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Hear poet Alexandra Citron read poems for wave 9 of literary poetry journal iamb. Alexandra Citron wave 9 spring 2022 back next the poet Alexandra Citron was born in the USA but has lived in the UK since her early teens. Her poems have appeared in Mslexia , Visual Verse , Ink Sweat & Tears and And Other Poems , as well as in the Emma Press' anthology, Everything That Can Happen: Poems about the Future . the poems Learning to accessorise 00:00 / 01:46 Eighteen, tank-top and jeans, the girl from three doors down holds court one summer on the trunk of her white saloon, draped in python. Cross-legged, bangles jangling, she loops four feet of lustrous snake along her arms and waits to see how long it takes for us to creep forward. Wide eyed. Mesmerised: aliens landed in our neighbourhood. Go on, you can touch him and shy hands reach to take the inky-lacquered dare, tip-toe fingers along dark bands glistening like moonlit rain on bark. We stroke a rolling shudder of pulsing silk, a placid purr, black eyes holding back a spell. Undulating to a whispered song, she charms to summer incense of charcoaled meat and late mown grass. Boys slow their bikes. Fathers home in time from work pause latchkeys in the locks. She swirls patchouli-scented hair off tendrilled shoulders, cradling the thick ribbon of him cheek to scale, his tail languid across her thighs. I go to sleep those sultry nights dreaming of someday sliding into rooms, sophisticated, cool, smelling of dark flowers and wreathed with serpent. The Novaya Zemlya effect For Max and Ben 00:00 / 02:03 Boys, be wary of the peddlers of absolutes. But certain things are known. Take on trust that the earth goes round the sun. Is round. Requires oxygen and ice and like us a balanced diet. That it can be seen from space. That we have walked in space and travelled to the moon not once but six times. That the moon controls the tides. Turtles swim hundreds of miles to return to the same shore. That the sun comes up the same each day as expected. Most of the time. That where the sun doesn't rise for months it can seem to, a mirage reflected in the atmosphere, stained glass glowing in a desert of polar dusk when the sky is a mirror to what lies below the horizon. A hope of light. A prayer. That the mirror of the atmosphere only works at certain latitudes, like Novaya Zemlya, in winter, where once they say during sun-starved days, the reflection of a polar bear was sighted miles away. That forewarned is forearmed. That what is called sorcery at one point in time may well be explained at another. With time and particular quirks of mind. That pointing this out is not heresy, just as seeing the sun rise where it is not is not madness but a trick of light and physics I do not fully understand. And boys, that's okay. We breathe the laughter of uncertainties. Sometimes there's trust and sometimes the evidence of your own eyes and the element of surprise. Let Streetview take you home for the holiday 00:00 / 01:00 Hitching a white arrow up Saffold Way the trees are all too tall. It’s garbage day. The blue door to the old house stands ajar but should be orange and the street wider where in summer small feet ran over searing asphalt for a dare. The birch in the front yard’s gone with the brown Toyota and begonia beds. A man in shorts is heading to go in, his chores complete. I shadow his retreat back to the kitchen on his left. Ahead the L-shaped room and stairs, perhaps a cat scratching the corner of a chair. You are outside on the balcony, let’s say, just out of sight, calling us in from play. Publishing credits Learning to Accessorise / The Novaya Zemlya Effect: exclusive first publication by iamb Let Streetview Take You Home for the Holiday: Ink, Sweat & Tears

Hear poet Zoe Brooks read poems for wave 8 of literary poetry journal iamb. Zoe Brooks wave 8 winter 2021 back next the poet Zoe Brooks returned to her native Gloucestershire to write and grow vegetables after 15 years in London. Her collection Owl Unbound appeared in 2020, and her long poem for voices, Fool’s Paradise , won the Electronic Publishing Industry award for Best Poetry eBook – it will be published as a physical book in 2022. Zoe is a member of the management team for the Cheltenham Poetry Festival, and as well as setting up and running the Poetry Events in UK & Ireland Facebook group , enjoys performing poetry. the poems My Grandfather and Uncle 00:00 / 01:04 My grandfather and uncle both returned to the earth with untimely haste. Although they worked it, broke its back for frost to bite into, dragged sedge from ditches, clawed back lambs from snowheaps, they did not inherit it. Unless it was in the length and width of a man's form. And it claimed them early, reaching up through the chest, pain filling the arms, which had gathered harvests. And still they loved it. And still they cursed on cold wet mornings as it worked like ringworm into their hands. In death they shall inherit the earth. Until this time they have been living on borrowed land. The Call 00:00 / 01:46 You want me to stay a hearthkeeper, a filler of stoves and a bearer of logs. But the forest calls and all the small unspoken things living there listen. You want me to be a guard dog, a lier by the fire. You place dead meat in bowls to comfort me. But the forest is stirring. Can't you feel its mossy paws rising up the walls? Can't you hear it? It scuttles in the attic and leaps on nesting mice, tears their little limbs and chomps on innards. You try to keep out its cold, but the roof insulation is red with the death of vermin. As you pull the rug over your head, I feel my tail grow bushy, my snout lengthen, my teeth turn iron. In the morning you will find my bed empty. Open the door and follow my trail, if you dare. Follow it up the hill, where the track skirts the ruined farm with windows black as the mouth of a gap-toothed hag. Follow it past the heavy cows to where the snow will not melt in the shadow of the birch trees, to the edge of the forest. I am waiting for you there. The Gypsies in the Room 00:00 / 00:43 It is the unstitching of the mind, we tell ourselves, watching as she slips further from us, like an old purse, the lining opening to reveal lost coins. Morphine and dementia see the gypsies in the room, silent in a row. The ancestors come to greet her, we joke, to watch over the journey we cannot take with her, not yet anyway. The coins jingle, crossing the palm of the ferryman. Publishing credits My Grandfather and Uncle / The Gypsies in the Room: Owl Unbound (Indigo Dreams Publishing) The Call: Obsessed With Pipework (No. 85)

Hear poet Kimchi Lai read poems for wave 6 of literary poetry journal iamb. Kimchi Lai wave 6 summer 2021 back next the poet Kimchi Lai is a bilingual poet based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. She has performed at Urbanscapes 2018 and 2019, and won third place in the 2018 Asia Pacific slam at Lit Up Festival in Singapore. Kimchi's work has also featured on The KITA! Podcast, as well as Speak Easy on BFM. She self-published her first chapbook, Solace in Solstice , in May 2019. the poems Waxing Moon, Waning Lover Featuring《水调歌头·明月几时有》by 苏轼 00:00 / 02:21 明月几时有?把酒问青天。 Tonight, the moon is full. She smiles at me, her gaze illuminating the glass in my hand as if she knows I wish it was you I am holding instead. 不知天上宫阙，今夕是何年。 I wonder if we have met in a different dimension; or if we will meet in heaven. 我欲乘风归去，又恐琼楼玉宇，高处不胜寒。 I would sit with you under an arbour in the gardens. Surrounded by pillars cut from the finest of jade and sharpest of teeth, protecting us from the fierce winds that try to blow us apart. 起舞弄清影，何似在人间? But the air is still tonight, and you are not by my side in this life. So how dare I wish for your presence in another? 转朱阁，低绮户，照无眠。 The moon comforts me from my window. She is trying to coax me into slumber. 不应有恨，何事长向别时圆? “You see”, she whispers to me. “I shine brightest in the face of longing. What need is there for my light if your lover radiates enough warmth? What need is there for a full moon if you already feel complete?” 人有悲欢离合，月有阴晴圆缺，此事古难全。 Perhaps I will never see your crescent smile, or hear your gibbous laugh again. Yet I know this: we are under the same sky. And now whenever the moon waxes or wanes, I will know it is her saying that you are thinking of me. 但愿人长久，千里共婵娟。 