Hear poet Christina Thatcher read poems for wave 4 of literary poetry journal iamb. Christina Thatcher wave 4 autumn 2020 back next the poet Christina Thatcher is a Creative Writing Lecturer at Cardiff Metropolitan University. She keeps busy off campus as Poetry Editor for The Cardiff Review , a tutor for the Poetry School , and a member of the Literature Wales Management Board . Her creative work has featured in over 50 literary magazines, and she's published two poetry collections with Parthian Books: More than you were and How to Carry Fire . the poems Becoming an Astronaut 00:00 / 01:25 Brother, if you want to become an astronaut you must first earn a degree in engineering, science, or mathematics. This will take four years or more. After this you can choose: become a pilot, join the military, complete a PhD or recognize you exceed the height requirement (147 centimetres) and decide this is enough to try. Astronauts must then complete technical courses in meteorology and geology. You must learn to scuba dive, to survive in the open ocean, tread water for hours. You must fly a T-38 Talon Jet, learn Russian. You must receive medical training. You must accept the principles of microgravity. You must simulate space walks at the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. You must repair and operate space vehicles. You must relearn how to move objects in a frictionless world. You must trust your mentors and rehearse your chosen mission. You must embrace fear but understand, too, that you are ready: you have been training for this since the first day you picked up a needle and took yourself to the moon. Detox Passage After William Brewer 00:00 / 01:21 You find spoons everywhere: under kitchen cabinets, inside comforters, poking through boxer briefs. Yesterday, you sat on the sofa and discovered spoons had replaced stuffing. You cut open cushions, heaved out hundreds. This is a clearing process. You dream only of metal. The pastor tells you: This is normal. You must simply let go of the spoons. You accept this but the sink still fills up with silver. The shower spits sterling. Rid yourself of temptation, my son. The pastor has our father’s blue-green eyes. You listen and nod: throw out every spoon in the house. You tell the pastor you can do it. You believe you can do it. God is with you, my son. The jerks in your arms and teeth begin to go. All you had to do was rid yourself of temptation. You thank God for new strength, bow your head to pray for more good, more clean, but every time you close your eyes you see that silver curve and linger. Hail 00:00 / 00:48 If stones were being thrown it would be better, at least then there’d be mystery and motive. Who did this— leapt into our high-walled garden at 4am with an arsenal of rocks? Instead I think it is a sign: thunder, high winds, rain and then a battering on the conservatory roof, our puffy-tailed cat running from the room, up-ending sleep. Like last year’s oak which rotted and fell, claimed a car in the office parking lot just as your body was carried like a grain sack to the barn— I fear this hail is exclaiming it happened: you finally let go of your life. Publishing credits Becoming an Astronaut: North American Review Detox Passage: commended in the 2019 Battered Moons Poetry Competition Hail: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Richard Jeffrey Newman read poems for wave 10 of literary poetry journal iamb. Richard Jeffrey Newman wave 10 summer 2022 back next the poet Richard Jeffrey Newman is the author of Words for What Those Men Have Done and The Silence of Men , as well as the translation, The Teller of Tales: Stories from Ferdowsi's Shahameh . Richard curates the First Tuesdays reading series in Jackson Heights, New York, and is on the Board of Newtown Literary . He's also Professor of English at Nassau Community College, where he recently stepped down to focus on his writing after a decade of service to his faculty union. the poems Just Beyond Your Reach 00:00 / 00:54 The prayer you say is neither seed nor plow, nor is it rain to quench your soul’s old thirst. The parched and blistered field your tongue is now bespeaks the long neglect about to burst, like rotten fruit thrown to chase from the stage a comic leaving dead words at your feet; and she, or maybe he, responds with rage, shrinking the room until the single seat that’s left is where you’re planted. Confront your god, shimmering and luscious, there, his skin— or is it hers?