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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.

Index Previous Next Pop Quiz Some bow their heads and wait for their pens to move. A ground cloud, like a fog, or an unexpected tide, pulls them away. Through the haze, the quiet one half-raises her hand, asks if – after today – there will be other chances . Today’s exam, I want to tell her, is not today’s exam. It is Everyman ’s call, nothing in stone; a practice run at squaring accounts; at facing what we did not plan; at being alone; a reference to the clock on our wall, whose hands advance with us or without us. I wait for them in the dim, rapt hush. A curtain rises. Scenes – like a showreel – flicker and flash: a hand untangling from a lover’s grasp; a slap for a ranting three-year old; a prayer clasp. As if to find answers, some raise their heads, gaze at a life scene outside: A yellow-breasted blackbird on a branch, savoring a grub in its beak. Other chances . Such a sweet ring. Winter’s buried bulbs; bloom in the next growing season. . Copyright © 2023 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Sky Island Journal , Issue #27, Winter 2024. From the editors: [This poem] is vulnerable, tense, powerful, and so incredibly accurate; it transports and challenges us in ways that poems seldom do. This piece—like so many of our favorite M.B. pieces—is a meditation on the presence of absence and the absence of presence, and it bears fruit in such personal, beautiful, and unexpected ways. Like all great art, “Pop Quiz” sticks its landing and is a gift that keeps on giving; we discover more about it, and ourselves, with every reading.

BIO Fourth Grade 1963 Miss D 1963 Quincy Shipyard Fore River Bridge Goliath I grew up in a town where our parents were ship builders, bakers, waitresses, and cashiers, and where books found their right and proper place in the local library. Ours was an oral tradition, with the sounds and voices of elders and neighbors in inflections of Portuguese, Greek, Irish, and Italian – all of which I quickly learned to imitate. The result was a technical training that served a writer. I learned by ear the necessity for music in language, the power of truths told in nods and quiet breaths, and the critical importance of timing. And, I learned at my kitchen table that if you’re going to tell a story, it must be artful and it better be worth everyone’s time. At the age of ten, I met the woman who would become my lifetime mentor – Miss D, my fourth grade teacher. She would unleash my passion for literature and the arts and teach me how art connects us. A few years later, at the age of fourteen, I was awarded my first literary prize – 1st place in a poetry contest hosted by Boston’s Emerson College. In a packed campus theater, the contest judge, renowned poet Charles Simic, handed me a check for a hundred dollars and mumbled, “Good job, kid.” Even at that early age, I understood that writers thrive on affirmation – not because the ego needs it, but because it confirms that through our art, we connect. At that moment, my life as a writer was confirmed. My passion for languages and literature took me on a course of studies to some of the best colleges in the world. At each college, it would be the Poet in Residence that I would seek out. At Williams College, Lawrence Raab and Richard Wilbur taught me to unleash the mystery in poetry; at Brown university, Michael Harper tuned my ear for the music in poetry; at Goddard College, Alfred Corn and Michael Klein honed my technique in poetry; and at Harvard University, the Nobel-prize winning poet, Seamus Heaney mentored me in the mercy in poetry. I was immensely fortunate to share countless hours and discussions with Seamus (sometimes over a PBR and Powers) not only on the topic of how to write good poetry, but on how to be a good poet. “It takes a good person to be a good poet,” Seamus often said to me. I knew that this “goodness” was what Seamus himself strived for; it was a positioning of himself in service to the world that I continue to try to emulate in my work – empathy, authenticity, and self-effacement. It is Seamus and the mentors who preceded him that walk with me in my recognitions. My book with Regal House Publishing, Beginner’s Mind , examines a topic that I have made my life’s focus: namely, education. In a time when our schools are dogged by institutionalized goals for our children, this book gives us a classroom where personal growth and innovative thinking happens in unimaginable ways because of a remarkable fourth grade teacher. Though my soul naturally defaults to the poetic, I have chosen a prose format for this book to more directly reflect the classroom dynamics. Beginner’s Mind is a collage of teaching moments that forever changed a generation of ten-year-olds, and examines the question, “How do we want teachers to educate our children?” The answer is given to us through a series of classroom vignettes that put on display the possibilities before us when a teacher’s love is combined with the beginner’s mind. M.B. McLatchey holds her graduate degree in Comparative Literature from Harvard University, a Masters in Teaching from Brown University, the M.F.A. in writing from Goddard College, and a B.A. from Williams College. She has over thirty years of teaching and has been recognized by her university as Distinguished Teacher of the Year and as Distinguished Scholar. She was awarded Harvard University's coveted Danforth Prize in Teaching as well as the Harvard/Radcliffe Prize for Literary Scholarship, and she received the Elmer Smith Award for Excellence in Teaching from Brown University. M.B. has authored numerous literary reviews, compiled several text books for Humanities courses, and has contributed to many books on teaching. She has received national and international literary awards including the May Swenson Poetry Award for her debut poetry collection The Lame God published by Utah State University Press and the FLP national Women’s Voices Competition award for her book, Advantages of Believing . Her book Beginner's Mind was Winner of the Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award from Salem College. Poetry awards include the American Poet Prize from the American Poetry Journal , the Editor’s Prize in Poetry from FOLIO literary journal, the Editor's Prize in Poetry from Spoon River Poetry Review , the Annie Finch Prize for Poetry, the Robert Frost Award in Poetry, the Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award, the New South Writing Award from Georgia State University, the 46’er Prize from the Adirondack Review , and the Vachel Lindsay Poetry Award. She has been featured in Verse Daily and by AWP as a “Writer in the Spotlight”. A Professor of Classics at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University, she also serves as Florida’s Poet Laureate for Volusia County, as Chancellor for Florida State Poets Association, and as Arts & Wellness Ambassador for the Atlantic Center for the Arts. My Mentors... R. L. Stevenson 1850 - 1894 H. D. Thoreau 1817 - 1862 W. B. Yeats 1865 - 1939 John Keats 1795 - 1821 Dlyan Thomas 1914 - 1953 Yevtushenko 1932 - 2017 Richard Wilbur 1921 - 2017 Larry Raab 1946 - Michael Harper 1938 - 2016 Louise Gluck 1943 - Seamus Heaney 1939 - 2013 Elizabeth Bishop 1911 - 1979 Michael Klein 1958 - Alfred Corn 1943 -

