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Index Previous Next 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 by murky water, it submerges and reblooms: petals like crystal glazed and without residue. As if you never felt something move: no welcome and prescient ache, no sudden flexing, no cycle taking shape. No memory. No calendar. No yield – because you are the bullet’s shield. As if you have nothing to lose. As if all that you have learned to love: the beating heart; the mythic glove of a palm blooming in the womb; the scent that follows touch – is suddenly dust. Just the open-grinned, white-toothed stare down this time; the stayed and steady practice on your knees of mastering someone else’s pleas. . Copyright © 2020 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Sky Island Journal , Summer 2020 Pushcart Prize Nominee 2020 Best of the Net Nominee 2021 Editor's comment: ...the epitome of what we consider powerful poetry to be. Vivid, palpable imagery saturates the perfect pacing of this svelte, knife-like piece. Full review

Index Previous Next Morning in Three Movements I I lie in my own pasty pool like a lamb in a druid’s bed. Layer by layer, thread after thread, I shed and shed. O, press me between your palms again! Deliverer, be delivered. Without your need, without a guise to beautify, what am I? II. I know her layers far better than she. Scales that I peel in a rush of steam. My tongue, her arch, her bending knee. The soft between her legs where I redeem myself, the way the Great Throwdini did, who earned his life, her love, by sparing them. Without her bristling flesh, oh what am I? III. In this morning light, I am almost transparent, a sheet of shimmering snow that holds another person’s fears – once in this tight embrace, twice in this lingering scent, this care, this newfound air. Answers to Riddles in Reverse: I: paos fo rab II : rozar III. eussit . Copyright © 2023 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in The Banyan Review , Fall 2023.

Index Previous Next Snow Globe La Tour Eiffel. An April-snow like pollen covers a patch of stolid tulips. From the first platform, he leans over slick railings, leans as if in Keats’s scheme to drop and drop a red corsage to a woman below. I see it now: this is the one of 300 steel workers, who tumbled to his death clowning around. Her promise is to keep him from his fall by gazing back – his sentinel, his figurine against the filmy wash of elements against the fading colors in a dome. I shake it – not for snow – but to marvel at their hold. . Copyright © 2007 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Cider Press Review , Vol. 9, Spring 2008.

Index Previous Next Dream Song For a sleeping student Our voices, a gurgling brook, became your parting song: a stream grading stones – meandering – where bend becomes slope. You teetered in the current – strong, young – yet bowed by doubts, centuries-old cares. A stream grading stones, meandering. Where might we have extracted you, harness and rope, young – yet bowed by doubts, centuries-old cares? Cold depths are ours to brave alone, I was also told. Might we have extracted you, harness and rope, what threshold did you cross; what pieces rearrange? Cold depths are ours to brave alone. I was also told our troubles wane when guardian spirits learn our names. What threshold did you cross; what pieces rearrange? Our voices, a gurgling brook, became your parting song. Our troubles wane when guardian spirits learn our names, bend becomes slope. You teetered in the current – strong. . Copyright © 2025 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Teach. Write . Fall 2025.

Award Winning Poetry - 2013 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 – looks back at us. Her eyes a dark glass. Opening day for deer hunting. Cars pass and pass. In a field, lightning bugs darted and flashed in your hand. Half-girl, half-doe, you started and stopped, palms cupped. Someone carried you off and we cheered for the boy in the clay, his heel on home plate. It was a beautiful steal. Did he thank the deer for her head when he knelt above her? When he opened her middle to empty inedible parts? When, for a clean job, he severed her windpipe and – hunter’s nectar – he saved her heart? Copyright © 2013 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Winner of the 2013 New South Writing Contest. Published in new south : Georgia State University's Journal of Art & Literature , Summer 2013. Judge's Review Previous Next

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Index Previous Next Ode for My Department Chair Who Left a Face Shield on My Desk For Sally Because all of this is seeing through complex prisms; seeds reconciling to stalks that lean grey-blue instead of the expected, upright green. Because the soil we trusted, turned, and patted on our knees became unresponsive, a sick child’s pale serene. Because birds and song became a dull-working machine. Because this exchange called teaching is more than granting access, pointing to open gates. Because Sophocles portrayed us as we ought to be; but Euripides portrayed us as we are: surprisingly unstayed and dying a happy death in front of them. Breath after breath. Because care in a time like this is not a stockpiling of perfect arguments, pleas and refrains as if part of a lesson plan – or worse, the cliché – something preordained . Because master and apprentice should look the same. Smithies hammering, melding, iron and steel. Because metals, once coupled with the right vistas and bent into shapes – a cruciform, time’s infinite wheel – were in a previous plague, thought to heal. . Copyright © 2020 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in NCTE's 2021 Fall issue of English Journal , National Council of Teachers of English

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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

Index Previous Next 2012 Robert Frost Award - First Runner Up The Arrangement I. Because we were getting old enough our instructor took us to look at (not to touch) some pictures grown men drew. We tripped like new recruits through orderly rooms. Some were sternly directed to carry their shoes as we made our hushed advance. In the dim hall we could hear a classmate whimpering as she would whenever she felt too far from home. Her tears a kind of prelude to the work itself: Flowers in a Vase - more paint than flowers whose stems arched away, whose poppies bleated and sprayed yellow tears on our starched uniforms, on the perfect walls. All the way home, the yellow hung on our clothes. The bus took us sluggishly along, and we felt the road under its beefy wheels change to a luminous river of paint and the trees gave up their souls in Autumn's clay glow. II. I knew what it meant but not really. So I took the stairs two by two for you, like any other day. In my pocket, paintings on postcards, a stick of gum. In the kitchen below, Dad had grown small beside the cakes the ladies brought. He would not eat, he would not speak to relatives in the hall, and the relatives awkwardly leaning on end-tables like faded photos of themselves. Mother was proud to find me at my prayers and honoring the adults who were clearly "spent". When she pressed her head to mine, I felt her hair like fingers on my brow: a gesture she'd learned from you, mother to mother, and was teaching me now. And, this was "hard" and "each of us will have his own lament." It took all I had to steady my temple to hers - to keep my sorrow apart - as we planned the next few hours: where the aunts would sleep and who would order the flowers. . Copyright © 2006 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. 2012 Robert Frost Award - First Runner Up, Robert Frost Foundation . Judge's Review

Index Previous Next Academic Calendar for my first born Those first months in Fall Term, you slept and dreamed and grew like a cub waiting to be born, his mother’s womb in hibernation. My students watchful as my middle bloomed and bloomed. Commencement was the flower that flew away – your phrase; you were eight. You pursed your lips and blew. We made a wish and watched the fluffy head release its seeds. There were courses to take. First steps, first words, first bicycle, first broken heart. Each asking from you attachment to the same survivor traits: adventure forward, balance – and brake. Graduation, a recurring awakening to the yield in loss: Fallen leaves, detached fruit reseeding. The surprise of new buds on dank limbs. These were the notes, your song, your convocation hymn. . Copyright © 2025 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in The Soliloquist Journal