—a proffered gift, a prod to every hunger you have called a sin. Welcome each new taste; spread wide; bow low. Lose yourself till loss is all you know. This Sentence Is A Metaphor For Bridge #20 00:00 / 00:55 Imagine hell unfenced, yourself the unburned center of all that burning, every prayer you’ve ever said undone line by line, until the empty page is all you have. Enter there the path in you that is only a path, gather its shadows into a dance, a movement that ends with love, that keeps on moving till love becomes the rhythm, and you the fire, and the dance, the life you’ve chosen to make your loving possible. You thought you had to be the clench you’ve held where none but you could feel it. Give yourself instead to all that rises. Fill that cloudless sky with laughter. After Drought 00:00 / 00:58 Knees rooted in the bed on either side of your belly, my body’s a stalk of wheat bent in summer wind, a bamboo shoot rising, an orchid, and then all at once a cloud swelling, a swallow sculpting air, a freed white dove. You pull me down, but you are hot beneath me, and the gust that is my own heat lifts me away: I’m not ready. Outside, footsteps, voices. Two men. Giggling, we pull the sheet around us till they pass, but if someone does see, what will they have seen? A couple making love. No. More than that: they will have seen the coming of the rain; they will have seen us bathe in it, and they will say Amen. Publishing credits Just Beyond Your Reach / This Sentence Is A Metaphor for Bridge #20: exclusive first publication by iamb After Drought: The Silence of Men (CavanKerry Press)

Hear poet Sascha Akhtar read poems for wave 3 of literary poetry journal iamb. Sascha Akhtar wave 3 summer 2020 back next the poet Sascha Aurora Akhtar is a poet of the liminal – someone for whom all is magic. She considers herself a 'Pakistani-British-American: something reflected in the linguistic registers in her work. Her six poetry collections have been published by Salt, Shearsman, Contraband, The Emma Press, Knives, Forks & Spoons Press and ZimZalla. Her first short story collection, Of Necessity And Wanting, is due out from The 87 Press in October 2020, while Oxford University Press (India) will publish her first book of translations in 2021. Sascha's Poems For Eliot , from the book #LoveLikeBlood , was named number one poem of the past five years by Poetry Wales in the summer of 2019. the poems Space dies for it 00:00 / 01:43 I am pure possibility drinking with both heads out of wishing wells geegaws to dust off, Dionysius That remind me of me picking manes are you catching water I give you wands imagine I need to get out there with a vengeance where is it I sit on a doll's platform you do not marvel at the wonder of things. Semi-state hands smell like chicken more words to give the mouth chosen worlds Send messages sometimes I seek sometimes, not beaded colors remind of another turn some reality if I don't write them down, will they disappear. I might close you off I am losing sunshine there is plenty for you to get stars twisted & still, blessed be you are edgewise, edgewise I would like to wrap my head in the salt of you who knows how many near misses you've had. The sky is majestic otherwise oven gloves people worried about library fines being on their record nothing impending words spoken go off I met someone undeniable how is one supposed to keep track of days I stepped on your pile of nails. Aethyrs Restoration of temperature 00:00 / 02:03 Magnets collide, poles pushing each other apart, each half of the brain doing the same, crashing the front of a car, red, burning into a wall rhythmic & repeated Ramming into the bricks bleeding at the joints, the car is redder now, my medulla love oblongata tending the sails aloft & blossoming outwards in a kiss-filled driving wind; Will, shining phallus of a female reading portents in the moonscape of a cloudy night Rising like death in a gas chamber ambles with six legs of an arachnid, the carver of slumber into nightmarish waltzes with familials Jaws yawning & you reflected in the epi-glottis hanging in the cavern of the throat where words ring pealing like awakenings. Under this heat-maddened sky of language & commerce, donkeys rot next to pye-dogs that rule the streets of days & night howling into forms that manifest suspended over above our beds like rain frozen in a pause a blink, each moment flows in a circuitous emblem designed to signify this immersion of senses, a vice grip keeping the head down, breath is all you can take, the mercury falling, your abdomen a lilting cadence the beginning song rustling through imaginary leaves on trees festooned with glowing cups ripe swords, sun-kissed winds & lush pentacles. Chaos Totem 00:00 / 01:45 If it is, condors in the night sky a gilded wooing eruption in the empress way of stars, I hear each bar of the xylophone beaten by their wings battling the atmosphere. A wish to pass behind the firewall, you. If it is, fire-starters in the dim in the cavernous, in the ruins of the day a pacing, piercing undulation rippling under the skin, I feel each dig of the claws of the panther puncturing my lungs to a paler, slivered