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Index Previous Next We leave the beaches for the tourists, mostly and the history of tourism, a history of our shadow selves: wing-prints of fallen angels in shimmering sand, flapping, flapping – the soul’s earth mapping or a mating dance. Mouths, an upturned string of shells opening to a vast and mythical sky. These are the things they leave behind. A paddleball court etched in the muddy flats where a ruddy turnstone makes his nest’s scrapes, space for a female’s eggs; and seagulls dive for nacho chips and funnel cake; and the sanderling’s shrill song is the echo of a mother’s plea to her children out too deep. These are the calls we hear in our sleep. Or, the black-bellied plover’s plaintive call as he circles the shore for a sandworm or a crab – or for something, something to eat – and absently darts toward a sand castle made from plastic-cup molds and a child’s empty pail, pink or lime green or gold. And a wave with a biblical thrust catches them off guard: a torrent of coconut oil and ocean spray, a sandal, a drugstore romance – then the bright, shallow meadows and plank. Kitsch in a tide’s eternal crawl and roll and spray. Song and refrain. . Copyright © 2018 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Saw Palm: Florida L iterature and Art , Issue 13. Forthcoming in the anthology Pushpins of Paradise, University Press of Florida.

Published Poetry Translations: Title Portuguese Journal Author 1 LITTLE BY LITTLE A POUCO E POUCO Ezra Maria Teresa Horta 2 THE LEAVES AS FOLHAS Ezra Maria Teresa Horta 3 THE HAND AND THE WRITING A MÃO E A ESCRITA Ezra Maria Teresa Horta 4 POEM POEMA Springhouse Maria Teresa Horta 5 FROM THE BEGINNING AB INITIO Springhouse Maria Teresa Horta 6 ANTICIPATION ESPERA Springhouse Maria Teresa Horta 7 IDEALIZATION IDEALIZAÇÃO Springhouse Maria Teresa Horta 8 FROM MUTINY TO MUTINY DE MOTIM EM MOTIM Metamorphoses Maria Teresa Horta 9 DELIRIUMS DELÍRIOS Metamorphoses Maria Teresa Horta 10 FURTIVE STEPS TRAÇOS FURTIVOS Metamorphoses Maria Teresa Horta 11 POEM AFTER POEM POEMA A POEMA Metamorphoses Maria Teresa Horta 12 FROM LIBERTY TO LIBERTY DE LIBERDADE EM LIBERDADE Inventory Maria Teresa Horta 13 GREED AVIDEZ Inventory Maria Teresa Horta 14 MY SUSTENANCE MEU ALIMENTO Inventory Maria Teresa Horta 16 THE CONDITION OF THE VERSES DA CONDIÇÃO DOS VERSOS Alchemy Maria Teresa Horta 17 VERSES VERSOS SWWIM Maria Teresa Horta

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 Invocation In this bar’s suspended lights, a halo hovers over you. The tattoo that you stitched to your neck – mythic spheres, a cluster of unnamed stars, a pyramid – transforms to a sheet of muted notes, or a lusterless, untraveled map once sketched for an epic plan you had to separate, engage the three Fates, their give and take, then bring your long tale home. The bartender asks, OK? And though it means a summoning, you nod and take another fill from her tap; the glass like Waterford the way you hold it still. It takes all you have to drink from this new fountain. To feel the sickening fall of cool, fresh water against your stomach wall. To smell the souring sediment of small bites of food. Good boy, your mother must have crooned, Open wide. And she must have mirror-opened her mouth too as she spooned up solids pureed and fed them to a vision, a mother’s trust, a boy’s long view. Her mission, to nurture the god in you. I am calling her here tonight – to your stool, to this constellation of dying stars; to this yearning – yours and ours – to this well of life’s water, grit and resolution, memories; to the imprint of an infant I held close to me still altering my posture and my scaffolding. . Copyright © 2020 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Cider Press Review

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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

Award Winning Poetry - 2012 Winner of the 46er Prize for Poetry Bingo Night for Missing and Exploited Children B efore we went underground. Before you fell through a gyre with no sound. I f one piece were unwound. If you had run. If we had looked for you sooner. If you had screamed. If the gods had intervened. N ascent. Still blooming, the orchid on your window sill. A thrill of color. G one. Gone. Gone. Gone. Gone. Phantom limb. If the soul leaves the body, we did not feel it go. Nothing and everything cloistered in stone. O mens we left for others. Ripples on a resting pond. The whistling of a breeze. The imprint on the ovaries. Copyright © 2012 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Winner of the 2012 Adirondack Review's 46er Prize for Poetry. Published in The Adirondack Review , Summer 2013. Original version published here . The 46er Prize refers to the forty-six major peaks of the Adirondacks. Hikers who reach all forty-six summits are deemed "Forty-sixers." Also published by Beacon Press in The Blue Room Collective's anthology, Grabbed , Summer 2020. Previous Next

Award Winning Poetry - 1974 Winner of the Emerson College Original Poetry Award On Rewinding I have been told that by wish and will I fell from His sheep- wool pocket into one dame's arms; and that was birth. I have been told that angels bowl; heaven opens up when the tenth pin rolls. I have been told of cloud-grazing mares— and twice it has rained cats and dogs. I have been told that Saint Peter saw a vision. I have been told that truth may be measured by the shade of one's tongue or the length of one's nose—and twice I have doubted my countenance. I have been told when 'neath the cornered quilt that the sand- man would alight and wave his sack of sleeping dust over my last Hail Mary. I have been told that woman is infamy; man sin. And I am the issue of both. I have been told to accept His rites and wrath. Yet, I have heard over grace and gossip. from bible and book, of womb-wrenching pain, of breached and blue-born, of original sin; and that was birth. I have heard of atmospheric pressure and tropical cyclones; and that was Hurricane Ann. I have heard that fishermen like their wine and all have visions. I have heard that the truth made Socrates stutter. I have heard that some men never sleep. I have heard that opposites attract (and gather ye rosebuds while ye may) I have heard that doubt is the stepping stone to knowledge, and knowledge is the end of man. I have heard too little of too much. And still as green as County Cork, I have but fingered man's seven selves. Copyright © 2017 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in the Spring 1975 issue of The Emerson Review . M.B., Weymouth North High School, Massachusetts, October, 1974 Contest judge - Charles Simic . Previous Next

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

Award Winning Poetry - 2025 Winner of the Lazuli Literary Group 2024 Writing Contest - 2 of 3 - 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 - First Place. Other poems in collection: "Ethos, Pathos, Logos" 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

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