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Index Previous Next Winner of the 2006 Vachel Lindsay Poetry Award Sanriku The game was not to look - but feel - the slow drag, the distant rise and fall, the quiet revolt of crests gaining an underworld; to know in our heels the moment of their advance: languid, insidious. "Sanriku!" one of us would call - a notice to the rest that it was imminent, and with one lift, a solidarity, we'd throw ourselves beachward, tossing and rolling in a curled force. Submerged, I would hear that call like water's moan, or like the heaving sobs of Asian fishermen, who felt too late the slip of plates, the buckling floor, the little missionary wave passing beneath their boats; who, steeped in so much grief, never knew the clarity that follows every quake -- when there, for just an instant, the contours of the seafloor below are mirrored in the water around our waists. Sanriku is a port in Japan that was destroyed by a tsunami in 1896. Fishermen 20 miles out to sea did not notice the wave pass under their boats because it only had the height at the time of about 15 inches. They were totally unprepared for the devastation that greeted them when they returned to the port of Sanriku - 28,000 people were killed and 170 miles of coastline were destroyed by the wave that had passed under them. . Copyright © 2003 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Winner of the 2006 Vachel Lindsay Poetry Award. Published in Willow Springs 58, Fall 2006.

Index Previous Next A Glass of Absinthe After Degas At first we pass them, unstudied as a snapshot where marginal subjects have slipped in. A disenchanted pair off-center and off-level, lean like bags of flour into the singular pitch of a cafe's genial keel; no ballast here except for the pool of milky licorice - a teetering glass of absinthe. So startling to see how everything was made to dovetail; how the zigzag of empty tables between us and the luckless couple traces a brooding loneliness, a composition so boldly calculated that we can hardly face its draughtsmanship. Powdered pigments molded into figures whose back sides blaze in mirrors propped behind them like butterflies caught in an ashen rain. The proprietor had thought the glass might brighten the place. But, there is no changing history or the reflections of our lives. . Upcoming in The Banyan Review, Fall 2023.

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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.

Index Previous Next Aftercare For John For the send-off, a haversack of mounting days: socks with slip-proof stops, a comb, an unused razor; hospital kitsch. A folder with paper-clipped scripts in Livy’s Latin: a history of pour turned into measured drips. Labels like vague instructions or memories of how and what we thought, how to retrieve our former selves – or not. There is no aftercare kit for this. Only the fossil imprint: years of love’s lava laying down sediment in love’s hard strata: summer’s dog days and winter’s cover; proof that for some the distress of a cavernous shift, for us will be valleys widened, rivers uplifted. And after-days will be the medic’s doses delivered thoughtfully and well -- meaning, unmeasured : a love that births Arcadia from grafted stems and tender cells. . Copyright © 2020 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in The Raintown Review .

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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, whose remains were found 3 years after she was abducted and murdered in June 2000. Award Winning Poetry - 2007 Winner of the Spoon River Poetry Review Editors' Prize 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, whose remains were found 3 years after she was abducted and murdered in June 2000. 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 vast 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. Copyright © 2007 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Winner of the 2007 Spoon River Poetry Review Editors' Prize. Published in The Spoon River Poetry Review , Summer/Fall 2007. Judge's Review Previous Next

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