Hear poet Anna Shelton read poems for wave 27 of literary poetry journal iamb. Anna Shelton wave 27 autumn 2026 back next the poet Anna Shelton is a mother, teacher, poet and part-time mermaid from Cambridge. Her first pamphlet was longlisted for the Disabled Poets Prize 2025 , while her poem about medical misogyny was commended in the The Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine 2024. Anna's been published in Magma , After… , Propel Magazine and Coven , as well as in the anthology To Light The Trails: Poems By Women In A Violent World . the poems Jellyfish Midlife Crisis 00:00 / 01:46 Lately, I’ve been researching how lightning strikes the sea, How many feet away from boats I’d need to swim to stay alive. Electricity is only lethal near the surface. If I could dive ten feet below, I might survive. I’d rather be diaphanous, moon jelly, short-lived, incapable of preference, curly white tentacles wave in the whimsical current, pulled everywhere by obstinate tide. Look at us – clusters of bulbous opaque moons hopelessly bobbing. In Neptune’s mosh pit, we relive our spilled- milk youth, deposited on ancient felsic rocks, left behind on green-streaked beaches between furbelows and conspicuous pink coral weed. Solo explorations that end inside leatherbacks, confined in rockpools, a fulmar snack. We still sting those who touch us even in death. When thunder starts, roll with the bowling waves – when lightning strikes, be rubbery – unafraid. Maybe happiness can wait. Remain adrift – catch passing shrimp, be buoyant; be tidal. Diaphanous. A Cambridge Education 00:00 / 05:57 This twisted village pulled me into poetry, this shadowed edge of Cambridge, before the flattened fens. This suburban Minotauran maze, where council houses seemed to breed, where childhood trauma grazed like cattle on the commons. Not the spires of colleges that inspired us, we didn’t notice domed churches, the stained glass seeming leached of colour as we passed, ignorant of all learning within those dim oak-panelled halls, the hallowed horn-drinking rituals of Michaelmas matriculation meant nothing yet, only othered us. We didn’t glimpse the pillared majesty of four-hundred-year-old walls, nor the mortarboards and gowns of graduates who milled about the Mill Pond. We never visited this town as tourists, never paid to punt gaily down the Cam, straw-boater hats on plum-voiced pimpernels, never heard their boastful brags of kings and buildings owned by royalty. How would we? No, it was just us, creeping down dank alleyways after dark, watching classmates bruise invisibly behind closed doors, the hidden handprints on our backs. How mewling kitten necks were snapped for lack of cash to pay the vet, where alcohol numbed those barely living lives in cramped unheated rooms, as adults failed us time over time. Where the cruelty of school was no respite; each dreamless fitful sleep, each anxious night. Our homes were bricks and mortar, nothing more, partitioned walls too small to fit our secrets in. Here, hide and seek was not for fun, our hides were tanned by hands we hoped would gentle, if only we could learn by rote the changing rules of being good. Here, we learnt to do as we were told, to say Thank you instead of No , to withhold want, to veil our need behind net curtains. Here, we mastered how to mask our real selves, or else , to risk the wrath of those supposed to love us. As kids we were word perfect in excuses, lies that covered just enough, like lining paper over mould. As teens we studied how to stay out late, stay out of sight, run out of reach, never upstairs, long arms can catch you there, grab ankles, yank you down down down, carpet burns elbows and knees, that’ll teach you . Our parents toyed with us like paper dolls cut from their likeness, folded heavy tabs of don’t you dare over our shoulders, our rigid shapes, our lift-the-flap faces swapped and swapped again until we showed the right emotion. Us gangs of girls held together tight like paperchains, the only thing in common was our longing to escape. Our throats were throttled closed, unspoken hopes caught in our mouths and collared in. Looking back, I see those girls – so full of need – how desperately we clung to anything that fed release. One vanished at fifteen, one barely spoke, one overdosed just trying to be free. And me – Only after years away did I return, lifted my eyes for the first time to find mismatched rooftops rising high above the streets, raised my expectations of this place I’d always felt excluded me. Only later did I dare to finally apply, somehow allowed right through those private gates. Now, I recognise the privilege of living near this history, the cobblestones and costly sticky buns, the low-bridged beauty of the Cam, the fluted chimney pots and floral calm of horticultured gardens; pomegranate trees now grow behind the library where Wordsworth sat, now poetry’s no longer something captivated kids get teased about. I graduated, PGCE, wore my cap and gown with pride. Now, I teach classes full of kids like me, I gently help them see that reading books can fill them up, can give them wings, make sure they know to play with language, shape it, hold it inside and then release it like a bird. How writing brings you back to life, how poetry is air itself. Can you see how books flung themselves into my hands? How minds longed to be touched more gently than skin? How each turn of the page felt like falling in love, where love was words and sentences were steak, and we were ravenous. Anna’s Anatomy or Get Your Eponyms Off My Parts! 