Hear poet Emma Lee read poems for wave 15 of literary poetry journal iamb. Emma Lee wave 15 autumn 2023 back next the poet Poet and reviewer Emma Lee is the author of The Significance of a Dress and Ghosts in the Desert . She was Reviews Editor for The Blue Nib , and the co-editor of Over Land, Over Sea : an anthology of poems expressing solidarity with refugees crossing the Mediterranean on small boats and rafts. Emma's poetry has featured in many print and online journals including Fevers of the Mind , Ink, Sweat & Tears , Clear Poetry and more. the poems The Bridal Dresses in Beirut 00:00 / 00:41 Each dress hangs from a noose. One is plain satin with scalloped lace, another an orgy of tulle, dreamy organza with appliqué flowers hanging from wire strung between palm trees. One is short, a shift with a tulip skirt, the sort of dress picked in a hurry to satisfy a shotgun or Article 522. The breeze breathes through them, bullies the dresses into ghosts, brides with no substance, angels bereft of their voices. What the Dust Left Uncovered After art installation The Fading Afterglow of Creation by Dave Briggs and Jack Squires 00:00 / 01:10 A screen sculpts a crumpled mass in an empty house, a 3-D image that takes the shape of what could be a heart. A sci-fi trope: machines outliving us. We all hope what will survive of us is not the pile of admin, worthless warranties, the embarrassing tweet, the spilt coffee, but our Insta life, our filtered wishes. The sculpture is not the easy outline of an emoji, but the complexity of valves, veins, a possibility of an organ, a human's engine. Here, what's left is our digital footprint, the avatar we taught to fight, scavenge, collect. Playerless it repeats the same responses, contact only from bots, a drift of binary lint. It's the unedited part of us that decided who we touched. The digital heart waits for us to breathe emotion into it, sculpting the memory of what it most wanted. The Wrapped Hedges 00:00 / 01:26 It looks as if a fog has whirled around the hedges, wrapping them in a swirl of candy floss like a fleece protecting them from frost. The implication is the hedges will be unwrapped to show a healthy growth, firm stems, perfectly green leaves, branches stretched in welcome. The covering takes on the texture of a regular weave, as if a team of spiders had worked solidly for months, but the structure is too crude to be natural, too regular to constructed by anything but a programmed machine. It reflects a grid of lines running from left to right with rectangular holes. If laid flat, it would represent a map of a housing estate, plans made by those seeking to enrich themselves on the grounds councils cannot demonstrate they have an adequate housing supply, that somehow executive, four bedroom homes, beyond the pockets of those on waiting lists, will meet and it’s fine to build in the country out of reach of public transport and amenities but it’s just these birds who will prevent building during the nesting season that are the problem. So man-made webs are their suggested solution; mimic nature to prevent it. Publishing credits The Wedding Dresses in Beruit: The Significance of a Dress (Arachne Press) What the Dust Left Uncovered: After... (December 8th 2022) The Wrapped Hedges: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Karan Chambers read poems for wave 23 of literary poetry journal iamb. Karan Chambers wave 23 autumn 2025 back next the poet Poet, tutor and former English teacher Karan Chambers (she/her) has just completed the first year of a Creative Writing MA at Royal Holloway. Highly Commended in the 2023 Cheltenham Poetry Festival International Poetry Prize , she's had work in The London Magazine , The Honest Ulsterman , Gutter , Anthropocene , Butcher’s Dog , Mslexia , Propel Magazine , Under the Radar , 14 Magazine and Ink, Sweat & Tears . Her pamphlet woman | folk appeared in February 2025, and her second pamphlet with Atomic Bohemian is due in 2026. Karan lives in Surrey with her husband, three lively children, and a long-suffering cat. the poems hebridean spring 00:00 / 01:20 here is land like an upturned fist. darkknuckled. jutting. awkward angles & uncanny places. a stretch. rock & shingle. skerrystruck. between jawopen seas. here are its quiet hollows. its openreach heights. its spiked invitation. here is the gorse. furzespine prickle. brindlecoated. here is the heather. a restless unfolding. lingslung fire. smoulder & tongueflicker. here is a melody. scattering its way