Hear poet Brian Bilston read poems for wave 5 of literary poetry journal iamb. Brian Bilston wave 5 spring 2021 back next the poet Brian Bilston, author of the Costa-shortlisted novel Diary of a Somebody , has been dubbed both the ‘Banksy of poetry’ and ‘Twitter’s unofficial Poet Laureate’. His first book, You Took the Last Bus Home featured poems he'd shared on Twitter. His poem Refugees was adapted into a picture book for children, and his new collection of poetry, Alexa, what is there to know about love? was published in early 2021. the poems How to Avoid Mixing Your Metaphors 00:00 / 00:50 It’s not rocket surgery. First, get all your ducks on the same page. After all, you can’t make an omelette without breaking stride. Be sure to watch what you write with a fine-tuned comb. Check and re-check until the cows turn blue. It’s as easy as falling off a piece of cake. Don’t worry about opening up a whole hill of beans: you can always burn that bridge when you come to it, if you follow where I’m coming from. Concentrate! Keep your door closed and your enemies closer. Finally, don’t take the moral high horse: if the metaphor fits, walk a mile in it. She’d Dance 00:00 / 00:55 She’d dance like no one was watching although she liked to think he was. The kitchen was her grand ballroom; her partner was a mop. She’d foxtrot among the pots and pans, she’d paso doble to the sink, and as she swept across the floor, her mind danced, too. She’d think of how he’d held her in his arms at the Locarno and the Ritz - whirling, waltzing, a world apart - in the years before the kids, and longer still before the shadow the doctor spotted on his lungs. How dazzlingly they had danced! How dizzyingly she had spun! Her neighbours saw her sometimes, shuffling bent-backed to the shops. But at home, she’d dance like no one was watching although she liked to think he was. How Much I Dislike The Daily Mail 00:00 / 01:01 I would rather eat Quavers that are six weeks’ stale, tie up the man-bun of Gareth Bale, listen to the songs of Jimmy Nail, than read one page of the Daily Mail . If I were bored in a waiting room in Perivale, on a twelve-hour trip on Network Rail, halfway through a circumnavigational sail, I would not read the Daily Mail . I would happily read the complete works of Peter Mayle, the autobiography of Dan Quayle, selected scripts from Emmerdale , if it meant I didn’t have to read the Daily Mail . Far better to stand outside in a storm of hail, be blown out to sea in a powerful gale then swallowed by a humpback whale than have to read the Daily Mail . If I were blind, and it was the only thing in Braille, I still would not read the Daily Mail . Publishing credits How to Avoid Mixing Your Metaphors: Diary of a Somebody (Picador) She’d Dance: Alexa, what is there to know about love? (Picador) How Much I Dislike the Daily Mail: You Took the Last Bus Home (Unbound)

Hear poet Kyle Potvin read poems for wave 9 of literary poetry journal iamb. Kyle Potvin wave 9 spring 2022 back next the poet Kyle Potvin is an American poet whose debut full-length poetry collection, Loosen , appeared in 2021. Her chapbook, Sound Travels on Water , won the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. Kyle's poems have featured in Bellevue Literary Review , Tar River Poetry, Rattle, Ecotone, The New York Times and elsewhere. the poems Do You Know Pain? 00:00 / 01:09 The slice of the knife The rock to the head The blow to the eye The lumbar puncture That spinal tap The mistaken try Or perhaps The prenatal jarring Pushing and bearing Perineal tearing The prick of the needle Poison-plumped veins White sores in the mouth Cold fog in the brain Then the burn of the beam For thirty-three days Day after day The high-energy rays Did you turn Up your eyes Write words in your mind Tap beats on your thighs To distract and deny Then return to this earth Forgetting it happened The aching and bruising The bleeding and writhing For the scarring is healing The hurting subsiding The hunger returns Tomato salted and ripe The slip of the finger The slice of the knife Mysteries of the Corn 00:00 / 01:22 Your priest of 20 years retires. Then your hairdresser. Elephants become sacred and the circus leaves town forever. Even the only queen you've known is blue, wearing sapphires from her dead father. Loss is the corn on your door: 16 rows 800 kernels. You finger each like a rosary bead: Hail Mary Mother of Yours lost in plaques and tangles. Glory Be to Your Father, livelihood lost to her care. Hail Holy Queen, watch over the teen shot near the corner and for the other who died of (conjecture). Our Father, remember the birch, lost to infestation, and the road around the lake, no longer traveled. Each year, the husk dries, decays a bit more. But you hang it anyway, a totem to stubbornness. After all, an ear to the ground is useless. You know what's coming. Sin 00:00 / 00:59 At eight years old, I dodged the sisters' eyes: ate my sandwich, then donned a saintly face, walked out the gate, past church and up the rise toward Horn's Variety, that mythic place. The path was new to me. I walked alone and genuflected to inspect a sheared- off branch, a mica fleck, a swallow's bone. I used a stick to write DAM HELL; then cleared away the words. Dust pleated in my skirt. I felt a breath unloosen in my chest, expanding, fearless in this wondrous dirt of disobedience, this fresh unrest. The church bells rang. I rose, denied the call. Picked freedom, sin, a red-hot fireball. Publishing credits All poems: Loosen (Hobblebush Books)

