Search Results

Award Winning Poetry - 2025 Winner of the Lazuli Literary Group 2024 Writing Contest - 2 of 3 - Is there a Final Exam? This was always the plan. The day and hour, of course, is out of our hands: Dickinson’s Carriage Man; Shelley’s desert sand. Imagine an untethering, a swansong reckoning. No proofs in stone. Almost certainly, you will be alone. The location, like an envelope you have been carrying, will be unsealed – a wakefulness, or a presence revealed: a man who taught you to field ground balls in the yard; devotions you fought and now whose storied part you want again. Or perhaps in a chance encounter with a schoolyard friend, a companion you abandoned for the faster track, the slap on the back. Our lives a history of what-ifs, lighthouses somehow missed. The final exam will not be timed. It will be scored blind. The final exam will leave you among the living, taking stock. Finishings all around; ashes still simmering – and a threshold to cross. Your gift if you use it, time : Gilgamesh, tunnelling trails to a city wall; Penelope’s loom and an ever- unravelling shawl. As for them, so you: there will be threshold guardians – a forest monster, suitors – reveals of the anima. Look these guardians in the eye. They are barriers to test your stamina. . 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: "Ethos, Pathos, Logos" 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 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.

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

Beginner's Mind From Shipyard to Harvard Yard: Embracing Endless Possibilities by M. B. McLatchey Winner of the Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award "Rippling with wisdom and creative genius." - Readers' Favorite ® 5 - Stars “IT’S WONDERFUL TO HAVE A BEGINNER’S MIND.” – Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple "Anyone who has been influenced by a beloved teacher will savor this work; educators will especially appreciate it." - Library Journal "Would the bad children please raise their hands?" Discover why that statement and so many more from Beginner's Mind will have you either smiling or crying. For parents of young children, their teachers, homeschooling parents, teachers in training, and all adults interested in discovering a more loving way for children to blossom in school, Beginner's Mind is the how-to book we have been waiting for – a book that describes teaching the way we so passionately want it for our children. Told through the eyes of a very observant ten-year-old who, in real life, did go from shipyard town to Harvard University, Beginner's Mind gently answers the question, How do we want teachers to teach, inspire, and guide our children? Teacher comments: "A must-read for every parent and teacher.” – Kevin McIntosh, Class Dismissed "Read this book and re-open your mind.” – Robert Fleck, PhD, Art History as Science History "Beginner’s Mind has galvanized my teaching. ” – Frankie Rollins, The Grief Manuscript "The perfect gift for every teacher, from every loving parent." - Reader's Favorite More Info: Video Trailer for Beginner's Mind Of Poets & Poetry: Prerelease Book Interview Readers' Favorite 2021 Five-Star Reviews Beginner's Mind in the Classroom A Poem by the Author - "Beginner's Mind" About the Author ERAU Industry Day Poster Praise by Teachers for Beginner’s Mind : “Quirky, wise, fierce, impossibly creative, Miss D is the fourth-grade teacher we all wish we had. Risk-taking and grace-under-pressure are among the lessons she teaches her students in a hardscrabble shipyard town, sometimes at great cost. M.B. McLatchey has repaid the gift in full, adding Miss D to that pantheon of teachers we never forget, who change our lives forever – for the better. A must-read for every parent and teacher.” — Kevin McIntosh, Class Dismissed “Einstein said he loved talking to young children because they hadn’t yet been brainwashed by education. In the sciences, it is so important to look at nature with an open mind, without preconceived notions and biases. M.B. McLatchey captures all of this in Beginner’s Mind , revealing its secrets to the reader through the innocent eyes of a remarkable fourth grader. Read this book and re-open your mind.” — Robert Fleck, PhD, Emeritus Professor of Physics & Astronomy, Art History as Science History from the Paleolithic to the Present “M.B. McLatchey’s readers encounter a visionary in this memoir about her fourth-grade classroom, a place where the dictionary becomes a ‘Sanctuary,’ where students leave space at the top of their papers for Big Ideas, and where the Busy People’s constant motion isn’t considered a nuisance but made useful instead. The teacher, Miss D, insists that her students learn to trust themselves in a world where authority offers little room for singularity. ‘Don’t look back,’ she urges us, because every day is another chance to choose how you want to live your life. Beginner’s Mind has galvanized my teaching.” — Frankie Rollins, The Grief Manuscript “This is the work of an original, smart, and talented writer. She has a great storehouse of knowledge and a penetrating understanding of many subjects, including human beings. It is wonderful to read someone who knows a capella, Sanctus, and the Agnus Dei, as well as Carol Channing and Hepburn (and knows the difference). When has a school room been given such vivid enunciation – the dioramas, shoe boxes, sticker-stars, and clay figure, the comfort of “half-truths” for other children, but not for Miss D’s. With a “sideways glance,” they took it all in, and were forgiving, like Miss D (whose door says welcome, an endless acquittal). It is difficult to see any of us “condemned,” and yet, there are standards. Standards! I can’t go on admiring line after line, when I am only on the first two pages in my commentary (and my language is so stupid and pale in comparison), but that’s what this essay does to me; it says look, see, remember. Word for word, sentence by sentence, I am enthralled. Thank God for Miss D, and for being reminded that at least one or two of my own teachers were, if not her equals, close sisters. While the writer appears like a new comet on my horizon, I am wild to know what this writer will do next. Meanwhile, she will be “graded,” though A+ hardly describes my admiration.” — Emily Herring Wilson, Judge, Penelope Niven Award in Creative Nonfiction The Center for Women Writers, Salem College "McLatchey pens a love letter to her fourth grade teacher, Katherine Arthur Dunning, an extraordinarily gifted and unconventional educator who for years taught in the public schools of North Weymouth, MA . The "beginner's mind" of the book's title describes the innocence and curiosity of young children, which Dunning (whom McLatchey refers to as "Miss D") sought to cultivate. The author vividly describes her dynamic fourth grade classroom, where Miss D focused on big ideas, eliminated labels such as "good" and "bad" to describe students, designated the dictionary as a "sanctuary," and helped hyperkinetic students channel their energy through additional tasks. Interspersed throughout are brief letters from Miss D to the author, charting their enduring relationship over decades. VERDICT Anyone who has been influenced by a beloved teacher will savor this work; educators will especially appreciate it." —Elizabeth Connor, Daniel Lib., The Citadel, Military College of South Carolina, Charleston Library Journal Where to Order: Regal House Publishing Amazon Barnes & Noble Book details: Publisher : Regal House Publishing Language : English Paperback : 230 pages I SBN-10 : 1646030680 ISBN-13 : 978-1646030682 Item Weight : 12.6 ounces Dimensions : 5.5 x 0.58 x 8.5 inches

