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Selected Poems of Maria Teresa Horta Translated by: M.B. McLatchey and Edite Cunhã Published in Metamorphoses , 2019 Prev 11 Next POEM AFTER POEM Poem after poem I write poetry day after day, after night and startled I clench and I whisper and again the tumult Poem by poem I write the disquiet the translucent honesty of the wing, the harmony which desires the verse in the body of light Poem by poem I touch, assume the body of the work, fondling the language in a slow and inseparable indeterminable pleasure I dream, past symbol, past metaphor past syntax Word after word, after word after word… POEMA A POEMA Poema a poema escrevo poesia dia após dia, após noite e sobressalto cerro e sussurro e de novo tumulto Poema a poema escrevo o desassossego a translúcida lisura da asa, a harmonia que deseja o verso no corpo da luz Poema a poema vou tocando, tomando o corpo da escrita, afagando a linguagem num lento e indizível prazer indeterminável Sonho, após símbolo, após metáfora após sintaxe Palavra após palavra, após palavra após palavra... 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 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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Index Previous Next Anthem No one makes love in European cities. Instead of sex, a café con leite in a leaning café, bread and olives like offerings or props between strangers. Between rooftops blank bed sheets wave, flags without countries, on cable lines. Hope for a better life ceased with the people’s resistance. In courtyards, dull statues of poets, cats in heat mime some godless coupling. What made us come here? Films like La Mime, or Il Postino where love is a mailman’s song to a wide-hipped woman and sex is a long suggestion in close-ups of mouths. Courses in college, where olive trees figured fertility and lovers in rivers or on moon-soaked rooftops promised a holy union. How we tracked in tripping rhythms and limping lines, those foreign places, foreign minds. And, your score-catching resistance to seeing a pulse in the poems that I swore was mine – a resistance that divided us then, but steadies us now, where marriage is an ancient, sacred mime: Montana’s native dance, a bushman’s song. In the hotel room next to ours, sex solves a couple’s dispute: breaths in small calls and answers like olive branches; breaths in syllabics that drift over bedsheets and rooftops like rhapsodies the ancients masked and mimed; sighs that recall the faint line between hunger and dying. Their post-coital quiet, like a lingering thought or line, makes us pause. In the quiet, a sheer curtain takes air, a quiet resistance to differences in hotel rooms, in heartaches, in countries, in love’s metered mime. For a few moments, we bathe in it. We are fluent in all languages, fluent in sex. From our window, a row of houses, an etch-a-sketch of intersecting lives, olive- toned children run home. A new moon casts drying bed sheets, quiet rooftops in a truer beige-bone. Below, an elderly pair flirts in open vowels and faint, staccato lines – Whitman’s free verse, Petrarch’s cypress vine. The body’s sung hunger; the soul’s mournful mime. We are almost home, love. For now, this is where god is: desire’s ancient theater, promises, olives. . Copyright © 2018 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Harpur Palate of Binghamton University, Fall 2018, Vol. 18.1.

Index Previous Next Ctrl+Z A shortcut to undo ; and so the hateful words we say, hateful because we have not loved someone so much before – can be reversed, undone, erased. A dream come true: No evidence. No blowgun residue. No shadowy pin-print in the chest, where the pointed tip pierced through. No plaintive call to cauterize the wound. No sky gods cheering for a second act. Nature reversed: No crawling back, no silken trail, no bouquets of fattened leaves in new host trees with larval tents; branches where we will leave our scent and later, feed. Limbs in silk sleeves like spring in a dying season, as if to ornament the kill. As if, behind the screen, like lotuses, merciless words did not fix their roots in swampy waters, undisturbed. . Copyright © 2021 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in The Florida Review

Index Previous Next The Missouri Review - Poem of the Week Full Disclosure World History. What the course title means: Whisperings in Xylography. Gambles and losses—like yearnings in braille— You will be asked to finger, sound out, unveil. No summit, no Zenith, no Alignment of planets guaranteed. Nothing in stone. You are Buying a home someone died in: Curie, Copernicus, El Cid. Chronicles disinterred: The wisdom of the renegade, the rebel kid. Days passed in a Provost’s calendar will be proof you endured. Endurance as in epic songs. Longings, self-makings, upendings. Finishings like beginnings, underdog odds. The heretic, the face of God. . Copyright © 2024 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in The Missouri Review , January 2025. Featured as Poem of the Week , Januarey 13, 2025.

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. 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 - 2012 Erskine J. Poetry Prize - Finalist Catharsis A portly man on TV says he’s eating jelly donuts since his doctor recommended more fruit. My head tucked beneath your chin, I feel you grin. A welcome joke – what Aristotle called a cleansing: the comedy channel in bed. A piecemeal purging meant to clear our minds, a chance to graft, like patchwork, the wreckage of our lives onto a campy figure, cheer for him; love him for dancing when the gods single him out, pile on their twisted trials. As if – for a few moments – we are watching someone else’s life unfold. Pizza and beer, you my armchair, tucked in our sheets. As if – for a few moments – we have climbed up from some well to lounge on sun-baked stone, take in the Dionysian Mysteries: lore of the vine – seasons, grapes, wine. Nothing ever truly dying. And us, tender initiates, laughing so hard we’re crying. Copyright © 2011 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Finalist for the 11th Annual Erskine J. Poetry Prize . Published in the 2012 Spring issue of S martish Pace . Previous Next

Selected Poems of Maria Teresa Horta Translated by: M.B. McLatchey and Edite Cunhã Published in Springhouse , Fall 2019 Prev 6 Next ANTICIPATION I constrain myself in waiting for the poem to arrive with a beating of wings with the heart on fire in the likeness of a body the reverse of verse remorse locked away quickly and quietly hallucinating ESPERA Limito-me a esperar que o poema chegue num bater de asas no coração em fogo no jogo do corpo no reverso do verso no remorso fechado num silêncio depressa alucinado 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

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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