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Index Previous Next Rhonda Gail Williford Poetry Prize - 2nd Place For a Dying Child Newborns in incubators in the IC Unit at Gaza’s largest hospital are dying as power fails and resources run out. – Palestinian Health Ministry, NBC News We wished for you a greenhouse gardener’s plan. His skillful hands. Seeds laid down in planting beds centuries old; a loyal water drip; roots taking hold; green tendrils taking to the gardener’s light. Stems kept alive – acacias, myrtle. An impenetrable inside. And not this grieving season. We wished for you a clear domed sky, light thermal winds to thaw your nestling trim, plump up your chalky skin. An angel to release your brittle frame from hissing tubes; smooth your two-week-old, old man’s head; anoint you with a name – before you are one of five listed: unnamed dead . And not this killing season. We wished for you ladders propped against shimmering olive trees. A long- limbed boy gingerly plucking, shaking the seeds. In a blur of boy and twigs, a laurel for your head: silver-green leaves. For certain harvest, sheets of netting below. Certain soap; certain oil, the essence of citrus, the golden-green glow. And not this hungering season. . Copyright © 2024 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Winner of the Rhonda Gail Williford Poetry Prize, second place. Published in International Human Rights Art Movement , Fall 2024. Source cited: NBC N ews

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Index Previous Next The Shadow Maker Our goal is to make it so there's as little friction as possible to having a social experience. – Mark Zuckerberg is the fifth richest man in the world; a harvester of pearls: our small talk like algae-rich waters and tides –new births, divorces, prizes our children acquire – feeding and keeping the oysters alive. is a master of illusion: figures in captioned poses, screen and light; shadows that dance on cave walls. Dramas that make us muse, lean in, post notes like medieval glosses in the margins of someone else’s domestic scenes; illuminators to an epic chant, a rhapsody’s god-dream. is the Ideal Prince, accepting the burden of princedoms, glory, survival, to jettison distinctions: good and depraved; monarch and something human saved. Better to be loved and feared rather than admired, or worse, revered. A lord who understands the desire to acquire. A magician with two hands. is a Philosopher King, able to discourse on goodness, justice, corrupting pride; hold court on high ideas: opinion, false truths, reality– a theory of forms that casts our lives in cycles, fruit and fallow; sinners redeemed. A god’s will altered; a cave master’s dream. . Copyright © 2022 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Sequestrum , Issue 32, June 2022.

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Index Previous Next 2006 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 of fading bleach. I give you the curl of my back, a nonevent. Yet, all of it art. Ingres and Ingres' Odalisque who drapes a velvet curtain's jeweled sash across her calf; whose hips turn in a wash of Turkish hues. A French settee or this bed: staging we need to fuel our natural lives. To feel the body lift to the extension of a kiss. The temporal shift in calling souls home -- stomach, thighs -- like this. A quickening in canvas or stone: my open mouth and your inarticulate moan. . Copyright © 2006 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award Finalist. Published in The Comstock Review , Fall/Winter 2006.

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 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

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 Ode for Amy Amy Donahue Fort Worth, Texas Army, Specialist - Paralegal Tikrit, Iraq 7/07–7/08 Baghdad, Iraq 3/10–2/11 Bagram, Afghanistan 2/11-5/12 100 Faces of War Exhibit Roll call. You know the drill. And even now you paint more than the painter can the story we should know. Clear eyed, salon-styled hair, civilian clothes. An aura around you like some after-glow of a time, a record, a narrative, a myth, a place that for your sake – or for our sakes – you’d rather not be told. In your denim jacket, trim black leotard below, you could be any woman; you could be all the women we have known. Around your neck, not tags, but a pendant in the shape of the state of Texas – home like a tarnished puzzle piece. Apparel and accessories you picked for this, for the portraitist, as if to signal in familiar code: a new self has been birthed – or perhaps it is just costume for a pose. In Homer’s Odyssey , Athena was the epic’s champion pretender; master of disguise, an Ithacan among the Ithacans. Better this way to shepherd home the troops, to arbitrate the terms for a man reentering and more alone than he has ever been in his own home – a soul-sick Odysseus. What did Athena know that made her call a truce, even absolve Odysseus for murdering his maids? What did she whisper in our epic hero’s ear – hero more comfortable in a beggar’s clothes – that buoyed him, returned him to his wife and son and dog? Here in disguise, another Ithacan, you must have made the same pact with the gods: Ithaca lives, but only so long as beggars in disguise can make the laws. . Copyright © 2018 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Arts&Sciences , a MOAS publication in association with the Smithsonian Institution ,Winter 2019

Index Previous Next A Kenning No room for a bird that sings through her dangling foot. Thus, always leaving always grieving the loss of middle-earth: things given birth then quickly reified: something rising in a corner swelling and lifting its cover - not bread left to it's own. A swan's wake, more shimmering than her plumage - not a monk's glosses. A field burned for grazing - not poetry. The long goodbye. Always counting on some hollow ilex -- a kenning, a beggar, a toddler with one eye up to his knees in water and lye; expectant, big-hearted, and lost - to take us across. . Copyright © 2004 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Published in The American Poetry Journal , Winter/Spring 2005.

Index Previous Next On Forgetting Ash Wednesday Between the harvesting and sowing: the stubble burn. Embers recycled from a dying fire; the promising scent of charred straw. Cinders inextinguishable as newfound desire. The calendar plan that out of the slag a new upright row might spring: Lazarus flowers, roses of Jericho. All this to call me home. As if to dress me in a penitent’s sackcloth, when for decades – even now – I would have come on my knees: a girl in love with high relief; stained-glass mysteries; the lightness and the weight of your hanging figure; the promise of one love and end of days. Who else could have sown, then seeded, this divide? Who else left this shadowy thumb print between my eyes? . Copyright © 2020 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Iris Literary Journal .

Index Previous Next Urban Helicon It starts like this: the clamps around my wrists. The little Saturn ring around my head, the wooden chair, the arms still warm, though dead; then the electric thrill, the arch, the twist. The expiation just before the twist, the quick reform of madam in her bed, the spasm, the welcome-wagon for something newly-wed; or the ambulance, the sirens, the sudden lisp. It makes me so serene. It ties me to a rock and sends me swimming. It causes quite a scene to feel the wood and stone become a dock; to hear the pastoral in stillness singing. . Copyright © 1982 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Cold Mountain Review , Spring 2016. Listen to the author's audio version on Cold Mountain Review's website .