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Index Previous Next Ocracoke With undying love, to my husband. ― Christmas 2013 In a letter to his wife, sure and seasoned, he said, I will be back. I will cross channels and oceans and islands and rushing rivers. And for the rest of her years, his flannel shirt that she made her own, caught her tears as they might in a lover’s hold. What are our days, she wrote, or distances, or promises, or years, if not one heartbeat measured out in a country’s checkered grid, weave in a cloth – worn, endeared. As once in Ocracoke – barrier island, barrier to all that does not hold against cruel winds and so, not love, which holds and takes its fortitude from simpler things: the stillness that follows cruel words; the kiss that cools ankle and wrist like a shore bird in low waters; gestures of a land within a land – a dress that I saw in a shop and I longed as we ferried away, as a small girl longs for sea winds catching its hem in a gust of sea spray above my knees. And you wanted to please me because – I would come to see – that is what lovers do. Let’s go back , you said. And I noticed the difference in miles for me and you: what for me was a turn in our plans and a girlish yearning, was for you love’s open hand – a summer dress on a wooden hanger – ocean and sand that we might reclaim like a sparrow’s song played and replayed. No distances, no time – I learned that day – no ferry we cannot take from lover’s gift to lover’s ache. . Copyright © 2013 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in The Briar Cliff Review , Spring 2016.

Isms Excerpted from the book Beginner's Mind Salem College Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award This is the work of an original, smart, and talented writer. She has a great storehouse of knowledge and a penetrating understanding of many subjects, including human beings. It is wonderful to read someone who knows a capella, Sanctus, and the Agnus Dei, as well as Carol Channing and Hepburn (and knows the difference). When has a school room been given such vivid enunciation -- the dioramas, shoe boxes, sticker-stars, and clay figures, the comfort of “half-truths” for other children, but not for Miss D’s. With a “sideways glance,” they took it all in, and were forgiving, like Miss D (whose door says welcome, an endless acquittal). It is difficult to see any of us “condemned,” and yet, there are standards. Standards! I can’t go on admiring line after line, when I am only on the first two pages in my commentary (and my language is so stupid and pale in comparison), but that’s what this essay does to me; it says look, see, remember. Word for word, sentence by sentence, I am enthralled. Thank God for Miss D, and for being reminded that at least one or two of my own teachers were, if not her equals, close sisters. While the writer appears like a new comet on my horizon, I am wild to know what this writer will do next. Meanwhile, she will be “graded,” though A+ hardly describes my admiration. -- Emily Herring Wilson, Judge 2007 Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award Salem College Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award

Award Winning Poetry - 2020 Pushcart Prize Nominee 2020 Best of the Net Nominee 2021 Smiling at the Executioner Reject your sense of injury and the injury itself disappears. - Marcus Aurelius, Meditations As if the open barrel were a lotus; its roots anchored in mud. How undeterred by murky water, it submerges and reblooms: petals like crystal glazed and without residue. As if you never felt something move: no welcome and prescient ache, no sudden flexing, no cycle taking shape. No memory. No calendar. No yield – because you are the bullet’s shield. As if you have nothing to lose. As if all that you have learned to love: the beating heart; the mythic glove of a palm blooming in the womb; the scent that follows touch – is suddenly dust. Just the open-grinned, white-toothed stare down this time; the stayed and steady practice on your knees of mastering someone else’s pleas. Copyright © 2020 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Sky Island Journal , Summer 2020 Pushcart Prize Nominee 2020 Best of the Net Nominee 2021 Editor's comment: ...the epitome of what we consider powerful poetry to be. Vivid, palpable imagery saturates the perfect pacing of this svelte, knife-like piece. Full Review Previous Next

Primary Sources Great Works of Ancient Greece, the Roman Empire and Middle Ages by M. B. McLatchey As a supplement to the wide variety of textbooks that students use in their Humanities courses, this collection of primary sources exposes readers to the original voices of the past. Primary Sources is a compilation of the most representative works from the Ancient Period through the Middle Ages, with annotations and introductions throughout to assist the reader. Significant readings from the modern era are also included to encourage the student to examine connections between ancient and modern ideas as well as discover the larger social and political questions that have defined Western civilization. Available on Amazon Book Details: Paperback: 282 pages Publisher: Independently published (July 10, 2012) Language: English ISBN-13: 979-8632406376 ASIN: B088BBNZVQ Product Dimensions: 8 x 0.6 x 10 inches Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds

Index Previous Next Days Inn Everything about it says Economy: The rattan headboard; the fibrous spread catching us in its threads. The walls: thousands of sherbet-green fronds set against fading mountain ranges like sketches from the notebook of a British colonel drawn and redrawn absent mindedly then posted all around as friendly notice of distant, unattainable exotica. On the television, and perhaps part of the package: Tarzan and His Mate, 1934. The treasure hunters have, at last, dispersed. O'Sullivan and Weissmuller slip - searing and nude - into a jungle pool. So verdant and so bestial a scene that Jane's a body double. Sweet paganism, one critic called it to thrust a man and woman into love like this naive in one another's world until they kiss. Hardly the English Lord fluent in languages this Tarzan smothers upturned panting lips with a desire that covers her like moss. Part ape, Robinson Crusoe, sometimes Moses. His role, in any case, is to save Jane from herself. To teach her how to sail from vine to vine as though standing still. And when it comes to leaving, not to pale from choosing human nature over longing. God knows this kind of choice sees casualties. In Kansas City, in a single day, fifteen children fell from trees while practicing the victory cry of the great ape. In cinematic style, medics healed the noble savages with splints. And young boys cried from their sick beds, all hours, jungle-piercing calls. Noblesse oblige. Cities, of course, have burned to choruses like this. Love wants a jungle shower. . Copyright © 2002 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Published in Shenandoah , Winter 2003.

