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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.

Index Previous Next Another Inevitable Romance at Olduvai Gorge People are always talking about you here. They picture you with lava under your nails and send maps saying, THIS WAY OUT . How do you tell them about the beautiful evening soups you’re making and about this science between you and the soups? There’s pleasure enough in a banquet, they say, Who wants any more? At the gorge you can’t help wanting more. You want more than ever to bury a skull in your lap and speak to it sweetly: Here is an evening for gazing, old man. Who was it that hammered your skull? You give soup to the skull and watch it come around. Nowhere but at the gorge were there two, you and the skull you love, so pure and full of soup. Still, they picture you with mud on your face. They wonder if you could describe the skull in an objective manner. There is no sense adding up the years since, at the gorge you have counted only the serenest hours. . Copyright © 1978 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Accepted for publication in Science , 1985. Appeared in Advantages of Believing, Finishing Line Press, 2015. Published in Avatar Review , summer 2021.

Award Winning Poetry - 2025 Winner of the Lazuli Literary Group 2024 Writing Contest - 3 of 3 - Ethos, Logos, Pathos Ethos Because we are different from our dogs that leave their scent on white fence posts; the raised hind leg, the pioneering boast. Because we stand upright, wonder at vaulted ceilings, songs in frescoes: A lifeless man sculpted in plaster and paint, lifting his flaccid hand to – what? An animating touch, a spark, self-understanding? Or a patriarch called to brave a flood, reclining like a Roman river god, not from too much wine, but from such a familiar forgetfulness of our limited time. Because we build pyramids with steps: discernment following the climb. Logos Because Athens never really fell. A radiant vase unearthed; centuries of burnt clay covering its storied face: a ring of epic battles – centaurs, half-man half-beast at the throat of a cool- headed Greek. The choice still the same: Nature untamed or the compass calibrated? The watchful peeling back to the urn’s Attic shape – not with landscape trenchers, but dental picks. Precision tools. A slow-moving, pointing trowel, a sieve. Because of the mindful coupling of powdery pieces: specs of gold from a goddess’s shield, a warrior’s bones too brittle to touch. The true story so reliant upon a delicate brush. Pathos Because the healer is the wounded one. Chiron, casualty of friendly fire, Heracles’s poisonous arrow: Sentenced, in his immortal state to a life of unfathomable sorrow – A perfect medic for the would-be hero: Jason, adrift at sea, until a centaur more adrift steels him: Push on, pass up the Sirens, regain a stolen throne . Asclepius, protégé, healer celebrity, and yet so alone – except for the healer more alone: Chin up, the physician’s heart cannot be helped; tend to your soul . Achilles, fed innards of boars to awaken a warrior core; to quiet his ego: bear marrow. Because for the life worth remembering the cure is an errant arrow. 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: "Is there a Final Exam?" 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

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

Selected Poems of Maria Teresa Horta Translated by: M.B. McLatchey and Edite Cunhã Published in Ezra , Spring 2019 Prev 2 Next THE LEAVES I defoliate the petals the leaves of the poem until I reach perdition desiring the unutterable between the place where one helps the hand that writes and the space where the writing finds shelter AS FOLHAS Desfolho as pétalas as folhas do poema até chegar à perdição desejando o indizível entre o sítio onde se apoia a mão que escreve e o espaço o nó onde a escrita se abriga Copyright © 2019 M. B. McLatchey & Edite Cunha, with permission. All rights reserved. Published in Ezra , Spring 2019. Copyright © 2017 Maria Teresa Horta, from her collection Poesis . Dom Quixote Publisher, Lisbon. Back to List

Index Previous Next Featured in Verse Daily - 2004 Against Elegies What if we let you sing first? What if we look for you with Mallarme’s blank stare: birds round an empty dish, stony limbs? To tell the history of our grief we settle for an empty doorway and a maple leaf or a woman with neckcurls, named Jane, changed by her poetry teacher’s love to a wren wound in light. Shimmering anodyne. Elegies so resolute in wood or wings that we forget the truer measurements of unfinished things: the distance between two disappearing habits; the echo of a promise lodged in a warbler’s throat; the length of a dreamy boy swinging from his favorite limb; the ragged patch below — our ground for spotting him. If grieving is a way of working wood, building thresholds, wrapping birds — then hands will keep us tending things too near. What if this June air should circle, not fall on, our copper chimes with the passiveness of prayer? What if the breeze that would carry a bird’s perfect sorrow were to kneel at the base of an oak, and refuse to rise? . Copyright © 2004 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in National Poetry Review , Fall/Winter 2004. Featured in Verse Daily ® with permission, 2004.

Index Previous Next Pop Quiz Some bow their heads and wait for their pens to move. A ground cloud, like a fog, or an unexpected tide, pulls them away. Through the haze, the quiet one half-raises her hand, asks if – after today – there will be other chances . Today’s exam, I want to tell her, is not today’s exam. It is Everyman ’s call, nothing in stone; a practice run at squaring accounts; at facing what we did not plan; at being alone; a reference to the clock on our wall, whose hands advance with us or without us. I wait for them in the dim, rapt hush. A curtain rises. Scenes – like a showreel – flicker and flash: a hand untangling from a lover’s grasp; a slap for a ranting three-year old; a prayer clasp. As if to find answers, some raise their heads, gaze at a life scene outside: A yellow-breasted blackbird on a branch, savoring a grub in its beak. Other chances . Such a sweet ring. Winter’s buried bulbs; bloom in the next growing season. . Copyright © 2023 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Sky Island Journal , Issue #27, Winter 2024. From the editors: [This poem] is vulnerable, tense, powerful, and so incredibly accurate; it transports and challenges us in ways that poems seldom do. This piece—like so many of our favorite M.B. pieces—is a meditation on the presence of absence and the absence of presence, and it bears fruit in such personal, beautiful, and unexpected ways. Like all great art, “Pop Quiz” sticks its landing and is a gift that keeps on giving; we discover more about it, and ourselves, with every reading.