Fatal Blossom 00:00 / 01:00 The sprig of leaves I planted the first night we spent together bloomed today. You cup one in your hand, petals the deepest shade of sunset at its final second before plunging into dusk, haphazard but stunning. Ignore the thrum beneath your feet; the tangled vines that pulse and hiss with poison and hidden truths cannot hurt you as long as you keep me near. Let them creep quiet and swift the same way nightfall creeps upon day, curling around your crown to whisper sleep into your temples. Do you understand? This garden started out an angry mess of ivy – it was never supposed to bloom. Do you like periwinkle? Focus on the flowers. I worked so hard on them. Romantic Sentence 00:00 / 00:53 Words are unconfined, not meant to be held. But once in a while I will get lucky and manage to catch some at the tip of my pen, just long enough for me to string them into an ink necklace. Alive with earnest grammar and passionate vocabulary; every dotted 'i' and crossed 't' quivering. Staining my fingers in haste I drape it around your shoulders, fasten the ends with a full stop. The letters startle at your warmth, smudging slightly. They tumble downwards in my clumsy locution and catch at your collarbone. The same way my breath does in my throat when I see them sigh and settle into your skin; dark blue biro etched across your chest. Oh, sayang. You were meant to wear these words. Publishing credits Waxing Moon, Waning Lover / Romantic Sentence: Solace in Solstice (self-published) Fatal Blossom: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Jean Atkin read poems for wave 4 of literary poetry journal iamb. Jean Atkin wave 4 autumn 2020 back next the poet Jean Atkin's latest collection is How Time is in Fields , in which there’s a lot of walking and witnessing of place and the natural world. Her work has featured on BBC Radio 4’s Ramblings with Claire Balding, and appeared recently in The Rialto, The Moth, Agenda, Lighthouse and Magma. In 2019, Jean was Troubadour of the Hills for Ledbury Poetry Festival, as well as BBC National Poetry Day Poet for Shropshire . She works as a poet in education and the community. the poems The not seen sea 00:00 / 01:54 Under cliff, under white chalk, Under Hooken we walk down the throat of the harts tongue and talk. Our boots are glossed with clever ivy. Overgrown, overhead and soft under old man’s beard, bosomy June leans down on us, up close to cyclical drift, centimetre shift of earth. While, sunk in its cage of feathers, a blackbird rots, deflates into the flint step down to the beach. Shingle rumbles in our ears. It hisses, passes, as we wind the path between the cliffs, and only now and then we catch the hill-high lurch of chalk in mist. Keen in the nose, the salt and fret of sea. All the while we twist a flint descent by rungs of ivy root, and all the while a thrush repeats repeats its song to coil to coil inside our ears. And another blackbird sings, so blackbird answers it in audible waves. By our feet a chasm of ash and fog. Low in our bones, not visible, churrs the sea. The tattoo’d man 00:00 / 01:26 has had a skinful, to go only by what shows. His bull neck’s chained, a padlock swings above its own hatched shadow. In scrolling calligraphic script, his knife arm pledges faith in love, and brags his unsurrendered soul. His other arm is tidal. On the backswell of a bicep lolls a mermaid, tits like limpets, eyes like stones. An anchor lodges in the flesh above his wrist: its taut rope twists across his sturdy, sandy bones. But much of him’s of land, for deep in the humus of his cheek a splitting acorn roots. An oak leaf grows towards his mouth on sappy, pliant shoots. With men, it’s never easy to be sure, but here’s one who’s tried to take the outside in. He’s shifty as gulls and bitter as bark. Every night he reads that skin: his library of pain and virtue, bright and thin. The snow moon 00:00 / 01:18 On the night the snowfields above the cottage became bright maps of somewhere else, we climbed up in the crump of each others’ boots. Capstones of walls charcoaled the white. The hawthorns prickled it. And a leaping trace below a dyke was slots of ghost deer gone into the fells. There were rags of sheep’s wool freezing on the barbs and lean clouds dragged the roundness of the moon. Jupiter shone steady to the south. It was so cold. And the children threw snowballs, all the time. My old coat took the muffled thump of them. Night snow shirred our mittens with silk. We turned for home, left our shouts hung out in the glittery dark. Publishing credits All poems: How Time is in Fields (Indigo Dreams Press)

Hear poet Margaret Dennehy read poems for wave 17 of literary poetry journal iamb. Margaret Dennehy wave 17 spring 2024 back next the poet Born in Waterford City in Éire, Margaret Dennehy now lives between Dungarvan in County Waterford, and Cork City in County Cork. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, and in 2020, a poem of Margaret's was featured in the RTÉ Radio One Extra series, Keywords . She is yet to publish her debut collection. the poems Ever Full Bithlán – Ever Full Tobar Rí an Domhnaigh – Well of the King of Sunday 00:00 / 01:38 A rusted ring embedded in a mooring post Marks the spot where ferrymen Offloaded their summer-Sunday cargoes Of 'hooded devotees' in search of health and healing. Rounds made, of three or nine, From east to west, following the motion of the sun. Stones, stacked in small mounds, tallied prayers. Pilgrims bathed their foreheads and hands in its waters And drank deeply of its cool, clear goodness. Rags of red or black Tied to its shady canopy of ash and elm. Left to flutter and fade, like leaves in the winter, Till they took up the wishes and woes of the bearer And carried them away on the wind. Only remnants now remain Of this 'fairy font' of wellness (which gave my place its name). A limestone plaque on the wall. The border of its beehive mound traced in brick beneath. Its sanctity suppressed in the name of 'progress'. Bithlán – this ancient spring of ritual and restoration, No longer nourishes the needs of those Who struggle to survive the marauding malady of our times, Or those in search of succour and of solace, Or those who seek to be healed and made whole again. Cinderella Shoes After Subh Milis by Seamus O’Neill For Maeve 00:00 / 00:54 Morning – a pair of black 'killer heels' Lies abandoned at my hall door. One, upright, standing tall. The other, fallen wearily on its side Like a warrior slain in battle. The stiletto heel, his weapon, Poised to strike his slayer as he fell. A momentary impulse surges to insist, That these high-rise icons of fashion Be removed at once from my hall floor! But the urge to scold is soon suppressed As I think of the time When these black sentries of style (To me, a secret signal of her safe return) No longer stand (or lie) at my hall door, And the one to whom these Cinderella shoes belong, Is gone. Exposure 00:00 / 00:37 Their smiling faces caught in a moment by the push of a button. As light through lens hits silver crystals, A latent image is made. But the magic happens in a dark room Where, like a blind man feeling his way, The one who draws with light, Feeds film onto a spool. Like a priest, he prepares for the ritual that Will once again make visible the happiness of those Who believe that the joy Of that snapshot moment Will last forever. Publishing credits Ever Full: Poems from My 5K (Cork County Council Library & Arts Service) Cinderella Shoes / Exposure: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Ken Cockburn read poems for wave 10 of literary poetry journal iamb. Ken Cockburn wave 10 summer 2022 back next the poet Poet and translator Ken Cockburn spent several years at the Scottish Poetry Library before going freelance to work in education, care and community settings – often in collaboration with visual artists. His most recent collection is Floating the Woods . Ken's also the man behind the pamphlet Edinburgh: poems and translations , which features work written for the guided walks he leads in the city’s Old Town. He also translated from the German Christine Marendon's Heroines from Abroad . the poems Hands 00:00 / 01:37 These hands have buckled belts and fastened buttons These hands have howked the tatties from the ground These hands have handled cutlery and weapons These hands have picked the apples from the bough Hands to hold a pen or blade Hands to strike and cup a match Hands to give the eyes some shade Hands to take another catch These hands have spooned out medicines and teas These hands have painted watercolour scenes These hands have tinkled old piano keys These hands have worked industrial machines Hands to turn another page Hands to hoist and set the sails Hands applaud those on the stage Hands with dirty fingernails These hands in tearooms picked up cakes and fancies These hands have sharpened pencils with a knife These hands held partners at the weekend dances These hands have mapped the progress of a life Hands to scrub and peel potatoes Hands to cup a baby’s head Hands to knit a balaclava Hands to smooth the unmade bed Hands to give a proper measure Hands to stitch the binding thread Hands up when you know the answer Hands to shush what’s best unsaid Ward 00:00 / 00:48 I keep my diaries in a large bookcase my mother told me crossly, years ago, she was now giving to my sister. Fine, fine. I left with what did belong to me, returning sooner than expected when, days before the move, my father collapsed. I went to visit him in hospital as he convalesced and took my daughter who, at eighteen months, was still innocent of past and future, caveats, grudges, grip and slow release. Let property wait. The ward dispenses all we need for now. Rodney 00:00 / 00:58 At that school at that time there was no choice: rugby. Skinny, tall and slow I was put in the second row, scrummed and pushed on cue. Asthmatic, on cold days I wheezed until my lungs gave in. I was keen. I wanted to be good enough for the first fifteen unlike Rodney, disinclined to bother. Played at full-back to avoid set pieces, on the whole, he was left untroubled. Once we were on the same team; a breakaway left only Rodney between the runner and our line. 'Tackle him!' I shouted, but he stood his ground and the ball was touched down. At that moment I could only admire his simple refusal to play the game. Publishing credits Hands: part of Lapidus Scotland's Working with ‘Hands’ and Living Voices Ward: exclusive first publication by iamb Rodney: Poetry Scotland (No. 101)

