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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.

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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.

Index Previous Next NRR's 11th Narrative Poetry Contest - Semi Finalist Ode for an Absent Student So many dramas have played themselves out: a girl who saw through us, our Scout’s-honor truths; a girl scribbling her own proofs on the walls of a cell; a girl singing Fado in a tilted café, her star-rise a perfect – a textbook – chandelle; or, a girl whose shrill call feathers the walls of a well. Well of knowledge, coins, half-lives; mortar and water, a god’s paring knife. For his warrior mettle, Aristotle made Alexander recite – not the songs of Ajax – but the chant of his mother’s midwife. How she crooned at the sight of his scalp. Quick breaths, short beats like a cuckoo’s heart in flight; later, a conqueror’s lullaby; an air in clipped verse for his trek across the east, for his rise and fall, for the sound of his troops’ flat feet. Airs like anthems we hear in our sleep; bright conquests or the dull retreat. This morning marks three weeks. Your peers – all of us – proceed because there is a map to walk, countries to Hellenize – or not. Seas, you and Alexander must have known, cannot be crossed with brute force, missiles and stone. There is the compass that is another rower’s heartache for his home; the crow’s nest call that it will not be long. Things you forgot when you set out alone. . Copyright © 2019 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Naugatuck River Review's 11th Narrative Poetry Contest - Semi Finalist Published in the Winter/Spring 2020 issue of Naugatuck River Review .

Index Previous Next 2008 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award - Special Merit The Retrieval Here again. The way you used to wake us – rouse us with that impatient stare. A stubborn, boy-crazy, eighth-grader you make the same requests. We say them with you. Isn't this what happens when some of us bring water to the dead? This private shift to living only sometimes with the living. Eight months among the missing and you come padding back in your white socks and jeans; specter of grief we locked away before it made us more dry-mouthed and speechless than our counterparts in dreams. Grief like light encounters in a half-sleep: your moist face in a morning mirror. Are you in someone else's too? O, city of mirrors. And how, each night you casually resume at every threshold to every listing room that awkward lean -- the one you would do when you could not ask, but knew that we could help. Your bony shoulder barely touching the wall; your right foot crossing the other. So much the pose of one who is neither coming nor going. It's difficult to know why we should wake. Still, every day we rise like guardians ex officio, like gate-keepers to a city of passing shades -- each one a new acquaintance with your face. Each one a new petition for deliverance of the innocent and quaking. . Copyright © 2007 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award - Special Merit. Published in The Comstock Review , January 2008.

Index Previous Next The Peculiar Truth Not much has happened since your last letter. I have read parts of it over again and to very close friends. They have felt obliged to say something as you have. They have been good friends. The postcard is to show you The sun-glazed coast of Salthill. But, of course, it is winter here too. I had not meant to carry on about the fog. Though it rubbed out the channel, probably it had no connection with our way of vanishing. Still, you must know how it is here; scraping beans up from Royal Worcester, how the table is set. My foreigner and I sit adjacent to each other swinging our forks, wishing for something spicy. Eventually we make apologies and slip through slender passageways to breathe easier, to feed on candy, to wrap our arms around ourselves the way this country does it. From my window and everyone else’s there is a beautiful garden which is not ours. From here I imagine you looking wiser than you are as if you knew this and that. . Copyright © 1978 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Grain , May 1985.

The Lame God by M. B. McLatchey Winner of the 2013 May Swenson Poetry Award University Press of Colorado & Utah State University Press 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. — From the foreword by Edward Field, American poet and essayist, and judge for the 2013 May Swenson Award What Others are Saying: Video of Reading at BYU on Nov. 1, 2013 Foreword to The Lame God by Edward Field The Florida Book Review Brad Crenshaw Review National Public Radio - An Interview w/ UPR's Tom Williams Interview by Kickstand Poetry Book Reviews: In The Brothers Karamazov, Ivan demands to know why, “if everyone must suffer . . . pray tell me what children have to do with it? McLatchey, like Ivan, asks her gods to explain themselves in this startling collection of poems, searing in their union of feeling and form. These poems tore me up, and they will you, too, but never does McLatchey sentimentalize. Instead, here are lines informed by an intelligence rarely heard today as the voice of a grieving parent crying out to the gods finds its echo, but little solace, in the immortals of classical myth. A painfully beautiful debut collection!! — Bruce Guernsey, former editor of The Spoon River Poetry Review and author of From Rain: Poems, 1970-2010 This book is crushing and brilliantly written. If ever there were a time for McLatchey’s deeply moving and compassionate poems, it is now with the crazed, unchecked violence against our children. Our Western myths of tragedy and religious martyrdom pale against such inexplicable preying on children and devastating tragedy. There are no elegies here, only a powerful intellect at work and a truly gifted poet’s heartbreaking songs to our lost children. — Jeffrey Greene, author of Beautiful Monsters Like the mockingbird's cry of loss in Whitman's "Out of the Cradle," a haunted music echoes throughout this wrenching sequence. Whether invoking myth or late night TV, the horrific scenario of a child's abduction and murder and the aftermath – experienced through a family's, especially a mother's eyes -- is never less than convincingly presented. With considerable technical flair, M.B. McLatchey in The Lame God reminds us of what poetry can be, at its best: a supreme act of imagination and empathy. — Peter Schmitt, author of Renewing the Vows In magisterial cadences, this powerful poetic sequence gives voice to the unspeakable and transposes profound grief into immortal song. McLatchey's poems are talismans and spells--not against loss but against forgetting. — Philip Brady, author of Fathom and co-founder of Etruscan Press We wake in scenes that tell us what we dreamed. So begins one of the poems in M. B. McLatchey’s harrowing and remarkable collection, which is, with its deftly rendered and exquisite surface, a book about child abduction and murder drawn as the alternate reality it actually is. This is a book, when considering the soul chamber from which these poems must have originated, about the world-without-end quality to grief and the unresolved heart. It resists every easy answer and courts every dangerous and heavenly prayer. — Michael Klein, author of The Talking Day Book Details: Title: The Lame God Series: Swenson Poetry Award Hardcover: 80 pages Publisher: Utah State University Press; 1 edition Pub. Date: September 15, 2013 Language: English ISBN-10: 0874219078 ISBN-13: 978-0874219074 Product Dimensions: 8.5 x 5.5 x 0.5 inches Shipping Weight: 1 pounds Reading Dates: October 30, 2013 - CityArt, Salt Lake Library, Salt Lake City, UT. 7:00pm October 31, 2013 - Utah State University, Logan, UT. 12:00 noon November 1, 2013 - Brigham Young University, Provo, UT. 12:00 noon

