Hear poet Matthew Stewart read poems for wave 16 of literary poetry journal iamb. Matthew Stewart wave 16 winter 2023 back next the poet Dividing his time between Extremadura in Spain and West Sussex in England, poet Matthew Stewart works in the Spanish wine trade. Following on from his debut collection, The Knives of Villalejo – a work some 20 years in the writing – Matthew recently published his second full collection, Whatever You Do, Just Don’t . He's also the author of the popular, influential and much-praised poetry blog, Rogue Strands . the poems Los Domingos 00:00 / 00:48 You’ve taught me to sip a café solo , to let its bitterness seep through my gums and mark the end of our tapas and wine, just as you’ve taught me to relish silence in the slow, shared sliding-by of minutes. I no longer force the conversation these never-ending Sunday afternoons while muffled westerns blink on the telly. An ancient carriage clock fights to strike four and your mother pours her glass of water. Perhaps this week she’ll suddenly repeat her suspicion of a neighbour’s illness. Or we’ll sit here without the need for words till your father stirs and cranks the volume to signal kick-off at the Bernabéu. Heading for the Airport 00:00 / 00:40 The cab suddenly turning up twenty-seven minutes late after my ten frantic calls from the pavement outside your block, your dressing-gowned silhouette hovering on the balcony with a halo of wispy hair. My suitcase thrown in the boot, doors slammed, the driver crunching gears, I forgot our goodbye wave while checking my flight. If only that cab had left me behind, longing for Spain. No way to know I’d never see you alive again. The Last Carry El Paseo Marítimo, Chipiona 00:00 / 00:32 You were seven and hadn’t asked for one in months, but the salt wind had whipped your energy away before calamares fritos at our favourite place on the prom left you woozy, slumped in your seat. Even as I threw you over one shoulder and braced for the trudge to our house, my back was hinting at a future without your breath tickling my neck. At you walking, beside us, if we were lucky. Publishing credits Los Domingos: Wild Court (King's College London) Heading for the Airport: The Spectator (July 16th 2022) The Last Carry: The Spectator (January 30th 2021) Author photo: © Marina Rodriguez

Hear poet Paul Brookes read poems for wave 2 of literary poetry journal iamb. Paul Brookes wave 2 spring 2020 back next the poet Poet and shop assistant Paul Brookes lives and writes in a cat house full of teddy bears. He's published numerous volumes of poetry, including The Fabulous Invention Of Barnsley (Dearne Community Arts), The Headpoke and Firewedding (Alien Buddha Press), and A World Where and She Needs That Edge (Nixes Mate Press). He's also collaborated with other artists – on Stubborn Sod (Alien Buddha Press) with Marcel Herms in 2019, and on the forthcoming Khoshhali with Hiva Moazed. Paul is a contributing writer of Literati Magazine and editor of the Wombwell Rainbow Interviews . the poems R Ash Wednesday 00:00 / 00:30 Thas gonna mucky me forehead wi old codgers ashes what we burned yonks since as if it could remove our guilt and sinfulness for doing so. As tha finger paints a cross on me bonce al see our ancestor crinkle and pop Like it were fireworks and watch all harshness and fret go up in smoke. Al have to go mi sen a wesh afore a sees our lass else it'll get her all wonderin' an we don't want that. Don't want folk pryin'. No need. The Gent 00:00 / 00:35 The regular gent as I beep the barcode of his white bread, I take correct change from his held out palm. He struggles to put his purchase into his thin plastic bag. I open the bag wider and drop the bread into it. My wife is cremated, he says She'll be buried Thursday. I say I'm sorry to hear that as my till queue gets longer he lingers, a heavy silence. I say hello to the next customer. The heavy silence moves towards the door. We Wait For Sick Sunblaze To 00:00 / 01:22 go. Too long in the barren teeth of glare, lustre is death, see this wrinkled skin, cancerous blotches, blinded by this sharp, dry lucence. The soft, sodden darkness will give us life. Make us young once more. Rub out these wrinkled laugh lines. Smile again in the night. Blood unclenches without light, opens nightscented warm inside thighs and