96% of the 3504 anatomical eponyms are named after men. 00:00 / 02:51 Bartholin’s glands aren’t his – they’re mine. Skene’s too belong to me – Falloppio, I reclaim my tubes! Long-dead medical men, let me be! Retzius, I return your nametag – my cavities are mine alone. Who declared that men could claim us? Their final attempt to become famous in a world already discovered – women’s bodies, the last uncharted shore. But we gave no permission for flags planted on anatomical maps, sometimes three or four men sticking pins in the same millimetrical gap. We have cunts, not countries to be conquered. We are no one’s property, even in death. Doctors dissected us, drew diagrams, labelled our labias, stamped our sex organs with surgeons’ names. That’s why Hart’s invisible line surrounds my shield-shaped vulval heart – I want to rub it out, erase their ownership of me, get Gräfenberg’s consonant off my ‘climactic spot’ (not G). So fuck off with your ‘fourchette’ and your ‘vulval vestibule.’ My cunt is not a cloakroom; no cutlery comes near! My body is not a mountain to be climbed. It’s my landscape and my lifetime to explore from peak to peak. I’m still discovering myself in middle age, so I decide who travels here, here, or here. Now it’s my turn to name Anna’s anatomy: I choose a ‘vulval valley’ – not a vestibule, change it to ‘lovefold’ instead of fourchette, swap ‘joyful void’ for Retzius’s cave – perhaps a ‘sexy secretion site’ or a ‘lubricating jet.’ I’m getting rid of all the names I never chose. Alcock – give me back my canal! Bring back biology. Name our bits by what they do. No more agèd anatomists living on inside our lady parts. So – Bugger off Bartholin! Fuck off Falloppio! It’s time for your eponyms to go! Publishing credits Jellyfish Midlife Crisis / A Cambridge Education: exclusive first publication by iamb Anna’s Anatomy or Get Your Eponyms Off My Parts!: Magma (No. 93)

Hear poet J-T Kelly read poems for wave 16 of literary poetry journal iamb. J-T Kelly wave 16 winter 2023 back next the poet J-T Kelly is an innkeeper in Indianapolis who lives in a brick house with his wife, their six children and his two parents. His poetry has appeared in Bad Lilies , Vita Brevis , Amethyst Review , Agape Review , Neologism Poetry Journal and elsewhere. J-T's debut chapbook is titled, Like Now . the poems Sousveillance 00:00 / 00:56 God has bugged the human heart. There are things in there God wants to hear. I imagine most of it is noise. Maybe God has something set up like a bobber on a fishing line. Talk to a friend about how you need a new toaster, and … Wait. That might be Facebook. God is the one who tells you that Santa can’t give you what you asked for. Behind a series of decorated wooden screens, God is moving, moving always. And muttering. But what is God saying? The language around God is all baffles: mystery this and can-you-catch-Leviathan-with-a-fishhook that. Well here’s the big secret: The listening device works both ways. You can hear God speaking whenever you want. Like now. Like now. Art History 00:00 / 01:42 I don’t know what you know about painting— house painting, I mean—but there’s an art to it. House painters are known to be drunks. So, of course, are painters of art. Caravaggio used models who were drunks and murderers. It takes one to know one. It may be that the mystery is not in the art but in the drunkenness. To be a drunk you don’t even have to paint anything. To paint a house you have to show up every day. You have to outlast the guy who caught the dropcloth on fire with his cigarette, the guy who fell off the roof because he found the safety harness restricting, the guy who cursed and threatened the homeowner in the homeowner’s own home. You have to show up Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and on your birthday. You have to show up on the Feast Day of Saint Catherine of Bologna, patron saint of painters. You have to show up on the Feast Day of Saint Matthias the Apostle, patron saint of drunks. Matthias is the one who, when Judas Iscariot didn’t last, was chosen by lots. It seems to be up to chance who turns out to be a drunk, although, if you’re a painter, the chances do seem to be higher. Who makes it out of