shadow of breath. Your smile glowing in the tint of a nuclear sun; the dream of red letters every night, new. If it is, angels of mercy unfurling ragged wings on runny skies I see Sophia’s paintings dripping on my head & each prayer wheel spins in the temples of Kathmandu furiously, yellow-bellied pigeons fall over from lack of oxygen, eggs are fried on the bonnets of cars & I hear the Noctiluca roaring of its hunger. If it is, I draw the line. I choke the hold on time & supply runs short. Shoals of unborns playing tantras with wooden legs on tankers carrying oil explode & melt the very tarsoul of the road & you you must run for your very, very life. Publishing credits Space dies for it: Astra Inclinant (Contraband Books) Aethyrs: The Whimsy Of Dank Ju-Ju (The Emma Press) Chaos Totem: Poetry International (2012) Author photo: © Christa Holka

Hear poet Briony Collins read poems for wave 1 of literary poetry journal iamb. Briony Collins wave 1 winter 2020 back next the poet Briony Collins is a writer, artist, and performer based in North Wales. Her career began when she won the 2016 Exeter Novel Prize. Since then, she has published numerous poems and stories, produced plays, and received the 2018 Under-25s Literature Wales Bursary. Briony enjoys illustrating her own work and performing on stage. She is represented by DHH Literary Agency. the poems taid taught me 00:00 / 00:41 how to open corked wine bottles: twisting a fusilli knife deep and prying the bone from a long, green spine until the tetric body pops. whenever i drink i remember this, meaning we will always be merry past when he’s gone and we can pretend that the darkness won’t come for us even though it is coming all the time. Newborn 00:00 / 00:11 Petals of your fingers around mine; Hibiscus closing around moonlight. Liberty Based on William Sidney Mount’s painting The Power of Music (1847) 00:00 / 00:41 Violin strings mark mayflower fingers while mine blister. We smile together and smoke our pipes down to embers. Toes tap the same southern rhythm: them, in the stables, me, outside with the horses, whistling intimations of liberty. Publishing credits taid taught me: exclusive first publication by iamb Newborn: Black Bough Poetry Broadsides: ‘gold lit hour’ (Issue 1) Liberty: Agenda Magazine (Vol. 52, Nos. 3-4)

Hear poet Estelle Price read poems for wave 23 of literary poetry journal iamb. Estelle Price wave 23 autumn 2025 back next the poet From lawyer to classicist to charity worker to poet, Estelle Price won the 2025 Kipling Society's John McGivering Writing Competition , 2024 SaveAsWriters Group International Writing Competition (Poetry) , 2024 Passionfruit Poetry Prize , 2023 Mairtín Crawford Award and 2023 Welshpool Open Poetry Competition . Her poetry has been long-listed three times in the UK's National Poetry Competition, and placed or listed in several other prestigious competitions. Often writing from a feminist perspective on her East End past, Estelle has had poems in The Honest Ulsterman , bath magg , The Ekphrastic Review and elsewhere. Featured in Nine Arches Press' Primers 6 , she's working on her debut collection. the poems Blessings ‘It would be infinitely lonely to live in a world without blessing.’ ~ John O’Donohue ~ 00:00 / 02:22 Bless the fox that tears into your bins and scatters your shame in the street. This is not the worst that can happen. Bless the red at the corner of the sky where there is a rip. You are part of it. Bless the blood that wells into the phial to be sent for analysis. Bless your stooped father when you leave him, like a grieving swan, on his doorstep. He needs guarding. Bless the baby you miscarried and the mystery of where she is. Bless the hands that picked the apple you are eating. Somewhere those hands seek rest. Bless the Earth and the voices that sing her anthems in your cities. They are the planet’s prophets. Bless the man you divorced. Bless the man you married after. Both have gardens in your heart. Bless the cupboard you hide in when memory wears laddered stockings. Bless hope when she navigates your mind’s black canals and places her fingers on the lock-gates. One day you will open. Bless the new-born river when it trickles into the light. You are that river. Bless the man in the tweed jacket who delicately lied to you. He is a house by the ocean whose walls are cracking. Bless the stranger in the red coat who jostled you in the grocers. She is the woman you were when your mother died. Bless the boy driving too loud in his souped-up car on the bypass. He is your faraway son. Bless the moments that surge like waves drowning the shore you love best. You are an oyster shell above the high tide mark. Bless the woman you still can be, who waits in your life’s long grass for you to grip her hands and dance. her wrist 00:00 / 01:35 