playful inside fragrant mouths tastes a sweetlife of shadows. Darkness outside reflects the firedark between your thighs, welcoming wild cave of your mouth. Our tongues play together in the juicednight. What has come into being in us is life, life that is tenebrous; eyes use what sunless gives, dark shines in lightness, and lightness cannot overpower it. Aphotic. Listen, words bear witness to dark, so that everyone might believe through them. Words out of warm, wet atramentous mouths. Words are not the dark, they bear witness to the dark. Real dark that gives dark to everyone; it is coming into the world. Publishing credits R Ash Wednesday: Stubborn Sod (Alien Buddha Press) The Gent: Please Take Change (Cyberwit) We Wait For Sick Sunblaze To: A World Where (Nixes Mate Books)

Hear poet Em Gray read poems for wave 27 of literary poetry journal iamb. Em Gray wave 27 autumn 2026 back next the poet Brighton-based poet Em Gray's writing often explores themes of neurodivergence, mental health, and the intersection between humans and other species. She was highly commended by the Forward Prizes for Poetry in 2024, won second prize in the Mslexia Poetry Competition 2022, and shortlisted for the Creative Future Writers' Award in 2021 . She's been interviewed for Modron Magazine 's More Than Human series, and was Mslexia's Poet Laureate for its Summer 2026 issue. Em's poetry can be found in Mindsprings , Propel Magazine , Perverse , Black Iris and elsewhere. the poems Horse goes pillow shopping in Ikea 00:00 / 01:14 Horse knows not to giddy her mare-hips near glassware – observes all creatures here are adept; the tender of tentacles for smalls, Owl who glows on demand. Horse studies pillows of most comfort for most bodies – gets spooked by polyester, what rubs off and on and thinks of moths, of dust not dust but scales that hold prisms lost through collision with the world. Horse isn't wild – more, skittish , defends her ears, wears a ribbon of sunflowers for saying, be kind. Horse wants to lie like a meadowsweet foal but stand-leans into waffle – sensing, to sleep this way, is readiness to run. On telling the depressed to exercise 00:00 / 00:39 It may not be enough to forward us a newsletter lauding the sprung beds of municipal flowers – leave bulbs in paper at our doors, return (on noticing they have not been taken in) to donate a trowel, return with soil, a jardinière, a watering can, then to fill it. It may not be enough to seat us at windows, describe the scent of hyacinths. What a silent disco is and isn’t 00:00 / 00:44 There have to be headphones, the claiming of funtime space like a pub garden or low tide beyond the shingle – glow sticks (ideally), an allegiance to the beat. Passersby should know just by looking when the track drops, and feel plaintive (how it is to watch gladness from an unlit street). What it cannot be is the sound inside your head – confusing your block for the set of a musical in which you are the only dancer. Publishing credits Horse goes pillow shopping in Ikea / On telling the depressed to exercise: exclusive first publication by iamb What a silent disco is and isn't: Lighthouse (Issue 30)

Hear poet Matthew M C Smith read poems for wave 2 of literary poetry journal iamb. Matthew M C Smith wave 2 spring 2020 back next the poet Matthew M C Smith, a Welsh poet from Swansea, is editor and founder of Black Bough Poetry . His poems have been in Anti-Heroin Chic, Barren Magazine, Icefloe Press, Wellington Street Review, Other Terrain and Fly on the Wall Press. Matthew is writing his second collection after his debut, Origin: 21 Poems . the poems Cool Oblivion ‘ ... llithro i’r llonyddwch mawr yn ôl.’ from T H Parry Williams’Dychwelyd 00:00 / 01:23 Choose life; extract yourself from systems, circuits, voices, spies in ether. Crawl as servant, slave from your masters, take freedom in roadless deserts. Leave gasfields burning. Echoes in canyons, drift of caverns, find your channel in rock, seeking nothing, nothing at all. Close your mind in cool oblivion, hide inside your silent shadow, where blood slows to deep time’s pulse. Dying King 00:00 / 01:51 I am with you. I am always with you. You pulse with a click of the drive. The dying king. I press your paper-thin shroud of skin, as thumbs curl over balsa bones, ridges royal. My eyes probe famine’s