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

Hestia, protector of missing children, you with soft oil dripping ever from your locks, come now into this house -- draw near, and withal bestow grace upon my song. ― Ancient Greek prayer. Award Winning Poetry - 2008 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award - Special Merit Museum Hestia, protector of missing children, you with soft oil dripping ever from your locks, come now into this house -- draw near, and withal bestow grace upon my song. ― Ancient Greek prayer. Historical pieces, these things of yours: a deflating ball, a bike not on its kick, but propped against a garage wall; a crestfallen lacrosse stick. Tours have come through as if walking the way of the cross: neighbors with pasta, a friend to awkwardly drop off a borrowed dress. Police with their pens and pads making calculations. A press release for the missing, accosted kidnapped, or dead; your photo, a ghost of a soul you had. Musee de Beaux Arts for the ambushed, the dispossessed, for guardians, who did not guard our watch, conservators of hellish thoughts, thoughts too wretched for talk. Prayers in place of a fight we would have fought had you called out. But what, after all, can our prayers do except repeat prayers from the past, and that surely God knew. Copyright © 2007 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award Special Merit. Published in The Comstock Review , January 2008. Previous Next

Index Previous Next 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. Our host asks each box: What’s new with you? We talk, in turns. We share the virtual part – meaning the essence . It’s lovely. How this half-body huddle forces us to talk; how we conform, like grafted stalks, to a new light source. Dante insists our afterlives will be the now eternal. I study my husband’s framed face unselfconsciously. No one can see me gazing at our years. My sons, I see, have become men whose eyes are equable and clear. Time lapses freeze, in pixel images, expressions like true selves they made as toddlers. On TV, the Pope delivers the Mass to empty seats. How alone he looks – in spite of the live stream. No pilgrims, no Vatican City festooned with flowers; only police to hold the barricades. And yet, the numbers say, more watched and listened to the liturgy than ever attended. On sofas that sag, on laptops, in drive-thru caravans for bread and wine. An insistence on right seasons if only to prove we are different from our dogs. We hear a whistle too. . Copyright © 2020 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality and the Art s , Issue #1, Fall 2020. Featured in Verse Daily ® with permission, 2024.

Selected Poems of Maria Teresa Horta Translated by: M.B. McLatchey and Edite Cunhã Published in Metamorphoses, 2019 Prev 9 Next DELIRIUMS At first one hears the wings with their veiled whispers then the feathers obscured by pearls and satins Murmurs of silk mutineers in a whirring of desire verses, delights sonnets and deliriums of lilies shattered DELÍRIOS Primeiro escutam-se as asas no seu rumor velado depois as plumas turvas de pérolas e cetins Gemidos de seda amotinados num zunido de desejo estrofes, deleite sonetos e delírios de lírios estilhaçados Copyright © 2019 M. B. McLatchey & Edite Cunha, with permission. All rights reserved. Published in Metamorphoses , Fall 2019. Copyright © 2017 Maria Teresa Horta, from her collection Poesis . Dom Quixote Publisher, Lisbon. Back to List

Index Previous Next Teaching the Tragedies They see how lightly tragedies begin: old friends approach, trade jokes, then ask the whereabouts of someone else. Inconsequential chit chat. I know by training what to think: invoking absent ones; that's nature out of balance. But I stay quiet and watch my best take turns reading aloud. Premonitions, prayers, misgivings all uttered much as we ourselves utter such things without implying real belief in astral influence or providence. In the mutilated versions that Restoration audiences knew finding the art in grief was just the same: the principal requirement of loss. Then, all the afterthoughts of obvious but distant analogues. This morning's work is metrics - harmless stuff, except for one: a girl whose lovely throat warbles what ought to be our longest vowels - our sad approach. I make her try again, knowing she'll have to do the rest herself. . Copyright © 2002 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Published in The Southern Poetry Review , Fall/Winter 2003.

Award Winning Poetry - 1974 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 tenth pin rolls. I have been told of cloud-grazing mares— and twice it has rained cats and dogs. I have been told that Saint Peter saw a vision. I have been told that truth may be measured by the shade of one's tongue or the length of one's nose—and twice I have doubted my countenance. I have been told when 'neath the cornered quilt that the sand- man would alight and wave his sack of sleeping dust over my last Hail Mary. I have been told that woman is infamy; man sin. And I am the issue of both. I have been told to accept His rites and wrath. Yet, I have heard over grace and gossip. from bible and book, of womb-wrenching pain, of breached and blue-born, of original sin; and that was birth. I have heard of atmospheric pressure and tropical cyclones; and that was Hurricane Ann. I have heard that fishermen like their wine and all have visions. I have heard that the truth made Socrates stutter. I have heard that some men never sleep. I have heard that opposites attract (and gather ye rosebuds while ye may) I have heard that doubt is the stepping stone to knowledge, and knowledge is the end of man. I have heard too little of too much. And still as green as County Cork, I have but fingered man's seven selves. Copyright © 2017 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in the Spring 1975 issue of The Emerson Review . M.B., Weymouth North High School, Massachusetts, October, 1974 Contest judge - Charles Simic . Previous Next