slender like a stick of bamboo. its bone an unexpected table-top balanced on a bed of wrinkles that crease and crinkle like a plate of over-cooked spaghetti. the skin thirsty. its texture roughed by eighty summers to the colour of toffee. freckles grown bold and sassy speckle her forearm where once a bracelet of daisies linked arms and danced a joy-jig until dawn. at the base of her thumb, a scar, napkin white, the pigment burnt lifting a feast from the oven. lean in touch can you feel the demands of steel cuffing her to a fence when the world wobbled on its nuclear tight rope? today she’s watch-less. it’s time to give up on earth’s beating drum. take a moment you don’t have long. rotate. be gentle this wrist is porcelain-frail. there you’ve found her shy-side split in two by a wand of blood. take your chance place a kiss where once a pulse purposed. cut through the hospital tag set free a prayer for your mother as her life softens to memory. Diva 00:00 / 02:17 Let the red curtain go up on the stage at Covent Garden and let it be you, Nan, skipping into silver footlights an audience of toffs in black ties and glitzy frocks clapping, conductor, down in the pit, his baton raised (but not for hitting). Let it be you whose ruby lips trill a Mozart aria who flings fear, like a cadenza into corners of the auditorium out-of-reach of echo. You, who bellowed from a stall down Petticoat Lane, flogging cast-offs from Chelsea. You who stood in factory-rain, a black-sequinned dress dangled off smoky fingers, telling the girl, who turned her perm away, to ‘try it on luv, it’ll fit like a glove, luv’ . Cos if it’s you, Nan, you can choose to be Mimi, Tosca, even Queen of the Night. but please don’t pick Carmen, I can’t watch you stabbed by a soldier or a husband who chases you down the stairs with a knife. Let it be bouquets of freesias, not punches, that fall round your frizzy hair. I can hear you yelling to stop ‘avin a larf but it’ll be fun Nan Trust me. I’ve got an Oxford degree. I know how to get creases out of consonants, how to bleach vowels. Your vibrato will be adored from Rome to Milan. No more whelks in Southend, no more whispers on the pier with your sisters, no more sharing a dodgem with Harry and his docker-fists. Even the King will love you (at least for a season or two). And in the end Nan, instead of wheeling the stall back to the lockup as if it were a pram full of ten children instead of Saturday nights at the bingo, I promise you’ll fly out the window (like I did) head west (goodbye Plaistow!) wearing the black-sequined dress – cos surely you must want to? Publishing credits Blessings: Ten Poems from Welshpool (Candlestick Press) Won first prize in the Welshpool Poetry Competition 2023 her wrist: Manchester Cathedral Poetry Prize Pamphlet 2017 (Highly Commended poem) Diva: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Anthony Etherin read poems for wave 25 of literary poetry journal iamb. Anthony Etherin wave 25 spring 2026 back next the poet Experimental formalist poet and musician Anthony Etherin specialises in working under strict constraints. His three poems for iamb are written in the ottava rima form and in iambic metres. Colourscape is intersected by a Shakespearean sonnet in iambic dimeter – each of the third feet of the ottava rima’s lines belonging also to the sonnet – while Famine Moon is a palindrome by letter. An omnibus edition of Anthony's work can be found in Knit Ink (and Other Poems) . the poems July 00:00 / 00:36 I walked a starlit field that cold July. I found a star and named it after you, the way the ancients mapped the gods to sky. I named another for myself and drew a line between us. Then, I said goodbye ... I wonder if the stars have named us too, with names that last far longer than our own – and echo, gently, mid that great unknown? Colourscape 00:00 / 00:51 The night was green. It might A day that might have been was painted black. A brush erased the moss and amber leaves. Then, any light that came was given back – consumed and flung across aborted eves – as time and space, the frame, began to crack ... Beneath the new, the old dimension grieves: That day became stained glass – an onyx mass Soon, every truth I’m told will likewise pass. the grass and dew were blue. Famine Moon 00:00 / 00:38 No omen, I’m a foetal stone. I die, null, at a fate lit far – die raw, one loss, Selene resewn on woe. We lord a memo, star afar, at some mad role we own. On, we, serene, less sole now are. I draft. I let a fatal lune – I die, not slate. O, famine moon! Publishing credits July / Colourscape: Slate Petals (and Other Wordscapes) (Penteract Press) Famine Moon: Stray Arts (and Other Inventions) (Penteract Press)