fault lines, scan this lucent husk, your twilight mask. Under your arm, now thin, translucent, I once slept, sheltered from terrors in the night. Now, I keep watch. How did it come to this? Morphine dulls your silent ward. It keeps you from fires in the fields, from the sibilant hiss of the underworld, the gaping maw of night. We are skin, my dark follows your dark. * Above tides, I feel winds of unconquerable spirit. I stand at the edge, choking with loss. Cosmology 00:00 / 00:50 from static we make our slow Rosetta linger lone in void of dark no one can hear us in these rooms of silence this is our language of stars fingers of intricate play & movement there are lights faint and far as moths we are drawn & dance Publishing credits Cool Oblivion / Cosmology: IceFloe Press (February 29th 2020) Dying King: Anti-Heroin Chic

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 Georgia Hilton read poems for wave 2 of literary poetry journal iamb. Georgia Hilton wave 2 spring 2020 back next the poet Georgia Hilton is a poet and fiction writer originally from Ireland who lives now in Winchester, England. In 2018, her poem Dark-Haired Hilda Replies to Patrick Kavanagh was joint winner of the Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize – her debut pamphlet, I went up the lane quite cheerful , being published by Dempsey & Windle that same year. Georgia’s first collection, Swing , is also published by Dempsey & Windle. the poems Dark-Haired Hilda Replies to Patrick Kavanagh 00:00 / 01:26 On Raglan Road I saw you first a dishevelled man with heavy black-framed glasses. So severe you looked but you had a wound that made you beautiful. After we talked that first day, I dreamt of you. You were walking towards me very fast and purposeful with an intent that might have been mistaken for malice, had I not loved you. I abandoned caution at first. But my father gave me a great gift when he said to me, Hilda, you cannot eat words and air, so I became a doctor and married the engineer. But not before I had given you poems with your own name in them, given you my youth. Let you open the catch to a window in my mind, thinking I would fly, but you had me chained to a pedestal. I, no marble idol, just a flesh and blood woman. And you were always an awful man for the drink, you said so yourself, Patrick. Oh to think I might have been one of those sorry women who follow their husbands to the pub screaming for them to come home before they spend the rest of the housekeeping. I might be a creature made of clay, Patrick, in fact, I’m sure I am, but you have a brass neck calling yourself an angel. Cinderella 00:00 / 01:19 If I were to slip into the river, it would not be at Poor Man’s Kilkee, where teenagers and vagrants take their ease with cans of lager. Nor would it be on O’Callaghan’s Strand, where the grey silt is deep, deep and a dozen swans are on the slipway. Nor would I make a dramatic leap off Sarsfield Bridge by the boat club, where an indecisive light flickers over the martyrs of 1916. No – I would choose this stretch, just downstream of the Curraghower with views of King John’s Castle and Thomond Bridge. By day the seagulls swoop and dive, swans fight the estuary current, and you can see the hills of Clare beyond the bend of the river at the Island Field. But by night my eyes are drawn only to the water – the roiling inky black inviting me to shed my history, surrender my skin. The old stone steps are there, I would not need to climb or jump but simply descend like a debutante – keeping both shoes on. On the Naming of Convict Ships 00:00 / 00:45 It seems cruel to name a convict ship the Eleanor. Eleanor, after all, is the parson’s daughter, who smiled at you once or twice. You could no more touch her than you can touch thin air. Eliza is the girl who took your hand at the county fair. Caroline is your sister, Georgiana the grim mistress you have only glimpsed on horseback. Jane is the governess at Manor Farm. Mary is the dairyman’s daughter. Elizabeth the name you sometimes murmur in your sleep, and Isabella is someone you will never meet. Isabelle, Isabella, Bella, Belle. Publishing credits Dark-Haired Hilda Replies to Patrick Kavanagh: I went up the lane quite cheerful (Dempsey & Windle) Cinderella: Lunate On The Naming of Convict Ships: Swing (Dempsey & Windle)