through the leaves. softkeyed promise. fertile ground sings to fallow. here are the women. working. & tending. & growing. & raising the bairns. & dreaming of more. here are the men at sea. except when they’re not. except when they’re shadowstood. landlooming. claiming what’s theirs. it’s fine if you’re willing. want makes flames of us all. but what if you’re not? what if your body can’t bear another. we’ve all seen his hands round her ankles. seen submersion in her eyes. i know how a woman drowns google tells me that summer 2023 is the northern hemisphere’s hottest summer in 2000 years 00:00 / 01:14 fish are dying from shropshire to sussex across the channel the loire has almost completely evaporated silver scales gasp in shrinking waters here reservoirs run dry gardens crumple under heavy heat & blackberries shrivel on hedges before we can stain t-shirts lips little grabbing hands purple clusters hanging parched listless i do my best to conserve resources turn taps off while soaping hands & brushing teeth take short showers clothes crack with dirt & sweat before i wash them my mind is air above hot asphalt shimmering late into the night i wonder what next summer & the ones after will bring how much difference can i make i’d like to believe but it all feels so futile a few weeks later the weather breaks & we dance in the muggy evening skin sweating even as rain slicks pavements i feel relief but then watch the news chest tightening as what seems like half a continent is washed away woman: drowned 00:00 / 00:28 silt-tongued, stonepocketed, her body a riverbed eroding its banks. surfacing with pondweed hair, she is pearleyed, staring, a glossy reflection want untethered. the drift of mouth of cheekbones seawards, lips & lashes currentstricken spurred into confluence a warning for all those who never learned to swim Publishing credits hebridean spring: Anthropocene google tells me that summer 2023 is the northern hemisphere’s hottest summer in 2000 years: exclusive first publication by iamb woman: drowned: woman | folk (Salò Press) Author photo: © Paula Deegan

Hear poet Claire Trévien read poems for wave 2 of literary poetry journal iamb. Claire Trévien wave 2 spring 2020 back next the poet Claire Trévien is a Breton-British writer currently living in Brittany, France. The author of The Shipwrecked House and Astéronymes (both from Penned in the Margins), she has most recently published her pamphlet Brain Fugue with Verve Poetry Press. Claire founded Sabotage Reviews , and now co-runs the unique Verse Kraken writing retreats in Brittany. the poems Daytime Drinking Brain 00:00 / 01:17 I hope it doesn’t end up [end] in one of your poems, [your poems] he says. [he says] Give me a coaster [give me] and I will create [I will create] strange confetti, a dagger. [a dagger] Rape is so cliché. [so cliché] Oh I had a bad experience [experience] and now it fills all my words [my words] with paralysis and smoke [smoke] and the trauma of it [of it] Yes, I agree, quite enough [quite enough] already from other … [from others] The pub is intricate like [like] a chocolate box – and [a box] just as lacquered [lacking] and you came back [and] wrong. [wrong] That was the summer that slates fell off my body like dandruff 00:00 / 01:59 every brick of me dismantled and scattered, I found my arm in the roof of a church. The neighbours collected my fingernails and brought them to me in a glass jar “for when the time is right”. That summer exploded my insides out, was I the city? I felt myself in every street, but nowhere either. My blood was draining down the pavements with the rain. Each bullet in the wall echoed back into my skin. I poked my bones. All of us haunted down the streets looking for our missing limbs. The weather grew so angry with us, we started spitting hail. Every Tuesday to the market, we gull-gathered from stall to stall. It was a miracle the way our legs could carry us from place to place. Our wings clipped and useless. We opened our mouth to speak and only rain came out, dull, grey, roof-like. We are forgetting the names of colours, the way they used to bubble out of our bodies and wriggle through the windows. Our footprints leave ash if anything at all. We must press ourselves into the very walls, hide our feathers from them. A flash of red and all is lost. There is still so much to lose. Sick or Sad? 00:00 / 01:27 Since we cannot speak of the landscape of the crowd, how it turns from hot to cold in a blink, drains my veins dry, makes my body a