Hear poet Polly Walshe read poems for wave 20 of literary poetry journal iamb. Polly Walshe wave 20 winter 2024 back next the poet Polly Walshe is a poet and painter, whose pamphlet, Silver Fold , was published in November 2024. Her poetry has appeared in PN Review , The London Magazine , 14 Magazine , Shearsman Magazine and The Spectator , and has been longlisted three times in the UK's National Poetry Competition. In 2019, a selection of Polly's poetry featured alongside Melissa Ruben’s paintings in Night Vision(s) at the Atlantic Gallery, New York. That same year, Polly won The Frogmore Poetry Prize . She also scooped a Betty Trask Prize in 1995 for her novel, The Latecomer . the poems One Small Case Only 00:00 / 01:11 Have you ever packed your bag before a war, Grabbing a few things hurriedly, Paperwork, some underwear? What, you wonder, will you really need? Will it even be possible to change your shirt During the war while on the road With nowhere to stay? You throw In a hairbrush, lipstick, evening shoes But who will have time for these? You know That in a day or two you’ll be laughing Dryly at choices you’ve made, At your ridiculous ideas. As if anything Will be normal! As if washing in clean Water might occur, or going to bed At a predictable hour after a meal. Something inside you knows this dance As if by memory, the need to thrift And thrift to pay a slave’s remittances And how there’s always someone more Forced out of you, a hedgerow poet Or a hidden priest, a conjuror To heal those wounded by their shame, Uncover words that fit when hope expires And cold stars offer no grace. Brand Sharpening Section A: Core Concepts (i) Now 00:00 / 00:49 Now is your only home And will make you authentic Across all platforms Not franchised to the future Or the past As many operators are. The progress of shadows Cuts up the hour But Now – and who knows how? – Has seamless power. All representatives and strategists Must beware of actioning Precise time terminology When Now is always streaming Perfectly, Licence up-to-date. Our Now is flashier, A great deal more Kardashian, Than tomorrow, Next week, Or the endless wait. Extraordinary Rendition 00:00 / 01:43 There was a woman who turned into a shadow, You could pass your hand through her quite easily. It was her desires, she could not overrule them, They chaperoned her everywhere and wore a hollow In her and the hollow grew into the whole of her. Mostly she longed for random retail objects, Heart-breaker shoes or a small Norwegian table, But her longings also looked for unprotected people Who lacked the strength to pull against the pull of her. This person drifted round a little spitefully and yet You pitied her. She was so small, so guinea grey, And getting greyer, more transparent, every day, While the hollow in her grew insatiable, hanging Out of her like Bonnie Parker to suck the strangers in Who stopped to talk to her. The hollow Would swallow her too, eventually, her nose, Her rings, her smile and her broken-brimmed fedora, Closing its portal to the human world and shooing Its desires back to their dark stable For refurbishment, but not before enticing several More unguarded strangers, showing them the charm In her and dragging them to the far side of her Where they remained, lost in a modish purple fog, Not understanding where they were and dreaming That they still lived modern independent lives, Following the news, et cetera. Publishing credits One Small Case Only: Pennine Platform (No. 95)  Brand Sharpening: Shearsman Magazine (Nos. 131 & 132)  Extraordinary Rendition: PN Review 269 (Vol. 49, No. 3)

Hear poet Sue Finch read poems for wave 7 of literary poetry journal iamb. Sue Finch wave 7 autumn 2021 back next the poet Sue Finch's first published poem appeared in A New Manchester Alphabet in 2015 while she was studying with Manchester Metropolitan University for her Masters. Her work has since appeared in a number of magazines including The Interpreter’s House , Ink, Sweat & Tears , Dear Reader , One Hand Clapping and IceFloe Press . Sue's debut collection, Magnifying Glass , was published in 2020. She lives with her wife in North Wales. the poems Flamingo After Liz Berry 00:00 / 01:47 The night she bent my elbows to fit the candy floss cardigan for the twenty-third time, my limbs turned to wings. She wished me to be a pink girl. My neck grew and grew, elongating, extending, black eyes shrunk in the pink like submerged pea shingle. Light in my fan of feathers, I was lifted like a balloon puffed with helium. Body and wings held stately, magically anchored by one leg, miniature rough patellas marked my hinges. When the scent entered half-moon holes in my new beak I could have salivated at the raw rip of scaled flesh but my juices would not run – I was gizzard now. I couldn’t bear the confinement of the flock, but flight had me fearful. Passing through flamingo phase I fattened, darkened. A birch broom in a fit, I shook my thick cheeks side to side became a dodo with a waddle in my walk that slowed. She sent my father then. He came alone with gun and incongruent grin and shot me dead. Skewered me above his heaped fire under moonlight, turned me slowly round and round. When he turned for the sauce I dropped; charcoaled feathers, beak tinged with soot, burning in the blaze. I laughed as I rose higher and higher; a golden bird from the fire. I Can’t Send You Back, Can I? 00:00 / 01:56 I I can’t send you back, can I? she said. What if I wanted to go? To have her voice filtered through skin and fat. Those words, those questions, that curious consoling babble. What if I wanted to be enclosed again? To be unseen, hidden. What if I wanted to keep her expectant? To have us halted in anticipation. II Last time I led with my head; tunnelling though grip after grip of concentric circles. A hot salted mucus sealed my squashed nose denying me her scent. Air on my hairless head shocked me as my face squashed tighter for my slow unscrewing. The throb of heartbeats confused me with her; fast and faster in my ears, my chest, my head. Longing to cry, my lungs had me impatient. A metallic tang hung in shivers of cold as at last my body slung out behind. I was landed. III This time I would be her contortionist daughter – her womb my lockable box. I would have to go backwards, lead with my feet, point my toes. Contoured contractions would twist my legs into a rope their powerful vacuum cramping, pulling, spiralling me upwards until the smooth, curled width of my hips pushes her pelvis, demanding to come in. My left shoulder would force her wide just before that warmth grabs my neck. Her stretch for the sharp shock of my head would finally close my eyes. Jars 00:00 / 01:27 It was a surprise so I kept my eyes closed all the way to the garden. My empty stomach was a theatre of kaleidoscoping gems. She stopped me walking, invited me to open my eyes. Slowly I began to see. An enormous glass jar had been delivered to our lawn. Above it, swinging from a crane was a lid. Do you like it ? she asked. It’s huge , I managed. I am going to exhibit you , she said excitedly. You like things in jars . I did. That was the truth. A collection of smurfs, smartie lids, miniature carved owls, that figure of Dick Tracy. I liked looking at them, it made dusting easier, they could be handed to someone with ease, for scrutiny. I wasn’t sure this was right for me. I ordered an extra large one , she was saying. She seemed to be making a speech, a declaration of love. I was supposed to be grateful now, touched, overwhelmed. Two men were smiling at me asking her if I was ready. then I was on a platform being lowered in. I smiled like a good exhibit should as the lid was lowered on. It fitted firmly. Did she know I would make condensation spoil the whole effect? Publishing credits Flamingo: won second prize in the Cheltenham Poetry Festival Competition 2020 I Can’t Send You Back Can I?: Interpreter’s House (Issue 69) Jars: One Hand Clapping Magazine