Hear poet Rachael de Moravia read poems for wave 4 of literary poetry journal iamb. Rachael de Moravia wave 4 autumn 2020 back next the poet Rachael de Moravia is a writer, journalist and university lecturer whose arts, culture, travel and business features have appeared in UK and international publications. She's been a magazine editor, broadcast journalist and radio news presenter, and her essays, fiction and poetry have been published widely – both in print and online. Rachael was granted an Authors’ Foundation Award from the Society of Authors in 2019. the poems The Topography of War Home 00:00 / 03:36 By the window, a grandmother sits, grey eyes on the jagged edges of buildings, a no- longer city of disorder and dust, powdered to destruction, the ashes of white marble. Precious ancient city, my ash-Shahbaa, living, breathing, marble {white} veined with porphyry {red} and diorite {green}, cracked and broken, open-veined, bleeding into dust, emptiness and substance bleeding out together on the margins of the streets. In dreams she hears {impact} the sound of one glass edge against another glass edge almost like a whisper; in waking she sits with splintered glass in her lap like jewels embroidered in the folds of black fabric, here in the frame of the once-window. Framed as in a painting, and, if looking up from the streets, caught in a moment, the moment a painter imprisons his seated subject looking elsewhere towards an imagined horizon, eternal gaze falling into the distance, she sits. Ancient city of calcined bone-ash, powdered minarets, ash-drift alleys, souqs submerged. {annihilate} They leave, they return. They burn, they destroy. They come to hide, shelter, rebuild; dredging, sifting, dreading, shifting. She doesn’t recognise the map laid out beyond the window now, the chart in the frame. Cartographer of disorder, she scans the ruins of the city. She tries to trace the arches of the caravanserai, delineate the rooves of the hammam. The walls of the citadel lay in ruins in the scarred landscape of her memory. Streets cede to dust cede to twisted steel, twisted like the limbs of pistachio trees in the orchards she knew as a girl. She is in the orchards and at home, past and present eviscerated, past and present forming a continuous loop as she sits in the window of the horizonless city. The grey city suffocates its past in a toxic fog of dust, and, sitting by the window, she recalls fragments of childhood; technicolour days and vivid past-lives preserved in black and white on glossy paper in the unsealing peeling plastic film of dry albums in dusty boxes. Former adhesions unstick in the present; mortar crumbles, families fragment, half-lives corrode. Mortars fall, mortar disintegrates. What holds together is torn apart, coherence to chaos. {mortar // mortar} For millennia we spoke this language of binding and building — now the words crumble in our mouths like broken teeth in bad dreams and we spit out destruction. {mort // morte} Steel shell-fragments pierce the words of a poem daubed on the lime-mortared citadel walls. City of learning, here is the lesson: lessen, lessen. Hospital 00:00 / 03:32 The evening sun gives the city a golden aura, hushed and hallowed, phoenix-feather clouds the colour of fire. It lays itself across the white façades like the yellowing photos in dry albums, a sepia city. {sepia // sepsis} Yellowbrown, sulfur mustard, toxic halo. A pause in the bombardment and the smoky city tries to catch its breath, but its lungs fill with weaponised air, bronchial alleyways and arches {inhale} grilles // gills {breathe} balconies, lintels {breathe} vaults, cupolas {breathe} the vapour penetrating tunnels and passageways, and deep into the alveoli of filigree windows and lattice-work shutters. Porous structures exhale their dead. A father carries his child through the scorched streets. The shattered concrete of the hospital climbs to eat the sky and spits out shell-casings caught between its teeth. He sits by the bed, fingers pulling at the thin white sheet, fingers flexing and tensing against the fabric the way he once gripped bedsheets in ecstasy. Now he rents in agony. His child lays, dustgrey skin, ashes to ashes to ashes, the hell of this skindust, fleshwounding red. Doctors shout to be heard but despair is louder. Louder still are eyes {clawed} and throats {raw}. Strip-lights flicker — doctors pause — flicker again and go out. The hospital is lit only by the evening, by the dark greyscape of trauma, and in the dark, bodies {pupils fixed} still writhing and convulsing. The blind acrid air scavenges in the dark for verbs: to choke, to vomit, to curdle. Powerless, the ventilators and monitors are silent, dead as the back-up generator in the basement where the dead used to lay. Now they lay in the dust. Treating the just-living, doctors scratch the cupboards bare for antidote, for atropine, for alkaloid. Running through corridors {bloodstream} labyrinthine in the dark, they go hunting for liquid relief, for release. Desperate to stay awake, exhausted, a father {don’t leave me} drifts bodily to the halfworld of dream-state where he walks between the planted lines of pistachio trees, the lines he walked a thousand times with brothers and uncles at harvest time. In the dark of his sleep the lines of trees become lines running into bodies, the lines of hospital drips and tubes, the bodies dissolving into sheets on beds, threadbare sheets becoming brittle sheets of paper, lines drawn on paper like careless borders drawn on maps, terrible and stained and perishing maps, scrawled with places he once knew, pock-marked and blood-flecked like bulletholes in walls, and all his life-lines written on the {palimpsest} landscape. In the black night, a father sits in the hospital. Over his heart a shirt pocket, and within it a photo. Hollow 00:00 / 04:55 Not far from the border, a mother sits in a hollow of earth, sheltering from the snow. Navigating by day away from smokedrifts over the city {remains}, at night she rests. She walks the limestone massif through the Dead Cities of antiquity. Beyond these forgotten cities, farmlands to the north and west where the olive and nut trees grow, orchards abandoned, the earth heavy and pregnant with unharvested fallen yields. Hungry, hollow-cheeked and skull-thin, she moves the tip of her tongue across the velvet bone of her lower jaw to feel the space where her wisdom teeth once buried their roots. Enamel may be the strongest