The Lame God: Book Review Review by Brad Crenshaw The End of the World A dear friend of mine from Holland has a son who, during his latency years, unexpectedly developed a seizure disorder. One evening years ago, after riding yet again in the ambulance to the hospital emergency room, his dazed son in his arms, he blurted out a Dutch proverb: “You’re only as happy as your unhappiest child.” The context added particular weight to the emotional vision. I had come along afterward bringing extra clothing, mainly pajamas and underwear for the hospital stay, and at the moment it seemed possible to me that, given the proverb, no one in that family would be happy ever again. It was a sobering thought, and it put me on alert. I had children too, younger than my friend’s, but they had their vulnerabilities as well–they had desires, and the frustrations to desire. So I hunted around for things to do, clearing a path, smoothing the way toward their futures. My daughter discovered early on that she wanted to play the piano—not a violin, not a keyboard, but a piano. So,well, okay, that was easy enough: we found her a piano. I mean, seriously, I couldn’t even get the instrument out of the truck before she was all over it. My son, for his part, basically needed room, an exit from the strictures of developed social play into the boundlessness of an unconstructed world. From the beginning he has pulled me outdoors, enticed me out from behind my desk and onto frozen dog sleds, into kayaks floating among whales in the Pacific Ocean, on treks in arid Southwestern mountains photographing petroglyphs–and then he has gone to places where I could not follow, so that his safety did not depend on me, but on another father–this one Kenyan, who sat outside his cloth tent at night with a wooden club to whack any marauding hyena that came too close. The lions, apparently, were no problem. I have wanted to risk all this personal detail here in order to bring each of us, in our minds, personally, onto a certain pathway that leads in the end to M.B. McLatchey’s new book, The Lame God . It’s a book that pretty much requires a personal response from us, because the core of its themes centers around a person: 16-year-old Molly Bish. It is possible that some of you may have heard of her, insofar as her plight unfolded for months in the national news. In fact, it is entirely possible that a few of you may actually have known her, the real Molly Bish—maybe as a high school student, maybe as a neighbor— before in June, 2000, she was abducted from her lifeguard tower at Comins Pond in Warren, MA, and subsequently raped, tortured and then murdered. Whether McLatchey herself knew Molly is unclear: she does not disclose what, exactly, her relationship to Molly Bish and her family has been. But she does reveal that she has, at a minimum, spoken with the mother, Maggie Bish, to obtain permission to write explicitly about Molly, and about the attending horrors that ensued after she was found to be missing. McLatchey writes in her Introduction “This book is offered in memory of Molly Bish and in homage to her mother, Maggie Bish, who encouraged me to ‘keep talking about this; keep writing.’” McLatchey adds that “The story that this book tells is true. No names have been changed to protect the innocent—the innocent have already seen the face of evil, smelled its breath, learned its customs.” This is a unique introduction to the poetry. We as readers are explicitly denied the usual aesthetic distances from the events depicted in the stories because the events are not fictionalized. McLatchey’s artistry here is working with brute facts—among which is the troubling recognition that the perpetrator, whoever he is, has not been apprehended. The man is still at large out there. Accordingly, there is no sense of justice in the book, no comfort derived from cosmic symmetries, no vengeance exacted, no eye taken for an eye, no recourse. Just horror. 