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Index Previous Next Leaving the Mainland The last resort as some wags dub it. And now for the first time since leaving the mainland we feel it. So narrow an approach, the road we're on seems less a slip of land than a channel of water. And everywhere the doubling back of life scenes: herons teetering on one leg as if to remain prescient of two worlds - this one that warms us through car glass, and the other a stirring life submerged. Island of bones. So overwhelmed were they by life's remains - so many bones - that de Leon and trails of others found there. The terrible name must have given breadth to their worst fears. Ships like theirs brought to grief by poorly marked reefs or the lure of a light on a cow's tail. And after disaster, the call - but not for help- among the islanders. A wreck! Prosperity from ruined ships - a life no one had entertained. Still, there they were chasing submerged treasures. A slip in judgment, perhaps. But given the choice between limestone too hard for digging graves or an ocean of pyramids, who could blame them - certainly neither of us - for wanting to live? . Copyright © 2004 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Published in The American Poetry Journal , Summer/Fall 2005.

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Index Previous Next The Lame God "When I'm alone here at night I cuddle him and hold him. Sometimes, I even try to make him walk." ― Nurse in one of the Lying Down Rooms in an orphanage in Russia, where, because of the social stigma of crippled children, they are often rejected by their parents and committed to the state. He walked on thin legs, as Homer put it. Hephaestus, born with a shriveled foot that so humiliated Hera she threw her son into the sea. Once tossed from high Olympus, he turned his frailty into grit: counterinsurgency. A terra firma, as opposed to the water she dreamed of, his exile made him face his kind, build her a catbird seat -- a throne with a trick release to trap her like the imperfections she reviled. In the end, he hobbled, motherless castaway, into their pantheon. What was it made the Greeks admit a lame god into their heaven? In all of their myths, his wit and craftsmanship. But there was plenty of that to go around. What if the Greek Ideal that gave them height, relied, for good form, on what the gods despised -- a symmetry of damned and apple of their eyes. Twins on a coin, a champion form: what men could learn to love; what the state wished was never born. . Copyright © 2007 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in The Spoon River Poetry Review , Winter/Spring 2008

People use the word 'closure.' It's not about closure, it's more about justice. ― John Walsh, father to Adam Walsh. Award Winning Poetry - 2008 Muriel Craft Bailey Award The Rescue People use the word 'closure.' It's not about closure, it's more about justice. ― John Walsh, father to Adam Walsh. Today in the news: Miraculous Rescue An uncle drags a shark to shore to save his near-dead nephew. A bull of a shark, the arm that it tore from the boy when he waved for help fueled the beast's palate; its tail in the uncle's grip, a blur of blood claret and kelp; the husks from his palms, a grim and edible kale. I want a shark that I can wrestle and make it spit you out. To make it yearn for its strength, to thrash about as I nestle its nose in my grip. I want to turn you loose from a palpable place: a well, a shed, a jaw. I want the monster to face me and beg for the law. Copyright © 2007 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award Special Merit. Published in The Comstock Review , January 2008. Previous Next