substance in the body, but even teeth rot. These roots are not so firm that they can’t be displaced by metal. The doctor said bone would grow back over time, and each passing month the gumflesh swallows the void, little by little. Flesh grows back with healthy blood-flow. Flesh grows back unless you’re dead. She tongues the root-hollows and tastes the air — acid that carries for miles with the wind. She tastes metal on bone, metal on flesh. Her body, too, hollow after bearing a child, born still, and her whole hollow body cries into the cold of the night, unheard. In the silence of the hollow {in the stillness of her womb} echoes of voices, anisotropic, immeasurable, like the echoes of shells falling in the city where a grandmother sits in grey dust // where shrieking echoes of mortars bounce off the carcasses of buildings // where the shrieks of children echo in the streets where bombs fall indiscriminate // where the children feel it in their eyes and throats and lungs before they even know it is raining at all. In the silence of the hollow, a memory of her brothers’ voices in the rows of pistachio trees, seeds closed-mouthed and ripening, shells splitting, an ecstasy of dehiscence. She recalls the orchard arteries, trees planted in parallel avenues, rooted deep like teeth, lines of gnarly trunks, rough-ridged grey bark, twisted limbs {like the children falling in the streets} waxy-leaved, canopy-dense, fruit-heavy. She recalls the changing colour of ripening drupes, the soft grey-green smooth nut inside, soft like the velvet gums against her tongue inside her hungry mouth which waters when she thinks of the harvest. She swallows the saliva, unsated. She thinks of the harvest, of sorting the nuts, open-mouthed shells here, closed-mouthed shells here, the abrupt splitting apart, the audible pop of hundreds of ripening, opening seeds in the fertile orchards like rapid joyous gun-fire. She cannot forget how the shells fall — in the orchards, in the city, on the hospital. She cannot forget the cracks in the citadel walls, or the crack of nutshells underfoot at harvesttime. From her shelter in the hollow she draws lines in the softly falling snow on the frozen ground, rudimentary map-making, marking out cities, coastlines and borders. The snow melts to her touch. She draws slowly, a lover running her fingers across another body, tracing blood rivers and sinew paths and flesh hollows. Mapping her thoughts, she finds some lines are organic: natural forms like rivers and plateaus and mountain ranges. Others are territorial, made by man, deliberately drawn and visible, like train tracks and roads and borders. But the best sort of lines are invisible to the eye: ley lines and desire lines and the shortcut she took through the trees to play with her sisters in the orchard —drawn by intuition, by routine, by heart— and how these undrawn lines seemed to her the most human topographical feature of all. Not far from the border, a mother sits in a hollow of earth, sheltering from the snow. It is night, and the land is nothing more than a colourless spectrum that spreads itself out between the black and the white. Publishing credits All poems: FELT: Aesthetics of Grey (ZenoPress)

Hear poet Rick Dove read poems for wave 11 of literary poetry journal iamb. Rick Dove wave 11 autumn 2022 back next the poet Queer, mixed-race and neurodivergent, Rick Dove is a poet and activist from South London. His work explores themes of social justice, epistemology and identity – drawing on science-fiction, philosophy and mythology (with no small measure of mischief). Using a blend of traditional and free-verse styles to interrogate the liminal spaces that define common humanity, Rick was dubbed ‘one to watch’ by T S Eliot Prize winner Roger Robinson. Rick’s debut collection Tales from the Other Box appeared in 2020, and he was crowned Hammer & Tongue UK Poetry Slam Champion at the Royal Albert Hall the following year. the poems Blind Study / Test Subject 00:00 / 01:44 Traces of LSD can be found in the hair up to 90 days after ingestion. This is 180 times longer than it is detectable in the blood. It is days after, and still an orgy of detritus is clinging to my skin. The brush of my shorn crown is prickly. It is fresh in-patient released. A new-born fleeced. Triggering apocryphal memories of Electro Convulsive Therapy, the chair, and of not wanting to catch fire. Triggering memories of reading about the invention of Velcro, of George de Mestral and his dog, stubborn cockle burrs with their hooks in deep, clinging. Glowing with bandwidth restrictions, the elemental filaments are burning wires in my skin, standing to attention, still receiving the whispering, on an acrid stench, days after. This is why they shave the heads of those about to die: to stop them transmitting. To prevent the secondary transfer of dreaming. I will have to wait for my hair to grow back before I'm identifiable as a victim. In most cases, nuclear DNA is broken down to its building blocks. So if a hair lacks a root it will be impossible to extract a useful sample. It is days after, and I am home. Greeted by golden threads, they pull me anti-Theseus back into the labyrinth, trip wires attached to booby traps, her blonde invading berserkers. The poison metabolised before she left that morning, its debris will take a lifetime to clear. Detritus of dissociation sticking to the rubble like Velcro, it must be pulled away slowly. Earning the Title Diva June, 2016 00:00 / 02:21 Chess timer chastising his strategy, hanging boardroom clock louder than memory, facial tics, he had asked for five minutes, when she had them, but tensions tied, had stolen his tongue for two. Blank. Floodgates. Gambit onslaught, the explanation to HR, briefing reasons for the meeting. A cortisol taster, wafer and wine anxiety. How he had bonded with a writer from Florida over America is a Gun by Brian Bilston. How, although Florida is a big state, when he had tried to raise the writer, his message went