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Florida Loves Poetry!! ™ W riting 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. - M.B., 2017 Writing Workshops: Testimonials from Poetry Workshop Participants This was a beautiful program, and it expanded my creative spirit and soul. - ACA 2023 This program was great for stretching the imagination. I wish it was ongoing! - ACA 2023 M.B. shared her insight in such an engaging and inspiring way. I truly learned a lot in this course, and it made me fall even more in love with writing and sharing poetry. - ACA 2023 I have never had a formal poetry class. I loved Everything. M.B. led with an ease, love and expertise to elicit and stretch our diverse class. Amazing. - ACA 2023 Wonderful! My mind and heart are elevated! - ACA 2023 This was the best poetry course I’ve ever taken, and I’ve taken college poetry classes. I have a MA in English. M.B. really inspires and gives us amazing examples and tools to become better writers. - ACA 2023 M.B. is so professional and engaging. My heart is happy. My mind stimulated. - ACA 2023 I loved the facilitator, M.B. She’s an excellent teacher. Great person. - ACA 2023 Fun class! - ACA 2023 The best poetry course in Florida! - A. M. Wow - who knew you would be there when I finally decided to let on I'm a poet ready to write again. Thank God! Thank you! Thank you, ACA, for facilitating this series! - L. M. I just loved your class. Thank you for facilitating this workshop! We covered so much in four weeks. It was a wonderful experience and I look forward to working with you again! So sorry this is ending… it was so wonderful. - V. I. Thank you for creating such a wonderful space to create! - C B. The workshop on poetry that M. B. McLatchey ran was one of the most rewarding experiences I have had in a long time. As a professional singer I have sung so many poems and studied them but never tried my hand at writing one. I was nervous since most were already "poets". M. B. immediately made me comfortable and I felt at ease to share what I was doing. She was supportive and encouraging and has made me want to continue writing poetry. I would take another workshop with her at the drop of a hat. I cannot thank her enough for the insights and guidance she provided in an atmosphere of kindness and support. - L. S. I have very much enjoyed this course with you and wish it could go on much longer! Thank you! - G. H. Thank you for your inspired leadership during this workshop experience. I sincerely regret having missed the first two sessions. My friend Carole invited me to your next to last session and I was smitten by your gentle and knowledgeable style. My goodness - how fortunate for us you are willing to teach, lead, and inspire fellow poets! - L. M. I have really enjoyed your enthusiasm and insights into what can make better poetry. I have enjoyed meeting and interacting with the other poets…both those whom I know and others whose voices continue to inspire . - D. H.

Index Previous Next Prometheus's Regret I will always place the mission first. I will never accept defeat. I will never quit. I will never leave a fallen comrade. ― Soldier’s Creed The Hand A harder man was what I meant to make, my print an atlas stitched to a boy’s soft side. His mind changed from the heat inside my palm – awakened to a god who trades in brother love and psalms. The Head So neatly planned, but look how you have lost him. See how our quiet Titan lifts the sky? Never an ending or starting. Always the twilight of shoulders changed into mountain ranges; always the life force tested and departing. The Heart Raiment of gold, a bronze shield, all the rivers on earth, I would give back. How to weigh the gains against the losses? The anthem instead of the man; a mother’s birth-breaths; the ground still soft where he took his first steps. . Copyright © 2019 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in The Halcyone Literary Review , December 2019.

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Award Winning Poetry - 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. Published in River Styx 87, Spring 2012. Previous Next

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.

Award Winning Poetry - 2013 Winner of the New South Writing Contest Amber Alert A white Ford, black gate, Georgia plate, squeezes into our lane. In the back, a Whitetail – tagged and slashed from her chest to hind legs – looks back at us. Her eyes a dark glass. Opening day for deer hunting. Cars pass and pass. In a field, lightning bugs darted and flashed in your hand. Half-girl, half-doe, you started and stopped, palms cupped. Someone carried you off and we cheered for the boy in the clay, his heel on home plate. It was a beautiful steal. Did he thank the deer for her head when he knelt above her? When he opened her middle to empty inedible parts? When, for a clean job, he severed her windpipe and – hunter’s nectar – he saved her heart? Copyright © 2013 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Winner of the 2013 New South Writing Contest. Published in new south : Georgia State University's Journal of Art & Literature , Summer 2013. Judge's Review Previous Next

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FURTIVE STEPS

Index Previous Next First Place - Lazuli Literary Group Ethos, Pathos, Logos Sorry... currently embargoed until publication in February, 2025. . Copyright © 2024 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Forthcoming in A zure, February 2025. Winner of the Lazuli Literary Group's Fall 2024 Writing Contest. 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

MY SUSTENANCE

Index Previous Next Before the Common Era Before the Common Era Before Epictetus, the Aztecs, Machiavelli; before Berkeley, Spinoza, Calvin, Hegel and Heidegger; before the Bavarian Illuminati; before Marie Antionette; before Schelling; before Hayek, Derrida, and Bukowski; before the laws of timeless nature; Kerouac. Before Nirvana analysis and conceptual tunneling; before subtle physics; before alternative systems; before god, I remember we planted some seeds in a narrow back lot, a trellis with open ties for the sprouts like bait and lure in sod tiles. And we waited for spring like we waited for our first child: a new world of water and marrow. And we knelt near the terraces, brushing the earth. And the air’s soft tongue kept us close and at our tasks, not missing things unsaid, anthems unsung. . Copyright © 2019 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Quadrant , January 2021

Award Winning Poetry - 2020 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. Semi-finalist, Naugatuck River Review's 11th Narrative Poetry Contest Published in the Winter/Spring 2020 issue of Naugatuck River Review . Previous Next