Hear poet Ed Garvey Long read poems for wave 14 of literary poetry journal iamb. Ed Garvey Long wave 14 summer 2023 back next the poet Life coach Ed Garvey-Long is a queer poet from North London. He has an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, and published his first pamphlet, The Living Museum , in 2019. Ed's poems have featured in Under the Radar , Perverse , c lavmag and harana poetry . His hobbies include hand-sewing quilts, and long walks with his husband. the poems Visitor 00:00 / 01:06 I look up from my muesli and Jane Austen’s in my kitchen, red-cheeked from dancing and tiny like a museum mannequin. She comes to join me at the table, doesn’t say a word, smiling warmly like we share a funny truth. I don’t say a word either – what would she make of my accent? She looks around bewildered but taking it all in her stride. Maybe she often falls out of time to join gay men eating their muesli? We look at each other awkwardly again with beaming smiles and a sense of when is this going to end? She goes to speak, looking at me directly, but she fades out, and then she's gone. Sunday in the Woods 00:00 / 01:10 All the dogs follow us home. At first we pretend it’s an inconvenience, but then we start dancing and skipping with a conga line of cavapoos and dachshunds, labradors and cockers, huskies, newfoundlanders and chihuahuas gambolling and prancing behind us. Once home, we thrive drenched in dog slobber, swimming in kibble and poo bags – our flat’s a Pets At Home warehouse. But we love them all endlessly, yes. We love them all more than the bored middle-class families did. We love the chaos of it, we love the glory and the noise. And the love: we love the love of having them with us, falling over each other in an abundant pile, a glorious fur phantasmagoria. Borrowed Light 00:00 / 00:43 Friday and I pick off the moss of this week and let myself stand in brightness streaming through our modest windows yellowing my books the snake plant likes to be crowded and the song thrush is back to nest if we have anything it is borrowed light warm on our faces large and powerful and second-hand Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

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 Nicholas McGaughey read poems for wave 19 of literary poetry journal iamb. Nicholas McGaughey wave 19 autumn 2024 back next the poet Nicholas McGaughey lives in Wales. He has new work in Lighthouse , Poetry Wales , And Other Poems , Bad Lilies , Stand and The London Magazine , as well as in Like Flyering for the Revolution: The VERVE Anthology of Protest Poems . the poems The Ring 00:00 / 01:14 The old ring was lost or stolen, bought on the never-never on the eve of our empty chapel. This new band has been forged out of many declarations, spilling from a box of old commitments to be smelted in a crucible of clasp and chain: one eternity, a keepsake that lost its charm and the uncoupled links of a gold wristwatch. Tokens given at font and altar, that glowed on clutched pillow and sheet, chucked or soaped-off by morticians … All the muck of life is veined there in the circle of surname and children. A century of unions, paper, silver, ruby or gold. I twist its weight from my finger, another ring is left: a transparent tattoo, which heals, then disappears too. der Stollen 00:00 / 01:02 A town has slept in a hillside for a century. Men who left their livings for the Kaiser: butchers, teachers, a clerk of works; some two and a half hundred stooped in feldgrau , where blue firs have canopied the craters and spoil that tombed them. There have been looters here bent on old coins and trench-art, on watches that looped on a week after the air expired. Deep in the dug-outs, pictures of kinder , they never saw marry, watch over tables set with benches, tin steins and chargers for a meal. A strop hangs under the mirror in the latrine, where a bone razor brush set and a nub of soap anticipate a morning. Anthem 00:00 / 01:00 They stand for Wales in wind and rain, impervious to elements that might conspire to quell them. He, strumming his lyre, she, sturdy, plaited, our Lady of Verse. In a town renowned for its bridge and song, these monuments are springtime flocked with daffodil and druid. In black bronze, they wait for The Prophesied Son, on the green acre of Ynysangharad, churned now like a battlefield, limbed with trees, where something dear was almost drowned. After the flood, a nation stirs in a park. Publishing credits The Ring: Scintilla Magazine (No. 23) der Stollen: And Other Poems (Issue One) Anthem: The London Magazine (March 1st 2023)