unread. How this worry was eating him, he said. He did not need to be at home, had to stay busy. But it might be necessary for allowances to be made, later, if the situation changed. He stopped for breath. This is the edge, he said, and I am on it. A ledge with no one to talk us down. My hypervigilance had been activated at some point of no return on the District Line that morning, shaken up by rocking motions, the lullaby wheels recalling the feel of rumbling bass through my feet. I was back on Frith Street on May Day Bank Holiday weekend in ‘99, a Friday. Turning right into Old Compton. Meeting clouds from the west. This five minutes of programming in endless repeats of Mr Angry. This morning’s tube rhythms fading into the stampede as breaks made screams, until again I could taste masonry dust. Asking who knows first aid. Debris learning triage in the field. It is not 9am, and I need a whisky. And I am watching him omit this part of our explanation to HR, saying merely, he cannot trust himself to remain stoic in the office today. Especially in the face of its typical hypermasculine heteronormativity, with epithets like confetti. Especially in the wake of what just happened a world away. How they are too threatening in this new frame. Too threatening today. I used to do drag he says. These were my people. By implication, HR and the rest of the team are not. Back from the Admiral Duncan, tears are salting the dust in our rushing blood. The boardroom clock is lost, as we resynchronise our brainwaves to present. Together again, America is a Gun we say – you should read it. It might help explain. Later, the MD will call us Diva for the first time. Claim the events are unconnected. We stayed all day. Protest is Pride. The Chat 00:00 / 02:45 i heard it first at seven the day they called me gollywog and as the word passed these lips to meet Mum’s ear a tear and every time since then i am back there little boy lost there wondering when i will grow up praying and praying (like that was ever enough) that this world will too strange then that this was too my childhood’s very end there in an eighties living room as Mum and Dad and i have The Chat and my dad tells the tale regales again and again in his final days about his early years on this isle how only black in the village was actually a thing and how it was him and how on a summer’s day no more than eight a policeman at the gate came to tell his mum he couldn’t go to the corner shop alone again he hadn’t stolen anything but the shopkeeper (like so many back then) wasn't one for details except that simple single one that still holds us back so later that evening Granny and Grandad give my eight-year-old dad The Chat and i rehearse it with a girlfriend same night as our first tiff late on a date about twenty-oh-three (the year not the hour) as she suggests we hail a cab and her privilege hits me there hits me square hits me full force in the derriere i won’t be able to flag one here i SNAP snarky inferring maybe it should be you in the flooded gutter in your good shoes … and later that evening as i am cleaning her boots she and i have The Chat and this is how it's been for generations parents to their children star-crossed lovers in explanation in conversation after conversation spelling out how being black (though having some advantages) will get you treated as lesser by some or make you a target to some will put you in the crosshairs of some and this is something a quartet of Carl Lewis Linford Christie Usain Bolt and Jesse Owens can’t outrun it's a baton that we’re still passing and this is me to you my son for that is how i have to give it to my boy saying i hope this world will grow so you never truly know this feeling of being so conspicuous and yet so small of representing an entire skin tone all on your own alone because i know whenever you feel the weight of that it will crush you flat and you deserve to be on show only when you choose to be and now you are fully grown and in possession of our truth i know you will guard it well until it is due but i hope and pray (like that's ever been enough) that this ends with you and hopefully one day a black man merely standing on a stage or putting a pen to page will stop being a political act but until then we'll have The Chat Publishing credits Blind Study / Test Subject: Hair Raising Anthology (Nine Pens Press) Earning the Title Diva: Sometimes the Revolution is Small (Nymphs & Thugs) The Chat: Tales from the Other Box (Burning Eye Books)

Hear poet Jinny Fisher read poems for wave 12 of literary poetry journal iamb. Jinny Fisher wave 12 winter 2022 back next the poet Before writing poetry, Jinny Fisher was a classical violinist, a teacher, and a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Her poems have since appeared in Lighthouse, Against the Grain , The Interpreter’s House , Under the Radar , Tears in the Fence , Prole , Ink, Sweat & Tears and Osmosis . Jinny's writing has been commended and placed in national and international competitions. She was first runner-up in The Interpreter’s House Open House Competition in 2016, as well as in Prole Laureate in 2020. Jinny also runs the Poetry Pram: taking poetry to audiences at festivals for random one-to-one readings. Her pamphlet, The Escapologist , was out in 2019. the poems Privilege 00:00 / 01:25 Aged eight, my brother walks through the cathedral school’s stone doorway. He is assigned a number, to mark with indelible ink inside his shoes. He is taught only by men who have been taught only by men. Big boys creep to the beds of shaking small boys, who wake in cold, damp sheets. Masters walk pretty boys upstairs, for personal attention, special education. * But my brother can pitch a note, so is chosen to be an apprentice chorister, learning melody and polyphony from the boys around him. Cantoris and Decani , the Cathedral choir stalls become his refuge; his friends are animal misericords under ancient polished seats. He floats to the rhythm of versicle and