drunkenness alive sometimes feels like chance, sometimes like something more personal. There is a mystery. There is an art. My Wife Says Loving the Fall is Short-sighted 00:00 / 00:23 The racing clouds of autumn make my heart race, as if life had no bottom, no top, just space and time to love what is, one thing by one, without this wintry business of being done forever. Publishing credits Sousveillance / Art History: Like Now (CCCP Chapbooks) My Wife Says Loving the Fall is Short-sighted: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Holly Peters read poems for wave 16 of literary poetry journal iamb. Holly Peters wave 16 winter 2023 back next the poet Holly Peters is a Creative Writing PhD student at the University of Plymouth. She held the position of Plymouth’s Young City Laureate from 2019-2022, and had her poem Artificial Moons featured in the Moths to a Flame: Art and Energy Collective installation at the Glasgow Botanical Gardens during COP26. You’ll typically find Holly hiding somewhere between the covers of a book, or out walking her crazy spaniels, Dotty and Booby. the poems Building the River a Bed 00:00 / 01:12 a river skitters in the dark wriggling like a lullaby’s shh I take the first rock; it weighs the same as the peach pit in my stomach. Clay rolls in the canyon of my palm, squishing between fingers, then shuddering back to shape. An audience of stones, I deliberate, the choice all mine. nothing falls fast in the waves, settling down for its final rest The second breathes dust, hot to touch, singed syllables filling my throat. You don’t have to ignore the craters: use your nails and crack them open. The river shapes beds from burdens: kneel down, whisper them gently. water ages slow, sighs as it swallows my offering Crumbling. I’d avoided the river for years – it no longer able to relieve me – yet I still gather the third rock that slices through the sand timer’s neck. The bank cuts into the hard white behind my shins and I cry as I litter what’s left like ashes. soft drops melt like they were never there at all The Bread Affair 00:00 / 00:53 Her teeth grind in time with the knife that slathers butter over his slice of bread. His dinner steams, fragrant with turmeric and all the time she has spent stewing over it. Not that he takes any notice. Whatever plate she presents him with – matsutake mushrooms, moose cheese, wagyu beef – his mouth waters only for the ample half-wheat bread. Her arrangement of lip-pink tulips has already been extracted from the table’s heart, so his bulging loaf can fill its centre. He takes his time massaging butter into the bread’s porcelain cheek. He cups his hand, its back arching, then spoons his dinner inside, letting the slice envelope it like skin. He chews it, mouth opening wide, tongue slopping. The crumbs cascade, shredded like the last slivers of her patience. I Want to be a Forest 00:00 / 00:49 You won’t know which part of me you hold in your hands: my lower lip, a worn-down heel or knobbly elbow – because it’ll look no different to dirt. You’ll be given a watch-sized box filled with two palmfuls of what’s left of me, and even though I’m only saying it, those flakes, like tree bark, are my heart. All the rest, enough to fill a wheelbarrow, will be mingled with the remains of others. What was once kneecaps, earlobes, eyeballs will become part of the damp woodland floor. But in that forest, it will always be a part of me you hold in your hands. It will be earth, and worm food, a home for tentative tree roots, a world unravelling in the planet of your palm. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Elisabeth Kelly read poems for wave 10 of literary poetry journal iamb. Elisabeth Kelly wave 10 summer 2022 back next the poet Elisabeth Kelly lives on a hill farm with her family and too many animals. She's been published in numerous anthologies and journals both online and in print, and she's authored three poetry pamphlets: Carbon , Mind Mathematics and Wild Chamomile . Her first children's book is due out in 2022 from Stairwell Books. Among Elisabeth's favourite things are puddings, and the changing of the seasons. the poems Otzi and the Giant’s Eye 00:00 / 00:31 Sometimes, I feel I am curled up in the eye of a giant, light glints makes an iris out of sunbeams that wink from the depths of this ice sea. I forget for a moment, that suffocating pressure keeps me still as bonded molecules suspend me in a sphere of solid fluid. And I wonder, if I tap a finger against this lens would my world fracture into crystal tears and cry me out from the depths of this ice sea. Tiny Bird Heart 00:00 / 00:15 Light whispers at the window, blue burrows through nudges the dark away. Quietly I uncurl, the nest gives way, as your tiny bird heart beats through the sound of your feet dabbling across the floor. Wild Chamomile 00:00 / 00:40 It smells of pineapple when your crush it, I didn’t know that was the smell, until later. It is the smell of summer, concrete cracks where engine oil pooled, rainbows on slurry puddles, afternoon trips across fields to find an old milking carriage eroding in dens of nettles, the corrugated roof calling like Sleeping Beauty’s turrets full of promise, drizzling reality across the rotting wooden floors. It is scars created by rusted metal treasure, submerged in bogs, or broken bottles used on flat stones to cut berries, it is long days alone. Publishing credits Otzi and the Giant's Eye: Dodging The Rain (This Ice Sea) Tiny Bird Heart: Green Ink Poetry (Discovery Part 2) Wild Chamomile: Wild Chamomile (Selcouth Station)