Hear poet Emily Blewitt read poems for wave 5 of literary poetry journal iamb. Emily Blewitt wave 5 spring 2021 back next the poet Author of This Is Not A Rescue and poetry submissions editor for New Welsh Reader , Emily Blewitt has poems in The Rialto, Poetry Wales, Ambit and The North , among others. She was Highly Commended in the 2016 Forward Prizes, and has appeared at the Hay Festival and on Radio 4. Emily has collaborated with other writers and artists on the Weird and Wonderful Wales project, and is a recipient of a Literature Wales bursary. She's currently writing her second collection. the poems 13 weeks, 2 days 00:00 / 01:18 I don’t know how to say it, but there you were—little ghost in my ceiling, floating on your side. The outline of your slim hips, strung spine stretched lazily in the same position I sleep some nights, facing away from your father. We watched you refuse to show us your nose. You offered your crown instead, crossed and uncrossed your arms and legs, dipped upside-down. You were turning the way a seal rolls underwater for joy. You were radiant and reluctant to share. The midwife said this was your place, that we were just visiting. When finally you lay on your back, a small otter cradling clam and rock, she was quick as a heron slipping a fish to the gullet to capture your image. She had to be. You were elusive. A natural phenomenon observed perhaps twice. Luminous like algae on the water, like Northern Lights. Archaeology 00:00 / 01:25 It’s getting your eye in: scraping the surface layer by layer with the edge of a trowel, moving the earth towards you and exposing the soil, a clutter of generations before you. Brushing dirt off dirt. Holding dirt to the light and tossing. Sifting dirt like prospectors. We dampen the ground, show the plough-lines’ scar, the clay cap that looks like stone, the outline of the ring pit. Stains show organic matter. Marrow sticks to the tongue. We mark what we find in situ because we must. Context is everything. Love, this is how we find ourselves once more in a field, with swifts and hares and the farmer. Where tributaries fuse, where a person might stand from a rath with her children and look out to sea. For every two people on their hands and knees, four more wait at the edge of the trench. This slow unearthing makes us. We dig, not knowing what it is that we are digging for. Parch Marks 00:00 / 01:26 That was the year it snowed in March. Drifts inside the front door, a small snowman in a corner of the attic, and I crunched up and down the hill to our house in walking boots, keeping to the verge. We scattered bird seed in the garden. I conceived and lost it just before the heatwave struck, in May. The grass singed, my sweet peas failed to flower, our house was airless and we couldn’t sleep or touch each other. The cat shifted from tile to tile. I blistered walking up and down the hill in sandals. By August, thunderstorms broke the tension between us and my headaches eased. You told me that when lightning strikes the junction box three times, it shorts. I became lighter, stronger, like wire. When the clouds cleared, parch marks everywhere: seen from the air, scars on the body of the land that prove there were settlements; that someone once lived here and here . Publishing credits 13 weeks, 2 days: Islands Are But Mountains: New poetry from the United Kingdom (Platypus Press, 2019) Archaeology: exclusive first publication by iamb Parch marks: Creative Countryside (Spring 2019) Author photo: © Michael Willett

Hear poet Isabelle Kenyon read poems for wave 18 of literary poetry journal iamb. Isabelle Kenyon wave 18 summer 2024 back next the poet Manchester poet and novelist Isabelle Kenyon is managing director of Fly on the Wall Press . She's had four poetry chapbooks published – most recently, Growing Pains and Potential . Isabelle has also published debut thriller, The Dark Within Them . Her poetry appears in IceFloe Press , Ink, Sweat & Tears and elsewhere. the poems Afternoon Tea with Self 00:00 / 00:54 We are in Ali’s café at the end of the world – it must be for I am sharing scones with myself at sixteen our legs gangly under table and much the same, though one pair is wrapped in electric blue, and I find there is always an Ali’s café to be found somewhere. She says she is ready to understand, dabbing