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Selected Poems of Maria Teresa Horta Translated by: M.B. McLatchey and Edite Cunhã Published in Metamorphoses, 2019 Prev 10 Next FURTIVE STEPS I feel its traces furtive in the hollow of my hand gaining sudden strangeness luminosities, ravings of my lost senses arresting my heart descending to the bottom by the arm’s attrition until it reaches the slim wrist It is poetry arriving taking form and voice saying what I do not say TRAÇOS FURTIVOS Sinto-lhe os traços furtivos no côncavo da minha mão ganhando estranhezas súbitas agudezas, desvarios dos meus sentidos perdidos a prender-me o coração a descer até ao fundo pela rasura do braço até chegar ao desvão na delgadeza do pulso É a poesia que chega tomando forma e ruído a falar o que eu não digo 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

Advantages of Believing by M. B. McLatchey 2014 FLP Open Chapbook Prize Winner - Finishing Line Press Publisher: Finishing Line Press M. B. has a real sense of the exuberance and playfulness of language … .This is not to deny the essential seriousness of some of her poems, but to praise them first as poetry, as investigations in the medium. – Lawrence Raab, author of The History of Forgetting The verses in this collection chronicle an earlier time in the author’s life as well as an earlier – and in some ways, foundational – poetic. A poetic, as E.E. Cummings suggests, that is more a way of seeing things than saying things. While the settings for the poems shift between continents – America, England, and France – the perspective, the way of seeing things, is undeniably that of the foreigner, the tourist, the disoriented – and yet somehow stewarded – young scholar. Whatever merit the poems present reflects the good guidance of the author’s former teacher and poet, Lawrence Raab. Published here for the first time as part of the Finishing Line Press Open Chapbook Competition, these poems hold true to Yeats’ observation that a poet’s life is measured out, inevitably, in verses. – M. B. Cover art: Isis Olivier http://isisolivier.com

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

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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

Index Previous Next Winner of the 2019 Folio Editor's Prize Ode for an Ode on a Grecian Urn Ode, let your sorrows go. Let brides be ravished, trees forsake their leaves, let lovers kiss and fade, daughters age. Let loss be the elixir that induces a new legend, new urn-dream: Forests that seed, mature, starve, and reseed without our overtures. Let wanting, waiting, pacing be the rings in carbon dating. A new museum piece. Imagine yearning bigger than an urn, bigger than god; desire out of bounds, desire crowned. Paint it fulfilled, the turning back of hounds. What good is song if not the end of one man’s wish, what-ifs? I died at twenty-five. So many do. Urn, make your story new: Beauty is truth when sung to a priest’s staccato voice and tone near a young marine’s too-heavy, too mature, burial stone; when love betrayed makes lovers stutter phrases – sweet clichés – that they used to say alone. Put it in stone: Beauty is truth when sung to the beat of a child’s quiet feet leaving home; when aging lovers sing to one another: Remember when we used to rock in one another’s arms and we knew god and the devil’s charms? . Copyright © 2019 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Winner of the 2019 Folio annual Editor's Prize for Poetry . Published in Folio Volume 34, May 2019.

