The Lame God Foreword by Edward Field Let me warn the reader: It takes courage to read this book. This heartbreaking sequence of poems on the abduction of a daughter hit me like a ton of bricks, and I had to put it aside several times. But what courage it took to write it! Though there are many poems on grief, and even on crime—websites are devoted to them—I have never come across a book of poetry like this before. I hesitate to mention a popular genre like “true crime” in relation to the high art of poetry, but The Lame God like that genre speaks with such power, because its subject matter is so unspeakable. While M.B. McLatchey’s lyricism here seems indifferent to narrative, and this collection recoils from the piecemeal reportage of the crime novel, each poem in the sequence draws us closer to the scene of the crime. What we are not told only enlarges the horror – and the pathos. With its controlled language and emotional restraint, I’m reminded of my acting teacher who used to say, “Actor weeps, audience sleeps. Actor withholds tears, audience weeps.” This book proves it. Striking about the style is its dead seriousness. The tragedy explored here has grounded the author in such a profound, such a justified, seriousness that there is no room for anything else—no playfulness, no witticism—no relief, except in the cathartic release of poetry. In fact, it seems a heroic act—an act of survival—that she has sculpted these poems so austerely, and so appropriately like a Classical urn. I was surprised to find Classical references in poetry again, after they had disappeared for the past half-century, but they work! For in the violence of the ancient Greek myths, McLatchey finds an appropriate landscape of metaphor. May Swenson, in her poem “Snow in New York”, spoke of the power and magic of words. Dealing with my own sorrows and terrors, I have always felt poetry to be a healing art, and it has helped me through my worst times. Indeed, the Inuit taught that the right words actually make things happen (in spite of W.H. Auden’s dictum that they don’t). Like a survivor of other horrors, one can never be reconciled to such a monstrous event as this book reveals. Nor does religion help much. Yet, in exploring such a grief through the language of poetry, McLatchey makes things happen—she gives a voice to those too grief-stricken to speak, and she refuses to allow us to suffer in silence. It is a hard fact that, to the artist, everything is material. We grit our teeth and use even the most personal catastrophes—our own and those of others—to make art. This is what the Classical authors did, and this is what M.B. McLatchey has done with her great subject in this book. The effect is powerful, and ultimately, The Lame God proves that if our traumatic experiences don’t destroy us, they can produce masterful works, in which human nature rises to its heights. Edward Field 2013 Preface by M.B. McLatchey In his Preface to the Lyrical Ballads, Wordsworth insists that the poet’s subject need not come from personal experience, but it must become personal experience. In committing to a regimen of repeated witness in the world, the poet’s very impulses and habits of mind are transformed until, over time, the poet’s work becomes the poet’s life. When parents lose a child to an abduction and murder and then descend into a well of grief, the poet writes as a way to call to them until it becomes clear that she must descend into the well herself—to know the water level there, the damp walls, the underbelly of this abomination. The poems in this collection are “well poems”—conceived and drafted in a pit of loss and rage, with its shadowy promise of redemption. The story that this book tells is true. No names have been changed to protect the innocent—the innocent have already seen the face of evil, smelled its breath, learned its customs. This book is offered in memory of Molly Bish and in homage to her mother, Maggie Bish, who encouraged me to “keep talking about this; keep writing.” It is also for Adam Walsh, Amber Hagerman, Levi Frady, Maile Gilbert, and Morgan Chauntel Nick. It is for the roughly 2,000 Mollys and Adams and Ambers and Levis and Morgans that are reported missing daily to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children; it is for Deb Cucanich and for the tireless case-workers at the Department of Children and Families. This book is for three girls held captive and abused for a decade in a house in an American city—but it is especially for the child who has not yet pried open a bolted door, borrowed a neighbor’s phone, and announced to a 911 operator, “I’ve been kidnapped and I’ve been missing . . . and I’m here.” M.B. McLatchey 2013

Index Previous Next First Place - Lazuli Literary Group 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. Other poems in collection: "Ethos, Logos, Pathos" 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

Index Previous Next Arcadia Hear the songs you crave. You shall have your songs, she another kind of reward. ― Virgil, Eclogue VI The city is sleeping in. Their breaths rise and part. Here at my desk and on a kind of wing, I slip into a dream that you seem to deliver: hips lifting and rocking, heels digging in. O, what kind of play is this? Is it what is real and what is not? What clarity it brings about the mind's cool refusal to over-script the heart's sense of time; about the body's urge to live its life. Pulled from one place, how naturally it grafts itself onto another; how, even in the driest season, we look for yield: shocking pink blossoms from clay earth or lilies from the dry cross-weave in a chair of forgetfulness. Or, about love's need to perform what it knows -- as in Rodin's artful unfinishedness: a passionate kiss, a woman's hips turning on a mass of roughhewn marble to which lovers are always attached. . Copyright © 2007 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Cider Press Review , Vol. 9, Spring 2008.

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 Aubade We wake in scenes that tell us what we dreamed. Like Pilon's warm gisants, my head turned toward yours as if to close a space. Your pulse oddly restored in a sculptor's bloc. Nude and appointed to reflect a light, to make a chapel out of earth's casualties. And then, inevitable as the breath we have to take, the choice we're granted in this early hour - the brackish call of migratory waterfowl or art's stony appeal: sealed in a hall as statues of our decay doomed, yet attached in a docket of holy days. . Copyright © 2005 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Published in DMQ Review , Summer 2006. Original version published here .

