New Poetry by M.B. McLatchey

The Shadow Maker
Our goal is to make it so there’s as little friction as possible to having a social experience. – Mark Zuckerberg

is the fifth richest man in the world;
a harvester of pearls: our small talk
like algae-rich waters and tides – new births,
divorces, prizes our children acquire–
feeding and keeping the oysters alive.

is a master of illusion: figures in captioned
poses, screen and light; shadows that dance
on cave walls. Dramas that make us muse, lean
in, post notes like medieval glosses in the margins
of someone else’s domestic scenes; illuminators
to an epic chant, a rhapsody’s god-dream.

is the Ideal Prince, accepting the burden
of princedoms, glory, survival, to jettison distinctions:
good and depraved; monarch and something human
saved. Better to be loved and feared rather than
admired, or worse, revered. A lord who understands
the desire to acquire. A magician with two hands.

is a Philosopher King, able to discourse on goodness,
justice, corrupting pride; hold court on high ideas:
opinion, false truths, reality–a theory of forms
that casts our lives in cycles, fruit and fallow; sinners
redeemed. A god’s will altered; a cave master’s dream.

War in Eurasia
We shall squeeze you empty, and then we shall fill you with ourselves. – Orwell, 1984

We sleep like guard dogs, one eye open, groomed to unlock
from one another’s folds. Older, a cooler grey than our adult
years. Your breast, like a forbidden prayer or scent or thought,
presses against my arm. The war in Eurasia rages on. The dull

flicker of the TV; the news anchor’s lips tattooed a deep
party red mouthing vowels: A and E, and O – not I or U.
Everything in black and white, or streams of sepia.
We hardly remember the difference between the news

and truer truths; the sum of two plus two. Harvest seasons
pass. Dictionaries yield a sulphury marsh gas. Winters sprout
days of halcyon, golden wheat. We yearn for myths that lean on
goddesses of crops, a mother’s loss and rage, a revenge drought.

Love is the warrior’s call. We knew it in the womb, first breath,
when we were made to choose: a dying art, or this waking death.