ghost of itself, you ask me if my absence was due to being ‘sick or sad’? I use the euphemism ‘not well’ to blanket over the trees, the hills, the path that stops being a path, the carpet of burned leaves catching the wheels of trains, the snow duvet that protects the flowers, or kills them (I can never remember which it is). My sadness is sick, my sickness is sad. My sadness has been unplugged from triggers you could relate to and lives in a different city now. My sickness is so connected to my sadness that I cannot tell you which is the chicken, which is the egg. Here is an ankle sprained after it gave way on a flat surface like plastic lit by a lighter. See how it sent my sadness flying and cracked its screen. Here is my stomach full of rams fighting about fleeing. Publishing credits Daytime Drinking Brain / Sick or Sad?: Brain Fugue (Verve Poetry Press) That was the summer that slates fell off my body like dandruff: exclusive first publication by iamb Author photo: © Sophie Davidson

Hear poet Emma Kemp read poems for wave 10 of literary poetry journal iamb. Emma Kemp wave 10 summer 2022 back next the poet Emma Kemp is from Coventry, where she runs the local Stanza of the Poetry Society. Her work has been published in journals including Transpositions , Ekstasis and The Rialto , as well as in anthologies such as the forthcoming Looking Out, Peering In from The Hedgehog Poetry Press. the poems A warning to myself not to entertain your preliminary advances 00:00 / 02:13 I buckle on the edge of myself, my virtue, your passenger seat. Some unholy unknown, taut between us. Your skin is ash. The thin blue off the instrument panel. My cheeks flushed in the dark, keyed up. You tell me that you are hard as regards rejection, given to press on in the face of defeat. I can believe that. I can believe you would impress yourself upon me. I can believe you leave a mark. Think back: you smothered your self in plastic irony. Admit you are untrue as Coventry blue. Admit inside that plastic shell you are spring loaded, a nichrome coil pressed hard to a twelve-volt socket. On charge, not blue but blaze red. You must know by now I am bone dry as summer brush, as tinder. Would you like me to tear you out of yourself so you can enjoy us destroy each other? I wonder. How much fire it would take to separate you into your fractions. Not a lot, my dear, not while I am feeling all prodigal. I could insist upon you, light you up, draw down bitumen from your contempt and naphtha from your audacity. Perhaps we would get high on what was left. I imagine that I can distil you and live happily alongside some residual fragile goodness. You say I want better . I say you want to forget yourself. I suspect you already have. I cannot take part in your remembering. Know this: you do not want me the way you think you do. See here. I can unbuckle. I can exit. I can take my dry bones elsewhere. I can wish you very well. A nichrome coil/twelve-volt socket was used as a cigarette lighter in older cars. Rovings 00:00 / 00:47 Tell me, love, why we addle ourselves in our search for truth, when we know that all there is is a heap of hastily shorn fleece from which all the time we are spinning? Fumble in the wool and pull some out, rove between your hands to form loose strands. I will do the same. We will spin from these rovings, at times alone, at times together. And then we knit. See how what takes form is neither yours nor mine but defines us? Forgive my dropped stitches; you may have dropped a few, too. Please do not hide yourself away and try to knit from your own pattern. I am in it. Render 00:00 / 01:27 You have seen that image of Thích Quảng Đức burning to death at a crossroads in Saigon and wondered at it. A mixture of knowing and incomprehension. That the human spirit can achieve self-mastery to the point of self-destruction. You have longed to sit cross-legged by the vast ocean, have it lick at you and carry you away; you have longed to become a symbol. A soup of sorrow and raging self-pity. That the human spirit can flare and burn out is a given, but you must pour water on the altar. You have stationed yourself on shingle and felt the insistent pain of every stone. You have waited for the tide to come in, and the tide has come. Every tide refusing to send you to the sea floor. The sea buoys you, dismisses you, light as flotsam returns you to the shore. You have felt the pang of the anticlimax. There is no one here watching; nothing has gathered around you. Your clothes are heavy with salt shame, streaming from you as you walk on, chilled, not shivering. To find what is next. You are rendered to yourself. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Maggs Vibo read poems for wave 11 of literary poetry journal iamb. Maggs Vibo wave 11 autumn 2022 back next the poet Maggs Vibo – pen name of veteran, military spouse and visual poet Margaret Viboolsittiseri – is the author of ash poetry booklet Ashes to Ashes . She’s contributed to anthologies from Poem Atlas, Penteract Press, Steel Incisors, IceFloe Press, Coven Poetry, Fevers of the Mind, AngelHousePress and Oxford Brookes University Poetry Centre. Published widely in the US, UK, Canada, Europe and South Asia, Maggs showed pieces in 2022 with L'Air Arts in Atelier 11 of Cité Falguière in Paris, and at The Library of Congress in Washington DC. the poems The Year of the Ox 00:00 / 01:01 Try not to box or blow up Chuck Dem-ah CRAZ EEEEE SAW Free DUMB Oh Fragil-egos and the Gods … k-NO-w science criminal enterprises drilling-in-digenous wears a Cape Fear full of shit bags of waste lands of carn age everything harnesses the power of the sun, winds, dust, rainmaker of all powerful Holy rolling phony and traitorous bologna sand Which way did they go? Storm In red and CAP-IT-ALL Off fences didn’t stop and neither could a WALL STREET of protestors (zip) ties mouth Shut the F. up You’re dis – loyal and royally F.U.C.KKKed up! Up! UP and A-way Through this maze of trickery The Year of the Rat 00:00 / 01:57 I don't find inspiration In a rat. Not that Creature scurrying along the floorboards looking forward to theft I'm bereft when looking at that tail, that long gruesome nose sniffing whiffing for the smell of death. Of plague. of Misfortune The Year of the Rat. Fat politicians told us that we’d be free of this virus when in fact or fiction (no contradiction) In our rat. He is the disease we wheeze and cough in his direction wherever he might go just know we wish he'd fall into the trap he laid for himself when he called all this a hoax just smoke and mirrors reflecting back a rat we loathe The rat serves no purpose and has no Make it Great claim to life Except through death, trenches and holes, Sewerbellies Of our globe. (Hold) The rat in a maze. It phases us How intelligent and how much they’re like us We hate the rat because: We Are the Rat And this is the year (we must endear) This creature who will represent All our selfish desires With ire we must take back (our rat) and Pet This debt … we make for generations In the future A suture to hold this geyser of blood We must mop to the corner and all over our Persistence and petulance Henceforth, This, POOOOR creature Is the Year of the Rat The Year of the Tiger 00:00 / 01:47 Lady Liberty Lingering threats January 6th Sense of Skipping rope With the reins of a Trojan horse Riding into the eye Yet do not see Your stripes A billion dollar Arsenal of logos, T-shirts, and Assaults A cache Of cash Yet, still you play the fiddle Down in Georgia Peaches Bragging and breaking skin Smash-n-grab’em By their special props In a Lone Star States Of oppression Against a mouse You taunt A community of trained Cops and Thieves who Claim supremacy You'll see We The People I am AMERICAN My hand raised to defend The Constitution You burned We The People We Are Cursed We Are Broken Our kindergardens Soaked in Coffins draped No playground Fallen grace Untenable and broken Lulla-byes Purring kittens Eyes too young to see Such tragedies Hiding Cowering Yet calling Out-stretched tails Sharpening nails Scratching A Cross And clawing Back We are Tigers Angry feoh-lions Roaring No longer silent Soaring Manticores Publishing credits The Year of the Ox: Visual Poetry (Fevers of the Mind) The Year of the Rat: Distanced 3.0 (ang(st)) / The Book of Penteract (Penteract Press) The Year of the Tiger: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Karen Havelin read poems for wave 25 of literary poetry journal iamb. Karen Havelin wave 25 spring 2026 back next the poet Published at the same time in the US, the UK and Norway in 2019, Karen Havelin’s debut novel Please Read This Leaflet Carefully was shortlisted for The Guardian's Not the Booker Prize . Karen graduated from the MFA program in fiction at Columbia University in 2013, and has since had translations, non-fiction and fiction published in Nylon , Literary Hub , The Scotsman and Words Without Borders . the poems We’ll Talk About It Openly or Not at All 00:00 / 00:46 Measure all that’s