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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

Award Winning Poetry - 1978 From the book "Advantages of Believing" Beginner's Mind We have been together in Buddha’s gentle rain for days. Our robes are soaked through. I try not to long for things as your palm unwinds under my chin. You speak to me in the simplest language, Have a cup of tea. I sense your compassion but my ears are filled with water and the incense unnerves me. You cup my ears and whisper, Rozan is famous for its misty, rainy days, and, The sky is always the sky. I believe you, though I am not surprised. Perhaps the exchange should not be this intimate. The shadows near my eyes and across your shaved head make us tired and ordinary. You are an old man with dry lips. Perhaps your middle sags as you smooth my hair, my hair that was just so. Copyright © 1978 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Williams College Archives, 1978 Published in the author's book Advantages of Believing , 2015. Previous Next

THE CONDITION OF THE VERSES

Selected Poems of Maria Teresa Horta Translated by: M.B. McLatchey and Edite Cunhã Published in Springhouse , Fall 2019 Prev 7 Next IDEALIZATION I fashion with care poetry and words life and its stories the stars and the characters I use in my life Between verses stanzas gardenias and just before dawn spinning and weaving I fashion the passion and the rose of my work IDEALIZAÇÃO Idealizo com esmero a poesia e as palavras a vida e as histórias as estrelas e as personagens usadas no meu viver Por entre versos estâncias gardénias e madrugadas a fiar e a tecer idealizo a paixão e a rosa do meu escrever Copyright © 2019 M. B. McLatchey & Edite Cunha, with permission. All rights reserved. Published in Springhouse , Fall 2019 Copyright © 2017 Maria Teresa Horta, from her collection Poesis . Dom Quixote Publisher, Lisbon. Back to List

Index Previous Next Winner of the 2005 Annie Finch Prize On Recognizing Saints As if to find new icons for her life or as if - piece by piece - to dismantle mine she scans our purchases too consciously. Flips through a magazine I'm embarrassed to be buying. Studies its regimen for shapely thighs, asks me - because she's heard - if drinking wine is good for nursing. The shift from idle chitchat to appeal. Camille, her nametag says. Camille of olive skin and violet nails with long metallic tips, who flashes her lover's sucking marks like her stigmata. Camille who isn't showing yet - but like Crivelli's virgin martyr Catherine, peers sidelong at me and leans decoratively against her register as Catherine did against her studded wheel. So clearly Catherine that I want to look away - or kneel. And yet, Crivelli would have framed her differently: a martyr tucked away with other martyrs in a predella of muted colors, quiet suffering. None of this heart-to-heart - this girlfriend talk that brings to mind a string of small petitions and makes me say my part. . Copyright © 2004 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Winner of the Annie Finch Prize, 2005. Judge: Margot Schlipp Published in The National Poetry Review , Fall/Winter 2005.

Index Previous Next On Folding a Fitted Sheet One eye looks within, the other eye looks without. ― Henri Cartier-Bresson The art, it seems, is in the ease of mirroring what is measured: at once attending to, surrendering to a set of numbers, a fixed but – when you release too tight a grip – supple and scented plane. Tuck the puckered edges back. Give it a thwack. Let it balloon – a goddess-smelted bloom of what remains after ablution: smoke-colored shadows, the stir of a post-coital myrrh. Hold as one holds a picture you would hang or, as in Prokofiev’s ballet: arms bent and raised, palms open-faced. Fold it until the edges meet – repeat, repeat. Walk it upstairs with the reverence you’d have for carrying your country’s flag. . Copyright © 2018 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Harpur Palate of Binghamton University, Fall 2018, Vol. 18.1.

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

Index Previous Next Calendar Plans For Geoffrey In the living room, a standoff – a deadlock between right and wrong side of the law. A boy bellies forward, holster and chaps, motions invisible troops; his silver gun drawn, waving in the morning sun as if to cut a map through ranges unknown: cushions from a worn sofa, sheer cliffs that fold, collapse, take their toll; his brother content in a sheriff’s badge removable for a change of roles. How our memories tell us what we cannot know. How in retrospect, days and months, our calendar plans were a grace. How stars on straw costume cowboy hats return like figures of forgotten clashes, traces of a shimmering now: a new uniform, new boots, new hat, new vows; occasion for the saints to be called by name. St. Michael, patron of the airborne, stay with my boy tonight, tomorrow, all the days. Know the two disparate tones beneath a skein of geese – their flight so fixed, resolved – when a mother prays, and when a mother calls. . Copyright © 2022 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Relief , Spring 2022.

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 Inventory As in drill rehearsal for an embattled place, we call in mirrored breadths an inventory, mime in duet a list, a ruck sack check, that makes you gaze at your wrist, check watch, check pockets, jingle car keys chin-high like copper chimes, or like the bells that focus our attention in the Mass, a summoning that at the altar an ordained event—body as host, wine that was blood—is happening and is past. We are older now; this is what this is. A pause midstride before leaving one another, before leaving the house; a wave from the drive the way angels—disquieted— watch, then catch us by the hair. They hear our doubts. Leaving, returning , for them: deliverance , reunion with the stars, a coming home. For us, chance , a constant drum. . Copyright © 2022 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Southern Poetry Review , Vol. 60, issue 1.

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Award Winning Poetry - 2004 Featured in Verse Daily Against Elegies What if we let you sing first? What if we look for you with Mallarme’s blank stare: birds round an empty dish, stony limbs? To tell the history of our grief we settle for an empty doorway and a maple leaf or a woman with neckcurls, named Jane, changed by her poetry teacher’s love to a wren wound in light. Shimmering anodyne. Elegies so resolute in wood or wings that we forget the truer measurements of unfinished things: the distance between two disappearing habits; the echo of a promise lodged in a warbler’s throat; the length of a dreamy boy swinging from his favorite limb; the ragged patch below — our ground for spotting him. If grieving is a way of working wood, building thresholds, wrapping birds — then hands will keep us tending things too near. What if this June air should circle, not fall on, our copper chimes with the passiveness of prayer? What if the breeze that would carry a bird’s perfect sorrow were to kneel at the base of an oak, and refuse to rise? Copyright © 2004 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in National Poetry Review , Fall/Winter 2004. Featured in Verse Daily ® with permission, 2004. Previous Next