lip-gloss curves with napkin. I say she never will, sorry, some things, people, you pass on from, like wraiths, better to shrug the last five years off like glitter. She says I am lying, of course, and I smile for I knew she would say it and we finish our tea like a stubborn, married couple. Gestures which are really about inadequacy and absent fathers 00:00 / 00:41 I like you experimental hair strands traversing the colour spectrum, sheep-shorn at base, wild deep, like your laugh. Lately, you've tamed nature to Mouse for a man who requires bread pre-chewed into starch. You mother-bird hop; I text silent space bars of an argument which is really about growing up and out as two separate shoots of grass one nestled in the same compost, one fidgeting for further fields. Wonder 00:00 / 00:30 She gives him hair on his chest downy like the otter, playful and familiar. He gives her her lips from the pit of a plum, all spring and juice she finds herself delicious. She has found answers: why his spine is sculpted just so why his hands are warm bowls of milk. Publishing credits Afternoon Tea with Self / Gestures which are really about inadequacy and absent fathers: exclusive first publication by iamb Wonder: Sarasvati Magazine (Indigo Dreams Publishing)

Hear poet Maggie Mackay read poems for wave 21 of literary poetry journal iamb. Maggie Mackay wave 21 spring 2025 back next the poet After retiring as a support teacher for young people with additional needs, Maggie Mackay took up writing again in 2009. A Masters degree from Manchester Metropolitan University followed – as did her pamphlet The Heart of the Run , and debut collection A West Coast Psalter . Maggie's second collection, The Babel of Human Travel , appeared in 2022. Her poem How to Distil a Guid Scotch Malt was awarded a place in the Poetry Archive’s inaugural WordView 2020 permanent collection, and one of her poems was a runner-up in The Liverpool Prize, judged by Roger McGough. Maggie is a regular reviewer of poetry collections and pamphlets at The Friday Poem . the poems Reasons for Time Travelling to Byres Farm Cottages 00:00 / 00:53 To witness the birth of my father one hundred and four years ago on that sunny November day To meet my grandmother humming a baloo to her new son To hear the milk cows low beyond the limewashed buildings To walk the fields towards the White Cart, Crookston Castle within sight To feel the oak barley breeze in my hair To watch the Clydesdale’s hooves sink as the plough carves into the soil To smell pure country air To play with my toddler uncle on the stone floor with his home-made wooden train which I have to this day To run it down the hallway and hear the wheels clatter as they have for three generations The Babel of Human Travel 00:00 / 01:37 The day comes when she hears the pasture murmur for the last time, and so/her trunk and her soul head for the/Broomielaw where the ship waits for her coming and the Lord/keeps faith while all manner of Scots are scattered/with all manner of dialects and accents, treasuring them/in this fine, vessel-stranger towards new lives abroad/She waits for a roll call, goes from deck to berth from/dining table thence/to fall upon/her lonely spot and weep the/salt from her pale face/dream of/the final lament her brother played, all/the longing pouring through the/Atlantic waters, that handful of earth/deep in her pocket and/the treasured Christening robe folded where they/packed it with the promise of babies to come. Those too aged waving off and miles away, left/behind. The worn spurtle, flat irons, darning mushroom, cradled too in the hold, as the ship casts off/towards the land of caribou and snowshoes through struggles to/understand othery Baltic tongues which yearn to build/homesteads along riverbanks, seek to befriend the Cree nation, preserve the/songs and stories of home, create new histories of their Manitoba city. Void 00:00 / 00:26 Father hanged himself perhaps above the washhouse mangle, or in the orchard maybe, dead weight dressed in apple blossom. You’re wondering if I miss him, if I miss his hand on my arm, if his voice is fading. It’s in the sparrow’s call, ten chisel clangs, a bicycle bell. Publishing credits Reasons for Time Travelling to Byres Farm Cottages: exclusive first publication by iamb The Babel of Human Travel: The Babel of Human Travel (Impspired Press) Void: A West Coast Psalter (Kelsay Books)