been done to anyone small and vulnerable throughout history No body has ever been left alone Is there a way to do it right? If you’re good will there be enough of everything? Or are we animals hiding on instinct in holes and dying unseen underground? Anything for the survival of the offspring Something slips away and the body is just an empty glove Already part of the scenery and whoever searches hundreds of years later will not find you The 12th of October 00:00 / 02:34 I Last year my sister-in-law planted pink heather on my balcony for me to discover when I came home from the hospital This year there’s only waterlogged leftovers of summer’s flowers Death isn’t a stranger It’s here already On a cellular level it happens every second Fragments of the body are let go to make survival possible II At 4 a.m. I woke up unable to focus my eyes Luckily, I called the nurse even though I didn’t know what was wrong only that it was bad Two young nurses one on each side of my bed watched the readings in tense silence while one squeezed the bag of saline into my arm as fast as she could The readings leapt about on the screen They told me to breathe deeply but the air didn’t arrive When they wheeled me into the elevator to go down to surgery again they kept telling me to breathe I saw my face in the elevator mirror Eyes like holes in waxy skin almost vacated Yet I was in there and I lived and I’m still here a year later The levels of healing are endless Or perhaps it is the damage that is endless Filo pastry crumbles everywhere III My grandfather was kind and said the inadvertent Finnish flag on the boat I’d drawn for his October 80 th was appropriate since he grew up speaking Finnish He didn’t mention how Norwegian schools beat it out of him He was pale and yellowish Yes, death was there but he was there too It was the last time I saw him alive For months I dreamed of his dead body being wheeled around on a stretcher by strangers IV Can death be a friend? We won’t get away anyway But each time I hear that someone took the early exit off the highway as my old doctor used to say I feel sick As Sappho says Death must be evil otherwise the gods themselves would die We Meant 00:00 / 00:50 the painted cave walls to be seen by flickering firelight between our dancing sweaty bodies Blood, tears, spit We were here Everyone could see that the lines were right Red ochre, fat and soot Our hands tattooed the stone like skin I placed rocks to build fires Splinted bones Sang and helped out Fed the little ones Weaved baskets to fill with berries Felt the hot glide of desire Slept under furs huddled against the others in the scent of us It was an honor to disappear completely Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb © Anna Julia Granberg

Hear poet Barnaby Harsent read poems for wave 23 of literary poetry journal iamb. Barnaby Harsent wave 23 autumn 2025 back next the poet Placing third in The Rosemary McLeish Poetry Prize 2024 , and with poems in 14 magazine and Propel Magazine , Barnaby Harsent has work forthcoming in the 2025 Black Bough Poetry Christmas/Winter anthology. His three poems for iamb form part of a sequence of short narratives he's currently working on. the poems Wormwood – speaking to spirits 00:00 / 00:37 The air is thin, the sky just beginning to bruise. She gathers wormwood to burn under the sycamore tree. The smoke curls low and slow like breath in winter, she closes her eyes to amplify any whisper. Light fades, crows settle like thoughts in bare boughs, a leaf in the ash still green – as if it has secrets left to share. Mandrake – hallucination 00:00 / 00:46 Lie still. Let the room grow distant. Let the walls forget you. Let the straw, heavy with the stench of piss, disappear from under you. Men’s faith in what you’re not has made you what you are. Fall upwards. Do not cry out. Do not return. Refuse to bring yourself back to bone. Move with weather, find a wind to hold you. And leave your root, that knotted thing, bleeding its shape into air. Valerian – rest 00:00 / 00:53 She doesn’t ask for comfort, just the calm of quiet seclusion, a slowing of the pulse. Still they turn their heads and spit, weigh her worth out loud. She lays plants out on a rack, the sun pulling moisture from the root. Still her nights are restless, sleep as thin as frost on slate. There’s a gate where the treeline thins. It opens and she walks until the path forgets her name. Still the milk sours, still the crops fail, still the children of the village cry at shadows. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Geraldine Clarkson read poems for wave 1 of literary poetry journal iamb. Geraldine Clarkson wave 1 winter 2020 back next the poet Geraldine Clarkson lives and works in Warwickshire. Her various occupations have included teaching English to refugees and migrants, working in warehouses, care homes, libraries, churches, offices and a call centre, and living in a silent monastic order for some years in South America. She has published poetry pamphlets with Smith|Doorstop and Shearsman Books. Her debut collection, Monica's Overcoat of Flesh , was published by Nine Arches Press in 2020. the poems winding down 00:00 / 01:04 maybe a tree falls or a bear keels maybe all the creatures of song are brought low and the grasshopper drags itself along and the moon fails clearly a light has left the earth bleeding slowly while the waters stopped clapping their hands it’s the end of lilies and liver-freckled butterflies the last flew off this summer the wind is tired now has petit mal is going home shutting up shop just a few scarlet leaves spin in its sigh as it boards up the door Muzzy McIntyre 00:00 / 01:35 Muzzy McIntyre brushed her bangs and went pell-mell down the staircase. The banisters pulled her palms back with their waxy residue and the ball at the bottom looked grey-black with grease. This place has gone downhill, she thought, descending. But she went out onto the front step and the mahogany door was flaming—it was that time of day—and the brass lion knocker, brilliant, was shooting out gold spears. All around, the red brick of the houses was deepening. For the sake of these twelve minutes or so, perhaps, one could tolerate the blanched mornings and the puny electric nights; the dust; and critters; the drunken singing of the wind in the passage; the pious crooning of the neighbours. The waiting. Her other self, the slow Muzzy, ambled out to take the air. She looked up and down the street, laid the flat of her hand to her forehead, against the slanting light. Another fine day tomorrow, she drawled, headlocking a memory. Brood 00:00 / 01:59 After two unhappy marriages, my sister settled on a man who marked their mid-life union by retraining as a vermin operative, the neon strips in his kitchen having turned caramel with cockroaches. He mastered the mechanics and theory of quenching little lives that flickered briefly in strange environs. And noted, for instance, that when roaches infested a disused cooker, it was always the babies who emerged first when you ignited the gas. The gas was, that if you left it burning, little roarers kept on coming, and in increasing sizes, till the fat daddy-roaches finally left the ship. He studied weevils which flourished in flour. And silver fish that slivered at human approach. Rat-trapping was daunting at first, then a thrill. I heard that housewives would call him out to halt fledgling tits which had flown into summer kitchens, twitching behind fridges; pigeons plumped in chimneys; squirrels nesting in lofts, all high hiss and spit. He used to say, my sister’s husband, as he polished his leather belt on a Saturday, ready for church (the belt had a fine silver buckle which shone and jingled), that pests are only creatures who happen to have strayed into alien territory. It made me hope my sister pleased him, and fitted in; was protective of her brood. Publishing credits winding down: POEM (Summer 2017) Muzzy McIntyre: No. 25 (Shearsman Books) Brood: Infinite Rust

Hear poet Alan Buckley read poems for wave 16 of literary poetry journal iamb. Alan Buckley wave 16 winter 2023 back next the poet Alan Buckley is a poet, editor, and poetry tutor. He was brought up on Merseyside, and now lives in Oxford. He is the author of two pamphlets – Shiver (2009) and The Long Haul (2016) – and his first full collection, Touched , was published by Happen Stance in 2020. His work has been highly commended in the Forward and Bridport prizes. He was a founding editor of the award-winning pamphlet publisher ignitionpress, and has taught creative writing to young people with both Arvon and First Story. He is a regular contributor of essays and reviews to The Friday Poem. the poems My Country A man is judged by his work ~ Kurdish proverb ~ 00:00 / 01:53 His fingers work the lotion into my skin. His palms come to rest, pressing my cheeks, before he draws them back. I close my eyes but can’t not see the history between us – in the Boy’s Own stories my grandfather read this man