response, to refrains of psalms and canticles that swirl up to the fan vaulted Sanctuary ceiling. Praetorius, Tallis, Purcell—their anthems shall cradle and comfort him always. And in peace he shall both lie down and sleep. Retrofocus 00:00 / 01:32 Brownie 127: The Beach. As we skimmed the deeps, his freckled back was my boat. I felt the rise and fall of shoulder blades under my thumbs, his mouth swivelling into view as he gasped for breath. Look: a squinty grin, a cartwheel, a sandcastle – fortified against the tide. Asahi Pentax: The Shed. Dust-coated cobwebs, thick as tea towels, draped the windows. I dangled my legs from the workbench, viced the battens while he sawed, and there were so many splinters to be gouged. Look: a table – sanded and glossed, a captain’s chair, three splay-backs. Nikon F: The Studio. A windowless shed at the end of the garden. Only my friend was with him. We all knew there were cameras on tripods, banks of flash-guns, umbrellas to diffuse the glare. I imagine his camouflaged murmurs as her blouse falls to the floor. Listen: Lovely – peep from under your lids. Now – a little smile? Little Brother, Big Sister 00:00 / 00:38 At the back of Deb’s wardrobe, Dan finds the frock: pink satin frills, unicorns, fairies— soon to be sent to the charity shop. Grandma’s beads from the dressing-up box set off the shine in his wavy blond hair. His unisex trainers match Deb’s rainbow socks. Dan poses and pouts to the full-length mirror, catwalks into the kitchen with a shrill ta-da! Father’s eyes roll. He storms out, slams the door. Publishing credits Privilege / Little Brother, Big Sister: exclusive first publication by iamb Retrofocus: The Escapologist (V. Press)

Hear poet Dave Garbutt read poems for wave 14 of literary poetry journal iamb. Dave Garbutt wave 14 summer 2023 back next the poet Dave Garbutt is retired, lives in Switzerland and has been a keen birder since he was 12. He was born in North London, less than a mile from Keats’ House, and began his writing career while still at school. Recent publications to include Dave's poems range from Deronda Review and The Brown Envelope Book to BOLD! (an anthology on masculinity) and Sound and Vision . His poem Thirteen White Birds was shown at Leigh Spinners Mill in April 2023 as part of the Paper Birds exhibition. Dave's poem ripped was long-listed in The Rialto's Nature and Place 2021 competition. the poems Walk, Stand and Sit by the Hornbeam 00:00 / 01:30 Come with me into the moment the world relaxes We talk, chatting, gesticulating, not drowning. Here, the hornbeam catkins are out— wait. Stand. Sit. Still. Breathe. Watch. —Count six hundred heartbeats— A Great Tit calls, moves past, twig to twig it stops to sing— a bit early, but sunshine makes it right. Now more birds move, quiz twigs, parse branches, a Tree-creeper sings, a Dunnock from the hedge releases its ‘short unassuming warble’ my first for this woody place. Four Magpies swoop past. A Nuthatch hammers a hazelnut A Hawfinch sits and watches drops to the ground ... here is the world when humans are still— this world, without us, is the one we live in best. Water Vole 00:00 / 00:54 The first time I saw a water vole it didn’t see me, and I watched it for half an hour. I had time. I was running away from the last quarrel of my marriage, from the last quarrel of my life, into my last sunset. And this tiny whisker-twitcher, tiny grass chopper, reed wrecker, ate, looked, sniffed, groomed itself, sniffed, rested watched for sky-scares, watched for water-shrieks and for a few seconds slept. Then it slipped off its rest place, and swam, leaving me with a life still to come, and a future yet to happen. Magnol.i.am 00:00 / 01:20 Although I am but one cell budding into a line I am just as much a petal although I am spread, to wind & sun I am just as much a petal although I am creased, folded back by frost I am just as much a petal although there are bruises marking my satin white I am just as much a petal although I rest now, released, on the ground I am just as much a petal although a footprint crosses my silvery tongue I am just as much a petal although time pushes the bruises to cover me I am just as much a petal although I am dissolving to moss and leaf I am just as much a petal and tell me human with eyes and ears and hands and pen how about you? are you a petal now? or still a human? Since when are you both? Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb Author photo: © Brigitta Hänggi

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 Caleb Parkin read poems for wave 3 of literary poetry journal iamb. Caleb Parkin wave 3 summer 2020 back next the poet Caleb Parkin is a day-glo queero techno eco poet and facilitator based in Bristol. He won second prize in the National Poetry Competition 2016, came first in the Winchester Poetry Prize 2017 and has placed in various other competition shortlists. Caleb's poetry has appeared in The Rialto, Poetry Review, Butcher’s Dog, Under the Radar, Magma, Envoi and elsewhere. He tutors for the Poetry Society, Poetry School, First Story and others, and holds an MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes. He’s now at work on his first collection, with ACE Developing Your Creative Practice support – and from October 2020-2022, Caleb will be the Bristol City Poet . the poems Minotaur at the Soft Play Centre 00:00 / 01:30 While the calves play, the other children-children huddle by the counter of the snack bar (beef burger and chips £3.99). Minotaur sits on a chrome chair, latte in his vast hand, watching the calves tumble and snort through padded rollers or down spiral slides. He rests a hulking elbow on the holographic tabletop and issues a bestial sigh. Every time the calves go out of sight, the timpani of his bull’s heart reverberates. Each time they vanish behind some painted frieze of children-children jumping, screeching, and reappear with their bovine ears atwitch with overexcitement, he hears echoes of thoughts he hoped he’d shut