Search Results

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.

We Are Coming Soon Sign up to be the first to know when we go live. Notify Me Thanks for submitting!

Index Previous Next 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.

Selected Poems of Maria Teresa Horta Translated by: M.B. McLatchey and Edite Cunhã Published in Ezra , Spring 2019 Prev 2 Next THE LEAVES I defoliate the petals the leaves of the poem until I reach perdition desiring the unutterable between the place where one helps the hand that writes and the space where the writing finds shelter AS FOLHAS Desfolho as pétalas as folhas do poema até chegar à perdição desejando o indizível entre o sítio onde se apoia a mão que escreve e o espaço o nó onde a escrita se abriga 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

Index Previous Next Winner of the 2011 American Poet Prize 1-800-THE-LOST The weight of the receiver in my hand: the down bird in my palm first lifting you. The counselor’s words: rehearsed, a burlesque bland. The shift in time, the shift to looking through her lens: today you are just one of two hundred lost. My eyes fix on our bright fence. I say your name, but you are no one new – caught in an ancient book that she’ll condense. I want her to discuss you in the present tense. I want the gods to stop pretending love calls the departed home. We called you with our various loves, had hope, hovered over still fields; made wind like the gods do before they come unhinged, let their rage loose on an unresponsive yield. Fields gone deaf and dumb; unshaken, fruitless ground, unmoved by a neighborhood of mothers who left their own to find you – tables, like mine, set. I want the gods to swallow their prayers whole. Choke up my child like the Olympians – a girl, unbruised by her journey down their throats. I want her at my table: fruit, alms that the gods, I see, can give or take – balm for the irritations I caused, or they caused; gifts between us or perhaps among themselves – a girl that they’ll barter away. I’m here. And I’m willing to talk, or trade. . Copyright © 2011 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Winner of the American Poet Prize for 2011 Published in The American Poetry Journal , Spring 2012.

Index Previous Next Balcony House Mesa Verde We huddle beneath a sandstone roof afraid of dream-like depths. All around: a cave metropolis. Two hundred homes piled story upon story, rise to a mezzanine of slick adobe tiles. Impregnable Balcony House. Its builders crossed a narrow ledge, then threaded a small entry that tests our king-size son and draws us to the same high wall the same sheer cliff that others slipped – or leaped from – seven hundred feet, seven centuries ago. They bartered goods, but had a taste for gambling. As here, a charming reconstruction: talus of tiny arrowheads, string of indigenous berries draped, with surprising grace, by an open pit. Exchanges we recognize: ritual gifts for the chance of a woman's forgiveness – and not – as our guide would have it – for the chance of crops. Seasonal beads for an earlier season's omissions. Shimmering talus, like the memory of a kiss. Plucked berries for a city whose heights must have made them light-headed, somehow unable to turn the earth back to life. A stirring pool of cold, clear water is all we hear today. Or perhaps, not water, but the buried tones of chanting priests in kivas underground. How could they not have heard the pools receding? How did they miss the cracking clay below? Perhaps it was our same habit of being: an ever-promising season – men trotting up toe-holds cut in stone to tend crops on a lush green mesa: a vigilance they must have thought unrivalled, while their babies swung from the ends of roof poles below, to a rhythm sung from above – quietly taking in the canyon’s toll on love. . Copyright © 2001 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Tampa Review , Fall 2023.