Index Previous Next Portable Labyrinth Moved by a quiet cyclone, a tarp set out to dry on our neighbor's lawn lifts itself, gasps and collapses, gasps and collapses. You lightly suggest someone check: perhaps someone's buried alive, or perhaps something's come to mock our little dying acts. Eddies of light drawn to a wayward canvas. Flecks of water surrendering to a draft the way that love surrenders after cruel words – breath by breath. That mechanical grace that filters through the hands and through the air when the self sees it has no choice but to move toward a world of symbols and prayer. In the desert tides of Reno, and under the brooding sky of San Jacinto men barefoot, women in beautiful cotton skirts are laying down tarps like this – portable labyrinths – on which they'll formalize our pilgrimage from kiss to bed to river's edge. For a path, a cruciform quadrant or a six-petal rose that calls up the Heart of Chartres. And, for the blind walk, the on-axis straight approach to the rose's core at the center of the mat: the mantra's mantra. How good they are to make a prayer life of the body's work. Or not goodness, but resolve, perhaps. The same resolve that keeps us at our tasks: Saturdays with our chores, Sundays in garden paths lost in the rhythm of bowing and straightening up assured our small cruelties are absolved from above. . Copyright © 2013 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in the Aurorean , Spring/Summer 2014.

Index Previous Next Rate My Professor: A Rebuttal Do not take. She makes you talk no matter where you sit. I greeted you at the door, another mother’s child delivered. You looked away as if a lamb had been slain. Your early sounds parsed, seeds seeking ground – then whole thoughts crowned. Ridiculous grader. She actually reads your work instead of the deserved A. So hard to put a score on this – this wrestling with your age. Rubrics hold out such promise – then fold, fade. Instead of systems: a new thought, like a starling transporting a golden bough, was what we praised. I didn’t come here to read ancient epics, poems, plays. Remind me again how this gets an engineer employed? Leaving Troy, Odysseus had one thing – Ithaca – in mind. The gods gave him their scales: slay the proud boy in you and die a king regaled. A cyclops, sirens, a bard spared among suitors to sing your tale. All of them pleading: Set sail. Set sail. . Copyright © 2022 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Sky Island Journal , Issue #23, Winter 2023. From the editors: [This poem] spoke to us immediately. Intensely personal yet wildly accessible, it transports and challenges us in ways that poems seldom do. This powerful, vulnerable, tapestry of human landscape is a meditation on the presence of absence and the absence of presence, and it bears fruit in such beautiful and unexpected ways ... The elegance of your craft, and “Rate My Professor: A Rebuttal,” are two gifts that keep on giving; we discover more about them, and ourselves, with every reading.

Index Previous Next Washday After Grandma Moses So hard to know the subject: a meadow, dead center of oils in green? Or left of it, this hyperactive wash scene: milky-white shirts scattered on the green's mossy edge. Rows of blanched sheets fluttering from taut lines that hem the green, that keep the women with their laundry always receding. And opposite the sheets, a picket fence that seems to frame the spongy grades of green and lime and ask us to reflect on - what? Something the women and the others have quietly agreed to turn away from. Look how they crowd their way into the margins. Here, a harvest story: flecks of red gathered into baskets. Words being said between the harvesters. Words so compelling that one of them stands upright to view the other. Is he facing the painting's question? Or does he only seem to look at him because they share this tiny patch of goldenrod and green and picket fences? Easy to grant: this kind of ground that parcels out our senses. And far, far off from center, a first or last encounter: a woman stops as she exits a dark, cool shed - stops, not to adjust to the day's stark light but to feel the gaze of a man more painted than she, to feel the thrust of sepia: his suit, dabbed on like that line of aging wood outside the shed; like the sepia dresses of the women nearby; like the silo, sepia and Indian red, that hedge her in. Roads leading in, but not to the center of life. Only the large white house, the same starched white as the sheets the women hang. Windows with shades half-drawn so evenly that they have clearly been painted on. A front door shut so tight that it disappears, at times, as white will against white. The chimney (and so, the hearth) an afterthought in browns and burgundy. Is this the cache of colors then that comes with knowing one's lot? The end of looking east or west? The fertile ground fenced off? . Copyright © 2006 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Published in Ekphrasis , Fall/Winter 2006.

Index Previous Next Oaths, Curses, Blessings As a girl, I learned to hurl a curse so it would hurt. The skill, not in the words but in the work: bringing the self to feel another's precious losses as though they were one's own. And then, like an informer against the heart, delivering the blows: May you wake without air, without light. May you walk with a league of homeless shadows by your side. Although it was play it frightened me to see a hex take hold in a friend's eye, to see the crushing sorrows one can summon with the mind. Tonight, in the ashen shadows of your room those curses seem to linger like stray dogs reminding me, as the unfortunate always do, of our double lives. Our tendency to come to terms too late. Your breadth, like oatmeal's blooming scent, circles them in a breeze. Above us, light that should comfort: glow -in-the-dark stars careen like clockwork through a black sky. For a lamp: a shuttle that turns unceasingly over a dimly-lit earth. I cover you again, although this August night is still and though it's me that's shaking. With a different girl behind us, this stillness might be our grace. Instead it keeps me here tonight not praying really, but pacing. . Copyright © 2007 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in the Georgetown Review , Spring 2008