away. Hooved thoughts, from years within those corridors, his meaty leaf-shaped ears rotating like radars, shifting sharply to the sounds of those frantic human-human feet. Soles like his endless and disposable; heads like his endless and disposable. Chromatophores ‘ … organs that are present in the skin of many cephalopods, such as squids, cuttlefish and octopuses, which contain pigment sacs that become more visible as small radial muscles pull the sac open making the pigment expand under the skin.’ from nature.com 00:00 / 01:53 Across the Despatch Box they make their bodies into proclamations, pigment their limbs into Pollocks that abstract speech. They lie but their skin is mainlined to their cerebella, spots untruth and scatters it like fireworks, displays it boldly across the mobile billboards of their foreheads. Every vigorous declamation and witty riposte rings only as true as their minds permit: intentions expand in stripes over hands, fear makes their cheeks as worn- red and cracked as leather benches. The Opposition’s voices force them to blush in torrid technicolour. These new palettes of their flat- screen selves broadcast every doubt or whim on patterned limbs. The electorate watches these screens on screens, peers down to check what we believe, merging with Hadean settees, camouflaged and craving ink. Kind Words About Darkness 00:00 / 01:30 To the bafflement of the swaying faces, we say we are happy to walk. Into this living night, we stride, fly on a day of sipping smiles, shining eyes, the few curving miles of hedge- meshed lanes, reliant at first on sight. But then, in the secret spectral cinema of purple-black-grey three am, away from the orange juice deluge of streetlights – we attune to touch, become alert to the crunch or slop of each step, awake to each other, the low-headed stoop of the dog. There is space in this darkness. A brightness. Between us and the softly backlit branches. No traffic to face down. No public to display to. Not a single tree jabs at us with censuring eyes. Just us: our hands meshing beneath this starlight. These hands, scattered otherwise, beneath the gazing windows of a city skyline. Publishing credits Minotaur at the Soft Play Centre: exclusive first publication by iamb Chromatophores: Envoi (No. 184) Kind Words About Darkness: The Rialto (Issue 88)

Hear poet Martin Figura read poems for wave 4 of literary poetry journal iamb. Martin Figura wave 4 autumn 2020 back next the poet Martin Figura’s collection and show Whistle was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award, and won the 2013 Saboteur Award for Best Spoken Word Show. His books Shed and Dr Zeeman’s Catastrophe Machine were published in 2016 – the spoken word show to accompany the latter earning Martin a shortlisting in the 2018 Saboteur Awards. That same year saw a new edition of Whistle . Martin had hoped to showcase his theatre show Shed in 2020. He lives in Norwich with the poet Helen Ivory, and sciatica. the poems Land of Opportunity ‘This is a new start for everyone in the UK … so let's get going.’ Michael Gove, July 2020 00:00 / 01:00 Here we are then, huddled on the exhausted stained mattress in the seaside boarding house of state. Rusty springs squeak out Rule Britannia whilst we make love to ourselves. The bed, digging its heels into a tidemark carpet that’s shrinking away from the chipped gloss of the skirting boards and the terrifying flora of the wallpaper. Thin rayon curtains spill yellow light onto our gilt-framed Boots the Chemist reproduction of Constable’s The Hay Wain, picks out the greyed varnish craquelure of the wardrobe quietly looming in the corner containing who knows what – a little shoebox of secrets perhaps? Suitcases sticky with dust sit atop – their handles ripped off. Failure After Gillian Wearing’s 2 into 1 (1997) 00:00 / 01:22 He loves me I suppose. I am a failure, there's a better way of doing things. I am a dramatic woman. I know I think too much of myself and I should be submissive – a proper wife. He's very caring really. He says I like to be dominated. When he's jealous he's abusive towards me. I'm afraid I won't grow old – I sometimes tell him that. He's beautiful looking. He will try and tell me about love, but hate is something he needs and I don’t. He says I am a failure and I don’t. He says I am a failure but hate is something he needs. Try and tell me about love. He's beautiful looking, he will grow old. I sometimes tell him that he's abusive towards me. I'm afraid I won't be dominated when he's jealous. He's very caring – Really? He says I like to be submissive – a proper wife. I think too much of myself and I should. I am a dramatic woman! I know there's a better way of doing things. I suppose I am a failure, he loves me. Harold Wilson Rows Towards Bishop Rock 00:00 / 01:10 Harold, knees like little moons, bends his back, puffs through the clamouring halyards of the bay. Always six moves ahead of the other buggers, be they Old Etonians or fellow grammar grubbers. And where else to escape serious concerns, but these Scilly Isles. The cormorant is attentive company at the blunt end of the boat, kinked wings hung out to dry, Harold’s words gulped down like slippery fish. The oars are worn soft in their locks, while he rows he recalls himself a boy in a school cap, at the steps of Number Ten. On the slipway, Mary diminishes to the red dot of her coat. The lighthouse lays down her path, tugs the glow of Gannex mac and pipe smoke through the net curtain of mizzle. Mary turns, heads up the slope towards the archipelago’s clustered lights and their ugly little bungalow. Publishing credits Land of Opportunity: The New European Failure: Dr Zeeman's Catastrophe Machine (Cinnamon Press) Originally commissioned in 2011 for the Norwich Castle Museum Family Matters Exhibition Harold Wilson Rows Towards Bishop Rock: The Rialto (Issue 89) Placed second in the 2017 Rialto/RSPB Nature Poetry Competition Author photo: © Dave Guttridge

