Index Previous Next Balcony House Mesa Verde We huddle beneath a sandstone roof afraid of dream-like depths. All around: a cave metropolis. Two hundred homes piled story upon story, rise to a mezzanine of slick adobe tiles. Impregnable Balcony House. Its builders crossed a narrow ledge, then threaded a small entry that tests our king-size son and draws us to the same high wall the same sheer cliff that others slipped – or leaped from – seven hundred feet, seven centuries ago. They bartered goods, but had a taste for gambling. As here, a charming reconstruction: talus of tiny arrowheads, string of indigenous berries draped, with surprising grace, by an open pit. Exchanges we recognize: ritual gifts for the chance of a woman's forgiveness – and not – as our guide would have it – for the chance of crops. Seasonal beads for an earlier season's omissions. Shimmering talus, like the memory of a kiss. Plucked berries for a city whose heights must have made them light-headed, somehow unable to turn the earth back to life. A stirring pool of cold, clear water is all we hear today. Or perhaps, not water, but the buried tones of chanting priests in kivas underground. How could they not have heard the pools receding? How did they miss the cracking clay below? Perhaps it was our same habit of being: an ever-promising season – men trotting up toe-holds cut in stone to tend crops on a lush green mesa: a vigilance they must have thought unrivalled, while their babies swung from the ends of roof poles below, to a rhythm sung from above – quietly taking in the canyon’s toll on love. . Copyright © 2001 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Tampa Review , Fall 2023.

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 The Wisdom of the Cave If you’re always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden. – Mark Zuckerberg In the cave, our histories are shadows on a wall; our memories rote lessons that flicker and mutate. Fall and spring, then and now, captured and interchanged. Friezes like post cards sculpted to ornament the grotto, endure, resist decay. When the shadows dance, we point, open our mouths, as if for a split second, something shifts, recalibrates. A glimpse of fire and lathe – and shadow makers. Forms beyond hope. Ideas like sirens singing. Cracks in a wall that luminate, hint at another source: rivers, flora and bursts of color, starlings with iridescent wings, shrubs whose roots finger through mud for something to drink. A world too fluid to dangle from rod and string. How could we want its ranges, moon, its chorus marking dawn, its feathered swirl confusing predators, its messenger’s glad song? Why should we mind the tether anchoring us; the flame that fixes seasons, stages night and day, that orients us frontward, ever frontward, and keeps the constellations in their place? . Copyright © 2021 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in SWWIM , January 2022.

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.

The Arrangement 2012 Robert Frost Award First Runner Up A poem that pays tribute to the power of art in a time of grief. The art here is a painting by an unidentified artist entitled “Flowers in a Vase.” The thick yellow paint of the petals reach down and stay with the speaker as young girl on a class outing. The yellow paint is suddenly everywhere: in the child’s starched uniforms, on the perfect walls, on the road and on the river as seen from the bus as she travels home. Was the surreal nature of the paint’s effect a sign of what would come? Or did she sense the turn of events about to happen, was she left susceptible to a visceral effect of the thick yellow paint, in a sense, the power of art? Once home, she finds family members assembled and her father in grief. A special connection is made with her mother in the form of a gesture, that of pressing foreheads to connect with another in grief, something she learned from her mother, the deceased. There is a wonderful link to the painting made in the last few lines as the family turns from grief to decide “where the visiting aunts would sleep/ and “who would order the flowers.” A deftly written lyric narrative with questions left open for the listener. --Judge, Kathleen Aponick 2012 Robert Frost Award Robert Frost Foundation

Index Previous Next Inventory As in drill rehearsal for an embattled place, we call in mirrored breadths an inventory, mime in duet a list, a ruck sack check, that makes you gaze at your wrist, check watch, check pockets, jingle car keys chin-high like copper chimes, or like the bells that focus our attention in the Mass, a summoning that at the altar an ordained event—body as host, wine that was blood—is happening and is past. We are older now; this is what this is. A pause midstride before leaving one another, before leaving the house; a wave from the drive the way angels—disquieted— watch, then catch us by the hair. They hear our doubts. Leaving, returning , for them: deliverance , reunion with the stars, a coming home. For us, chance , a constant drum. . Copyright © 2022 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Southern Poetry Review , Vol. 60, issue 1.

Index Previous Next Before the Common Era Before the Common Era Before Epictetus, the Aztecs, Machiavelli; before Berkeley, Spinoza, Calvin, Hegel and Heidegger; before the Bavarian Illuminati; before Marie Antionette; before Schelling; before Hayek, Derrida, and Bukowski; before the laws of timeless nature; Kerouac. Before Nirvana analysis and conceptual tunneling; before subtle physics; before alternative systems; before god, I remember we planted some seeds in a narrow back lot, a trellis with open ties for the sprouts like bait and lure in sod tiles. And we waited for spring like we waited for our first child: a new world of water and marrow. And we knelt near the terraces, brushing the earth. And the air’s soft tongue kept us close and at our tasks, not missing things unsaid, anthems unsung. . Copyright © 2019 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Quadrant , January 2021

Primary Sources Great Works of Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire and Middle Ages by M. B. McLatchey As a supplement to the wide variety of textbooks that students use in their Humanities courses, this collection of primary sources exposes readers to the original voices of the past. Primary Sources is a compilation of the most representative works from the Ancient Period through the Middle Ages, with annotations and introductions throughout to assist the reader. Significant readings from the modern era are also included to encourage the student to examine connections between ancient and modern ideas as well as discover the larger social and political questions that have defined Western civilization. Available on Amazon Book Details: Paperback: 282 pages Publisher: Independently published (July 10, 2012) Language: English ISBN-13: 979-8632406376 ASIN: B088BBNZVQ Product Dimensions: 8 x 0.6 x 10 inches Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds

Selected Poems of Maria Teresa Horta Translated by: M.B. McLatchey and Edite Cunhã Published in Metamorphoses, 2019 Prev 10 Next FURTIVE STEPS I feel its traces furtive in the hollow of my hand gaining sudden strangeness luminosities, ravings of my lost senses arresting my heart descending to the bottom by the arm’s attrition until it reaches the slim wrist It is poetry arriving taking form and voice saying what I do not say TRAÇOS FURTIVOS Sinto-lhe os traços furtivos no côncavo da minha mão ganhando estranhezas súbitas agudezas, desvarios dos meus sentidos perdidos a prender-me o coração a descer até ao fundo pela rasura do braço até chegar ao desvão na delgadeza do pulso É a poesia que chega tomando forma e ruído a falar o que eu não digo 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

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