Atlantic Center for the Arts An Interview with M.B. McLatchey In her newly appointed role as Arts & Wellness ambassador for the Atlantic Center for the Arts, M.B. was asked to comment on her work, the arts, the community, and her new role with ACA. What do you most love about your work combining health and the arts? For me, creating art has always been a way to care for the heart and mind. Working as an Ambassador for ACA, where we consciously join arts initiatives with an interest in healing, has been some of the most rewarding work in the arts that I have ever done. What inspired you to pursue this field? I think art makes us more human – or at least it reminds us of our humanness. Emily Dickinson once said that she writes poems in order to know what time it is. Making art is a wonderful way for us to value the minutes and days in our lives. How have the arts been transformational in your life? Wonderful shifts in ways of seeing – in ways of being -- have occurred for me through my teaching and through my interacting with other poets in New Smyrna Beach and in Volusia County. What’s special about the people of Volusia County or New Smyrna Beach? People who live in our county – especially artists – truly love our surroundings. The flora and sounds of our county frequently color the poems that people produce in my workshops. There’s a wonderful rhythm that we all march to here – it’s a pace and beat that shows up in our poems and visual art. What is the most rewarding part of your work with ACA? The people whom I have had the chance to come to know and love has been the most rewarding part of my work with ACA. So many talented and generous artists make up the community called “ACA”. I have felt very blessed to have been welcomed into this community. 3/28/2019

Award Winning Poetry - 2025 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. Imagine an untethering, a swansong reckoning. No proofs in stone. Almost certainly, you will be alone. The location, like an envelope you have been carrying, will be unsealed – a wakefulness, or a presence revealed: a man who taught you to field ground balls in the yard; devotions you fought and now whose storied part you want again. Or perhaps in a chance encounter with a schoolyard friend, a companion you abandoned for the faster track, the slap on the back. Our lives a history of what-ifs, lighthouses somehow missed. The final exam will not be timed. It will be scored blind. The final exam will leave you among the living, taking stock. Finishings all around; ashes still simmering – and a threshold to cross. Your gift if you use it, time : Gilgamesh, tunnelling trails to a city wall; Penelope’s loom and an ever- unravelling shawl. As for them, so you: there will be threshold guardians – a forest monster, suitors – reveals of the anima. Look these guardians in the eye. They are barriers to test your stamina. . 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 "Plan B". 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

The Healing Power of Poetry - Women's Health and Breast Cancer Care Awareness Women's Health and Breast Cancer Care Awareness - 2024 Sponsored by Atlantic Center for the Arts and AdventHealth This article first appeared in Of Poets & Poetry , Nov/Dec 2024. Application is no longer available.

Award Winning Poetry - 2008 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award The Retrieval Here again. The way you used to wake us – rouse us with that impatient stare. A stubborn, boy-crazy, eighth-grader you make the same requests. We say them with you. Isn't this what happens when some of us bring water to the dead? This private shift to living only sometimes with the living. Eight months among the missing and you come padding back in your white socks and jeans; specter of grief we locked away before it made us more dry-mouthed and speechless than our counterparts in dreams. Grief like light encounters in a half-sleep: your moist face in a morning mirror. Are you in someone else's too? O, city of mirrors. And how, each night you casually resume at every threshold to every listing room that awkward lean -- the one you would do when you could not ask, but knew that we could help. Your bony shoulder barely touching the wall; your right foot crossing the other. So much the pose of one who is neither coming nor going. It's difficult to know why we should wake. Still, every day we rise like guardians ex officio, like gate-keepers to a city of passing shades -- each one a new acquaintance with your face. Each one a new petition for deliverance of the innocent and quaking. Copyright © 2007 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award Special Merit. Published in The Comstock Review , January 2008. Previous Next

We have been together in Buddha’s gentle rain for days. Our robes are soaked through. I try not to long for things as your palm unwinds under my chin. You speak to me in the simplest language, Have a cup of tea. I sense your compassion but my ears are filled with water and the incense unnerves me. You cup my ears and whisper, Rozan is famous for its misty, rainy days, and, The sky is always the sky. I believe you, though I am not surprised. Perhaps the exchange should not be this intimate. The shadows near my eyes and across your shaved head make us tired and ordinary. You are an old man with dry lips. Perhaps your middle sags as you smooth my hair, my hair that was just so. Copyright © 1978 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in the author's chapbook Advantages of Believing , 2015. Author's website: www.mbmclatchey.com Beginner's Mind

Index Previous Next Trigger Warning We have art in order not to die of the truth. ― Friedrich Nietzsche This spring, as in previous springs we will have our themes: A young man will take his mother to bed – then blind himself with her dress pins when he learns the truth. Another mother will die yearning for her son’s lost youth – ten years in combat in some hell called Troy, ten more at sea, a champion of the gods, or a beautifully- carved chess piece. In our fifth week, the most promising student will stop coming to class – uncounted, unseen. Some of us will look for her in our dreams. In one, she will wave, relieved, as she sails away. In another, she will signal a code – fragments like shards from an ancient, splintered vase; runes like self-spun elegies which, as a class, we will read. A champion of the gods, or a beautifully- carved chess piece? In the tenth week, the quietest one will change his place from Enrolled to Audit – a jockeying for a Pass on this charted and uncharted course – or kiss and a roll of the dice. A look at his source. The same week a veteran marine will submit his term’s work – a dense, hard-copy, thoughtful, heap – then swallow and swallow and swallow and finally sleep. A champion of the gods, or a beautifully-carved chess piece? The rest of us will proceed. Like clockwork, carillon will ring. Gowns, assemblies, deans. Swallows will stir the clock tower – Lazarus-like – and crocuses will flower on the campus green. . Copyright © 2018 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Harpur Palate of Binghamton University, Fall 2018, Vol. 18.1.