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 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 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. The quotation alone is hair-raising—though with that said, I am struck by the poet’s lack of overt drama in the poetry that follows. On the one hand we have the sensational, flat enumeration of the number of bones that were, over time, returned one-by one to the grieving mother—and with the manner of that return left unstated. How would you do it? Did they come in a box? Labeled with an evidence tag? Did a policeman ring the doorbell, and hand over her skull? What kind of protocol could even be possible here? However, before we step out into that emotional darkness, we hear the poet’s measured voice avoiding hysteria by invoking a classical myth, and with it organizing a parallel narrative of divine retribution to help her metabolize her raw feeling. Because contemporary explanations just feel petty, just lame excuses offering a simplistic cause-and-effect model to rationalize the behavior— something like ‘bad parenting creates bad boys’, or these days maybe it is a defective neuron causing the problem. Bullshit. It takes the scale of mythology to begin to convey the goliath male evil that descended upon Molly. The poet’s task is, essentially, to figure out how to express the full weight of the violation without screaming. It is a delicate matter. Often in the book McLatchey combines classical figures with traditional poetic forms to allow us perspective with which to view the scope of violence, and the depth of the insult to Molly and her family. In Little Fits, for instance, the poet composes a sequence of Petrarchan sonnets to organize her thoughts and feelings, and to secure a mental space in which to arrive at insight, emotional clarity, and decision. The formal restraints allow the emotional matter to be pitched very high, but without ever sounding bathetic. And look at the graceful formal movement in this sonnet: 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 catharsis: 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 the 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. Fortunately for the book—possibly for the poet herself—McLatchey moves from her contemplation of the brutish facts of murder, and toward a reprieve, toward a respite that acknowledges other continuities besides those of abiding anguish. Here we find an intimate pair coupled, which is to say, linked in their common association that, for the moment, includes humor and catharsis. Here we are offered an image of mutual purpose, and shared pleasures, as well as their doubled purgation expelling together the poisonous, unacceptable affects. The purgation signals an emotional transition out of trauma and into sorrow, and to a generalized sense of both vulnerability and promise. The transition is an essential point of the poet’s vision. She discloses that she, too, has children—two sons, we are told—and she has to wonder what she has let herself in for. Having children is a sort of biological vote for continuities, a tacit endorsement of future, continued participation in the social morass. Like it or not, she as a parent is compelled to be party to a world that has its disgusting matters, its truly fearful possibilities, against which she tries to civilize brute desires, and ward off threats to naked innocence. But there is only so much she can do. Always in the distance burnt brown combines sweeping up spools of wheat. My sons sleep in the back seat—the younger one bowed over; the other up straight like a sun-drenched sheaf. Up ahead, one sheer pool after another that the heat lays down. Day stars (the older one calls them) spring up from the pools and usher us on, then flicker and steam. A Dakota we’ve never seen… I reach back to wake the older one: solicitude, or a favoritism that I had thought might pass. Or a reckoning of our lives that comes when the light slants like this, as if we are looking through more than window glass. I pat his leg to comfort, or to bless him, or to brush some divination off. But he is already looking out…. from Joseph Dreams Two Dreams There is only so much any of us can do, and who knows if it is ever enough? POSTSCRIPT : It occurs to me that an interesting mirror image to McLatchey’s book —or at least to the events composing the detonating first cause of the book—is a poem found in Frank Bidart’s first poetry collection, Golden State . I’m thinking of Herbert White , which is the first of Bidart’s poetic attempts to inhabit the psyche of various historical persons—Vaslav Nijinsky, for example, the anorectic Ellen West—and convey through them his own matching torments. Herbert White is, or was, a convicted murderer, child molester, and necrophiliac. Bidart’s poem, with its monstrosity, can be read as a companion piece to McLatchey’s traumatic abhorrence. I have written about Herbert White elsewhere: http://www.bradcrenshaw.com/sin-body-frank-bidarts-human-bondage Brad Crenshaw April, 2014. The original article can be found at: http://bradcrenshaw.me/tag/m-b-mclatchey/