Hear poet Sarah Holland read poems for wave 17 of literary poetry journal iamb. Sarah Holland wave 17 spring 2024 back next the poet Sarah Holland is a writer, poet and meditation teacher living in rural England. She's a regular at the writing groups and open mics held by the Poetry Pharmacy , where she also teaches mindful writing practices. This is the very first time Sarah's poems have been published. the poems Unseen 00:00 / 00:43 The sly smile of flesh knows its own beauty. Somewhere, a naked body is screaming, sweating, still. It howls when uncapped by sleeves, cold slicing bone, shocked by its own need to be covered. Now a lonely, lost landscape, blindly eroded. Tiny streams in rivulets you won’t remember weren’t always there. Your care of my nakedness is all I will ever know of love. When I’m next uncovered, I’ll no longer witness myself being seen. Dress in Stars 00:00 / 02:06 The dress is clustered with flowers join the lines between the nodes to find her stories in the eyes of the stars. Virgo Here I trace a girl standing proud in new folds of fabric paid for by her own wreath-weaving hands. The hem is hitched to her waist in a teenage tryst the stars hold her heart when broken. Draco The dress becomes lazy, lounging in corners forgotten for pyjamas and red-tipped hair and freedom and pint-size laughter. Notes are absent, margins full of rhyme. Aquarius The fabric sprawls dazed with travel on a bugged bunk-bed. See here, a map of islands, an elephant’s wrinkled ear, the currency of symbols smoke singing from the folds. The Bears Here is a woman now, buying new dresses from markets, city-chic, following rivers to return to the ring where the bear was tied to steps and she will sometimes wait. Gemini The straps sting like cuts on reddened shoulders muddied by festival swamps. Friends fade to twin with pole stars. Behind a closed door, the dress hangs limp and worn. Leo The dress has been lifted from sun-striped skin a tigress released again and again and again she curls alone into her warmth and swims the wide water. Hercules Hold the dress as carefully as that first love hang from a hook that drags the door but remember to hope. There is still space in its starred sky amongst the moss-worn patches. Gargoyles 00:00 / 01:53 I had remembered you wrong with a hoop in your ear but the curls were real that uncoiled from a cap another woman pressed to your scalp. Coffee from a market stall instantly chilled as the wind whipped the steam to the gargoyles who supped it like breath. We chose a face for each of us and perhaps that was a gift, seeing how we would soon jeer across the distance, bitterness spitting the air. I wanted you to ease me down the river on a boat you had made, wade with me across the brown water. I thought it would be glassy, our faces two stars reflected there. But we were just tourists, disappointed by the churn of the silt and the slime and the mud, a memory punishing itself again and again. The bridge suspended us over floods that might have carried us to fences, flowers. We didn’t know we’d be sucked under, crushed by the wheels of a tour bus as a gargoyle cackled, ringing from a city’s tall tower. I scratch into stone with my nail I don’t want to write these poems anymore but my blood obscures the words. I want to cup you in my palm feel your breath mist my skin. We played house in a home I thought had two beds. I still feel the warmth in our current as I flick fragments of stone into the ripples, sneers etched over smiles, but even though I’ve been here before, we are forever gargoyles. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Craig Smith read poems for wave 9 of literary poetry journal iamb. Craig Smith wave 9 spring 2022 back next the poet Craig Smith is a poet and novelist from Huddersfield. His writing has appeared in The North , Blizzard , The Interpreters’ House and MIR Online . Craig’s poetry publications so far are L.O.V.E. Love and A Quick Word With A Rock And Roll Late Starter . His first novel, Super-8 , is out of print. Craig is currently working toward an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck University. the poems The New Trogolodytes 00:00 / 02:09 They speak so well, these New Troglodytes, as if porting rubies in the pouches of their cheek or swirling cognac in the brandy glass of their jaw. Their hair is cut thick like good bacon in a public school sweep, a money cut, and their torso is layered in gold thread with magician's pockets to facilitate the bait and switch. They speak so well but they lie, lie, lie, and steal things, smirking, and drop public wealth into the pockets of their cronies. Their schooling was a family investment to jemmy open the cash box of State, using Latin and Greek to spin fables that make their greed noble, their privilege inevitable, their entitlement heroic, their crimes forgivable, their theft philanthropic, aligning their reputation with the triumphs of the nation while stashing the takings off shore out of reach. We call them My Lord, these New Troglodytes, Your Honour, the Right Honourable, His Highness, Lady, Sir, Dame, Duchess, Duke, Ma’am, though their title was a reward for exploitation and brutality and was flipped through the currencies of the age – power, platform, credit – until we perceive it as a gift from God. Yet, they are beholden, not to us, but to the pocketbook of oligarchs, the good will of global media. I’ve seen them, the New Troglodytes, on TV, in the unelected upper house, in rotten boroughs across the land, or beamed in from a loan home in Marbella. They destroy in a session what was built over a lifetime and front the betrayal because their tone belies that they are lying. Their sophistication is a quiet word with the right person to swing a debate or stymy public good. They provoke my anger, but I met one once and liked him, and that frightens me. A Poem for a Friend Long Gone 00:00 / 01:37 A bottle of pills, wasn't it? Or your parents' Scotch, guzzled like pop, or a bash on your temple on the backroads above Burton from which