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Award Winning Poetry - 2011 Winner of the 2011 American Poet Prize 1-800-THE-LOST The weight of the receiver in my hand: the down bird in my palm first lifting you. The counselor’s words: rehearsed, a burlesque bland. The shift in time, the shift to looking through her lens: today you are just one of two hundred lost. My eyes fix on our bright fence. I say your name, but you are no one new – caught in an ancient book that she’ll condense. I want her to discuss you in the present tense. I want the gods to stop pretending love calls the departed home. We called you with our various loves, had hope, hovered over still fields; made wind like the gods do before they come unhinged, let their rage loose on an unresponsive yield. Fields gone deaf and dumb; unshaken, fruitless ground, unmoved by a neighborhood of mothers who left their own to find you – tables, like mine, set. I want the gods to swallow their prayers whole. Choke up my child like the Olympians – a girl, unbruised by her journey down their throats. I want her at my table: fruit, alms that the gods, I see, can give or take – balm for the irritations I caused, or they caused; gifts between us or perhaps among themselves – a girl that they’ll barter away. I’m here. And I’m willing to talk, or trade. Copyright © 2011 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Winner of the American Poet Prize for 2011 Published in The American Poetry Journal , Spring 2012. Previous Next

Index Previous Next Calendar Plans For Geoffrey In the living room, a standoff – a deadlock between right and wrong side of the law. A boy bellies forward, holster and chaps, motions invisible troops; his silver gun drawn, waving in the morning sun as if to cut a map through ranges unknown: cushions from a worn sofa, sheer cliffs that fold, collapse, take their toll; his brother content in a sheriff’s badge removable for a change of roles. How our memories tell us what we cannot know. How in retrospect, days and months, our calendar plans were a grace. How stars on straw costume cowboy hats return like figures of forgotten clashes, traces of a shimmering now: a new uniform, new boots, new hat, new vows; occasion for the saints to be called by name. St. Michael, patron of the airborne, stay with my boy tonight, tomorrow, all the days. Know the two disparate tones beneath a skein of geese – their flight so fixed, resolved – when a mother prays, and when a mother calls. . Copyright © 2022 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Relief , Spring 2022.

Selected Poems of Maria Teresa Horta Translated by: M.B. McLatchey and Edite Cunhã Published in Metamorphoses , 2019 Prev 11 Next POEM AFTER POEM Poem after poem I write poetry day after day, after night and startled I clench and I whisper and again the tumult Poem by poem I write the disquiet the translucent honesty of the wing, the harmony which desires the verse in the body of light Poem by poem I touch, assume the body of the work, fondling the language in a slow and inseparable indeterminable pleasure I dream, past symbol, past metaphor past syntax Word after word, after word after word… POEMA A POEMA Poema a poema escrevo poesia dia após dia, após noite e sobressalto cerro e sussurro e de novo tumulto Poema a poema escrevo o desassossego a translúcida lisura da asa, a harmonia que deseja o verso no corpo da luz Poema a poema vou tocando, tomando o corpo da escrita, afagando a linguagem num lento e indizível prazer indeterminável Sonho, após símbolo, após metáfora após sintaxe Palavra após palavra, após palavra após palavra... Copyright © 2019 M. B. McLatchey & Edite Cunha, with permission. All rights reserved. Published in Metamorphoses , Fall 2019. Copyright © 2017 Maria Teresa Horta, from her collection Poesis . Dom Quixote Publisher, Lisbon. Back to List

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.