Sestina for an ill boy Award Winning Poetry - 2016 Robert Frost Award Sugaring Sestina for an ill boy A loyal maple lingers by your bed: nature fiercely altered. Its sugar finds your pulse, then trickles in with a rhythm partly boy, partly tree. For comity we call it Mr. Pipes: a way of making peace with hard adjustments. It takes long freezing nights and thawing days to make the sap come like this -- a big run. Drip after drip, each steadier than the last, run through clear lines. I see, now, nothing’s altered that hadn’t already gone awry. Your limbs, thawing in the afternoon sun. The only rhythm -- rations of sap met evenly, at last, with insulin. The hard trek back from a seizure’s arctic grip: whistling pipes, banks of white cotton; a nurse (too cheerful) pipes up: how brave you are, and you’ll be up and run- ning in no time. A promise? Or a wish for her hard- luck kids? One spring, we got behind; buckets overflowed, altered the ground below to a sticky mat that sounded the rhythm of hard luck in thick, slow plops. The whole world thawing like centuries of ice cracking beneath us, thawing the gummy linings of blackened buckets and pipes – dripping with a precision suggestive of a subterranean rhythm. I read, that spring, that scientists can tell if the sap has run up from the roots or down the bark – but, not why its taste is altered year to year. Always the questions we care about that are hard. And “coming to” always the same: that hard expression sweeps over you. Your eyes, half-frozen pools still thawing: late winter, but late in feeling the seasons altered. Your way of banning ceremony, or welcome-horns, or pipes. Your way of taking back the small reserves that run from you each time you lose this fight. Your fitful rhythm yielding to this old-world, pacing rhythm. And knowing where to greet you, here or there, always so hard to gauge. Which is the place of the senses? Where we out-run our fears? You take us there, each thawing day, it seems. Limbs or pipes? We give up these distinctions. Nothing is altered that wasn’t already granted. Nothing is altered that makes us see things hard to see. Some call it god, others just tendrils thawing. Copyright © 2014 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Naugatuck River Review , Winter/Spring/ 2016. Reprinted with permission from Robert Frost Foundation . Semi-Finalist, Naugatuck River Review's 7th Annual Narrative Poetry Contest Previous Next

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.

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.

Selected Poems of Maria Teresa Horta Translated by: M.B. McLatchey and Edite Cunhã Forthcoming in Inventory , 2020 Prev 14 Next MY SUSTENANCE The more I write poetry the more I surrender to the loss the more I lose myself the more I find myself I catch a glimpse and despise and discount myself The more I write poetry the more I become enlightened to turn it into my body to summon it in time making it my sustenance MEU ALIMENTO Quanto mais escrevo poesia mais me entrego ao perdimento mais me perco e mais me encontro me desencontro e vislumbro me desacato e desvendo Quanto mais escrevo poesia mais me torno alumbramento a transformá-la em meu corpo a convocá-la no tempo tornando-a meu alimento Copyright © 2019 M. B. McLatchey & Edite Cunha, with permission. All rights reserved. Forthcoming in Inventory , Princeton University, 2020. Copyright © 2017 Maria Teresa Horta, from her collection Poesis . Dom Quixote Publisher, Lisbon. Back to List

Index Previous Next Ode for Amy Amy Donahue Fort Worth, Texas Army, Specialist - Paralegal Tikrit, Iraq 7/07–7/08 Baghdad, Iraq 3/10–2/11 Bagram, Afghanistan 2/11-5/12 100 Faces of War Exhibit Roll call. You know the drill. And even now you paint more than the painter can the story we should know. Clear eyed, salon-styled hair, civilian clothes. An aura around you like some after-glow of a time, a record, a narrative, a myth, a place that for your sake – or for our sakes – you’d rather not be told. In your denim jacket, trim black leotard below, you could be any woman; you could be all the women we have known. Around your neck, not tags, but a pendant in the shape of the state of Texas – home like a tarnished puzzle piece. Apparel and accessories you picked for this, for the portraitist, as if to signal in familiar code: a new self has been birthed – or perhaps it is just costume for a pose. In Homer’s Odyssey , Athena was the epic’s champion pretender; master of disguise, an Ithacan among the Ithacans. Better this way to shepherd home the troops, to arbitrate the terms for a man reentering and more alone than he has ever been in his own home – a soul-sick Odysseus. What did Athena know that made her call a truce, even absolve Odysseus for murdering his maids? What did she whisper in our epic hero’s ear – hero more comfortable in a beggar’s clothes – that buoyed him, returned him to his wife and son and dog? Here in disguise, another Ithacan, you must have made the same pact with the gods: Ithaca lives, but only so long as beggars in disguise can make the laws. . Copyright © 2018 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Arts&Sciences , a MOAS publication in association with the Smithsonian Institution ,Winter 2019

We Are Coming Soon Sign up to be the first to know when we go live. Notify Me Thanks for submitting!