Hear poet April Yee read poems for wave 6 of literary poetry journal iamb. April Yee wave 6 summer 2021 back next the poet April Yee is a writer and translator of power and postcolonialism. A Harvard and Tin House alumna, she reported in more than a dozen countries before moving to the UK. April reads for Triquarterly , contributes to Ploughshares online, and mentors for University of the Arts London’s Refugee Journalism Project. the poems Kopachi / Pripyat / Vilcha 00:00 / 02:07 In the cloud that drifts online, I discover an image of myself, notebooked, remember I toured Ukrainian villages in April, the anniversary of their before and after, the date they understood dirty and clean , touched new energies released into air. My recollection floats ungraspable as air. The high-res photograph does not recover dead actions to the hippocampus, now clean as a blank notebook sheet. I remember the detailed email from my father after I said I’d go to Chernobyl that April. He cited a scientific study: Dear April, Mushrooms, exposed to soil and air, can remain radioactive for years after. For breakfast, the local hotel covered pasta in mayonnaise and dismembered hot dogs. I also half-recall the clean white shirt of an engineer. He’d keep clean our air in a then-future, now-past April with a steel sarcophagus to stop the embers from dispersing particles in global air. His metal tonnes could fully cover the Statue of Liberty, he intoned, after a meal of many courses. I marvelled, after, how he kept his white shirt so pristine clean. A visiting Japanese mother, face covered, gripped two Geiger counters an April and a half since Fukushima blew the air. She earthquaked her body to remember. Actually, I use records to pretend-remember. I Google articles I must have written after that trip, read emails maybe sent from air- craft raining pollutants over unclean nimbuses. I trigger cruellest April, places where every root was covered in irradiated air and nuclear embers. After, I wash my consciousness clean, allow the cover to contain all of April. Listening to Lola Flores 00:00 / 01:03 In your ghost berry house, you screw the leg still tighter in its wooden frame, the hoof suspended, question mark. Botanists peg the mulberry to man, their shots at life quick decades. No estás más, corazón. Silkworms spin threads from fruit before it spoils. You shear off fat, locate shrunk flesh. Off bone it falls. He plumps the fruit your maid slow boils to blood-gelled jam. In your arguileh’s crown, his coals burn orange hot, each breath you take cremation. Hide your father’s jamón bone in the slingshot shadow of the lamp you break, below the mulberries, their blinded lobes seen too in cemeteries of my home. West / East 00:00 / 01:53 My eyes are the hammered edge of a Chinatown butcher’s cleaver, heavy and heaved with momentum, not sharp. There’s enough sharpness in sheared bottles, wires embroidered with barbs, paid bills that slip inside the flesh. I heave my eyes on discards, cleaving past from present: Who touched this can, and can it buy my lunch? My butcher heaves his cleaver through a duck’s shiny body, and I see the X-ray of its bones, perfect whites circling congealed purple cores. The rice: free, my butcher’s Buddha plea. I swallow slowly, seeing with my tongue for paddy stones that seek to crack my teeth. I picked one time a book, heavy with large font: The Geography of Thought. A man inside theorised mankind’s mind cleaved in the age of the ancient Greeks, each fisherman hauling his solo catch while Chinese strewed rice across collective fields. West sees the thing; East sees the place the thing sits in. I can see I am now West: sifting, sorting, seeing the trash, and not the street the trash sits in. Someone saw this book as trash. Were I East, I’d be the rice, the duck, and the butcher, whole in every grain. Publishing credits Kopachi / Pripyat / Vilcha: Commended in the Ambit Poetry Competition 2020 Listening to Lola Flores: Ware Poets 22nd Competition Anthology 2020 (Ware Poets) West / East: Live Canon Anthology 2020 (Live Canon)

Hear poet Oormila V Prahlad read poems for wave 19 of literary poetry journal iamb. Oormila V Prahlad wave 19 autumn 2024 back next the poet Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad is an Indian-Australian poet, artist and improvisational pianist. Her poetry and art have appeared in journals and anthologies including Cordite Poetry Review , Black Bough Poetry and Bracken Magazine . As well as being nominated for The Pushcart Prize, she's had work put forward on several occasions for Best of the Net. Author of Patchwork Fugue and A Second Life in Eighty-eight Keys , Oormila lives and works in Sydney, on the traditional lands of the Cammeraygal. the poems Dirge in June 00:00 / 00:47 A lone tree wilts in the solstice night— a ripple in blue pashmina. Slow denudation— its trunk is a withering cross sowing moth wings in the night. All around the periphery of the dark hours frost-eaten buds decay, a carpet of papillae strewn on purl-furrowed soil. There is no mercy in the frigid sky. It descends in a shroud of clouds. Myrrh numbs the pain of bruised torsos, tortured limbs shivering in winter’s Golgotha. Padma mudra 00:00 / 01:09 The boy on the marshland is a pious lotus a helix of petals unsullied by the murk of mud. He lies awake at night in a hammock of moon— breath sustained by the thin gruel lining the stalk of his belly. His fingers moisten cotton wicks. Oil hisses into blue-eyed flames as primroses quiver in prayer. The boy knows that his salvation lies in the power of the syllable— he captures cold cursive in chalk on slate forging words forming phrases raising a bridge over the quagmire one kernel of knowledge at a time. An indigo god smiles, bamboo flute in hand glowing from an igneous wall. They will converse—boy and deity and alter what seems to be hewn in stone. Padma mudra is a hand gesture in Hinduism and Buddhism that resembles an opening lotus. It symbolises the journey from darkness to light. Maiasaura 00:00 / 00:37 I know her in her unravelling— her kaolin scales ground to dust scattering upon a tongue of breeze. There are lessons I learn early on— that I must grow a pellicle over my skin to heal the penury of touch. Frenzied murmurations mimic the shape of her armored heart— love is a severed appendage the shadow of a fleeing gecko a clot of cold blood throbbing in the dark. Maiasaura means 'Good mother lizard' Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Kim Harvey read poems for wave 1 of literary poetry journal iamb. Kim Harvey wave 1 winter 2020 back next the poet Kim Harvey is a San Francisco Bay Area poet and Associate Editor at Palette Poetry. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. You can find her work in Poets Reading the News, Rattle, Radar, Barren Magazine, 3Elements Review, Wraparound South, Black Bough Poetry, Kissing Dynamite and elsewhere. She won The Comstock Review’s Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award 2019, and placed third in the Barren Press Poetry Contest in the same year. the poems Standard Credibility Inquiry for Displaced Plant Life 00:00 / 02:23 Are you now or have you ever been considered an invasive species? How long can you survive in the desert without water? Have you ever lied to the U.S. government? Are you lying now? You let me know if you need something to drink. To what fungi have you been exposed? Are you infectious? Do you carry contagions? Are you viable? How much attention do you require? Are you wild? Tell me why you are afraid of fire. What is your country of origin? Do you seek the shade of others? Do you plan to uproot established trees? How far back can you trace your seed? Are you a clone? Are you barren? Are you a weed? Will you reproduce incessantly and choke the perennials? Why were you harmed? When were you harmed? So you were witness to a violence. Are you damaged at the cellular level? Under what conditions will you wilt or wither? How did you escape? And where have you been since? On whom or what do you depend? Are you a hallucinogen? Are you medicinal? Are you lethal to domestic animals or people? Can you be bought and sold? Are you illegal? And the Plant Answers Back [Redacted]: (muffled, inaudible) …my sister was burned part of me died too I don’t know how I got out I will tell you I flew I was a samara on the wind I can still feel her like a phantom limb [ ] I could [ ] smell her [ ] singed skin [ ] raining down around me [ -------- ] Even now I hear her howling Light & Shadow ‘The best way to know God is to love many things.’ ~ Vincent Van Gogh ~ 00:00 / 02:17 A hawk takes a snake in its talons, flies to the top of the trees, aspens I think, above the canyon. Can we agree the snake is dead now? Your words, shards from a broken vase I turn over in my hands, crush fine like millet into the fallen leaves. Stop brooding on the form of things. Think of Van Gogh. Modest blue room. Towel hung on a nail by the door, bowl and pitcher, water if you’re thirsty – absinthe green spilling in through paned glass like a sickness. Loss, a lamp lit long ago. Wasn’t it you who told me blue was the last color to be named in every language? Show me again in moonlight the hollows of you – the places where your body starts and stops. I remember you told me about Van Gogh, how he ate yellow paint to try to get the light inside him. How when he died his body was laid out alongside easels and brushes in a room full of yellow dahlias and sunflowers. How, in the end, it wasn’t just the light he was after. What he wanted was to drink turpentine, to choke on black cadmium and lead. What he really wanted was to die eating his paints, breathing them in, every color, all of them – orange, sienna, crimson, ochre, gypsum, lapis, gold, cobalt blue. Winter Solstice Incantation 00:00 / 01:00 Snapdragon petals, pink and yellow, rose hips, gold paint chips tossed over my shoulder. Hellebore and phlox, candles to burn through the long pitch-black. This spell’s being cast at last light and you’ll come back through the mirror’s crack like Lazarus from the dead tonight if I can just find the right words. Close and closed, what you were to me and a door slammed shut between this world and the next. Outside, a wild wind whips through the trees, whispering its warning—what’s done cannot be undone. Slippery as winter ice, you’re gone. Publishing credits Standard Credibility Inquiry for Displaced Plant Life: Poets Reading the News (September 14th 2019) Light & Shadow: The Comstock Review (Fall/Winter 2019) – winner of the Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Contest 2019 Winter Solstice Incantation: Black Bough Poetry Christmas / Winter Edition 2019 (Black Bough Poetry)