Hear poet Elizabeth M Castillo read poems for wave 10 of literary poetry journal iamb. Elizabeth M Castillo wave 10 summer 2022 back next the poet British-Mauritian poet Elizabeth M Castillo is a writer, indie press promoter, and two-time nominee for The Pushcart Prize. Her writing reflects the various countries and cultures she grew up in and with – exploring themes of race, ethnicity, woman/motherhood, language, love, loss and grief (often with a dash of magical realism). Published widely in the UK, USA, Australia, Mexico and the Middle East, Elizabeth has bilingual debut collection Cajoncito: Poems on Love, Loss, y Otras Locuras to her name. She'll add debut chapbook Not Quite an Ocean in December 2022. the poems Ghosts 00:00 / 00:45 I tell my children there are no ghosts in this house. I press a kiss into their cheeks and foreheads and leave them to the peaceable mercy of sleep. No ghosts, I say. Except the one that lives in the stain on the bathroom floor. The lady that swirls around the bottom of your mother’s teacup, in amongst the sediment. The ones you plastered into the walls. No ghosts, except the one that lies in bed between us. The one hidden beneath the flowers in the garden. The two I folded between the pages of my passport. The one that stares back at me from the bathroom mirror when I brush my teeth at night. Zot dir, or a short history of Mauritius 00:00 / 01:47 Ou koné ki zot dir? So many things mon tann zot dir they say / they say the dutchman came / he ate the dodo / curious bird / stupid bird / zot dir independence will be won by the wits of the indian / papi inn dir / nu bizin alé / nu bizin get out / zot dir Le Père de la Nation has the ear of the queen / they say / things are better in Australia / In UK / In SA they don’t say créole zot dir coloured / Mo matante inn allé last year / 65 / before the riots start / labas tou prop / she said / labas seulman ena bon dimoun / nice people / they say / zot inn met bann lekor / under the mountain / enba la ter / they say / Mauritius is still the star of the indian ocean / they say parti socialis pu sauv nu zile / zot dir / ten thousand rupees / c’est rien / they say / sorti la! / sorti la! / kifer Kaya pann res trankil ? / they say / the hungry tourist / come down / devoured our coastline / the south / the east / is all we have left / Ramgoolam / they say / has lined his own pockets / they say it once / they say / look to the horizon / thick and black / we blame Japan / zot dir / the island is retracting / inwards / they say / nu zil pé vinn bien gran / no more beaches / no fish / ban pecheur / zot disan / has pooled down by the river’s mouth / Jugnauth / zot dir / his hands live under the table / so bann kamrad / their coffers are full / faratha from six / to 25 rupees / they say / we have no language / they say if bis don’t kill you / hopital will / they say / pa kozé / stop saying all the things we saying / res trankil / dernié fwa kiken in kozé / so disan / his blood / it runs beneath the mountains / out beyond the reef / into the sea / that you left behind / The Other Woman 00:00 / 02:16 The sun has set, and at this hour, shadows hang between the daylight and the trees. There, the sudden scent of blood, scent of man , carries to me on the breeze, the wind howling through, falls silent at my feet: 'good hunting, milady,' it whispers, then retreats. There is a darkness in this forest, an end that rivals death itself, in the mist about my ankles. Even lizards know they would do well to hide inside their hovels, and underground. Dirt crunches beneath. Treacherous soil! Leaves plunge downwards, to be eaten by the earth. The naked trees testify: this forest is deadly, and will swallow you whole. I hear footsteps racing, running, in thundering lockstep. Flash of black. Flash of teeth. There are dangerous games afoot! Surely it’s time to turn back. Surely it’s time to go home. I am well beyond my borders now. She can’t catch me, she can’t catch me, here, where I lurk and linger on the periphery just out of sight, just beyond her mind’s eye. She knows I am here, her veins course with rage, and vengeance. But she does not know where. She is death. She is danger. But the line has been crossed, the