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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

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Index Previous Next Trojan Horse Sorry... currently embargoed until publication. . Copyright © 2025 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Forthcoming in The Common , Spring 2026.

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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.

Selected Poems of Maria Teresa Horta Translated by: M.B. McLatchey and Edite Cunhã Published in Metamorphoses, 2019 Prev 9 Next DELIRIUMS At first one hears the wings with their veiled whispers then the feathers obscured by pearls and satins Murmurs of silk mutineers in a whirring of desire verses, delights sonnets and deliriums of lilies shattered DELÍRIOS Primeiro escutam-se as asas no seu rumor velado depois as plumas turvas de pérolas e cetins Gemidos de seda amotinados num zunido de desejo estrofes, deleite sonetos e delírios de lírios estilhaçados 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

Selected Poems of Maria Teresa Horta Translated by: M.B. McLatchey and Edite Cunhã Published in Metamorphoses, 2019 Prev 10 Next FURTIVE STEPS I feel its traces furtive in the hollow of my hand gaining sudden strangeness luminosities, ravings of my lost senses arresting my heart descending to the bottom by the arm’s attrition until it reaches the slim wrist It is poetry arriving taking form and voice saying what I do not say TRAÇOS FURTIVOS Sinto-lhe os traços furtivos no côncavo da minha mão ganhando estranhezas súbitas agudezas, desvarios dos meus sentidos perdidos a prender-me o coração a descer até ao fundo pela rasura do braço até chegar ao desvão na delgadeza do pulso É a poesia que chega tomando forma e ruído a falar o que eu não digo 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

AWP Interview with M.B. McLatchey Can Writing Be Taught? I have no doubt that writing can be taught—but here the burden of responsibility falls mostly on the teacher, not the writer. By this I mean that writing must be taught in a way that emphasizes discovery and growth of the student-writer’s voice, rather than emphasizing adaptation of a writer’s voice to a history of literature or to current trends in literature. I believe that this is the best way to foster originality and freshness in young and so-called “emerging writers.” M.B. - July, 2017 Excerpted from her Full Interview with AWP.

Index Previous Next First Place - Lazuli Literary Group 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. Other poems in collection: "Plan B" and "Is There a Final Exam?". 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