Hear poet Rhona Greene read poems for wave 19 of literary poetry journal iamb. Rhona Greene wave 19 autumn 2024 back next the poet Rhona Greene is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer from Dublin, Ireland. She loves to read and celebrate the work of contemporary poets, particularly those in the online poetry community. Rhona has had work published in several volumes from Black Bough Poetry, and was shortlisted for its Dai Fry Mystical Award in 2022. She was the featured prose writer in the second issue of The Storms Journal , and her work has appeared on Susan Richardson’s A Thousand Shades of Green poetry podcast, as well as in The Wombwell Rainbow's Disappearance calendar . the poems Day Trip to Newgrange with my Grandmother When I Was a Little Girl More than 5,200 years old, Newgrange stands at the UNESCO World Heritage site Brú na Bóinne in Ireland. The rising sun illuminates its passage and chamber around the winter solstice. 00:00 / 06:16 My grandmother tells me whispers: ‘Fadó, fadó, far away, far below. Éistigí, eistigí. Listen.' O shimmering sun. O breath of life. Still. Life. Still. Breathing. Below, below. Fadó, fadó. Kings, queens, gods, goddesses, preparing, turning, positioning crowns to glitter, to glow, tilting glinting halos light caught dark to shine between flicker and flow, flaming unborn visions to flight, crowning spinning heads brim full to dreaming, deep in the majesty of time. ‘Éistigí.' Shimmering sun. Breathing life. Below. ‘Fadó, fadó’. She whispers: ‘Tar liom’ . I follow. Up one grassy mound to another, then another, little giddy goat galloping up, rolling down, skipping, squealing, spinning round and round and round. Knowing nothing of time – yet, but to follow the sun following me in cartwheeling revolutions of joy and its grip soft, green, underfoot, holding me here, holding me now and O how it fills a throbbing heart to burst spilling over with bird songs of joy and sparkling wide-eyed wonder. Eyes open. Sun. Eyes Close. Wait. Open. Sun. Bright. Shadow. Bright. Shadow. Close. Cover eyes. Splay fingers. Filter. Flicker. Filter. Flicker. Shimmer – Shimmer – Shimmer. Glimpse. Vision. Dream. Whispering whispers. 'Tar Liom. Tar liom.' Follow the sun. Up ahead, my grandmother billows in floral skirts leading the way beyond here, beyond now, gathering me – ribbons and bows – in ripples, in flow. When the powder puff cloud of her passes on through the yawning gap and disappears, everything slows. My spinning head. My thumping heart. My every motion winds down to stop and I turn to stone – to this chiselled moment tracing rhythms throbbing to touch. There is no name for this. This day of light and shade, cloud and revelation, forever and now humming, thrumming, trembling stone, coiling and uncoiling the spiral of me, of everyone on this trail. 'Ciúnas, le de thoill.' Quiet, please. The stone is singing. I spiral on to the rippling melody of touchstone, following my grandmother’s dusty footprints laid down before me as softly as snow on snow – a faint trail leading toward a mound. The Mound! O how it looms, blooms, blossoms and grows on approach and I, all shrinky Alicey, my heart full of wonder, bending and folding like a butterfly, crouch down and pass on through the low portal of time, entering a long dark narrow passage, becoming one more tiny dimple in the continuum. Squinty blinking into the vast unknown shape-shifting familiars appearing and vanishing between icy breaths, O so shivery cold to the bone, stirring the primal tendrils of instinct to search, reach, touch, intertwining ribboning strands binding, briefly. We connect, reunite and persist in this heart of darkness where shadow dust sprinkles tangled souls into cradles rocked by rhythm and scattered bones, where time bleeds in sun and echoes, where I feel flow. Silently, we seep into sacred chambers, swelling with life in the slip between flesh and bone, where blood pools, warms to touch in anticipation of a promise, a spark. Hearts beat, beat, beat, pounding hard, fast, loud, throbbing rhythm’s ancient pulse, then slowly, gently down, synchronise to quivering harmony and grace notes, time’s simple signature, and O how we hang in this hallowed place oscillating, unknowing, hoping for the untangling of everything so barely contained. Clinging on in unspangled enfolding black ribbons of fragile awakening unravelling, flinging against the entangled dark whispering: ‘Oh Nana. What do I do now Nana? What do I do now?’ Her sweet voice comes calling, softly, again and again. ‘Mo chuisle, a chuisle mo chroí.' Tilt your shattered head skyward, and wait for light to return. Fadó fadó / Long ago (Fa -though) Éistigí / Listen (Ay-shtig-ee) Tar liom / Follow me (Thar-lum) Ciúnas, le de thoill / Quiet, please (Queue-in-us leh duh hull) Mo chuisle. A chuisle mo chroí / My darling, but literally, my pulse/ beat of my heart (Muh cooshla. A cooshla muh cree.) First Love 00:00 / 00:43 It leapt out of me glistening like a wild salmon on the run up the Boyne – river of my heart. Surging on and on, driven by impulse or memory of its pea-sized beginnings. Tiny thing, mother-planted in the burrowed gravel of her love. Flipping itself in the sparkling air, hurling against rushy waters, turbulent life gushing towards it. First love – the flippin’ and leppin’ madness of it! Shiny Distant Thing 00:00 / 01:25 Wings singe-glow transparent in dipping gold – light is leaving. A silhouette in solitary flight far from this catastrophic labyrinth of gloom. Soft comes the crash of night – music melancholy, blue. Waves receding murmur a vow of silence: ‘mare tranquillitatis - hush, hush, hush.’ After comes rain like petals – sacramental, light. Then comes mourning dovetailing dark infinite deep and shadow-dazzled bright breaking fast any commitment to sorrow, resistance to flow. Anointed, ocean-holy, ascend through blossoming trees to sky-high altar sacred-blue and wish a upon a fish high-leaping to catch a shiny distant thing – star-shaped, moon-blest. Then dance! Publishing credits Day Trip to Newgrange with my Grandmother When I Was a Little Girl: Freedom-Rapture (Black Bough Poetry) First Love: exclusive first publication by iamb Shiny Distant Thing: Sun-Tipped Pillars Of Our Hearts: The Dai Fry Award for Mystical Poetry Anthology 2022 (Black Bough Poetry)

Hear poet Nicole Tallman read poems for wave 18 of literary poetry journal iamb. Nicole Tallman wave 18 summer 2024 back next the poet Nicole Tallman has authored three poetry collections – Something Kindred , Poems for the People and FERSACE – as well as co-writing the forthcoming collaborative work Julie, or Sylvia with Beryl Cooper and Ibrahim Sofiyullaha. A Michigan native, Nicole now lives in Miami, where she's the official Poetry Ambassador for Miami-Dade County. She's also the editor of Redacted Books , and poetry editor of The Miami Native , South Florida Poetry Journal and The Blue Mountain Review . the poems Montréal 00:00 / 00:54 I book us a room in a hotel named after a famous poet. It reminds me of an ex I thought I’d forgotten. It has a balcony that faces the street. In the morning, the sound of plates wakes us. You bring me a coffee in bed and an apple. We watch the city wake up below us. A man carries a bushel of hyacinth. A woman cries to someone on the phone. We dress and go downstairs for breakfast. I speak French to the hostess and remember I have another voice. It’s the one I use when I pretend I’m someone else. She seats us next to a couple in love. They drink out of each other’s glasses. We move to a table closer to the window to forget ourselves. Tulips After Sylvia Plath 00:00 / 01:12 The tulips are too excitable, it is summer here. Look how yellow everything is, how loud, how sunned-in. I am trying peacefulness, lying by the pool quietly As the light stares at these concrete walls, this float, this face. I am somebody; I have everything to do with implosions. I have given my name and my night-clothes up to my work. Nobody watched me before, but now I am watched and recorded. The tulips have turned me in, from the window beside me Where once a day their lens slowly widens and slowly zooms in, And I see myself, exaggerated in the papers and on the screens Between the eye of the public and the eyes of the seen, And I have only a cartoon face, I have effaced my real self. Before the fame the day was quiet enough, Then the tulips filled it up like an explosion. Now the air blares and flares around me the way a trumpet Blares and flares around its bright-yellow bell like a bee. Chicago 00:00 / 00:54 We spend Christmas in Chicago. We fly bundled up for a blizzard. It never snows while we are there. We take a walk before the sun comes out. We drink jasmine tea and watch our breath form in the air. The