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Index Previous Next Learning the Scriptures Molusco … Aqui… Aqui. Bucket in hand, I follow his lead. His silhouette in the early light strikes a perfect toe point – not ballet but the liturgy’s greeting in a sun-steamed fandango. The hard, muddy floor of low tide, his stage. I see a clam spit where he taps his toe. Plunging my fingers into the cold, black muck, I wriggle it out: meal and sacrifice. A ritual-like rhythm that the dance ignites. When we steam the clams, the smell of vinegar and hops bubbling in the broth overtakes us. A purifying incense. Pabst Blue Ribbon for him and since I am ten, Porto with Ginger Al e. In the pot the clams flower and pop. Pelican-like, he tips his head back to let the fat belly slide down whole. Delicioso . Body, blood, soul, divinity. Clean-shaven for Mass. Brown. Azorean. Vovô , to me. A welcome substitute to the homily: Tap. Plunge. Smell. Dance. Taste . But not in a faith, not in a language I knew yet. . Copyright © 2018 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Naugatuck River Review : A Journal of Narrative Poetry That Sings, Summer/Fall 2018 – Issue 20.

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

Selected Poems of Maria Teresa Horta Translated by: M.B. McLatchey and Edite Cunhã Forthcoming in Inventory , 2020 Prev 13 Next GREED I submit to my greed along the trail of voices and the footprints of books that disrupt my peace I learn each word down to the stem of the rhyme taking pleasure from the hem of my writing skirt in the vertigo of poetry adjusting the verse to the danger Epic and homeless AVIDEZ Eu sigo a minha avidez pelo caminho das vozes e as pegadas dos livros a tirarem o sossego Cada palavra aprendida até à haste da rima tomando o gosto à bainha da saia da minha escrita na vertigem da poesia ajustando o verso ao perigo Epopeia e desabrigo Copyright © 2019 M. B. McLatchey & Edite Cunha, with permission. All rights reserved. Forthcoming in Inventory , Princeton University, 2020. Copyright © 2017 Maria Teresa Horta, from her collection Poesis . Dom Quixote Publisher, Lisbon. Back to List

Award Winning Poetry - 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 Previous Next

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 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 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 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.

Published Poems (sorted): Click on column to sort. * publication forthcoming

The Lame God: Florida Book Review Reviewed by Marci Calabretta Because the adage is true that there are too many books and so little time, I've learned to devour poetry quickly. When I picked up M. B. McLatchey's debut collection of poetry, The Lame God , I expected to breeze through it as easily as any other book. But The Lame God is not like any other book. In fact, it is exactly the sort of book you can only read by pondering slowly. It is also a book that calls readers to action, even before the first poem begins. In the preface, McLatchey writes that roughly 2,000 children "are reported missing daily to the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children." An opening epigraph next reads, "Acting quickly is critical. Seventy-four percent of abducted children who are ultimately murdered are dead within three hours of the abduction." In the first section, each poem resonates with the frustration of waiting helplessly for a child to return. The narrator in "1-800-THE-LOST" says, "I want her to discuss you in the present tense. // I want the gods to stop pretending love calls the departed home." Each subsequent section delves deeper into the anguish of loss. First, McLatchey shows the frustration which evolves into real and righteous anger, demanding that the guilty "choke up my child like the Olympians— / a girl, unbruised by her journey down their // throats." Then comes the lashing-out and self-blame. "Apology" is a list poem of regrets that will break your heart: For—trusting your safe return-- not missing you. For trusting the gods. For my second-rate circumspection; for trusting the odds. [...] For teaching you not to shout. For us still uncovering your terror—layer by layer. For this sputtering sound of real prayer. Finally, comes the acceptance—not of absence, or of seeking justice, or even of grief itself. No, these poems finally settle into the acceptance of waiting for news of any kind—good or bad— because either way, these parents will be there when their children come home. "Do not worry, daughter. We are not leaving our watch / or showing our cards—just changing the guard." McLatchey is the poet standing at the gate, holding a torch to keep hope aflame even as the darkness descends. A graduate of Harvard University, Brown University, and Goddard College, McLatchey currently teaches writing and humanities at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University in Daytona, Florida. Well-versed in Classical mythology, she knows how to grit her teeth and tell the traumatic story in a way that will make people listen. She is the rare poet who looks fearlessly and closely at the terrible actions of which humans are capable, and who tenderly yet artfully tells the true stories of Adam Walsh, Amber Hagerman, Levi Frady, Maile Gilbert, Morgan Chauntel Nick, and Molly Bish, whose mother "encouraged [McLatchey] to 'keep talking about this; keep writing.'" When Edward Field chose The Lame God for the 2013 May Swenson Poetry Award, he wrote, "it takes courage to read this book...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." This book is not for the faint-hearted, or for the "breezy reader." This book is for those 2,000 children daily reported missing, for their families, and for those moments when poetry alone can break through the grief. "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.'" Marci Calabretta grew up in Ithaca, NY and is currently earning an MFA at FIU. Her work has appeared in Rainy Day, The Albion Review, and The MacGuffin. She is the co-founder and managing editor for Print Oriented Bastards and a Florida Book Review Contributing Editor. Marci Calabretta grew up in Ithaca, NY and is currently earning an MFA at FIU. Her work has appeared in Rainy Day, The Albion Review, and The MacGuffin. She is the co-founder and managing editor for Print Oriented Bastards and a Florida Book Review Contributing Editor. The original article by Marci Calabretta can be found at: http://www.floridabookreview.net/poetry.html

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. Award Winning Poetry - 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. Previous Next

For a foster child Award Winning Poetry - 2014 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. Previous Next