Award Winning Poetry - 2004 Featured in Verse Daily Against Elegies What if we let you sing first? What if we look for you with Mallarme’s blank stare: birds round an empty dish, stony limbs? To tell the history of our grief we settle for an empty doorway and a maple leaf or a woman with neckcurls, named Jane, changed by her poetry teacher’s love to a wren wound in light. Shimmering anodyne. Elegies so resolute in wood or wings that we forget the truer measurements of unfinished things: the distance between two disappearing habits; the echo of a promise lodged in a warbler’s throat; the length of a dreamy boy swinging from his favorite limb; the ragged patch below — our ground for spotting him. If grieving is a way of working wood, building thresholds, wrapping birds — then hands will keep us tending things too near. What if this June air should circle, not fall on, our copper chimes with the passiveness of prayer? What if the breeze that would carry a bird’s perfect sorrow were to kneel at the base of an oak, and refuse to rise? Copyright © 2004 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in National Poetry Review , Fall/Winter 2004. Featured in Verse Daily ® with permission, 2004. Previous Next

For a foster child Award Winning Poetry - 2014 Narrative Poetry Contest - Semi-Finalist The Bath For a foster child The slightest wrong move could mean tidal waves. Certain disaster to a boy with everything resting on delicate tissue – a bruised knee to which you command a corps of plastic ships – an austere but (you promise) heavenly beach where men may lie down in soft sand, a tiny fold in your thigh; write letters and find oranges to eat; plan the next battle. Hard that you know so much about these distances from home. A trumpet blast! You steam your mission out. Predictably bad weather and still another perilous gorge of falls and fleshy islands. The search resumes for citrus or, at least, friendly harbor. I wish you both -- and not another tour of calculations tossed or unchartered, and not this shadowy map on water. Copyright © 2014 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Naugatuck River Review's 6th Annual Narrative Poetry Contest Semi-Finalist. Published in Naugatuck River Review , November 2014. Previous Next

Award Winning Poetry - 2012 Winner of the 46er Prize for Poetry Bingo Night for Missing and Exploited Children B efore we went underground. Before you fell through a gyre with no sound. I f one piece were unwound. If you had run. If we had looked for you sooner. If you had screamed. If the gods had intervened. N ascent. Still blooming, the orchid on your window sill. A thrill of color. G one. Gone. Gone. Gone. Gone. Phantom limb. If the soul leaves the body, we did not feel it go. Nothing and everything cloistered in stone. O mens we left for others. Ripples on a resting pond. The whistling of a breeze. The imprint on the ovaries. Copyright © 2012 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Winner of the 2012 Adirondack Review's 46er Prize for Poetry. Published in The Adirondack Review , Summer 2013. Original version published here . The 46er Prize refers to the forty-six major peaks of the Adirondacks. Hikers who reach all forty-six summits are deemed "Forty-sixers." Also published by Beacon Press in The Blue Room Collective's anthology, Grabbed , Summer 2020. Previous Next