would be swarthy (I would be ). He’d flash his teeth , grasping a curved dagger. I’d stand aloof, wielding a service revolver. We talk, as he brushes the lather up in a little bowl – second lockdown, Premier League (Man U: I offer my sympathies). I don’t ask why he came here. It’s my country, my country’s friends, my country’s enemies’ enemies, that spent a century drawing straight lines across his forefathers’ lands, that gunned and bombed and gassed, that drove him here to this shop on an English street corner, a cube of light resisting the dusk. O Mesopotamia: derricks rose up, drills bored down, and black gold gushed, with the force of blood released from a jugular vein by a razor’s quick slit. I feel the stainless blade caressing my throat, as he scrapes off the stubble with patient, professional love. Flame Use matches sparingly Instruction on front of matchbox 00:00 / 01:06 Not meanness or thrift but wisdom; respect for each small torch that’s kept in there. Lover, the same is true for words. I bring you no fireworks. A room is never so dark that it needs more than one slim burst of sulphur to show the mirror hung on its wall, the way to its door. And lovers know too how even a single flame might raise a scar that time can’t heal. So come, stand next to me; let’s flip this little box. Strike softly away from body. See how it urges us. The Error 00:00 / 01:11 They’re standing like figures on a cake, by a pre-war Hillman Minx. My father, stiff as the mannequin his suit was lifted from, has a pleasantly startled expression, as if he can’t quite believe he’s got to this threshold beyond which adult life begins. My mother’s hiding behind her lipstick smile, the blinding white of her dress. They think they’ve found a way out, and here’s the car that will take them away to a housing estate that’s still being built, to earth that’s yet to be dug over to make a vegetable patch, to a life untethered from its past. They’re wrong, of course; I’m witness to how their histories followed them out of this frame. But look – here’s where I’ll choose to say I come from, that small place of reassurance that something else is possible, the warm hollow made by their locked hands. Publishing credits My Country: The Friday Poem (February 2022) Flame: The Dark Horse (Issue 34) The Error: Touched (HappenStance Press)

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 Caroline Stancer read poems for wave 26 of literary poetry journal iamb. Caroline Stancer wave 26 summer 2026 back next the poet Nottingham-based poet and novelist Caroline Stancer is a counsellor and trainer for the NHS and other organisations. She has a Creative Writing MA from Nottingham Trent University, and has twice been longlisted for the UK's National Poetry Competition. Caroline was also longlisted and shortlisted for Nine Arches Press' Primers competition, and commended in the Verve Festival Poetry Competition. She co-runs the Dandelions Poetry events and podcast, and her poetry can be found in Like Flyering for the Revolution: The VERVE Anthology of Protest Poems as well as in Anthropocene . Caroline is a PhD candidate at Manchester Metropolitan University, and her debut pamphlet is Full Body Reclaim . the poems Daffodil 00:00 / 01:28 Hell yeah! My mouth is open to eat all the eddies in the air I am hungry and loud Yellow! Yellow! I shout along with the cacophony of life like when you do the breaststroke in the sea and sink into each scooping dip a world of water hits your chest when the next wave rises it covers your head and your face is all salt all salt everywhere. Do you think it’s easy being this gorgeous? Being stretched to the endless limits of yellow paper thin and barely here I am almost all water and yet look how generous I am with all I haven’t got Do you remember when you gave birth and you felt blown open wide enough to let the world in? I live like that wide as an estuary at high tide Look at me look at me I am a herald for the Earth’s orbit and for Yes! one impossible moment in an ordinary grass verge Bluebell 00:00 / 01:40 Our smooth blue throats hang down hungry for the earth in its woody decomposition we breathe it in and breathe it in that rich rotting history some of us are uplifted to drink the air and its million currents when we gulp together we swallow you down into coolest spring like when you wait at the top of the tunnel slide in the water park then swing yourself down into the channel of water whoosh and dimmed light and then all your breath is taken