threat prowls within her marked territory. She may think I have lost, but this no longer bears any resemblance to a fair fight. No, now two legs, not enough. I drop down onto four, draw strength from the thousand invisible heartbeats, the lifeblood, the microbiome of the forest floor. There is fear, and some fury, encrusted under each hungry claw. The hunt smells of my father, champion long before I had ever heard of this sport, and I wonder: would he be proud? There is sweat at my temples, and my wrists are bound to stop them from trembling. I step, crabways, low and feral, without shadow or sound. Your ears twitch and you shudder, your neck craning to see what you and I must learn the hard way: the deadliest thing in here is me. Publishing credits Ghosts / Zot dir, or a short history of Mauritius: exclusive first publication by iamb The Other Woman: Glean & Graft / Descent (Fresher Publishing) Shortlisted for the 2021 Bournemouth Writing Poetry Prize

Hear poet Candradasa read poems for wave 7 of literary poetry journal iamb. Candradasa wave 7 autumn 2021 back next the poet Born in Canada and raised in Scotland, Candradasa is an ordained Buddhist who now lives in New Hampshire, USA. His poetry has been published (sometimes under his given name, Michael Venditozzi) in Agenda, Acumen, Black Bough Poetry, Chapman , Finished Creatures and elsewhere. He was nominated for The Pushcart Prize in 2020. the poems Banagher Dam 00:00 / 02:38 That time we walked up to Banagher Dam competing all the way: the shocked, stern, physical silence, and the miraculous heat, and our thumping hearts when we got to the top. I fell asleep on the grass. When I woke you convinced me about eating apples including the core, though already a little wary of me; so it felt like I was being taught, not the old mutual sharing of ways. (A few years later, a man in Wales tells me birds won’t eat an apple’s pips as they contain some tiny trace of cyanide. He’d stopped himself on hearing this and, glad of the excuse, I found it made a lot of sense to me.) But back at the dam it’s getting late. We’re starting down, lighter between us as we come near the moss-wood, fern-breaks, soft-crumble sides falling away to the burn beneath; we cross a bridge – and run: Whooping, barking, down on all-fours, shuttling between trees like men formed in a certain kind of light growing supple as deer, while overhead a tawny sky, and underfoot the fawny ground. Scampering the wounding way of a young forest’s hollows: trip- humps and leaf-fills and rotting trunk-cuts; ducking in and out of vision like the lost patrol in a film of a far-off jungle war. A wreathing passage then, the yield of branches; smooth our stooping, sharp our awareness of the other, even when invisible. We’d stop, dead but for the beat in the ears – then strain, catch sound, and whoop again And run again, and harry and chase and laugh respectful; maintaining reserve – then suddenly veering over new paths won together through the wood: crisscrossing in front, behind each other, never getting in the way. Till eventually we emerge – glorious and nakedly undefiant – to collapse sweating, roaring with blood, silent again in a heap of grasses piled dry beside the stile close to where we’d left the car. Allan Donn ‘Ailein Duinn ὸ hì shiubhlainn leat’ Ailein Duinn 00:00 / 01:36 My Allan Donn, where do you lie in foam white as an alb? Your pillow now a mermaid’s purse, your bed of kale and gorse unseen beneath the sea, Oh, Allan, who can comfort me? The seals kept faith with every soul that fell from Hurkar rocks; their mothers watched them from the doors but no one made the shore, and all of us were torn, Oh, Allan, may we be reborn? So talk with them, my Allan dear, as we would in the dawn, our little boat with anchored dreams of other ways and times warm by the harbour side, Oh, Allan, have we lost the tide? Then pity us, sea kings and queens, the orphans of your race; whose fathers wash ashore like shells, and all the stories tell of hearts lost in the sound, Oh, Allan, sorrow’s in our hands, My Allan, when will we be found? Brú na Bóinne (Newgrange) 00:00 / 00:48 Those stones. Stones like huge mountain breads all dried out, still with the memory of oil. The heaviest overlaid in rings, spiral darknesses, sun-proofed save for the keyhole glow shown once a year: a god lasering in. The blessed work of generations roped together, hauled up and on: setting unequal day and night, their solstice harvest of grain and art. The wonder of river minds that floated quartz the length of the Boyne and turned whole hillsides to heavens where all our kings will be crowned. Publishing credits Banagher Dam: exclusive first publication by iamb Allan Donn: Chapman (Vol. 106) Brú na Bóinne (Newgrange): Deep Time, Vol. 2 (Black Bough Poetry)