Hear poet Mona Dash read poems for wave 4 of literary poetry journal iamb. Mona Dash wave 4 autumn 2020 back next the poet Mona Dash is the author of the memoir A Roll of the Dice: a story of loss, love and genetics , the novel Untamed Heart , and poetry collections A Certain Way and Dawn-drops. She holds a Masters in Creative Writing (with distinction), and her work has been both long and shortlisted in leading competitions such as Novel London 2020, SI Leeds Literary Award, Leicester Writes Short Story Prize and The Asian Writer Short Story Prize. Her short story collection, Let us look elsewhere, is due out in 2021 from Dahlia Publishing. Mona has an MBA and an engineering degree, works for a global tech firm, and lives in London. the poems Implications 00:00 / 01:10 Born and raised an Indian; not living in India implied: not Indian now British, not born in Britain implied: not British a mother, working full time implied: not a mother a sales manager, a mother implied: not a sales manager a woman, a mother implied: not a woman a writer, a technocrat implied: not a writer an engineer, an artist implied: not an engineer a businessperson, a poet implied: not a businessperson becoming more than I was meant to implied: a sense of erosion Venn-diagram like I seek implied: commonalities finding intersectionality implied: a pinpoint Unsaid, Unwritten 00:00 / 00:59 Unseeing, unthinking piece words unrelated like flowers in a vase on the kitchen table lark, larkspur, lavender When the night calls answer in words swallowed in a past forgotten eels, egalitarian, eccentric then it is morning slicing sun through clouds unopened eyes, sleepy sex a day to use, misuse harvest, hyacinth, harbour a month is over the thought still shattered ravaged and unformed the words meant to disappear in bloodstreams vapid, victory, vilify like Rodin’s Thinker count words on fingers the tongue struggling still to form the unformed the pen curling, curling to write the unwritten For Plath, for Love 00:00 / 01:25 Let us then recite Plath Let us wear white bikinis and smile up at the sky, blue in our hearts as in the heavens Let us sing mad-girl love songs and in its rhymes search for a thunderbird, hold the bird close dip into its heart, tasting its blood, mine, yours Let us find these Hughes-like men who love deeply, amorously, thick-honey words that choke so well, filling us, filling us with still, deep water, cleansing and drowning who twist deep into us, severing every self-belief, every little hope we have burning away the mind-body-soul chain Let us write, write crazily into the night and let our words howl in the still dawn and let us then open the oven door and lay ourselves in, breathing in purist like a single strain of air, lying still, lying while our children lie in their beds, dreaming, dreaming Publishing credits Implications: May We Borrow Your Country (Linen Press UK) Unsaid, Unwritten: Sarasvati 057 (Indigo Dreams Publishing) For Plath, for Love: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Karen Pierce Gonzalez read poems for wave 24 of literary poetry journal iamb. Karen Pierce Gonzalez wave 24 winter 2025 back next the poet Award-winning poet, writer and intuitive artist Karen Pierce Gonzalez is the author of several chapbooks and poetic librettos. These include Coyote in the Basket of My Ribs , Moon kissed Earth wrought Vision drunk , Down River with Li Po , Mountains of Ocean: 10 Waves and RavenSong . Sun and Moon Wired Together is forthcoming from Midsummer Dream House. Karen is also a performance poet, and several of her one-act plays have been staged at San Francisco Bay Area fringe festivals. She publishes the Ekphrastic Folk Art flipbook, co-hosts North Bay Poetics, and hosted The Broken Spine Arts' #NotJustPretty . the poems Fortunee’s Mandolin 00:00 / 01:47 My maternal grandmother’s mandolin lies in a bed of wet brown-green seaweed at my feet. Most of the strings broken; hardwood varnish licked off by salt water. Its melodies meant only for the man she had to leave behind. Did the bowl-back instrument slip from her hands as the ship entered the New York harbor? Did it ride the crest of outgoing tides carrying it forward five decades—cold, damp, and swollen — to me? Her