as you submerge there is nothing else there is nothing else only spring our blue soothes even the parts of you that cannot be soothed the tangled conflict the unbearable loss like an efficient nurse with ice cubes flannel and drugs who slides you down the dark flume of night our frilled edges like the careful curls at the edge of your grandmother’s face our buds bunched arguments ready to burst the white lumps of our planted hearts shoving forth fountains of green and moon in slow motion insupportable cascades Rose 00:00 / 02:03 You worry about dropping things so much has been spilled already but I am careless balanced on a stem my petals blowsy overblown I lose a few and lose a few my filmy pieces of bliss discarded a silk wrap for your fingertip a piece of dreaming sky you want to know what kind of enigma I am— I only know that I am one that is translucent and one that is yellow and one that is red I have dewy edges still wet when in shadow damp even after hours in sunlight and hinges where petals fold down from the white of my fleshy centre you ask what can that flesh be made of? … tiny ear bones all crushed and softened the heart of hearing or a flood of miniscule shells patterns erased by the sea the still centres of constant motion And how can petals emerge from this? … I let my colour bloom like blood You ask more questions— How does each petal know where it lives? How does every part of you know where it lives? I answer— … all the creatures of the Earth know where they live remember here is your hair and here is each limb sometimes outside of every miracle and sometimes held within Publishing credits All poems: Otherwise Engaged (Vol. 10, Winter 2022) Special thanks to Five Leaves Publications for publishing these poems as part of Full Body Reclaim

Hear poet Ysella Sims read poems for wave 7 of literary poetry journal iamb. Ysella Sims wave 7 autumn 2021 back next the poet Poet, writer and producer Ysella Sims has had her work featured in The Guardian , Brittle Star and the The Blue Nib Literary Magazine , where she was a contributing editor. Ysella produces poetry and spoken-word events, as well as the immersive poetry podcast, Tell Me Something . She published her first poetry pamphlet, you are here , in 2021. the poems Echo 00:00 / 01:45 They watch the screen as the sonographer traces slow circles on her belly and the room dulls to a thick, cloistered hush. In another room, smaller, colder the world rends, roils beneath the blue plastic sofa while they wait for the midwife to tell them, it doesn’t look good. In the weeks between, they lean against the cool bark of the witching tree on the heath whisper pleas into its tessellations stick stray feathers into the sand to arrange their wishes, just so. And when it is time, she lies still oh-so-still on the table holds her breath behaves. Outside, a morning of crows bare-branched, murdering the brumal air with clatter and chaws; a carnival flash of parakeets at the Richmond window. Sun breaking through dank in the gorse-crowned field to colour the sky sugared pink starling egg blue the sweet heft of a pear-sized ghost in her arms. I am turning into all the mothers 00:00 / 00:45 I am turning into all the mothers my younger self condemned; the ones that baulked at journeys, heights, the world beyond the door the diazepam-rattlers cake-offerers, stomach-ragers sobbers the confidence-tricksters told-you-so-ers nitpickers frowners the news-tutters jar-scrapers eavesdroppers sighers – all those felled by their children’s fingers un- – picking the strings. Folk Festival, 1982 00:00 / 01:21 All she remembers is that there was a coach brimful with men and women punchdrunk with Friday night and possibility, the air sun-ripe and sweet kids stacked amongst kit bags fiddles and sticks and as dusk fell a field of yellow and green where they pitched their tents and Big Sue, apple-cheeked and bangled, squeezed her brother into her bosom’s curve in the tent’s zipped orange glow a car park, pulsing with music and bells light spilling from the pub like it was somebody’s front room the electric scent of men their danced-in shirts the velveted whirl of women’s black-chokered throats childrens’ voices in the glow-wormed hedges and a scratchy-faced stranger pinning her, like a butterfly, to the August ground – her brother, reaching in to release her like she was one of his own. Publishing credits Echo: The Blue Nib I am turning into all the mothers / Folk Festival, 1982: exclusive first publication by iamb