Hear poet Warrick Wynne read poems for wave 18 of literary poetry journal iamb. Warrick Wynne wave 18 summer 2024 back next the poet With three published books to his name, Australian poet Warrick Wynne has had his poetry featured in various Australian and international magazines and journals, including Walleah Press and Varuna, The Writers House Blog . Warrick lives and writes on the Mornington Peninsula, south of Melbourne. His most recent collection is The State of the Rivers and Streams . the poems Hands 00:00 / 00:39 Level 3 is 'Hands': the swathed palm, the unhinged fist, the fingers fractured black or twisted, suspended in slings wrapped in gauze. We all face each other mute as moons. This is what happens when pressure is applied against the grain, this is the flaw in the great architecture what a piece of work ... how easy it is to break this hold we have on things, we can hardly grasp it. Spider Crab 00:00 / 01:08 Above the Victorian Fish poster, (vivid illustrations of the edible denizens of the deep) a white spider crab mounted on a wooden board pinned to the wall as it was in my childhood. I mean, this exact crab, legs now blackening with age was in a (different) fish and chip shop of my youth, brought here, no doubt, with the goods and chattels from some former enterprise, and I recognise it: one giant claw open wide to snap, the other retracted shy, evasive punch and counter-punch. At Hector's Seafood now, the staff wear light blue tops emblazoned with a yellow marlin rising from a vividly tropical sea. I wait for my flake below fading ivory claws, one outrageously enlarged, one curled inward gently like an invitation, or an imploring gesture to the past. At the edge For Harriet 00:00 / 00:27 We walk to the edge of the bay drawn, it seems, to this great dish where you played and swam and now, stand here, with your own baby strapped to you. Could anything be stranger? the three of us beside the sea, the submerged beach where you played a stone wall, the city in the distance whatever next? Publishing credits Hands: The Best Australian Poems 2013 (Black Inc.) Spider Crab: exclusive first publication by iamb At the edge: Love the Words Anthology 2022 (Infinity Books)

Hear poet Angela T Carr read poems for wave 2 of literary poetry journal iamb. Angela T Carr wave 2 spring 2020 back next the poet Angela T Carr is a poet, editor and creative writing facilitator. Winner of the iYeats International Poetry Competition 2019 and The Poetry Business 2018 Laureate's Prize, Angela's had work placed or shortlisted in over 40 national and international literary competitions. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The North, The Lonely Crowd, The London Magazine, Poetry Birmingham, Strix, Mslexia and elsewhere. Originally from Glasgow, Angela now lives in Dublin. the poems Girl with Child on a Swan’s Wing Grave 8: Mesolithic Cemetery at Vedbaek, Denmark 00:00 / 03:24 I was a girl when my father brought me to him – my dowry, the tawny-sheened hide of a buck, twenty bright strings of the teeth of a roe – I came, the tremble of a small wild thing. I came, a creature caught – a hunger, a heart, its string the beat of the forest. Strangers stripped me, braided shells in my hair, said my sons would be warriors, a chief’s kin: And my daughters, I thought, what of them? Men killed boars to roast and feast, the night air thick with smoke, their flesh, a drum and burning stars – they writhed about his head as he took me. In time, my belly grew a boy, a fawn – he kicked and quickened, my nearly child – I hunted him across three starless nights and, blooded, fell. Women washed my corpse, wreathed me in ivory, daubed me blue – my wedding fine, a pillow. They wept as they bore us out through the grasswood huts, past the hummocks of the elder dead, to the shade of the trees, laid out where the black earth bared and the sun, a bone knife, speared the charging sea. A tithe of red ochre, blown from a bowl drifted down, clotting where the birth-tide flowed. We were put to ground in the lope of the wolf's moon, my breathless boy in the cuff of a swan's wing – flint blade at his belly – and I, ringed in teeth, all the beasts of the forest at my throat. The Truth About Figs 00:00 / 01:40 Each ripe fig has at its heart a devoured wasp: a solitary female, to pollinate the fruit's inverted blossom; she crawls in at the meeting of the bracts, the ostiole: a hole so small it rips her antennae, splits the tectonic opacity of skeletal wings; sky-bereft and undone, she nonetheless tends the fig's dark garden, its minute inflorescence – strokes stigma, seeds stamen, tucks her eggs into the styles of ovule florets – and settles into death: the enzymatic gall of her own deflowering. Sink your tongue into the burst of purple skin; mouthful of fleshy sweetness, born of a sting. Quadratic Love Song 00:00 / 01:27 So many things will sit inside a square – a book, a bell, a tooth, a cup, a bone – but who would look and think to find