your driver walked away? Or a leap from a viaduct in Scarborough because a boy didn't love you? The means are less important than the fact that you're gone. You no longer occupy the space we put aside for you. I remember our last encounter, a word in passing one Friday night at the Clothiers on my return to the Asteroid table with three pints of Tetleys shored between my finger ends. It was bands, probably, or beer, or football, or possibly love, a hint of our dreaming flattering the mundane with last orders looming and a tramp through the woods to a supper of tinned potatoes, beans and stewing steak. We were swamped with drink and giddy with the moment, sidling up to our possibilities, bashfully, approaching our futures, shyly, embarrassed by our desires but confident we could handle our dreams, regardless. You rarely visit the forefront of my thoughts. We never lived like that so why die like that? My memories of you are not keepsakes or heirlooms. They would not impress my son in the telling, or make a chatshow chortle. Ours was an ambient friendship of kindness and good-nature, and quite enough as that. Café 00:00 / 00:15 Another year in the same café, the rain on the window like a microscope sample, a cross-section of watershed, a perfect example of our foulest weather. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Rachael Clyne read poems for wave 9 of literary poetry journal iamb. Rachael Clyne wave 9 spring 2022 back next the poet Rachael Clyne (she/her) has been published in journals including Tears in the Fence , Shearsman , The Rialto , Lighthouse and Ink Sweat & Tears . She's also had work anthologised in #MeToo: A Women's Poetry Anthology , Queer Writing for a Brave New World and Rebel Talk: Poems from the Climate Emergency . Her prize-winning collection, Singing at the Bone Tree , addresses our broken connection with nature – while her pamphlet, Girl Golem , explores her Jewish migrant heritage and sense of otherness. the poems Girl Golem 00:00 / 01:27 The night they blew life into her, she clung bat-like to the womb-wall. A girl golem, a late bonus, before the final egg dropped. She divided, multiplied, her hand-buds bloomed; her tail vanished into its coccyx and the lub-dub of her existence was bigger than her nascent head. She was made as a keep-watch, in case new nasties tried to take them away. The family called her chotchkele , their little cnadle , said she helped to make up for lost numbers – as if she could compensate for millions. With X-ray eyes, she saw she was trapped in a home for the deaf and blind, watched them blunder into each other’s neuroses. Her task, to hold up their world, be their assimilation ticket, find a nice boy and mazel tov – grandchildren! But she was a hotchpotch golem, a schmutter garment that would never fit, trying to find answers without a handbook. When she turned eighteen, she walked away, went in search of her own kind, tore their god from her mouth. The golem legend is of a man made from clay and Kabbalistic spells to protect Jews from persecution. Rewilding the Body Based on Isobella Tree’s account of rewilding Knepp House Farm 00:00 / 01:06 The ribs of my country jut, its dreams gutted, hopes tilled to exhaustion. Fault lines exposed by monoculture expectation, by intensively farmed ambition. Let thistle stitch my wounds, as painted-lady caterpillars feast on the prickles. Let pigs unzip my paths with cracks for bastard toadflax and meadow-clary. Let ragwort flourish as one hundred and seventy-seven insect species thrive on its bad reputation. Let longhorn cattle tramp hoof-print pools for fairy shrimp, water crowfoot, stonewort. And one moonlit night – nightingales will return to fill my country with their song. Plague Times 00:00 / 03:35 At Passover, we dipped a finger into our wine. We splashed a drop, for each plague named. We did not rejoice. I BLOOD On hands, in every breath, in gullet and gizzard, in belly of whale, from every littered shore, we the seas incarnadine. II FROGS After ice-melt, I pulled three frogs, bloated and stinking, from the pond. Can we afford to lose them? Slugs will flourish in this unlikely spring. III FLIES Feast on our flesh, they wriggle their fatted way, before winging to offshore havens, leaving us a humanless world. IV WILD BEASTS In Chernobyl, wolf-law rules empty dachas, factories. Bears refill forests. Here, Adonis Blue butterflies will thrive on Salisbury Plain. Rats and dogs will shelter in car shells. V CATTLE PLAGUE Play-barns with swings and muzak, and no place for chickens. Carousel feed-troughs rotate past cattle. Pigs gaze through gratings at a crack of sky. VI BOILS This winter virus has no end. The people cough their way into summer. Vaccinations, rumoured to be toxic, do not help. An unreliable source blames chemtrails. VII HAIL First, snow, so deep. That night, rain. By morning the window – solid ice. On the ground, black ice, invisible. We could not step outside. Next day, hail thuds onto the roof. Hail, snow, a sound like falling corpses– these are surely plague times. VIII LOCUSTS Gobbling hoards turn Friday black, as they swarm through shopping malls, stampede for their white gods, trample one another for plasma screens. IX DARKNESS A firmament of LED glare and twinkle of red and white lights thread highways through the undarkened night. The only visible stars are on the ground. X DEATH OF FIRSTBORN Floods destroy the power station. Fish without scales, tumour-ridden, cover the ocean to its farthest coast. There will be no offspring. XI PARTING OF WAVES Red the ocean, gone the ice, gone coastline. No more trips to the seaside. No sandcastles. No fish to fry. No bargains to buy. No creatures to catch. No trees. No insects to bite. No birds to shoot. No property to buy. No planes to fly. No God to part the waves. Just burning bushes. Publishing credits Plague Times: Shearsman (Issue 121/122) Girl Golem: Tears in the Fence (No. 67) Rewilding the Body: Riggwelter (Issue 18) Author photo: © Jinny Fisher