elms are lonely and naked without their winter coats. We head back to bed and watch TV. Later, we walk to get some ramen from this place the concierge recommends. We buy a bottle of our favorite wine to share in the room. This is the point in our trip when I’m tired of dining out. I imagine you are back home in our kitchen cooking. Cutting vegetables with precision. You play jazz. Why do I always want to be somewhere else? Publishing credits Montréal: River Mouth Review (Issue No. 14) Tulips: Cultural Daily (August 9th 2023) Chicago: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Michael McGill read poems for wave 10 of literary poetry journal iamb. Michael McGill wave 10 summer 2022 back next the poet Michael McGill is a writer from Edinburgh whose work has recently appeared in The Interpreter’s House , Lunate , The Haiku Quarterly and elsewhere. Michael also has work in the Scottish Poetry Library’s Poems by and for Social Workers anthology. As well as performing for Big Word Performance Poetry in Edinburgh, Glasgow and London, Michael has appeared in several episodes of BBC Radio 3’s The Verb. His work has also been featured on the Micro podcast . the poems Puppy Dog Man 00:00 / 02:01 I thought I saw a puppy dog. I did! I did! I saw the Puppy Dog Man! Baroompta-doo-da. Walk tall, Puppy Dog, Puppy Dog, walk tall – Hey there, Puppy Dog Man – Puppy Dog Man never understand; never understand, little Puppy Dog Man, never understand – Let's talk man to man, acrobat to magician, Devil to Christian, honest man to politician on the street, drowning in a sea of integrity, of humanity; 'Such things as these don't please His Majesty!' Baroompta – do do do. Hello? Oliver Speaking speaking. I was talking to the dog, Maury. Please, you're annoying me. Baroompta-doo-da. Lie low, Puppy Dog, Puppy Dog, lie low – Hey there, Puppy Dog Man – Puppy Dog Man take me underground; take me underground, little Puppy Dog Man, take me underground – New street! New street! I wanna live in a new street. I wanna live in your face. I wanna live in the warm puppy dog folds of your skin. Yeah, I wanna live there, man. Woof! Woof! Baroompta-doo-da – walkin' hand in hand with Puppy Dog Man … Pyjamas in the Snow 00:00 / 02:07 Free postcards were scattered all over New York then, filed in metal displays on the walls of clubs and coffee shops, and I’d collect them and tuck them away in my journal, stumbling around like a 1996 Hansel and Gretel reject, and it was January and everywhere was lit like a still from a Blondie video, and sometimes I’d order a Hazelnut Latte and a Sour Cream Mini Bundt Cake, and I’d write home using one of these postcards, back when home-whilst-travelling was a strange place, an exotic village elsewhere, a solipsist’s mirage, a narcissist’s daydream, and then I’d go to the Post Office on East 34th Street and watch these postcards take flight, because I was living life in Technicolor then, but, oh, that boy back at the hostel was a strange one, and he slept in the bed opposite mine in the dorm, and he’d talk about how much he missed ‘The Bay’ and I’d look puzzled, and he asked me why I’d never been to Ireland, and he laughed when I replied, 'Because it’s so far away,' and he seemed homesick and lost, and very sad, so I showed him my postcards, and one was RuPaul’s face in close-up, and he said, 'She’s gorgeous!' – but he’d turn shifty most evenings when a note was stuck to the door because he was late paying for his bed, and the word REMINDER would sit at the top of the page in cold black font, and then he’d disappear for a time and come back later looking dishevelled and used, and then the note on the door would disappear, and one day it was time to pack and head to JFK, and he wasn’t there so I left the RuPaul postcard on his pillow, and I never said goodbye – and back then Jackie 60 nightclub had a hotline you’d call, yeah, it was listed in Time Out , and one night I stood in a phone booth in the lobby of the hostel, and a recorded voice said the theme that week was Scotland and the dress code was ‘tartan tartan tartan’ and, oh, how I wish I’d gone to Jackie 60 in my tartan pyjamas, walking through Manhattan in the snow, but I never did. Celluloid Clown 00:00 / 01:11 'Your poem isn’t a fit for us,' the email read. I recall him emerging; black biro, yellow Post-it. I recall the usual questions: 'To and or to ampersand ?' etc., etc. What is to become of him, I wonder? He doesn’t fit anywhere, it seems. Still, he remains my three-line darling; long-lost relative of that scrawled first draft. 'Your poem isn’t a fit for us,' the email read. Yes, I know he ended up like a circus clown from some campy old film. You know the type of character: always a criminal in hiding (for what are celluloid clowns really, but painted criminals?). 'Your poem isn’t a fit for us,' the email read. In his final scene, he is led to the jailhouse. He hands over his dog (a Boston Terrier) to a young girl and says, 'Take care of him, Cheryl, he’s a good ‘un.' Then he walks away – fade to black. Publishing credits Puppy Dog Man / Celluloid Clown: exclusive first publication by iamb Pyjamas in the Snow: Anser Journal

Hear poet Heidi Beck read poems for wave 11 of literary poetry journal iamb. Heidi Beck wave 11 autumn 2022 back next the poet Heidi Beck grew up in a small New Hampshire town – emigrating to the UK in 1998, where she now lives in Bristol. She holds an MA in English Literature from the University of Chicago, and an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University. Her poems have been published in The Rialto , Magma , Poetry Ireland Review, The North, Butcher's Dog , Finished Creatures , Under the Radar and The Alchemy Spoon . Heidi also has poems with The Friday Poem and And Other Poems . She was longlisted in the 2020 UK National Poetry Competition. the poems Hunting Season 00:00 / 02:35 A girl steps from a yellow bus at Loon Pond Road, anticipating a long walk home—down the hill, around the pond, past the swamp with the beaver dam, the final stretch just woods—with her heavy bag of books. It’s hunting season, and the men are out in pick-up trucks, stalking through the woods with ammo, scopes and shotguns, dressed in their camo, carrying coolers stuffed with cans of Budweiser, Coors, Tuborg Gold. The girl puts on a safety vest, flimsy fabric in fluorescent orange, begins to sing—Supertramp, Fleetwood Mac, all the lyrics to Evita —loud and long, so they hear she is not a deer, so loud she does not hear the pick-up truck slow behind her. It pulls ahead, stops, just past the swamp. Hello, Honey, where you heading to? She smells the beer as they corral her. Let us help, all smiles and hands. The book bag drops, the vest falls off, she’s on her knees, white rump to the air, trying to keep her tail down. She shakes her head, now fuzzy and furred, nose dark as dirt, everything narrowed. Her ears stretch, eyes widen, gaze becomes fixed, the world slows. She remains still, their laughter like an echo, then lifts herself on spindly legs, fragile bones at risk as she attempts to kick, hooves flailing. She tries to buck and punch, awkward in these limbs. Flanks damp, she spins, all panting ribs, spins again, falls. A girl steps out of the forest, arriving for dinner, late. They glare at her clothes, her hair, her wet, evasive face. She tries to describe how she was a deer. Stop! they cry, stop with your lies, your make- believe tales. Don’t bring this trouble here. All the Things Flying are Overwhelming 00:00 / 01:34 Even here, which feels like home, I need to be ready for the planes, the sucking sound and roar, the possible explosion— I’m mapping the trajectory of falling and flame while trying to track the flamingos, their splayed-out necks, the pink under wings as they jockey and speed, then they’ve gone too far and a flash of godwits whistling past, turning white turning black left white right black white black and he shouts You’re missing the spoonbill, just over your head! Didn’t you get it? and I swing my lens and there’s only an egret flapping to splash too late but then storks, Shit , my settings are all wrong, wheeling higher and higher, keep calm, find the pattern, pull them into the frame and keep on walking past the mountain of salt to Iberian magpies in the pine tree shade and don’t startle the hoopoe on the manicured grass, then the bright yellow spot of a weaver bird calling from the reeds by the lake, but look up, maybe an osprey or eagle, how the gulls squawk and lift in a tangle and a pintail duck crash-lands by an ibis, startling a grebe and everything’s flying and the crack of a golf ball and I flinch, remembering that man and the blood pouring out from under his hands. Family Bible 00:00 / 03:00 GENESIS On the first day I watched The Flintstones , The Jetsons , Sylvester and Tweety. I created sculptures from slices of American Cheese. I climbed up my slide and saw that it was good. EXODUS And so 2.6 million men were sent to Vietnam; another 40,000 fled to Canada. LOTTERY The Law said birthdates should be placed in capsules, mixed in a shoebox, transferred to a glass jar. NUMBERS The birthdates of three of my uncles were chosen. GEORGE He raised his hand when they asked who could type, and stayed behind the lines, tapping out words like defoliation. He didn’t know about the truce between Agent Orange and his chromosomes until he was nearly sixty, when we learned how acute lymphocytic leukaemia could kill you, and how quickly. HARRY He remained in combat, first with ‘the Gooks,’ who took out part of his intestine, and then with Benedictine and brandy and blackouts, with nicotine and nightmares. The hemochromatosis turned his skin grey, the liver cancer waited for the lung cancer to get him first. He died on the bathroom floor, haemorrhaging from a shot of chemotherapy. 