Award Winning Poetry - 2005 Winner of the Annie Finch Prize On Recognizing Saints As if to find new icons for her life or as if - piece by piece - to dismantle mine she scans our purchases too consciously. Flips through a magazine I'm embarrassed to be buying. Studies its regimen for shapely thighs, asks me - because she's heard - if drinking wine is good for nursing. The shift from idle chitchat to appeal. Camille, her nametag says. Camille of olive skin and violet nails with long metallic tips, who flashes her lover's sucking marks like her stigmata. Camille who isn't showing yet - but like Crivelli's virgin martyr Catherine, peers sidelong at me and leans decoratively against her register as Catherine did against her studded wheel. So clearly Catherine that I want to look away - or kneel. And yet, Crivelli would have framed her differently: a martyr tucked away with other martyrs in a predella of muted colors, quiet suffering. None of this heart-to-heart - this girlfriend talk that brings to mind a string of small petitions and makes me say my part. Copyright © 2004 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. Winner of the Annie Finch Prize, 2005. Judge: Margot Schlipp Published in The National Poetry Review , Fall/Winter 2005. Previous Next

Award Winning Poetry - 2006 Muriel Craft Bailey Award - Finalist Odalisque Early light, the chill of souls leaving. You draw up the sheet to cover us; the soft of musk, the body's heat from an air pocket, nudged and wayward. The scent of fading bleach. I give you the curl of my back, a nonevent. Yet, all of it art. Ingres and Ingres' Odalisque who drapes a velvet curtain's jeweled sash across her calf; whose hips turn in a wash of Turkish hues. A French settee or this bed: staging we need to fuel our natural lives. To feel the body lift to the extension of a kiss. The temporal shift in calling souls home -- stomach, thighs -- like this. A quickening in canvas or stone: my open mouth and your inarticulate moan. Copyright © 2006 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award Finalist. Published in The Comstock Review , Fall/Winter 2006. Previous Next

Index Previous Next 2012 Robert Frost Award - First Runner Up The Arrangement I. Because we were getting old enough our instructor took us to look at (not to touch) some pictures grown men drew. We tripped like new recruits through orderly rooms. Some were sternly directed to carry their shoes as we made our hushed advance. In the dim hall we could hear a classmate whimpering as she would whenever she felt too far from home. Her tears a kind of prelude to the work itself: Flowers in a Vase - more paint than flowers whose stems arched away, whose poppies bleated and sprayed yellow tears on our starched uniforms, on the perfect walls. All the way home, the yellow hung on our clothes. The bus took us sluggishly along, and we felt the road under its beefy wheels change to a luminous river of paint and the trees gave up their souls in Autumn's clay glow. II. I knew what it meant but not really. So I took the stairs two by two for you, like any other day. In my pocket, paintings on postcards, a stick of gum. In the kitchen below, Dad had grown small beside the cakes the ladies brought. He would not eat, he would not speak to relatives in the hall, and the relatives awkwardly leaning on end-tables like faded photos of themselves. Mother was proud to find me at my prayers and honoring the adults who were clearly "spent". When she pressed her head to mine, I felt her hair like fingers on my brow: a gesture she'd learned from you, mother to mother, and was teaching me now. And, this was "hard" and "each of us will have his own lament." It took all I had to steady my temple to hers - to keep my sorrow apart - as we planned the next few hours: where the aunts would sleep and who would order the flowers. . Copyright © 2006 M. B. McLatchey All rights reserved. 2012 Robert Frost Award - First Runner Up, Robert Frost Foundation . Judge's Review

Index Previous Next Trigger Warning We have art in order not to die of the truth. ― Friedrich Nietzsche This spring, as in previous springs we will have our themes: A young man will take his mother to bed – then blind himself with her dress pins when he learns the truth. Another mother will die yearning for her son’s lost youth – ten years in combat in some hell called Troy, ten more at sea, a champion of the gods, or a beautifully- carved chess piece. In our fifth week, the most promising student will stop coming to class – uncounted, unseen. Some of us will look for her in our dreams. In one, she will wave, relieved, as she sails away. In another, she will signal a code – fragments like shards from an ancient, splintered vase; runes like self-spun elegies which, as a class, we will read. A champion of the gods, or a beautifully- carved chess piece? In the tenth week, the quietest one will change his place from Enrolled to Audit – a jockeying for a Pass on this charted and uncharted course – or kiss and a roll of the dice. A look at his source. The same week a veteran marine will submit his term’s work – a dense, hard-copy, thoughtful, heap – then swallow and swallow and swallow and finally sleep. A champion of the gods, or a beautifully-carved chess piece? The rest of us will proceed. Like clockwork, carillon will ring. Gowns, assemblies, deans. Swallows will stir the clock tower – Lazarus-like – and crocuses will flower on the campus green. . Copyright © 2018 M. B. McLatchey. All rights reserved. Published in Harpur Palate of Binghamton University, Fall 2018, Vol. 18.1.