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Index Previous Next Parousia A presence and this morning's shower lingering like jewels between my thighs. As if to flaunt my unpreparedness – towel for a turban; my face, a pale and open sky – I greet them at my door. Picture the scene , they ask, a harlot sitting on the back of a fearsome beast . A terrible waking-dream of a naked whore of false beliefs straddling the back of a wild boar: metaphors for the Parousia. Yet, standing on my porch, I wonder if they are attached, newlyweds perhaps, who fell in love over scripture or perhaps they present themselves like this: a final act to test my interest in the text, or in the man. Sun-bleached hair, finger-combed, his face unexpectedly tanned, the curl of his lip. I tell them to come back – a slip, or another faith talking? I say this squarely looking at him. As for ancient debts, healing, forgiving: I am going – have already gone – toward the living. . Copyright © 2015 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Tar River Poetry , Spring 2016.

Videos Videos: Fres h Perspectives in Poetry - Video Series . In partnership with Atlantic Center for the Arts and with sponsorship from The Florida Humanities Council, M.B. hosts a four-part video series on poetry. Join her on a journey of learning from the masters. Intro: How forms liberate the poet The Sonnet: Then and Now The Odyssey & Today’s Returning Veteran Seamus Heaney: Master of the Lyric Book Trailer for Beginner's Mind ( Link ) Podcasts: Education in Literature Podcast . Listen to M.B. (Beginner's Mind ) and author Kevin McIntosh (Class Dismissed ) discuss the philosophical underpinnings of their new education-themed books with Regal House Publishing's Jaynie Royal and Pam Van Dyk who do a spectacular job of getting to the story behind the stories while also eliciting foundational commentary from these seasoned pros on the challenges and rewards of teaching in today's age. Interviews: Of Poets & Poetry - FSPA How I Write Kickstand Poetry Atlantic Center for the Arts AWP - In the Spotlight NPR (Utah) - Radio with Tom Williams The Authors Guild - Member Spotlight Sequestrum - Contributor Spotlight My Links: My Author's Guild Site My Amazon Author Site My Facebook Site My Linkedin Site My Teaching Philosophy Can Writing Be Taught? What Others are Saying: Florida State Poets Association Poetry Workshop Reviews Seamus Heaney Edward Field Florida Book Review Brad Crenshaw New South: Georgia Spoon River Poetry Review Robert Frost Foundation Sky Island Journal Reviews Salem College Book Reviews by M B: Paradise Drive Accommodations The Clock of the Long Now Dark Card Earthly Freight Selected Essays by MB: Garcia-Aguilera and Barbara Parker Odysseus' Wounded Healer Beginner's Mind in the Classroom Published Chapters from Beginner's Mind : Right Notes Isms The Good Thief A Purple Heart Ex-Patriots Fallen Angels A Good and Simple Meal

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Index Previous Next Winner of the 2006 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.

Award Winning Poetry - 2020 Featured in Verse Daily - 2024 Afterlives Only faces in little boxes now; blinking and peering into a starless space, not knowing what to do except perhaps, wave. Our host asks each box: What’s new with you? We talk, in turns. We share the virtual part – meaning the essence . It’s lovely. How this half-body huddle forces us to talk; how we conform, like grafted stalks, to a new light source. Dante insists our afterlives will be the now eternal. I study my husband’s framed face unselfconsciously. No one can see me gazing at our years. My sons, I see, have become men whose eyes are equable and clear. Time lapses freeze, in pixel images, expressions like true selves they made as toddlers. On TV, the Pope delivers the Mass to empty seats. How alone he looks – in spite of the live stream. No pilgrims, no Vatican City festooned with flowers; only police to hold the barricades. And yet, the numbers say, more watched and listened to the liturgy than ever attended. On sofas that sag, on laptops, in drive-thru caravans for bread and wine. An insistence on right seasons if only to prove we are different from our dogs. We hear a whistle too. Copyright © 2020 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Pensive: A Global Journal of Spirituality and the Art s , Issue #1, Fall 2020. Featured in Verse Daily ® with permission, 2024. Previous Next

Award Winning Poetry - 2008 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award - Special Merit Museum Hestia, protector of missing children, you with soft oil dripping ever from your locks, come now into this house -- draw near, and withal bestow grace upon my song. ― Ancient Greek prayer. Historical pieces, these things of yours: a deflating ball, a bike not on its kick, but propped against a garage wall; a crestfallen lacrosse stick. Tours have come through as if walking the way of the cross: neighbors with pasta, a friend to awkwardly drop off a borrowed dress. Police with their pens and pads making calculations. A press release for the missing, accosted kidnapped, or dead; your photo, a ghost of a soul you had. Musee de Beaux Arts for the ambushed, the dispossessed, for guardians, who did not guard our watch, conservators of hellish thoughts, thoughts too wretched for talk. Prayers in place of a fight we would have fought had you called out. But what, after all, can our prayers do except repeat prayers from the past, and that surely God knew. Copyright © 2007 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award Special Merit. Published in The Comstock Review , January 2008. Previous Next