BIO Fourth Grade 1963 Miss D 1963 Quincy Shipyard Fore River Bridge Goliath I grew up in a town where our parents were ship builders, bakers, waitresses, and cashiers, and where books found their right and proper place in the local library. Ours was an oral tradition, with the sounds and voices of elders and neighbors in inflections of Portuguese, Greek, Irish, and Italian – all of which I quickly learned to imitate. The result was a technical training that served a writer. I learned by ear the necessity for music in language, the power of truths told in nods and quiet breaths, and the critical importance of timing. And, I learned at my kitchen table that if you’re going to tell a story, it must be artful and it better be worth everyone’s time. At the age of ten, I met the woman who would become my lifetime mentor – Miss D, my fourth grade teacher. She would unleash my passion for literature and the arts and teach me how art connects us. A few years later, at the age of fourteen, I was awarded my first literary prize – 1st place in a poetry contest hosted by Boston’s Emerson College. In a packed campus theater, the contest judge, renowned poet Charles Simic, handed me a check for a hundred dollars and mumbled, “Good job, kid.” Even at that early age, I understood that writers thrive on affirmation – not because the ego needs it, but because it confirms that through our art, we connect. At that moment, my life as a writer was confirmed. My passion for languages and literature took me on a course of studies to some of the best colleges in the world. At each college, it would be the Poet in Residence that I would seek out. At Williams College, Lawrence Raab and Richard Wilbur taught me to unleash the mystery in poetry; at Brown university, Michael Harper tuned my ear for the music in poetry; at Goddard College, Alfred Corn and Michael Klein honed my technique in poetry; and at Harvard University, the Nobel-prize winning poet, Seamus Heaney mentored me in the mercy in poetry. I was immensely fortunate to share countless hours and discussions with Seamus (sometimes over a PBR and Powers) not only on the topic of how to write good poetry, but on how to be a good poet. “It takes a good person to be a good poet,” Seamus often said to me. I knew that this “goodness” was what Seamus himself strived for; it was a positioning of himself in service to the world that I continue to try to emulate in my work – empathy, authenticity, and self-effacement. It is Seamus and the mentors who preceded him that walk with me in my recognitions. My book with Regal House Publishing, Beginner’s Mind , examines a topic that I have made my life’s focus: namely, education. In a time when our schools are dogged by institutionalized goals for our children, this book gives us a classroom where personal growth and innovative thinking happens in unimaginable ways because of a remarkable fourth grade teacher. Though my soul naturally defaults to the poetic, I have chosen a prose format for this book to more directly reflect the classroom dynamics. Beginner’s Mind is a collage of teaching moments that forever changed a generation of ten-year-olds, and examines the question, “How do we want teachers to educate our children?” The answer is given to us through a series of classroom vignettes that put on display the possibilities before us when a teacher’s love is combined with the beginner’s mind. M.B. McLatchey holds her graduate degree in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, a Masters in Teaching from Brown University, the M.F.A. in writing from Goddard College, and a B.A. from Williams College. She has over thirty years of teaching and has been recognized by her university as Distinguished Teacher of the Year and as Distinguished Scholar. She was awarded Harvard University's coveted Danforth Prize in Teaching as well as the Harvard/Radcliffe Prize for Literary Scholarship, and she received the Elmer Smith Award for Excellence in Teaching from Brown University. M.B. has authored numerous literary reviews, compiled several text books for Humanities courses, and has contributed to many books on teaching. She has received national and international literary awards including the May Swenson Poetry Award for her debut poetry collection The Lame God published by Utah State University Press and the FLP national Women’s Voices Competition award for her book, Advantages of Believing . Her book Beginner's Mind was Winner of the Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award from Salem College. Poetry awards include the American Poet Prize from the American Poetry Journal , the Editor’s Prize in Poetry from FOLIO literary journal, the Editor's Prize in Poetry from Spoon River Poetry Review , the Annie Finch Prize for Poetry, the Robert Frost Award in Poetry, the Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award, the New South Writing Award from Georgia State University, the 46’er Prize from the Adirondack Review , and the Vachel Lindsay Poetry Award. She has been featured in Verse Daily and by AWP as a “Writer in the Spotlight”. A Professor of Classics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, she served two terms as Florida’s Poet Laureate for Volusia County (2015-2025). She currently serves as lifetime Chancellor for Florida State Poets Association and as Arts & Wellness Ambassador for the Atlantic Center for the Arts. My Mentors... R. L. Stevenson 1850 - 1894 H. D. Thoreau 1817 - 1862 W. B. Yeats 1865 - 1939 John Keats 1795 - 1821 Dlyan Thomas 1914 - 1953 Yevtushenko 1932 - 2017 Richard Wilbur 1921 - 2017 Larry Raab 1946 - Michael Harper 1938 - 2016 Louise Gluck 1943 - Seamus Heaney 1939 - 2013 Elizabeth Bishop 1911 - 1979 Michael Klein 1958 - Alfred Corn 1943 -

Award Winning Poetry - 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. Previous Next

Amber Alert 2013 New South Writing Contest Winner “Amber Alert" is a poem that is so compressed it fools us into thinking it's only going to be about a road and a deer. The clean lines hold so much more – movement, murder, youth and sensual beauty stolen, worlds of boys and girls in collision, the hunter, the hunted, rituals, and poetry inside poetry – a "hunter's nectar." In the end, the poem offers a saving grace – “her heart.” -- Judge, Marilyn Kallet 2013 New South Writing Contest new south : Georgia State University's Journal of Art & Literature