them there? Who’d ink their shape in light when there was none? I think about the square that is a house, a room, where footsteps creak the wooden boards – the one that’s empty of the two of us – I’d name the sound if I could find a word. Though you were never one to fit a tongue or root equations as are graphed by hand – you’d lay your shadow as your sun demands and slip through pauses tighter than a drum. My arms have learned to love the weight of air, to circle what won’t linger in a square. Publishing credits Girl with Child on a Swan’s Wing: The North (No. 62) – winner of The Poetry Business 2018 Laureate’s Prize The Truth About Figs: The London Magazine – placed third in The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2016 Quadratic Love Song: The Lonely Crowd (No. 10)

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

Hear poet Seanín Hughes read poems for wave 2 of literary poetry journal iamb. Seanín Hughes wave 2 spring 2020 back next the poet Seanín was first published on Poethead and featured on the inaugural Poetry Jukebox, based at the Crescent Arts Centre in Belfast, in 2017. Her work has been published widely online and in print – everywhere from Banshee and The Stinging Fly to Abridged. Seanín was shortlisted for the 2018 Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing, and published her debut chapbook, Little Deaths , with Smithereens Press in 2019. She's currently studying literature at University of Ulster and working on her first full collection. the poems I Want You To Know That You Are Alive 00:00 / 01:43 The natural law is that sometimes, this must hurt. You will find yourself hurled headlong into a mound of salt, skin raw, inside out. And you will know, then, what it means to be the wound— what it means to learn how to breathe through it all. Know that it is a bravery to live at full capacity; fill each lung with equal measure of dark and light. Drink every cup dry. Know that nothing is ordinary, and all things are temporary— we can never outrun this bittersweet truth. But here’s the secret: we can stop, for a moment, and taste it, unafraid of the sting. It’s easier when you know it’s coming; when you lean into the fall, go limp, and let the cushion of your knowing absorb the impact. You will heal again and again, until. You will. The Long Bones 00:00 / 01:15 Bring to us your blackest dog, your tightrope mania, your voices and visions; lay them on the table lengthways. We'll measure your madness, convert it to voltage. Be still. Bite down. Listen when we tell you, we’ve come a long way from fractured femurs, cracked vertebrae. Here. This holds the chemistry to heavyweight your limbs from within; no restraint necessary. Bite down, now. Be a good girl. Slight risk of trauma to teeth or tongue while you sleep, but we promise, this will eat the pain. Yes— on waking, you may forget your name, the year, or how you came to be here— but your bones will remain intact. They’ll hold you together safely until the world comes back. The Birds Are Silent 00:00 / 00:45 & then the lights go up to reveal it all— the beat of fist-deep purple in every chest a tremolo, each knot of bone wet with blood, bodies upon bodies sharing the same wild shake, a writhe of hot molecules. We know the truth now on this godless tilted spin around the sun, dancing ourselves into frenzied circles: the end is here, and all the birds are silent. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Zelda Chappel read poems for wave 3 of literary poetry journal iamb. Zelda Chappel wave 3 summer 2020 back next the poet Zelda Chappel's first collection, The Girl in the Dog-tooth Coat , was published by Bare Fiction Press in 2015. Her work has also appeared in a number of journals, anthologies and collaborative projects online and in print. Formerly the Editorial Curator of the now defunct Elbow Room mixed arts journal, Zelda continues to work as a creative mentor and workshop facilitator. She won the National Poetry Library's Battered Moons in 2014 , and has been commended in a number of other competitions. the poems PTSD season 00:00 / 00:42 It is at the most inopportune of moments I am caught remembering the pressures of lip on lip & needing the salt of something to savour it, remembering there is a sea & it is ravenous for gritty light & bare skinned sky, all vulnerable & daring it’s delicious & blasphemous to think of what I wasn’t, what it was, what failures I wore instead of you I was sinking still gladly taking on water, unknowing This time of year 00:00 / 00:50 they’re out pushing leaflets through the doors again asking if we left our baby at St Peters if we know who did and it gets me every time I want to confess I left my baby in a chapel too once but she had already left me on Skype we joke about time travel me six hours ahead and you ask for no spoilers so I tell you a have a new desk plant that I called her