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Selected Poems 1-800-THE-LOST 2012 American Poetry Journal Display Poem 2011 American Poet Prize - Winner A Drink of Water 2023 The Banyan Review Display Poem A Glass of Absinthe 2005 Anthology of New England Writers Display Poem A Kenning 2005 American Poetry Journal Display Poem Academic Calendar 2025 The Soliloquist Journal Display Poem Aftercare 2021 Raintown Review Display Poem Afterlives 2020 Pensive: A Global Journal... Display Poem Featured in Verse Daily - 2024 Against Elegies 2004 National Poetry Review Display Poem Featured in Verse Daily Amber Alert 2013 new south: Georgia St. Univ. Journal Display Poem New South Writing Contest - Winner Another Inevitable Romance at Olduvai Gorge 2021 Avatar Review Display Poem Anthem 2018 Harpur Palate Display Poem Arcadia 2008 Cider Press Review Display Poem

Item List M.B. McLatchey Associate Professor of Classics, Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University Daytona Beach, FL Member Since: 2012 About: M.B. McLatchey is a recipient of the 2011 American Poet Prize from the American Poetry Journal, and the author of two award-winning collections of poems, most recently The Lame God (Utah State University Press), which was awarded the 2013 May Swenson Prize. Currently a professor of Classics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, M.B. is also Florida state's Poet Laureate for Volusia County, serving as a mentor to young poets and co-facilitating and participating in panels that address the link between citizenry and artistry. She has received numerous academic awards, including the Harvard University Danforth Prize, the Radcliffe Prize for Literary Scholarship, and the Brown University Elmer Smith Award. Photo Credit: Daryl Labello

Award Winning Poetry 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... 2011 American Poetry Journal 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... 2020 Sky Island Journal Winner of the Lazuli Literary Group 2024 Writing Contest - 1 of 3 - Plan B I watch them settle in. David’s Death of Socrates on the projection screen... 2025 Azure: A Journal of Literary Thought Winner of the Lazuli Literary Group 2024 Writing Contest - 2 of 3 - 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... 2025 Azure: A Journal of Literary Thought Winner of the Lazuli Literary Group 2024 Writing Contest - 3 of 3 - Ethos, Logos, Pathos Because we are different from our dogs that leave their scent on white fence posts; the raised hind leg, the pioneering boast. Because... 2025 Azure: A Journal of Literary Thought Featured in Verse Daily - 2024 Afterlives Only faces in little boxes now; blinking and peering into a starless space, not knowing what to do except perhaps, wave... 2020 Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality and the Arts Winner of the Folio Editor's Prize Ode for an Ode on a Grecian Urn Ode, let your sorrows go. Let brides be ravished, trees forsake their leaves, let lovers kiss and fade, daughters age. 2019 Folio Winner of the Annie Finch Prize On Recognizing Saints As if to find new icons for her life or as if - piece by piece - to dismantle mine she scans our purchases too consciously... 2005 National Poetry Review Winner of the 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... 2013 new south: Georgia St. Univ. Journal 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... 2016 Naugatuck River Review 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... 2004 National Poetry Review 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... 2007 Spoon River Poetry Review Winner of the 46er Prize for Poetry Bingo Night for Missing and Exploited Children Before we went underground. Before you fell through a gyre with no sound. If one piece were unwound. If you had run. If we had looked for you sooner. If you had screamed. If the gods had intervened... 2012 The Adirondack Review Winner of the 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... 2006 Willow Springs Winner of the Emerson College Original Poetry Award On Rewinding I have been told that by wish and will I fell from His sheep- wool pocket into one dame's arms; and that was birth. I have been told that angels bowl; heaven opens up when the... 1974 Emerson College Review 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... 2006 Comstock Review DISPLAY MORE

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.

Index Previous Next Anthem No one makes love in European cities. Instead of sex, a café con leite in a leaning café, bread and olives like offerings or props between strangers. Between rooftops blank bed sheets wave, flags without countries, on cable lines. Hope for a better life ceased with the people’s resistance. In courtyards, dull statues of poets, cats in heat mime some godless coupling. What made us come here? Films like La Mime, or Il Postino where love is a mailman’s song to a wide-hipped woman and sex is a long suggestion in close-ups of mouths. Courses in college, where olive trees figured fertility and lovers in rivers or on moon-soaked rooftops promised a holy union. How we tracked in tripping rhythms and limping lines, those foreign places, foreign minds. And, your score-catching resistance to seeing a pulse in the poems that I swore was mine – a resistance that divided us then, but steadies us now, where marriage is an ancient, sacred mime: Montana’s native dance, a bushman’s song. In the hotel room next to ours, sex solves a couple’s dispute: breaths in small calls and answers like olive branches; breaths in syllabics that drift over bedsheets and rooftops like rhapsodies the ancients masked and mimed; sighs that recall the faint line between hunger and dying. Their post-coital quiet, like a lingering thought or line, makes us pause. In the quiet, a sheer curtain takes air, a quiet resistance to differences in hotel rooms, in heartaches, in countries, in love’s metered mime. For a few moments, we bathe in it. We are fluent in all languages, fluent in sex. From our window, a row of houses, an etch-a-sketch of intersecting lives, olive- toned children run home. A new moon casts drying bed sheets, quiet rooftops in a truer beige-bone. Below, an elderly pair flirts in open vowels and faint, staccato lines – Whitman’s free verse, Petrarch’s cypress vine. The body’s sung hunger; the soul’s mournful mime. We are almost home, love. For now, this is where god is: desire’s ancient theater, promises, olives. . Copyright © 2018 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Harpur Palate of Binghamton University, Fall 2018, Vol. 18.1.