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Three Poems By Heaven Santiago

MAR Editorial Assistant
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Three Poems By Heaven Santiago

STABILISER

My eyes floated
towards nearby archers

with their candy pink,
flame red,
mustard yellow bows,

suspended between their hands

with the wristband, like a yo-yo

rocking back and forth like a cradle—

their stabilisers, the anchor.

The weighted rod branches

from the front of the bow,

like another limb

to maintain balance, sharpen precision.

Bows sway, crescent-shaped, lulls my anxiousness to slumber,

I’ve never owned a stabiliser.

ARTEMIS

My second friend was a Hoyt Olympic recurve bow.
My arrows’ fletching were feathery fiery reds & bright whites.
I fired them into the foam bail target, earning myself
a proud gold disc glistening in the summer sky.
For once, I conquered something out of my reach,
The target, some twenty yards away.

My future, even farther.

My present—a waning crescent.
My home housing a sinkhole. Irreversible.
As we descended into homelessness,
I don’t know when

My arrows lost their fletching, their points,
halved the length & soul, strength & heart.

TWILIGHT OF THE ARCHER

Hollow holes plastered our sheetrock walls.
Tonight, she gifted me an onyx black recurve bow.
It had a militaristic feel to it, with its neon orange grip.
I struggled to hold it in my palm. My arm, a collapsing bridge.
I barely drew the string back, before launching the arrow
with its metallic tip, into the weak wall.
I was aiming & shooting incorrectly.
I wasn’t trained, back then

Oh, the damage I could cause.

Heaven Santiago is from Brooklyn, NY. She is expected to receive her MFA degree in Creative Writing this May. She has attended the Barrelhouse conference for writers in Washington, D.C. twice. She writes in multiple styles within poetry.

Multimedia poetry account: @poetry_from_an_archer

Featured image in this post is, “Changlimithang Archery Ground, Thimphu, Bhutan” by Bernard Gagnon, licensed via creative commons 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Three Poems By Michael Young

MAR Editorial Assistant
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Three Poems By Michael Young

Love Letters

We who are wedded to time
lounge on the beach. Gulls
sweep along the sand
carrying a message of depths.
They have salted their paths
in the brine of enduring secrets,
a source that the waves pounded
into a scattering of questions
and children shape into castles.
It clings to us all day and
as we leave, carrying it out
into the world, disperse it
like pollen. It’s what draws us
back to the shore of its mystery,
not to answer but simply to feel
what love there is in being asked.

The Only Where We Live

The only stair we take, winding down
into ourselves, one rib at a time inside
this citadel of flesh, these walls that ache,
tingle, and scooch into ripples at the merest
touch, a release of geese at the slight graze
or glance nearest to nothing but only the sound
of violins surging from a piece of music
like Mahler’s 5th Symphony. Or it could be
the return of stone pushing its way out,
what the kidney’s calcified of the remains
of beer and wine and the celebration of all
that passes over us, like weather and wonder,
a wave cutting the surface of us as the world
passes through and all its aethereal etchings,
like a tree troubled by wind or a river
flinging itself off the edge of its untidy bed
into a waterfall, and all that we are
flies out with it into arcs and spindrift,
suspended in air briefly before the plunge.

Had to Believe

How many ways can I learn what is hidden?
Can I learn what is hidden in so many ways,
or shredded or deleted, the documents,
the conversations in Washington offices
limiting the help my aging neighbor will
receive, a worker at McDonalds in his
golden years, or the single mom on the corner
considering still a third job because of
the rising cost of groceries, the rising cost
of medicine for her ailing son who likes
to sit at the window watching the birds
along the telephone wires like beads
on an abacus, especially when they take
to flight as if the addition and subtraction
could be tossed into the air and there’s
a chance that when it all comes down,
it could fall out in his favor and he would
have more time to spend with his mother,
and in sorting out those numbers, it might be
the reports will tell us not what we had
to believe but something useful like how to fly?

Michael T. Young’s fourth collection, Mountain Climbing a River, will be published by Broadstone Media in late 2025. His third full-length collection, The Infinite Doctrine of Water, was longlisted for the Julie Suk Award. He received a Fellowship from the New Jersey State Council on the Arts and the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. His poetry has been featured on Verse Daily and The Writer’s Almanac. It has also appeared in numerous journals including I-70, The Journal of New Jersey Poets, One Art, and Vox Populi.

Featured image in this post is, “Stairway To Hell” by Karmela Kortizija, licensed via creative commons 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Three Poems By Kate Powell Shine 

MAR Editorial Assistant
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Three Poems By Kate Powell Shine 

EXHAUST FOUND HERSELF INSIDE AN EMPTY SNAIL SHELL

A private spiral, whiff of yuck bit off her trail of pummel slick. The shell was cold, and damp, and empty. 

Exhaust feared the snail’s return would poison cork her uncooked void, any moment, any nowness, replace her empty shellness, resting mess of nestness. 

So Exhaust shrank back and back, shore receding, shove and smudge and grope, fractal nothing to divide her weight by zero up the empty coil recoil, until she found the smallest cone of curl, exhaled her thereness speechness. 

But still she feared outside the empty shell, its runs and boils, and so Exhaust took up her size and pulled and pushed all overhang and bulge as small as small, then smaller still inside the empty shell, and waited for the snail. 

