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Award Winning Poetry - 2025 Winner of the Lazuli Literary Group 2024 Writing Contest - 3 of 3 - Ethos, Logos, Pathos Ethos Because we are different from our dogs that leave their scent on white fence posts; the raised hind leg, the pioneering boast. Because we stand upright, wonder at vaulted ceilings, songs in frescoes: A lifeless man sculpted in plaster and paint, lifting his flaccid hand to – what? An animating touch, a spark, self-understanding? Or a patriarch called to brave a flood, reclining like a Roman river god, not from too much wine, but from such a familiar forgetfulness of our limited time. Because we build pyramids with steps: discernment following the climb. Logos Because Athens never really fell. A radiant vase unearthed; centuries of burnt clay covering its storied face: a ring of epic battles – centaurs, half-man half-beast at the throat of a cool- headed Greek. The choice still the same: Nature untamed or the compass calibrated? The watchful peeling back to the urn’s Attic shape – not with landscape trenchers, but dental picks. Precision tools. A slow-moving, pointing trowel, a sieve. Because of the mindful coupling of powdery pieces: specs of gold from a goddess’s shield, a warrior’s bones too brittle to touch. The true story so reliant upon a delicate brush. Pathos Because the healer is the wounded one. Chiron, casualty of friendly fire, Heracles’s poisonous arrow: Sentenced, in his immortal state to a life of unfathomable sorrow – A perfect medic for the would-be hero: Jason, adrift at sea, until a centaur more adrift steels him: Push on, pass up the Sirens, regain a stolen throne . Asclepius, protégé, healer celebrity, and yet so alone – except for the healer more alone: Chin up, the physician’s heart cannot be helped; tend to your soul . Achilles, fed innards of boars to awaken a warrior core; to quiet his ego: bear marrow. Because for the life worth remembering the cure is an errant arrow. Copyright © 2024 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Azure , Vol. 8, March, 2025. Winner of the Lazuli Literary Group's Fall 2024 Writing Contest - First Place. Other poems in collection: "Is there a Final Exam?" and "Plan B". 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 Previous Next

Index Previous Next Teaching the Tragedies They see how lightly tragedies begin: old friends approach, trade jokes, then ask the whereabouts of someone else. Inconsequential chit chat. I know by training what to think: invoking absent ones; that's nature out of balance. But I stay quiet and watch my best take turns reading aloud. Premonitions, prayers, misgivings all uttered much as we ourselves utter such things without implying real belief in astral influence or providence. In the mutilated versions that Restoration audiences knew finding the art in grief was just the same: the principal requirement of loss. Then, all the afterthoughts of obvious but distant analogues. This morning's work is metrics - harmless stuff, except for one: a girl whose lovely throat warbles what ought to be our longest vowels - our sad approach. I make her try again, knowing she'll have to do the rest herself. . Copyright © 2002 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Published in The Southern Poetry Review , Fall/Winter 2003.

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 Portable Labyrinth Moved by a quiet cyclone, a tarp set out to dry on our neighbor's lawn lifts itself, gasps and collapses, gasps and collapses. You lightly suggest someone check: perhaps someone's buried alive, or perhaps something's come to mock our little dying acts. Eddies of light drawn to a wayward canvas. Flecks of water surrendering to a draft the way that love surrenders after cruel words – breath by breath. That mechanical grace that filters through the hands and through the air when the self sees it has no choice but to move toward a world of symbols and prayer. In the desert tides of Reno, and under the brooding sky of San Jacinto men barefoot, women in beautiful cotton skirts are laying down tarps like this – portable labyrinths – on which they'll formalize our pilgrimage from kiss to bed to river's edge. For a path, a cruciform quadrant or a six-petal rose that calls up the Heart of Chartres. And, for the blind walk, the on-axis straight approach to the rose's core at the center of the mat: the mantra's mantra. How good they are to make a prayer life of the body's work. Or not goodness, but resolve, perhaps. The same resolve that keeps us at our tasks: Saturdays with our chores, Sundays in garden paths lost in the rhythm of bowing and straightening up assured our small cruelties are absolved from above. . Copyright © 2013 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in the Aurorean , Spring/Summer 2014.

Index Previous Next Another Inevitable Romance at Olduvai Gorge People are always talking about you here. They picture you with lava under your nails and send maps saying, THIS WAY OUT . How do you tell them about the beautiful evening soups you’re making and about this science between you and the soups? There’s pleasure enough in a banquet, they say, Who wants any more? At the gorge you can’t help wanting more. You want more than ever to bury a skull in your lap and speak to it sweetly: Here is an evening for gazing, old man. Who was it that hammered your skull? You give soup to the skull and watch it come around. Nowhere but at the gorge were there two, you and the skull you love, so pure and full of soup. Still, they picture you with mud on your face. They wonder if you could describe the skull in an objective manner. There is no sense adding up the years since, at the gorge you have counted only the serenest hours. . Copyright © 1978 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Accepted for publication in Science , 1985. Appeared in Advantages of Believing, Finishing Line Press, 2015. Published in Avatar Review , summer 2021.

Index Previous Next A Kenning No room for a bird that sings through her dangling foot. Thus, always leaving always grieving the loss of middle-earth: things given birth then quickly reified: something rising in a corner swelling and lifting its cover - not bread left to it's own. A swan's wake, more shimmering than her plumage - not a monk's glosses. A field burned for grazing - not poetry. The long goodbye. Always counting on some hollow ilex -- a kenning, a beggar, a toddler with one eye up to his knees in water and lye; expectant, big-hearted, and lost - to take us across. . Copyright © 2004 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Published in The American Poetry Journal , Winter/Spring 2005.

Amber Alert Winner of the 2013 New South Writing Contest “Amber Alert" is a poem that is so compressed it fools us into thinking it's only going to be about a road and a deer. The clean lines hold so much more – movement, murder, youth and sensual beauty stolen, worlds of boys and girls in collision, the hunter, the hunted, rituals, and poetry inside poetry – a "hunter's nectar." In the end, the poem offers a saving grace – “her heart.” --Judge, Marilyn Kallet 2013 New South Writing Contest new south : Georgia State University's Journal of Art & Literature

Index Previous Next Aftercare For John For the send-off, a haversack of mounting days: socks with slip-proof stops, a comb, an unused razor; hospital kitsch. A folder with paper-clipped scripts in Livy’s Latin: a history of pour turned into measured drips. Labels like vague instructions or memories of how and what we thought, how to retrieve our former selves – or not. There is no aftercare kit for this. Only the fossil imprint: years of love’s lava laying down sediment in love’s hard strata: summer’s dog days and winter’s cover; proof that for some the distress of a cavernous shift, for us will be valleys widened, rivers uplifted. And after-days will be the medic’s doses delivered thoughtfully and well -- meaning, unmeasured : a love that births Arcadia from grafted stems and tender cells. . Copyright © 2020 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in The Raintown Review .

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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.

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. Published in the author's chapbook Advantages of Believing , 2015. Author's website: www.mbmclatchey.com Beginner's Mind

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