by M.B. McLatchey

If you’re always under the pressure of real identity, I think that is somewhat of a burden. —Mark Zuckerberg

In the cave, our histories are shadows
on a wall; our memories rote lessons
that flicker and mutate. Fall and spring,

then and now, captured and interchanged.
Friezes like post cards sculpted to ornament
the grotto, endure, resist decay.

When the shadows dance, we point, open
our mouths, as if for a split second, something
shifts, recalibrates. A glimpse of fire and lathe—

and shadow makers. Forms beyond hope.
Ideas like sirens singing. Cracks in a wall
that luminate, hint at another source: rivers,

flora and bursts of color, starlings with iridescent
wings, shrubs whose roots finger through mud
for something to drink. A world too fluid to dangle

from rod and string. How could we want its ranges, moon,
its chorus marking dawn, its feathered swirl confusing
predators, its messenger’s glad song? Why should we

mind the tether anchoring us; the flame that fixes seasons,
stages night and day, that orients us frontward, ever
frontward, and keeps the constellations in their place?

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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 Univ. Press) and Advantages of Believing (Finishing Line Press). She is also the author of a recently-published and award-winning memoir, Beginner’s Mind (Regal House Publishing, 2021). M.B. 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. Currently Florida’s Poet Laureate for Volusia County and Arts Ambassador for the Atlantic Center for the Arts, she is Professor of Humanities at Embry-Riddle Aeronautical University. Visit her at mbmclatchey.com.

by M.B. McLatchey

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.