1 PETER He once kept a pet duck and ordered a crocodile by mail. He could recite the statistics of every attack by a Great White Shark. He met the love of his life over there, Heroin. He married her, became a panhandler, settled down to a lifetime’s free access to methadone. 2 PETER He sits in a classroom of medical students at Yale, Exhibit A, a shrunken, shivery gnome in a beanie, insisting that everyone would be happier with Heroin. WIDOWS Katheryn and Antoinette. REVELATION On Christmas Day my father is on his seventh mission, flying cargo out of Okinawa, with seven Vietcong shooting at his tail. I visit Santa on his Throne in the belly of a Lockheed C-130 Hercules, the seventh child to sit on his knee. I beg him please could he bring me a Barbie. He gives me this Bible, full of Good News, instead. Publishing credits Hunting Season: Live Canon Anthology 2020 (Live Canon) All the Things Flying are Overwhelming: Finished Creatures (Issue 6) Family Bible: The North (Issue 63)

Hear poet David Pecotić read poems for wave 17 of literary poetry journal iamb. David Pecotić wave 17 spring 2024 back next the poet Born a poet nearly five decades ago, David Pecotić has had many adventures in the years between then and now: as seeker after truth, academic, partner, public servant, father and counsellor. Recently, tragedy reawoke in David a need to express himself in poetry. His poems have so far appeared in the Australian Poetry Collaboration and The Canberra Times . David lives in Australia, where he's in a complicated relationship with his daimon. the poems There are Days You Cross Hunted 00:00 / 01:08 There are days you cross hunted in rivers, shaded and breezed. Foot after sucked foot, this little can be a lot if it’s yours in the solid dark. Where you stand, others barely there move slightly unseen and you see to live is to live around yourself closer and finer and doesn’t take the eyes in a face. Where they narrow, they blow in. Where they long, they draw out. Such small round things slip through the net strings. Even at the last strung at the estuary’s edge. Inheritance 00:00 / 02:00 Out of time, I am become what I was: a fisherman off & on a black goddess island, where the fish that make dreams school their poison. Back on shore, I tell the bees the names of every gutted vision earned. A million glass wings beat sweetness in return. Further inland, I am the goat man, hoofed hard-on chasing every woody piece of arse, even my own. Up on the mountain, I’m his father, equally erect but frozen, the holy thief whose hungry mouth made the music. A dead ringer for shades who wings for tricks. Only in the forest dark can I reach down my throat to pull myself out, a vukodlach , wolf-skin turned inside-out, drum-like and ruddy. Village monster I kept down for so long, I had cut my hams, pricked my whole body with pins to prevent this: I cannot pretend after this operation I won’t walk about forcing your submission. Strigun —human by day, demon by night; held in check by my krsnik : the warlock gift with his hawthorn stick, that takes away, gives peace by piercing, the heart again. Hoarfrost Future 00:00 / 01:02 Winter is always colder half-broken— the frost bleeds out as a sacrifice to what comes. Today is as hard and cold, sparkling a sharp wet razor. So many melting facets, so much hoarfrost future. Glass candy hard on a ground we can’t feel getting warmer, so subtle the seasoning. I flow out the same, rhyming the solid ebb-tide— wounded words and eyes swallow unsatiated spongey beds of loved leaves. What does the sun-warmed wind mean to their delicate rise and fall? They tell me to my autumn and spring I don’t owe anything at all. Publishing credits There are Days You Cross Hunted: Australian Poetry Collaboration (Issue 34) Inheritance: Australian Poetry Collaboration (Issue 30) Hoarfrost Future: The Canberra Times (February 2021)

Hear poet Reshma Ruia read poems for wave 2 of literary poetry journal iamb. Reshma Ruia wave 2 spring 2020 back next the poet Reshma's poems and short stories have appeared in various British and international anthologies and magazines, and have been commissioned for BBC Radio 4. Her debut poetry collection, A Dinner Party in the Home Counties , won Word Masala's First Collection Publication Award 2019. Co-founder of The Whole Kahani-a – a British South-Asian writers collective – Reshma was born in India and raised in Italy. As a result of such a heritage, her writing portrays the preoccupations of those who possess a multiple sense of belonging. the poems Pomology 00:00 / 01:10 Being a woman can be fun at times. To be called a shape – a pear or a plum. A fruit salad deconstructed daily. Your breasts are ripe mangoes. Your hips have a melon’s flair. Your mouth – a strawberry ripe for the picking. A lifelong lesson in pomology it is. To be classified by the shape of your limbs. Being a woman is fun up to a point. One day it’s over. The harvest is ripe, ready to rot. In your sleep, while you’re not watching, the seed goes sour, the juice runs dry. No glances. No whistles. All funeral quiet. You tiptoe down the street. You still have your fruit. But it’s no longer the season. 1947 The year India gained independence from Britain, and the country became divided into India and Pakistan, with the largest migration of people in modern history. 00:00 / 01:42 1947. Say it quickly – it’s a number. Say it slowly – it becomes a code. Opening doors no one can see. My father, small as a hummingbird, sits in his chair, frail of body and brain. He’s made up of medicines and memory. There’s a train running somewhere behind his eyelids. He is gambolling through a field of wheat where a pink turbaned scarecrow stands, arms stretched rigidly. His father’s callused hand lets go of his own. Is that his mother’s voice calling? Quick! Run! We have to catch the train. She gifts him a single boiled egg for the journey. Books, slingshot, the red striped ball by the Tulsi plant in the courtyard – he remembers them all. His grandchildren crowd round him. The girl is doing a PhD on borders and dividing lines. 'Tell me about 1947, Nana', she says, tapping his shoulder, her laptop buzzing like a bee. He stirs. He smiles. Scratches his chin. ‘My ball. My red striped ball – I must have left it behind.' Soft Peaches 00:00 / 00:40 They are soft peaches left in the sun too long. They bruise easily. Their milk teeth grow old within their cheeks, fall by the roadside. Become dentures. Their heart is an umbrella stand on which they hang rosaries of petty disappointments and dreads. Medical prescriptions and utility bills. Death is a salesman who rings every night, keeping them awake. Publishing credits All poems: A Dinner Party in the Home Counties (Skylark Publications UK)

Hear poet Nina Parmenter read poems for wave 17 of literary poetry journal iamb. Nina Parmenter wave 17 spring 2024 back next the poet Nina Parmenter is a poet and working mum from Wiltshire. Her debut collection, Split, Twist, Apocalypse , was published in 2022. Nina's work has appeared in journals that include Magma , Raceme , Honest Ulsterman , Obsessed with Pipework , Atrium and Ink Sweat & Tears , and has also been nominated for both The Forward Prizes and The Pushcart Prize. Nina describes herself as easy to manipulate – but only if you're a dog. the poems Blooming 00:00 / 01:09 A celandine went first, and if we had ever looked, we would have known it was a freeze-frame of a live firework, we would have expected the violence that sparked from the inside out, the heat petalling sweetly, each stamen springing a hellmouth. A rose caught, thorns spitting pop-pop-pop from the stem, the leaves crisping, and as an afterthought, the buds, like charged kisses, lipped the flames to ragwort and vetch. An oxeye daisy burst, white-hot in its eagerness. We dialled nine-nine-nine, but our words fell lifelessly away, and as day bloomed into evening time, the honeysuckle, its lashes glowing in the last light of the sun, tipped a long wink to Venus and blew like an H-bomb. Where Does Darkness Come From? 00:00 / 00:47 The bee is a soft eclipse at the heart of a clematis, the noon lighting a constellation on each cluster of her fur, and the bee suspects it is she who brings the darkness, but she knows it like the catacombs of her hive and feels no remorse. Imagine a sweetness you would die for. Imagine shunning the sun even as it brightens the space you leave behind. Imagine your honey-drunk mind willing you into the umbra. Imagine the sugar stars waking. The Conversation We Don’t Have 00:00 / 01:09 The headache, I realise, is a clenched jaw. I tense up, release, stick my tongue out, waggle it, roll my head so determinedly that a conversation falls out, pink and slippery. It has been