Where Winter Spends the Summer

On a beach towel print of a bosomy mermaid
that reads I LOVE Miami. In an everglade’s
wild plan marked with grilles and canopies.

Between concrete, leaning towers and a sea
meant for healing. In a daze, dreaming, gazing
at Odysseus’ wine-dark deep. In the unclothed

body’s prescient haze. On the front of a postcard—
a postcard painter’s dream—in dabs of yellow
and green, intended, as postcard painters will,

to make a symphony of bathers between brush marks;
map out, in palm-tree fences, a new world: an answer to
the sirens’ call, when all the bathers want is no world at all.

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M.B. McLatchey is the author of two books of poems, The Lame God, for which she won the 2013 May Swenson Award (Utah State University Press) and Advantages of Believing (Finishing Line Press), as well as an educational memoir, Beginner’s Mind (Regal House Publishing, forthcoming), excerpts of which have won The Penelope Niven Creative Nonfiction Award and appeared in journals such as MEMOIR (and), Slippery Elm, Chautauqua, and Carolina Quarterly. She is the recipient of several literary awards, including the American Poet Prize from the American Poetry Journal and the Annie Finch Prize from the National Poetry Review. Recently elected as Florida’s Poet Laureate for Volusia County, she is Associate Professor of Humanities at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Visit her at www.mbmclatchey.com.