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

Award Winning Poetry - 2008 Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award 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. Previous Next

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FROM LIBERTY TO LIBERTY

Index Previous Next 2017 Narrative Poetry Contest - Semi-Finalist Bad Apology As if in an endless rehearsal, I packed and unpacked. The challenge, you said, was to take no more than I’d need. Tenderly, you followed the track of a storm moving in from the east. In bed, a wrinkled map across our laps; you circled a town and highlighted a road. A yellow, satiny, path. When we slept, you tried the path, left markers you had kept for days like these. And the markers were keys. Clues in a moonscape of dust-covered things – a pair of gloves with suede tips; a scarf; a ring. Ruins like proof of a marriage, a story’s skeletal sheen, small deaths, small victories. Maestro, my mourning dove, another chance? Put me back in that place with its signals and gestures and promise of more mistakes. And I’ll show you the hurtful lessons lovers make. . Copyright © 2017 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. 2017 Narrative Poetry Contest - Semi Finalist Pubished in SWWIM , December 2017. Also featured in SWWIM March 2020 #TBT

Index Previous Next Where Winter Spends the Summer On a beach towel print of a bosomy mermaid that reads I ♥ Miami. In an everglade’s wild plan marked with grilles and canopies. Between concrete, leaning towers and a tide meant for healing. In a daze, dreaming, gazing at Odysseus’ wine-dark sea. In the unclothed body’s prescient haze. On the front of a postcard – a postcard painter’s dream – in dabs of yellow and green, intended, as postcard painters will, to make a symphony of bathers between brush marks; map out, in palm-tree fences, a new world – an answer to the sirens call, when all the bathers want is no world at all. . Copyright © 2019 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in SWWIM , September 19, 2019.

Index Previous Next Winner of the 2007 Spoon River Poetry Review Editors' Prize The Rape of Chryssipus ''She came home bone by bone. First her shin bone, then her skull. In the end, 26 of Molly's bones came home to us." ― Mother of 16-year old Molly Bish, whose remains were found 3 years after she was abducted and murdered in June 2000. For the rape of Chryssipus, King Laius suffered. The gods saw what he took -- a young boy's chance to play in the Nemean Games, to make his offerings to Zeus, to win his wreath of wild celery leaves, advance the Greek way: piety, honor, and strength. He raided their vast heaven, not just a small boy's frame. Their justice was what Laius came to dread: a son that would take his mother to bed, a champion of the gods, an Oedipus. We called on the same gods on your behalf, asked for their twisted best: disease like a Chimera to eat your Laius piece by piece; a Harpie who might wrap her tongue around his neck and play his game of breathing and not-breathing that he made you play; Medusa's curse in stone; and a Golden Ram to put you back together bone by bone. . Copyright © 2007 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Winner of the 2007 Spoon River Poetry Review Editors' Prize. Published in The Spoon River Poetry Review , Summer/Fall 2007. Judge's Review

Index Previous Next 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.

Index Previous Next Invocation Before a Day of Teaching Janus, god of thresholds, passageways, watch over me today. Grant them your two masks: one looking back – a green confidence, salad days; the other forward – a god- scripted series of demons to slay. Let the enemy on this warring field, (this chalky classroom space) hear this, my summoning, a call before the siege: We are not here (this hushed November day) to take guild-crafted friezes, temples, city walls; not to make bards sing. Only to pass through an open gate; fling, like a skipping stone across a mirror-glass lake, sediment from this edge toward a distant base; relish the rhythmic hop across; watch and reflect on the ripples it makes. . Copyright © 2024 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Crab Orchard Review . Fall 2024.