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

Index Previous Next The End of Knowing The absence of Copernicus’s scope. Stuttering logos. The ego’s trophy halo. The quiet, unnatural death of the three artistic proofs. The excuse rather than the fight. Homer’s limping hero, Buddha’s blind eye. Plato’s cave dweller empowered by the shadow maker; the messenger despised. A crush of valedictorians still tethered to their mothers’ seedy placentas. The golden bough made bronze for more to enter. Elysium no longer the nerve center. The present, past, and future: Picasso’s flung bones in Guernica – discordant tones, discordant consciousness. The epic hero homeless, more or less. . Copyright © 2021 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Published in The Criterion , April 2021.

When speaking of the creative mind, Steve Jobs is quoted as saying, “There’s a phrase in Buddhism called ‘beginner’s mind’. It is wonderful to have a beginner’s mind.” The beginner’s mind is a way of looking at the world as embraced by one of the world's most creative giants ever known – Steve Jobs. As the author, M.B. McLatchey shares with us in classroom stories from her coveted childhood, beginner’s mind is a mind innocent of preconceptions and judgements; a mind that continues to face life mull of curiosity and wonder and amazement; a mind that invites creativity and sheds conformity. And, in a time when the education "experts" reward teachers for meeting standardized goals, Beginner’s Mind , the book, reminds us of what we already instinctually know about the need to nurture nonstandard lives. In Beginner’s Mind , we experience first hand the teaching we wish for our children – for all children. We see the beginner’s mind being nurtured and grown – day by day, page by page – and come to understand it’s warmth and beauty firsthand through the eyes of a 10-year-old and her classmates under the enlightened and loving mentorship of their fourth-grade teacher, Miss D. For America’s business leaders and CEO's, encouraged by flourishing STEM projects and government-funded programs in our public schools, Beginner’s Mind is a cautionary tale about what we may have forgotten and what our children may be missing, and it is about an enlightened teacher that led the battle – and proved the value – in educating the whole child: head, body, and soul. Beginner's Mind , Regal House Publishing, 2021.

Selected Poems of Maria Teresa Horta Translated by: M.B. McLatchey and Edite Cunhã Published in Alchemy , 2020 Prev 16 Next THE CONDITION OF THE VERSES I am of the condition of the verses with eagerness rescued I have a pact with the angels I recognize the trace of light I want the rigor of words I sing the flame of poetry in the most bitter extravagance I write the excess with the pain of the blaze in the desire to be the splendor And if in each poem I invent flight with my poetic voice I choose lava DA CONDIÇÃO DOS VERSOS Sou da condição dos versos com avidez resgatada Tenho um trato com os anjos conheço o traço da luz quero o rigor das palavras Canto a chama da poesia na desmesura mais amarga Escrevo o excesso com a pena do fulgor no desejo de ser o esplendor E se em cada poema invento o voo com a minha voz poética eu escolho a lava Copyright © 2019 M. B. McLatchey & Edite Cunha, with permission. All rights reserved. Published in Alchemy , Issue 17, Summer 2020 Copyright © 2017 Maria Teresa Horta, from her collection Poesis . Dom Quixote Publisher, Lisbon. Back to List

Index Previous Next NRR's 6th Annual Narrative Poetry Contest - Semi Finalist The Bath For a foster child The slightest wrong move could mean tidal waves. Certain disaster to a boy with everything resting on delicate tissue – a bruised knee to which you command a corps of plastic ships – an austere but (you promise) heavenly beach where men may lie down in soft sand, a tiny fold in your thigh; write letters and find oranges to eat; plan the next battle. Hard that you know so much about these distances from home. A trumpet blast! You steam your mission out. Predictably bad weather and still another perilous gorge of falls and fleshy islands. The search resumes for citrus or, at least, friendly harbor. I wish you both -- and not another tour of calculations tossed or unchartered, and not this shadowy map on water. . Copyright © 2014 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Naugatuck River Review's 6th Annual Narrative Poetry Contest - Semi Finalist. Published in Naugatuck River Review , November 2014.