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 2008 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award - Special Merit Museum Hestia, protector of missing children, you with soft oil dripping ever from your locks, come now into this house -- draw near, and withal bestow grace upon my song. ― Ancient Greek prayer Historical pieces, these things of yours: a deflating ball, a bike not on its kick, but propped against a garage wall; a crestfallen lacrosse stick. Tours have come through as if walking the way of the cross: neighbors with pasta, a friend to awkwardly drop off a borrowed dress. Police with their pens and pads making calculations. A press release for the missing, accosted kidnapped, or dead; your photo, a ghost of a soul you had. Musee de Beaux Arts for the ambushed, the dispossessed, for guardians, who did not guard our watch, conservators of hellish thoughts, thoughts too wretched for talk. Prayers in place of a fight we would have fought had you called out. But what, after all, can our prayers do except repeat prayers from the past, and that surely God knew. . Copyright © 2007 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award - Special Merit. Published in The Comstock Review , January 2008.

Selected Poems of Maria Teresa Horta Translated by: M.B. McLatchey and Edite Cunhã Published in SWWIM , 2020 Prev 17 Next VERSES They’re the verses the twilight they’re the days they’re the seas the saliva the open hand in the back-light at noon they’re the abyssal gestures, the uncertain pain They’re the verbs the secrets the alchemy they’re the sweet lips and their excess the impulses of the gesture where rose up the contour of the body most perverse They’re the voices singular the melodies they’re the rigors of the forms most diverse inventing themselves simply because they prevented an anxious possession so uncertain They’re the syllables intact the utopias the clumsy the past the nightmare dreamt during the dawn the sweat drenching my hair They’re the doubts, possibly the night in the labor of unfettered writing everything that is tactile and internal entwines itself in the thread of dawn Sometimes an even more thirsty gesture surges and then the flight, the stroke of a knife to the voracious side of reflection when love has nothing more to say VERSOS São os versos os crepúsculos são os dias são os mares a saliva a mão aberta na luz de bruços ao meio-dia são os gestos abissais, a dor incerta São os verbos os segredos a alquimia são os doces lábios e o seu excesso os impulsos do gesto onde se erguia o contorno do corpo mais perverso São as vozes singulares as melodias são os rigores das formas mais diversas a inventarem-se só porque impediam uma ansiosa posse tão incerta São as sílabas intactas as utopias o torpe o passado o pesadelo sonhado durante a alvorada o suor alagando o meu cabelo São as dúvidas, possivelmente a noite no labor da escrita desatada tudo aquilo que é táctil e por dentro se enovela no fio da madrugada Por vezes surge ainda um gesto mais sedento e em seguida o voo, o golpe de uma faca no lado voraz do pensamento quando o amor não quer dizer mais nada Copyright © 2019 M. B. McLatchey & Edite Cunha, with permission. All rights reserved. Published in SWWIM (Supporting Women Writers in Miami), Septmber 2020. Copyright © 2017 Maria Teresa Horta, from her collection Poesis . Dom Quixote Publisher, Lisbon. Back to List

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

Index Previous Next Winner of the 2007 Spoon River Poetry Review Editors' Prize The Rape of Chryssipus ''She came home bone by bone. First her shin bone, then her skull. In the end, 26 of Molly's bones came home to us." ― Mother of 16-year old Molly Bish, whose remains were found 3 years after she was abducted and murdered in June 2000. For the rape of Chryssipus, King Laius suffered. The gods saw what he took -- a young boy's chance to play in the Nemean Games, to make his offerings to Zeus, to win his wreath of wild celery leaves, advance the Greek way: piety, honor, and strength. He raided their vast heaven, not just a small boy's frame. Their justice was what Laius came to dread: a son that would take his mother to bed, a champion of the gods, an Oedipus. We called on the same gods on your behalf, asked for their twisted best: disease like a Chimera to eat your Laius piece by piece; a Harpie who might wrap her tongue around his neck and play his game of breathing and not-breathing that he made you play; Medusa's curse in stone; and a Golden Ram to put you back together bone by bone. . Copyright © 2007 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Winner of the 2007 Spoon River Poetry Review Editors' Prize. Published in The Spoon River Poetry Review , Summer/Fall 2007. Judge's Review

Index Previous Next A Glass of Absinthe After Degas At first we pass them, unstudied as a snapshot where marginal subjects have slipped in. A disenchanted pair off-center and off-level, lean like bags of flour into the singular pitch of a cafe's genial keel; no ballast here except for the pool of milky licorice - a teetering glass of absinthe. So startling to see how everything was made to dovetail; how the zigzag of empty tables between us and the luckless couple traces a brooding loneliness, a composition so boldly calculated that we can hardly face its draughtsmanship. Powdered pigments molded into figures whose back sides blaze in mirrors propped behind them like butterflies caught in an ashen rain. The proprietor had thought the glass might brighten the place. But, there is no changing history or the reflections of our lives. . Upcoming in The Banyan Review, Fall 2023.

Index Previous Next A Drink of Water A tactic for keeping us near, not for staying awake. Still we’d call, Go to sleep! – joke that the well was dry. We don’t see our mistakes right away. I sent his father pushing his whole self: sleep-walker, his father's father, laggard pilgrim. From across the hall, we heard a small boy drink as if he meant to teach us how it’s done: exaggerated gulps, or blessing of the throat, or baptism; the sinking thrill of water filling his bony frame, or drowning him. And then the playful gasp between each self-immersion. The antics of the unconverted. Had he said his prayers? His sadness at the question, his sour objection. One more. One more dog-weary tour and prayer was this encounter of his thirst with ours. . Copyright © 2019 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in The Banyan Review , Fall 2023.