THE ITCH TANK

Windows here don’t work right. They’re not mirror sunshinesafe with eyes trained out, but sinking in. My inside view is blank so even glass cupped broken squint can’t see past ruffled knifeprint pupil. 

The neighbors glance and see a zoo. The room’s scraped empty, foundation excavate, invade a squirm and squeeze. 

I crave, please store me, but no tissue, bag, or cardboard box is safe. I spread my own paint thin to walls. I grab a sheet of jostle dust to floatcollect unplanned array, no rag rub complicate or jealous trace, just mundane display of a slimy shrine.

WHERE TO APPLY THE IMPULSE 

When the walkway is paved with felt and food, you’ll know.

When your ears stretch string into bone and drop notes on the floor, you’ll know.

When clouds slice the sun, twin yolks wide, and paper rains from each half, you’ll know.

When each fork of aspirin leads to a ring of bees, you’ll know.

When hand knits knuckle to silk, spent mouth behind mouth-bent back, and all you hear is tin, you’ll know.

When each face scowls on each roll, 

and each rind wraps each seed and flies back soft, 

when wood grows teeth out your neck,

and fire beats lies,

and plastic teaches beaks to bark and spit to crawl,

you’ll know what to do.

Kate Powell Shine (she/her) lives in Maryland, where she is active in numerous literary communities including those at Montgomery College, Montgomery County Public Libraries, and the Eastern Shore Writers Association. She has had poems published in anthologies and magazines including FuseLit, Gargoyle, and Little Patuxent Review. She was a finalist
in the 2024 Enoch Pratt Free Library Poetry Contest, and she is co-editor of the poetry anthology, Echoes Through the Stacks.
Her recent writing explores themes of isolation and illness via grotesque humor and the surreal. She has struggled with mental and physical illness for most of her life.

Featured image in this post is, “Thésée-la-Romaine” by Daniel Jolivet, licensed via creative commons 2.0 via Wikimedia Commons.

Two Poems by Dianne L. Knox

Gregory Luce
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Two Poems by Dianne L. Knox

Coaling the Furnace

Am I such a romantic to believe
that the coaling of the furnace
was a job my parents enjoyed sharing
before it was exchanged for oil?
They seemed to have a rhythmic shoveling
knew the coal hours burn-time
took turns descending to the dank basement.
My mother didn’t want me to spend time
there in the dark musty dirty depth of the house,
would come check on me if she thought I’d
stayed down too long. What was I doing
in this mysterious area lit only with a dangling bulb?
Mom wanted to protect my curiosity from harm.
I wanted to unravel the secrets of boxed memories.
Loving warm coals cooled to remembered embers.

Clean Canvas

My house has interactive art.
Pieces that I have placed change arrangement every two weeks.
She re-moves the boredom of the job she has to do
the job I don’t want to do, now don’t have to do

I hope she notices that I keep her creativity until her next visit
when she is inspired to move the paint brushes to a new order
the rocks in the bathroom to other rocking positions
the knit bag of sage jumps up top the quartz splash
the towel postures itself on the right this time

dining baskets, basil, and squash in a row on the table
Italian sculpture and tins balanced on the server
painting abstract pictures with her duster.
She has an eye.

Dianne L Knox is a poet who lives in the Pacific Northwest on the Olympic Peninsula in the small town of Sequim (skwim). Dianne is a marketinggraduate of the University of Iowa, worked for a defense communications corporation in Business Development, owned a small business, practices and taught Tai Chi, and is a rabid reader, listener, observer. Knox has been published in several anthologies, Cirque Literary Review, Tidepools Literary Magazine, Port Angeles Fine Arts Center Poetry in the Park, Poetry Corners Bainbridge Island Press, Avalanches in Poetry III, Inspired by Art, Blue Whole Gallery, and her book, Red Hot Pepper.

Image: James St. John, CC BY 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Two Poems by Daniel Edward Moore

Gregory Luce
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0
Two Poems by Daniel Edward Moore

Nativity Blues at the Border

The world was dark. Very dark. Political tensions were high.
He thought maybe a star. A very bright star. Could end the violence

at the border. It would have to be very particular. Like recruiting
dancers of DNA. Yet, universal as grief’s bulldozer burying hearts in heaven.

The need for intervention was clear. My offer to help accepted.
History was introduced to my lover, Lord Belt. A perfectly pierced

serpent of leather. Friendly enough to plan the reveal of beautiful
inches of ecstasy Yet, easily converts to a wrist accessory.

If holy submission transforms the bed. Into a manger scene.
Mary becomes Queen of the Prom. Making me a wise man with gifts.

Flooded By Fictions of Rescue

If you get this close to the edge of drowning
floating may seem like a dream to you
rising from beneath the sawtooth waves
where fear is just my breath god said,
helping the body stay cool and calm
before your future’s phallic vessel
arrives with screaming animals.

Fast forward to the desperately needed tsunami
in your frigid pool of affection where
lightning’s slow-motion burn can cause
serious marine life arousal, can
make thunder’s bad-ass biblical mouths
into back-up singers for Noah’s last song,
Flooded by Fictions of Rescue.

Daniel Edward Moore lives in Washington on Whidbey Island. His work has appeared in Southern Humanities Review, North American Review and others. His work is forthcoming in The Stillwater Review, Verse-Virtual, and Action Spectacle Magazine. His book, Waxing the Dents, is from Brick Road Poetry Press.

Image: “The Sacrifice of Noah,” Metropolitan Museum of Art, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons

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