Selected Poems of Maria Teresa Horta Translated by: M.B. McLatchey and Edite Cunhã Forthcoming in Inventory , 2020 Prev 12 Next FROM LIBERTY TO LIBERTY Beauty by beauty poetry is made, stone by stone of light, image after image, in search of a rebellious language, to crush the loneliness and surrender. Barb, thorn, and wood, but also jubilation and rejoicing. Nothing impossible to our imagination, in poems restless and brilliant where the panther runs along verses and dreams. Disobedience by disobedience poetry is made. Wing and winged flight, until it becomes a rose of greater scintillation, to name creativity, the foundation of writing, in search of suicide comets and constellations in the work of the poem. Sirius and Cassiopeia. Oh, our language constructed with the rigors of unique words, uprising and insurrection. Enchantment by enchantment poetry is made. Navigation of verses to bring down frontiers rejecting blind obedience, and prohibitions, at times of darkenings and deceptions. To refuse principles of imposed acceptance and ruins, from which the dictators watch us, the wolves of cruelty, the censors and the concealed inquisitors, of the Apocalypse. Rebellion by rebellion poetry is made. Fighting darkness and dagger of insidiousness, tricks, handcuffs. With song, with odes and hymns of rebellious verse, armed with our poet’s words, sunset and sunrise. Fiery flight and contempt. Body by body poetry is made, in its unfathomable work of syllables and images, metaphors and rhymes, tumultuous and untiring heart, to fight the dark voices at the head of the bed. Grain and grape of clarity to save us, because poetry redeems but does not appease. Because poetry saves, but does not tranquilize. Dream by dream poetry is made, from utopia to utopia, equality to equality, by laying the poem on the table, on the bedsheet, on the knee, on the stubborn skin of the wrist. Our biggest weapon of liberty by and large. DE LIBERDADE EM LIBERDADE Beleza a beleza constrói-se a poesia, pedra a pedra de luz, imagem a imagem, na busca da linguagem indócil, a quebrar a solidão e a entrega. Farpa, espinho e lenho, mas também júbilo e regozijo. Nada é impossível ao nosso imaginário, em poemas inquietos e fulgentes por onde a pantera corre ao longo de versos e sonhos. Desobediência a desobediência constrói-se a poesia. Asa e voo voado, até se tornar rosa de cintilação maior, a nomearmos a criatividade, a fundação das escritas, em busca dos cometas suicidas e das constelações, no labor do poema. Sirius e Cassiopeia. Oh, a nossa língua construída com os rigores das palavras únicas, sublevadas e insurrectas. Deslumbramento a deslumbramento constrói-se a poesia. Navegação de versos a derrubar frontei- ras, negando-se às obediências cegas e às interdições, aos tempos de assombramentos e obscurantismos. A recusar princípios de aceite imposto e ruínas, de onde nos espreitam os ditadores, os lobos da crueldade, os censores e os inquisidores embuçados, do Apocalipse. Insubmissão a insubmissão constrói-se a poesia. A combater a escuridade e o punhal da insídia, as mordaças, as algemas. Com o canto, com as odes e os hinos de versos revoltosos, armados com as nossas palavras de poeta, poente e alva. Voo ardente e desacato. Corpo a corpo constrói-se a poesia, no seu insondável trabalho de sílabas e imagens, metáforas e rimas, coração tumultuado e incansável, a combater as vozes obscuras, à cabeceira da lonjura. Grão e bago de claridade de nos salvar, porque a poesia redime mas não apazigua. Porque a poesia salva, mas não aquieta. Sonho a sonho constrói-se a poesia, de utopia em utopia, de igualdade em igualdade, a deitar-se o poema na mesa, no lençol, no joelho, na pele ensimesmada do pulso. Nossa arma maior de liberdade em liberdade. Poem celebrating World Poetry Day 2013, done by the Directorate of the SPA. and set out on 21 March of that year in the Belém Cultural Center by initiative of the then president. Vasco Graça Moura . Copyright © 2019 M. B. McLatchey & Edite Cunha, with permission. All rights reserved. Forthcoming in Inventory , Princeton University, 2020 Poema comemorativo do Dia Mundial da Poesia de 2013, feito a coiwitc da Direcção da SPA. e exposto em 21 de Março desse ano no Centro Cultural de Belém por iniciativa do então presidente. Vasco Graça Moura Copyright © 2017 Maria Teresa Horta, from her collection Poesis. Dom Quixote Publisher, Lisbon. Back to List

Index Previous Next Winner of the 1974 Emerson College Original Poetry Award On Rewinding I have been told that by wish and will I fell from His sheep- wool pocket into one dame's arms; and that was birth. I have been told that angels bowl; heaven opens up when the tenth pin rolls. I have been told of cloud-grazing mares— and twice it has rained cats and dogs. I have been told that Saint Peter saw a vision. I have been told that truth may be measured by the shade of one's tongue or the length of one's nose—and twice I have doubted my countenance. I have been told when 'neath the cornered quilt that the sand- man would alight and wave his sack of sleeping dust over my last Hail Mary. I have been told that woman is infamy; man sin. And I am the issue of both. I have been told to accept His rites and wrath. Yet, I have heard over grace and gossip. from bible and book, of womb-wrenching pain, of breached and blue-born, of original sin; and that was birth. I have heard of atmospheric pressure and tropical cyclones; and that was Hurricane Ann. I have heard that fishermen like their wine and all have visions. I have heard that the truth made Socrates stutter. I have heard that some men never sleep. I have heard that opposites attract (and gather ye rosebuds while ye may) I have heard that doubt is the stepping stone to knowledge, and knowledge is the end of man. I have heard too little of too much. And still as green as County Cork, I have but fingered man's seven selves. . Copyright © 2017 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in the Spring 1975 issue of The Emerson Review . M.B., Weymouth North High School, Massachusetts, October, 1974 Contest judge - Charles Simic.

VERSES

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.