$14.00
poems by
ISBN: 978-1-964277-82-0, 60 pages, $14 (+ shipping)
Ship Date: March 26, 2026
The Advance Sale Discount price on this title has expired. For those who prefer to pay by check, the price is $18/book (which includes shipping & sales tax) and should be sent to: Main Street Rag, 12180 Skyview Drive, Edinboro, PA 16412.
Mike Santora (he/him) holds an MFA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from the University of New Hampshire. He is the author of the chapbook, Sugarflood, (Finishing Line Press). He lives in Cleveland with his wife and two children.
From the start, its own genesis, Mike Santora’s poems illuminate the multitudes we contain, move through, and have our being in. There is a velocity to these poems, racing along at the speed of life. You’ll want to join the poet and with him, “run with any good thing”, learning to be reckless in your empathy. Lean in. Listen. You may just hear the beat of your own heart here. ~Milenko (Miles) Budimir, author of Licorice Heart (Roadside Press)
There is a hard-won, gem-like quality regarding the poems in Minimum Safe Distance, Michael Santora’s debut collection. Like a crystal, there is both clarity and angular refraction, images both smooth and rough, the world observed, recorded, and reimagined in all its facets from yard sales and dildos to the fluorescent yooperlite. Santora has a keen vision and “a heart as big as a wedding.” Read his book! ~Stuart Dischell
Minimum Safe Distance traverses gardens, galaxies, and grief, finding lyric wonder in banana peppers, extinct flowers, and Ohio valleys. With humor and tenderness, these poems blur the boundaries between loss and joy, myth and memory, the ordinary and the astonishing. At once elegy and celebration, the collection reveals how carrying our dead, our children, and our failures can also carry us toward flashes of resilience, astonishment, and luminous survival. ~Noor Hindi
But for me it’s on the swelling
lip of Lake Maracaibo,
in an august before Augusts
where the old lightning
astonished the coast
and made us.
You and me and the New World
warblers, the tyrant flycatchers,
and all lucky thirteen species
of true vireos.
Yesterday, they sang
that it’s okay,
it’s okay.
Grief and grind are so close
in soul and bones.
And as they sang
the rain was the earth
reading our alluvial fortune.
Look at us,
young diamonds in Islay
so confident in our station.
I’m telling you, take that middle management money and buy the vintage Bordeaux you know from the blacktop. The ones for scuffing under streetlamps, not for collecting dust in Moldovan wine caves. Either Bordeaux will help quiet your ankles, either will tell those Adam’s apples of the feet to quit whispering about your weight. But the simple nubuck upper in black and light graphite will hold up so much longer than a vanishing act in four glasses. So, if you must, buy the French Bordeaux. Drink it. Then take out your phone and order the Jordans. Drink another Bordeaux. It helps with none of the things the wine moms say, but it does slow the dreaming of Cambodian or Pakistani factories. You know. You and your crew were not the first children to sweat inside those shoes. The air was so different between your feet.
It took some time,
but after everything
had burned and the air held
only fire, it was the fragrance houses
in Grasse and the stills of Kannauj
that became the sacristy of earth.
For some, nothing could nourish
like the memory
of the last time they caught
the rain kissing the earth.
Every attar base-noted in twilight showers
was now a relic of that
oldest romance. All was looted,
the perfumes bartered
for food.
When the children
we had left asked me
about rain, atmosphere
it was hard for them
not to hear of it as a god —
It came down from the sky.
Brought flood.
We are of one body.
We killed it.
It’s been said that Woolie Reitherman
had the cels of those scenes
drawn over each other
because it had already worked
once, so why not again? Well,
because that afternoon
Christopher Robin walked
a resurrected Indian jungle
and began to feel the transfusion
flowing through the landscape’s veins.
Déjà vu at first,
and then the full embrace
of a parallel abandonment.
Slinging rocks over the bluff
was really young Christopher
questioning the colonialism
of Mowgli’s god.
How did I miss that? And if I missed that,
it seems certain that I, too,
am an organic sketch
drawn over many past lives.
Tell me, great animator,
how did the last me
fair when our leg was fractured,
running through cinders
in the schoolyard?
Or when we approached the burning
car in the early hours before
our breakfast shift at Jennifer’s?
The night of the neighbor’s fire,
how often do they live
and does the flame continue
to follow me through time?
It does, doesn’t it?
It’s rare
but sometimes out on the rocks,
if I stand still enough,
I can feel your ventriloquism
in some kind of celestial acrylic.
I must admit
it’s easy to lose track of your life.
Sometimes, I think I can hear
your clear sheets flipping,
layering themselves over us
the weight holding us down,
moving us along.