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Selected Poems of Maria Teresa Horta Translated by: M.B. McLatchey and Edite Cunhã Published in Ezra , Spring 2019 Prev 3 Next THE HAND AND THE WRITING I let my hand run through my dream sudden wakeups thirsty in the invention of the word the other side of pain and the truth of the page A MÃO E A ESCRITA Deixo a mão correr pelo meu sonho num sobressalto sedento no invento da palavra pelo avesso da pena e a lisura da página Copyright © 2019 M. B. McLatchey & Edite Cunha, with permission. All rights reserved. Published in Ezra , Spring 2019. Copyright © 2017 Maria Teresa Horta, from her collection Poesis . Dom Quixote Publisher, Lisbon. Back to List

Index Previous Next The Shadow Maker Our goal is to make it so there's as little friction as possible to having a social experience. – Mark Zuckerberg is the fifth richest man in the world; a harvester of pearls: our small talk like algae-rich waters and tides –new births, divorces, prizes our children acquire – feeding and keeping the oysters alive. is a master of illusion: figures in captioned poses, screen and light; shadows that dance on cave walls. Dramas that make us muse, lean in, post notes like medieval glosses in the margins of someone else’s domestic scenes; illuminators to an epic chant, a rhapsody’s god-dream. is the Ideal Prince, accepting the burden of princedoms, glory, survival, to jettison distinctions: good and depraved; monarch and something human saved. Better to be loved and feared rather than admired, or worse, revered. A lord who understands the desire to acquire. A magician with two hands. is a Philosopher King, able to discourse on goodness, justice, corrupting pride; hold court on high ideas: opinion, false truths, reality– a theory of forms that casts our lives in cycles, fruit and fallow; sinners redeemed. A god’s will altered; a cave master’s dream. . Copyright © 2022 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Sequestrum , Issue 32, June 2022.

Selected Poems of Maria Teresa Horta Translated by: M.B. McLatchey and Edite Cunhã Forthcoming in Inventory , 2020 Prev 14 Next MY SUSTENANCE The more I write poetry the more I surrender to the loss the more I lose myself the more I find myself I catch a glimpse and despise and discount myself The more I write poetry the more I become enlightened to turn it into my body to summon it in time making it my sustenance MEU ALIMENTO Quanto mais escrevo poesia mais me entrego ao perdimento mais me perco e mais me encontro me desencontro e vislumbro me desacato e desvendo Quanto mais escrevo poesia mais me torno alumbramento a transformá-la em meu corpo a convocá-la no tempo tornando-a meu alimento 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

Index Previous Next Girl at Piano Rings of blue smoke swirl above her head like kisses floating off a palm, or like balloons of varnished silk that stretch and lift her toward a parting draft. A mix of comic strip and something raw that worked in Lichtenstein's pastiche of lines and polka dots; yet, somehow, coming from her lips these figures make us shift and sip - and sip again. What is it makes us look away as if remembering things to do at home? Is it the clear distinction: what she sings and what she knows? That unexpected nimbus of true thought? Easier, no doubt, to look through little comic blocks, dream-like and Byzantine -- present, yet one remove from present scenes. . Copyright © 2006 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Published in Beauty/Truth: A Journal of Ekphrastic Poetry , Fall/Winter 2006.