Callie that there’s a delay on the line and I can hear myself and it’s strange I ask if you’re coming back soon you don’t know your aunt survives another season and no one thought she would Bad air 00:00 / 01:07 and it was in this place I got caught growing light-sick weed’s damp smell a bitter vexation, sweet urine stench a warning in the alley we take every time this is the beginning of the line and the end and the light is tight as a lime, under-grown between my lives, bad air is a grievance I can’t settle this is the beginning of the line and the end and I mutter our griefs constantly, solitude a scream in a fist kept closed, the beginning of the line, the end and water absorbs everything or simply unmakes what we made beginning, the line, the end is tether and death gets proved in our kneading so hard I am breaking, breaking this beginning, end Publishing credits PTSD season: exclusive first publication by iamb This time of year: The Interpreter ’s House (Issue 72) Bad air: Luminous, Defiant (Listen Softly Press)

Hear poet Tara Skurtu read poems for wave 1 of literary poetry journal iamb. Tara Skurtu wave 1 winter 2020 back next the poet Tara Skurtu is an American poet, writing coach, and speaker. A two-time U.S. Fulbright grantee and recipient of two Academy of American Poets prizes, a Marcia Keach Poetry Prize, and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, she is the author of the chapbook Skurtu, Romania and the full poetry collection The Amoeba Game . Tara is based in Bucharest and leads creativity seminars and writing workshops internationally. the poems Hum For Indrė 00:00 / 01:13 Are you aching? The poet held my hand at the edge of the world’s smallest village. Think of pain as a plane. She wanted me to forgive what I couldn’t forgive. Only the side door to the Assumption of Mary was unlocked—she knelt at the Virgin’s painted feet and prayed, and I took pictures of a crucified Jesus in a fishbowl under the alter table. She wanted me to love the man I couldn’t love. It may take a year. Outside, she translated, word for word, a Lithuanian saying: “When you fall down drunk, the ground will catch you.” My god is no god but the God of Human Will. I needed the poet’s prayer, I wanted her to will my forgiveness to bloom. A bruise is a plane: I fell, the ground caught me, I got up. Writing Poetry is Like Fielding Ground Balls 00:00 / 01:47 Someone is smoking in the lavatory and one of the flight attendants says shit and she gets on the mic and says whoever this is will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law upon landing while I’m writing I hate ballpoint pens with a ballpoint pen because they don’t spray my period-brown ink all over the white designer jeans of the gorgeous Miami woman to my right—which was how I learned not to write poems in a metal box in the sky with a 1930s Sheaffer fountain pen—and I was the one waiting at the lavatory door when we all smelled the smoke and didn’t know what to do and I’d already been between two bombs at a bombing, so after being ordered back to my seat with a full bladder of wine, I order a whiskey, and this turns the Romanian flight attendant on, who winks and gives me nuts and olives on the house, and by now I know again we aren’t about to explode this time, and swallow my nip and eat my snacks and continue, with this ballpoint pen I hate, working on what will, nineteen days short of two years from now, become a poem, and we land in Bucharest and everyone but me claps in perfect post-communist unison and the smoking man gets away with it. Penance 00:00 / 01:58 But it was I who held your arm as the three gravediggers hammered your father’s narrow coffin shut. It was I who drank every pour of your mother’s vișinată, sucked the liquored meat of each sour cherry from its pit, swallowed even the floating worms. But it was also I who disobeyed the two saggy-breasted, callous- handed babas in headscarves, who, after asking if I knew anyone at the funeral, scolded me in Romanian for placing twelve marvelous white roses on the grave and not in the village church, where they’d live longer, be admired by the living. It was I who wiped the vișinată vomit from your face, wiped it from your arms and hands with my hands in the back of the backyard before dark. Daily I wipe everyone else’s piss from public toilet seats. And daily I let traitors kiss my cheeks in public—but tonight, in my sleep, I’m finally arriving in outer space. I’m in orbit with my husband, whom I’m leaving for no one. We’re breathing air that’s just air and I want to go back to our speck on the sliver of earth out the window, but this is now and I am here, so tonight we’re in space for years, and this may shorten my life—but what a view! Publishing credits Hum: Poetry Wales (Vol. 55, No. 1) Writing Poetry is Like Fielding Ground Balls: AGNI (November 26th 2018) Penance: The Baffler (Issue 45)