hiding behind my uvula. Close inspection reveals that it is self-contained, self-sustaining, high fat, low sugar, terrifyingly fresh. And although my stomach aches at the meat of it, I reach out a finger. Give it a poke. It tenses. Darkens. Grows somewhat huger. Along its flank, eyes appear. It stares. Angrily, I scoop it up, and stuff it back down my throat. I relock my jaw and head out. Publishing credits Blooming: Split, Twist, Apocalypse (Indigo Dreams Publishing) Where Does Darkness Come From? / The Conversation We Don’t have: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Morag Smith read poems for wave 24 of literary poetry journal iamb. Morag Smith wave 24 winter 2025 back next the poet Morag Smith's work has featured in the Scottish Poetry Library’s Best Scottish Poems of 2023 , Poetry Ireland Review , Crannóg Magazine , The Scotsman , Gutter and Ink, Sweat and Tears . Winner of the Paisley Book Festival's 2021 Janet Coats Memorial Prize, Morag has also been highly commended in the Ginkgo Prize , and shortlisted twice for the Bridport Poetry Prize. Her debut pamphlet, Background Noises , examines the re-wilding and human history of the partly abandoned Dykebar Hospital . She's currently working on a pamphlet of visual poetry about semi-derelict hospital buildings, due out in 2026, with her first full collection set to appear in 2027. the poems Bog 00:00 / 01:27 Her lessons are ankle deep at the edge, tannic brown spilling over my shoes she sprawls patient in her hive of lost things, poisoned monarch of sedge and rush always knowing her place in the world the air above her thick with pollen microscopic debris remnants of murmurations that settle like nets on hedgerow rise and fall again with the exhalation of millennia scant summer whitethroats search for crane flies in the shift and flow of permanence find instead blister packs molars sharp moraines of mouse bones a barbed wire torque gleams on the bank ready for the flood plains where Cala Bellway Persimmon wait with their diggers unable to let things be the plash of her whispers tells me I am also a queen of sedimented clay the more I twist the more I sink a quilt of benzodiazepine wraps and transmutes anger breath memory to ancient carbon spores of Mesozoic ferns drifting to the Day Room it would be best not to build here Background Noises 1. Extraneous sound which can be heard while listening to or monitoring something else; 2. A person or thing considered to be irrelevant or incidental 00:00 / 02:23 Every breath thick with mycelium and brick dust, ornate fences rusted down. Hollow knocking on a smeared window, jumble of prosthetic limbs, tangled with the rustling chokehold of ivy’s betrayal. We propose removal from the greenbelt . Whump, whump of trees falling. Hawthorn and Sycamore thrash through the night’s storms, gone by morning. Removal vans, engines running, porters calling, matches struck, smoke exhaled, sound of a wren, like a fire alarm. Pine cones skitter dry on tarmac, shouts of wind-swung signs DANGER ASBESTOS NO ENTRY, copper coins nestle deep in oak burrs. Buildings shift shoulders, moan to scratch, flap, groan of rafters heavy with crow. From the new block, consultants’ cars purr, locks buzz, monitors beep; the sound of a wren, though rare, is occasionally heard. What the old asylum says is unreliable; scratched letters, doctors’ notes on yellow paper in manilla folders, closed archive shelves. Commendations in the Paisley Gazette describe palatial dwelling houses for lucky staff and patients, where a nurse sobs for her lost fiancé and a joiner cries for his mother while a young lieutenant learns to walk with a crutch, spends his afternoons flicking through collected works of Shakespeare; pages whir through fingers, The isle is full of noises … Concert parties sing of rowan trees that creak and stretch into sun-quiet summer, bees on cabbage flowers, lunchtime bells and dinner gongs; sound of a wren, tic, tic, trill. Two Storms 00:00 / 02:17 The Glasgow Hurricane Once in 1968, our neighbourhood made the news when December gales peeled a tenement gable end. We gathered to gape at dolls' house rooms, furnished with G-plan sideboards, cocktail cabinets, suicidal mattresses, teetering. I remember the cracked eyes of television sets gazing down, my voice asking, Where are the people? That year at Christmas I got a bungalow with detachable roof, fold down walls, and the Newtown Home Set – parents with teenage daughter and monozygotic twins. Their jointed limbs let them sit for dinner. There was a rocking horse, badged school blazers, savings in the bank, unwrinkled plastic smiles of vigilance, always ready for sudden hands descending through the ceiling or random soldiers at the breakfast table. They knew one day the cataclysm would come, so tumbled uncomplaining into their graves at the council tip. Now, in my sleep, the whole family floats in the South Pacific Garbage Patch, though recently they've been swimming back to me like old friends. Arms and legs pump furiously. I cry out loud, You haven’t aged a bit! Ciara, 2020 The Bridge Guest House is peeled open, walls still hung with summer landscapes. They gave the tempest its chosen name and showed on TV the bedroom doors still hung above a landscape filled with floating debris of two hundred years. My bedroom doors are closed tight against winds and rivers, too strong, too high, the swells that excavate my sleep and peeled the Bridge Guest House. They are brutal and constant as old friends. Now we give them names. In spring 2020, half of the 200 year old Bridge Guest House in Hawick was washed into the River Teviot by a storm. Publishing credits Bog / Background Noises: Background Noises (Red Squirrel Press) Two Storms: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Corinna Board read poems for wave 19 of literary poetry journal iamb. Corinna Board wave 19 autumn 2024 back next the poet Corinna Board teaches English as an additional language in an Oxford secondary school. She grew up on a farm, and her writing is often inspired by the rural environment. Her work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in And Other Poems , Anthropocene , berlin lit , Propel Magazine , Spelt Magazine , Atrium , Ink Sweat & Tears , Magma and elsewhere. Corinna won the Gloucestershire Wildlife category of the 2023 Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust poetry competition, and was commended in the 2024 Verve Poetry Festival Eco-Poetry competition. She published her debut pamphlet, Arboreal , in January 2024. the poems Picking up my prescription ‘Sometimes as an antidote to fear of death, I eat the stars.’ ~ Rebecca Elson ~ 00:00 / 01:00 There are no stars in this city. I nibble on concrete, sip cocktails of NO₂. I’m dying for a decent constellation. Would some of those neons do? Or the flashing red lights on a high-rise? I FaceTime Olivier in the Pyrenees. He points his camera at Ursa Major, Cassiopeia, Orion’s Belt … Star after star devoured through my screen. I whisper Merci , then sleep like a baby. When the woman in Boots tells me I’m glowing, I say it must be the new meds. I keep quiet about the stars. On the tube ride home, they twinkle in my stomach like a Tiffany’s heist. My uncle brings back a fox tail from the fields 00:00 / 01:09 He is carrying his rifle, brandishing the tail like a trophy. A week ago, the fox (was it this one?) got into the coop and slaughtered all the hens. My uncle is grinning. The tail is cleanly cut, bloodied at the end. It hangs from a nail in the big barn, swinging like a corpse on the gallows. For days, I'm scared to touch it. The fur is coarser than I expected. I comb it with my fingers, breathe in its musk, close my eyes and pretend it's whole. Later, I run wild with my cousins. We are foxes — and I, the eldest, am the mother, the vixen. Driven by hunger, I burn through the fields, my cubs left hiding in the ripening wheat. The wind ruffles my coat the wrong way. Too late, I pick up his scent. Field notes 00:00 / 02:02 1. field noun : an area of land, used for growing crops or keeping animals, usually surrounded by a fence. 2. Green as far as the eye can see, then the brook. Water-mint, pebbles bedraggled in weed. 3. A six-year-old girl with a net, a bucket full of bullheads. Friesian cows bellowing, tick of the fence. Where did the years go? 4. Before he died, my uncle planted a rowan tree – there in the tall grass. 5. When we first saw the barn owl, it could have been a ghost. It flew low over the field, wings whispering. 6. If I buried my heart, what would grow? Perhaps a sapling. 7. Today, I have counted three kinds of butterfly: marbled white, common blue, speckled wood. 8. Dear Field, Do you ever dream of picking yourself up and striding off over the horizon? Be honest now. 9. I don’t know what I’d do if you left. I love you, field. Please stay. 10. Are you crying or is that rain? 11. In the field, I’m a child again. All this green, all this sky. I could disappear. 12. Meadow foxtail, yellow oat, timothy. I am the field, and the field is me. I am , the field is . Publishing credits Picking up my prescription: Anthropocene (July 2024) My uncle brings back a fox tail from the fields: Modron Magazine (Issue Four) Field notes: exclusive first publication by iamb