Award Winning Poetry - 2006 Winner of the Vachel Lindsay Poetry Award Sanriku The game was not to look - but feel - the slow drag, the distant rise and fall, the quiet revolt of crests gaining an underworld; to know in our heels the moment of their advance: languid, insidious. "Sanriku!" one of us would call - a notice to the rest that it was imminent, and with one lift, a solidarity, we'd throw ourselves beachward, tossing and rolling in a curled force. Submerged, I would hear that call like water's moan, or like the heaving sobs of Asian fishermen, who felt too late the slip of plates, the buckling floor, the little missionary wave passing beneath their boats; who, steeped in so much grief, never knew the clarity that follows every quake -- when there, for just an instant, the contours of the seafloor below are mirrored in the water around our waists. Sanriku is a port in Japan that was destroyed by a tsunami in 1896. Fishermen 20 miles out to sea did not notice the wave pass under their boats because it only had the height at the time of about 15 inches. They were totally unprepared for the devastation that greeted them when they returned to the port of Sanriku - 28,000 people were killed and 170 miles of coastline were destroyed by the wave that had passed under them. Copyright © 2003 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Winner of the 2006 Vachel Lindsay Poetry Award. Published in Willow Springs 58, Fall 2006. Previous Next

Index Previous Next 2012 Rita Dove Poetry Award - Semi Finalist At the Grieving Parents Meeting In the parish hall of Saint Anthony’s Catholic Church, pictures of murdered children in our hands, we huddle in a sphere of folding chairs and a flickering fluorescent light. Some lean near the coffee and coffee cake that, each week, has the same floury smell of sympathy and each week, the same sour taste. By the tissues, a painted soapstone statuette – our patron saint. O, the watches and keys and gloves that appeared at your feet! A ruse that my mother relied on to make me believe that our smallest petitions are heard, that events, with the proper appeals, can be reversed, that almost anything lost can be retrieved. As a girl I chanted your name while I followed the trail: pockets, under the bed, under the sofa cushions, pockets again. Something's lost and can't be found. Please, St. Anthony, look around. When it didn’t turn up, I brought you coiled vines – like the petals I bring to my daughter’s room as if to stir up stale air – and the search would resume. Look at the priestess of talismans I have become: her saint card from First Communion in my purse; lodestones for paperweights at work. For good luck, a horseshoe-shaped necklace under my shirt: the crescent shape of the sacred moon goddess in Peru or the bow of the Blessed Mother’s cradling arm, arch like the threshold of her sacred vulva, twine like the helix of lovers. Look at the virtuoso that was finally birthed, who would use this ring of linked hands not for fellowship or grace, not to make my peace on earth, not to lay my gifts at your feet and give up the search, but to summon the face she petitioned and conjure a curse. . Copyright © 2011 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. 2012 Rita Dove Poetry Award - Semi Finalist Published in River Styx 87, Spring 2012.

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

Index Previous Next The Breakfast Piece Web of unturned matter smoldering in the yard. A flame in the compost or a molten tongue that starts the dog barking. Abortus tranquillus. Every day now: a before or an after . Or, an endless encore. Born in a long hall under a burnishing moon. Go to your room. Go to your room and stay there. Look at your tongue: tiger stripes up and down – Bearer of sorrow, curl up your muddy locks and worm away. I’m not the one to teach you how to walk. I have been mopping up after you all these days. II. Milk crusting in a cereal bowl. Figs like little death’s- heads left, predictably, untouched. A paper cup berthed in its own spilt pool. A still life of the widespread type – The Breakfast Piece – that, in their rush to school, the boys lightly abandoned. Remnants of a meal or of a life? In all of our formal studies, always the latter. Pieces unexpectedly arranged and surfacing like orphans wanting care. We move as if across an oily canvas to wash them, wash them. . Copyright © 2015 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in The Drunken Boat , Fall 2015.

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Index Previous Next Urban Helicon It starts like this: the clamps around my wrists. The little Saturn ring around my head, the wooden chair, the arms still warm, though dead; then the electric thrill, the arch, the twist. The expiation just before the twist, the quick reform of madam in her bed, the spasm, the welcome-wagon for something newly-wed; or the ambulance, the sirens, the sudden lisp. It makes me so serene. It ties me to a rock and sends me swimming. It causes quite a scene to feel the wood and stone become a dock; to hear the pastoral in stillness singing. . Copyright © 1982 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Cold Mountain Review , Spring 2016. Listen to the author's audio version on Cold Mountain Review's website .

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 .

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