copyright © 2017 Maria Teresa Horta, from her collection Poesis . Dom Quixote Publisher, Lisbon. Back to List

Index Previous Next 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

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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.

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 Another Inevitable Romance at Olduvai Gorge People are always talking about you here. They picture you with lava under your nails and send maps saying, THIS WAY OUT . How do you tell them about the beautiful evening soups you’re making and about this science between you and the soups? There’s pleasure enough in a banquet, they say, Who wants any more? At the gorge you can’t help wanting more. You want more than ever to bury a skull in your lap and speak to it sweetly: Here is an evening for gazing, old man. Who was it that hammered your skull? You give soup to the skull and watch it come around. Nowhere but at the gorge were there two, you and the skull you love, so pure and full of soup. Still, they picture you with mud on your face. They wonder if you could describe the skull in an objective manner. There is no sense adding up the years since, at the gorge you have counted only the serenest hours. . Copyright © 1978 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Accepted for publication in Science , 1985. Appeared in Advantages of Believing, Finishing Line Press, 2015. Published in Avatar Review , summer 2021.

Index Previous Next Morning in Three Movements I I lie in my own pasty pool like a lamb in a druid’s bed. Layer by layer, thread after thread, I shed and shed. O, press me between your palms again! Deliverer, be delivered. Without your need, without a guise to beautify, what am I? II. I know her layers far better than she. Scales that I peel in a rush of steam. My tongue, her arch, her bending knee. The soft between her legs where I redeem myself, the way the Great Throwdini did, who earned his life, her love, by sparing them. Without her bristling flesh, oh what am I? III. In this morning light, I am almost transparent, a sheet of shimmering snow that holds another person’s fears – once in this tight embrace, twice in this lingering scent, this care, this newfound air. Answers to Riddles in Reverse: I: paos fo rab II : rozar III. eussit . Copyright © 2023 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in The Banyan Review , Fall 2023.

For a foster child Award Winning Poetry - 2014 Narrative Poetry Contest - Semi-Finalist The Bath For a foster child The slightest wrong move could mean tidal waves. Certain disaster to a boy with everything resting on delicate tissue – a bruised knee to which you command a corps of plastic ships – an austere but (you promise) heavenly beach where men may lie down in soft sand, a tiny fold in your thigh; write letters and find oranges to eat; plan the next battle. Hard that you know so much about these distances from home. A trumpet blast! You steam your mission out. Predictably bad weather and still another perilous gorge of falls and fleshy islands. The search resumes for citrus or, at least, friendly harbor. I wish you both -- and not another tour of calculations tossed or unchartered, and not this shadowy map on water. Copyright © 2014 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Naugatuck River Review's 6th Annual Narrative Poetry Contest Semi-Finalist. Published in Naugatuck River Review , November 2014. Previous Next

Index Previous Next Winner of the 2013 New South Writing Contest Amber Alert A white Ford, black gate, Georgia plate, squeezes into our lane. In the back, a Whitetail – tagged and slashed from her chest to hind legs – looks back at us. Her eyes a dark glass. Opening day for deer hunting. Cars pass and pass. In a field, lightning bugs darted and flashed in your hand. Half-girl, half-doe, you started and stopped, palms cupped. Someone carried you off and we cheered for the boy in the clay, his heel on home plate. It was a beautiful steal. Did he thank the deer for her head when he knelt above her? When he opened her middle to empty inedible parts? When, for a clean job, he severed her windpipe and – hunter’s nectar – he saved her heart? . Copyright © 2013 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Winner of the 2013 New South Writing Contest. Published in new south : Georgia State University's Journal of Art & Literature , Summer 2013. Judge's Review

Award Winning Poetry - 2025 Winner of the Lazuli Literary Group 2024 Writing Contest - 1 of 3 - Plan B And so, we are not to be concerned about living – but about living well. - Socrates, Dialogue with Crito I watch them settle in. David’s Death of Socrates on the projection screen. Clashes of colors like warring teams: a white toga hanging from a teacher’s shoulder; the blood-red robe of a servant, who holds out the deadly drink. An ancient story, someone else’s fight. And yet, the old man who sits upright to take the servant’s chalice. The absence of malice. Gestures like haunting glyphs. We open ourselves to what ifs. What if someone you love, someone who taught you right from wrong; drew you a map of valleys not yet drawn; rowed with you on a winding river: the labyrinth of your young years. A chance to visualize: a wrestling coach; a theater teacher tirelessly recapturing missed lines. What if this person you love comes under fire. A mob seeds hatred, until – like trees that burn too easily – they are cheering for his demise. Why. Because he is winning in an art his accusers used to prize: logic as leak-proof as a Grecian vase. Because he is gaining fans. Because they can. Suppose, like an extended hand, the mob gives your mentor a choice: Disavow all you ever taught. Apologize – or hemlock. They grasp for the extended hand. Why not sign a pity release? Spare your children and wife. Surrender – just for the moment – what defines your life. The boat for escaping is waiting in the bay. The judges want their take. What will history say if friends do not save a man accused in the wrong? Who will teach virtue if the teacher of virtue is gone? Scales that tip and sway. It must have weighed on Crito’s heart to learn the decision was already made; to arrive in a drafty cell for a teacher- student review – so late. How he misread the old man sitting on his cot: alone and unafraid. The question on his teacher’s face: How much are you willing to trade ? We weave, instructed, heart persuaded. We leave it – not for the Midterm – almost certainly for a later day. 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 "Is There a Final Exam?". 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