cross-country train ride, Ellis Island to San Francisco, ended on the eve of High Holy Days. The arranged wedding to a stranger had to happen quickly. Borrowed dress, hem hand-stitched with prayers for happiness. I think of that when my fingers, thin like hers, lightly trace the mandolin’s slim neck. a sea breeze whistles eddies of memory swirl briny notes play long In a Bird Cage 00:00 / 01:13 Strong coffee, my paternal grandmother Ruby’s favorite. Boiling liquid poured slowly into her favorite cup, thick and hand-painted like her. Then condensed milk, easy to store in very small spaces, stirred in. With broad strokes, she spoon-mixes the two until hot and cold meld. Battered hands rubbing the mug’s decorative buds, she whistles to her canary wake up . When it warbles back, Ruby sits on their shared plaid perch and sips while it sings. winter blooms stay closed morning sunlight too late petals won’t blossom Last Mother-Daughter talk 00:00 / 00:57 The telephone cables between us stretch from San Francisco to Seattle. Long-distance tollgates intercept phrases, disconnect sighs from gasps. Our taut voices travel through conductors semi-muffled, sometimes slipping out through cracks in sun-blistered rubber coatings. The entirety of what you say after Daughter drops. Was it I’m sorry? forget-me-nots bloom wild grasses lay down their blades westerly clouds drift away Publishing credits Fortunee’s Mandolin / Last Mother-Daughter Talk: exclusive first publication by iamb In a Bird Cage: GAS: Poetry, Art and Music (Feb 16th 2023)

Hear poet Jane Robinson read poems for wave 21 of literary poetry journal iamb. Jane Robinson wave 21 spring 2025 back next the poet Jane Robinson is an award-winning Irish poet with a doctoral degree in biological science from the California Institute of Technology. Her books are: ‘ Journey to the Sleeping Whale ’ (2018) and ‘ Island and Atoll ’ (2023), both published by Salmon Poetry. Jane has taught poetry workshops in libraries and outdoor settings. In recent months she was the invited reader at Green Sod Ireland’s Biodiversity Summer School in Kylemore Abbey, and at the IMMA Earth Rising Festival. Listen here: Music for the Atoll, 2023 (SoundCloud). the poems Fairy Castle Two Rock Mountain, Dublin 00:00 / 00:57 After a long, slow climb from the road, calling out the names of bramble, foxglove, ling and furze, we left the flies behind when we turned from the wood’s edge, bending our bodies to the sandy granite track, to the bog-water pools and slender rushes. But a drone hummed over. All of a sudden it owned the hill, flexing mechanical insect-legs. Whose gadget filmed us tilt our moon-faces down to the mica path? A thin, pixilated sliver of mind let loose on the raised bog made skylarks crouch from their songs to cover nests hidden by heather stems. We threaded our way on up to the cairn. Coastal Forest Fragment ‘Go with the process, go with what you’ve got!’ ~ Breda Wall Ryan ~ 00:00 / 00:52 Your feet are unshod, grassy-toed, horn-hard on wandering paths to a paradise where humans did not ever learn to wield a flint or turn a thread. Imagine the mossy temperate forest grazed by giant deer, phosphorescence haloing their upheld heads and antlers. Hear chuckles from a family of rooks who gossip on the topmost branches of oak trees lining a path from strand to dreaming bed. A pocketful of sand from Magheramore. Sprigs of water-mint. Heathland Observation After a photograph by Tina Claffey 00:00 / 01:06 The landscape’s sharp details are sprung up close by macro lens. On one of the seven heathers stands a grasshopper who resembles a horse in medieval armour. The insect’s breastplate, green. Brighter, the nets of her compound eyes as she watches from her temporary rest on St. Daboec’s heath. Hummocked beside the peaty water, this heather’s named after a saint who raised both his hands to the sky as he walked the mountains and scattered huge clouds of insects with each step taken. Few grasshoppers still sing in the fragments. In wilderness we’ve shopped out, car shaken, light slain. Earth’s future saints will be the ones who help all forms of life and hold them sacred. Publishing credits Fairy Castle: Island and Atoll (Salmon Poetry) Coastal Forest Fragment: Poetry Ireland Review (No. 144) Heathland Observation: exclusive first publication by iamb