Hear poet Tracey Rhys read poems for wave 17 of literary poetry journal iamb. Tracey Rhys wave 17 spring 2024 back next the poet With a New Writer’s bursary from Literature Wales, Tracey Rhys finished her first pamphlet, Teaching a Bird to Sing . Its theme of parenting a child with autism, told through poetry, would later feature in two touring theatre productions, and as part of an exhibition at The Senedd. Tracey’s work can be found in journals from Poetry Wales and New Welsh Review to The Lonely Crowd and Ink, Sweat & Tears , and she's no stranger to being long and shortlisted for poetry competitions – the Cinnamon Press Pamphlet Competition, Poetry Wales Pamphlet Competition and Cardiff International Poetry Competition among them. Tracey was also among the 20 winners of The Poetry Archive’s WordView Now! competition in 2020. Her first full collection, 21st-Century Bathsheba , will be published by Parthian in 2025. the poems Flood 00:00 / 02:07 Flood woke up on the wrong side of her bed, flowed over the bank with displeasure. There was power in her upsurge, the great swell of her being. Birds who waded in, the egrets and cormorants, recalled that once Flood was happy, but now was better. By better, they meant Ocean. Flood was broad and tidal estuary. She left a salty ring around their beaks and gave them shells. Flood was beautiful, they said. She should stop and feel it. But how could Flood pause when she was all reflection? Moon-driven, surging to sea. * Flood recalled her first taste of tarmac. Compared it to fennel. Preferred it to liquorice. She drawled, No need for glass when you have fibreglass. Or slate stacks, when you have those aching aluminium greys: the skeletons of automobiles. Ever since she’d drunk her first bollard, Flood had regretted concrete. The way it sunk into her pit and stayed there, trolley-bound for years. * Stories began circulating that Flood had been a stream, had thought big and got lucky. She was fast becoming folklore. It was true that she’d tried all the tricks; consuming lakes, spouting dams. I am braver than I know, Flood told the starlings. Bigger than is necessary. Beaks rippled in. The sun gave her prisms. Soon, she was run through with flowing, even as she was imbibed. I am always inside other bodies, she confided to the water rats on the underside of her skin. Interview with a Flood 00:00 / 01:41 I appreciate you must be busy … Well, I’m nothing without my fans. And your fans love you. Why, thank you. They want me to ask what your favourite colour is? My favourite colour is calcite. Pearly, like the inside of a tooth, all pulp and tusk. It reminds me of better days; snow quartz skies, rain on the way, white horses rising to pummel the hard brick houses. Where do you go on holiday? The fat berg. Everyone will be surprised by that! I think we imagined the Maldives … The fat berg is an island destination, a busman’s holiday if you like. Not everyone’s choice but I confess to enjoy oozing up through a drain grille, along waste pipes to vanity units, coating myself slick on the gunge loaded with hair in the trap. The limescale on the U-bend is a good day out. What keeps you going? It has to be the Blob Fish. Have you seen how ugly they look, dead on land? That nose! Almost human. 4,000 feet under the sea they don’t look half bad. I live by that. What are you afraid of? Jugs. What advice have you got for our youngsters, starting out? Get yourself a spot, it doesn’t have to be nice. Grow into it. To be small is no small thing. I always felt as big as I could be. As if the air was with me, walls parting at the dam. Shame 00:00 / 00:43 Though she’s old enough to have forgotten all the embarrassing beginnings, Flood lets them in at night, which is when the wind rushes at her edges and the riverbank is audible in its silver spoons. Flood remembers her great shames, burns with them. Her vast stupidities. Didn’t she once boast to the moon that she had the bigger tides? She pours herself into the earth, spreads herself thinner than vapour. Nothing will find her until morning, when the tinny glug of her belly will answer the flushing loos. Publishing credits Flood: Poetry Wales (Vol. 56, No. 3) Interview with a Flood / Shame: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Eleanor Holmes read poems for wave 3 of literary poetry journal iamb. Eleanor Holmes wave 3 summer 2020 back next the poet Eleanor Holmes is a writer, doctor and educator living in Valencian Country, Spain. Her poem yolk was nominated for the 2020 Pushcart Prize by Black Bough Poetry . Her debut digital chapbook Born in a Pandemic was published by IceFloe Press in May 2020. Eliot was commended in the National Poetry Competition in 2014 for her poem The Crab Man , and her work in various forms has appeared in Firewords, Structo, Acumen, Re-side, Dovecote, The Broken Spine Artist Collective, Perhappened and Ink Sweat & Tears. the poems Moonrise over the candyfloss hut Bordeaux, France 1994 00:00 / 02:15 I wander through Aqualand at night, muggy evening, Bordeaux-sticky. The place is closed to the general public, choir off-duty. Thirteen years old in my saggy blue Speedo suit, arms hugged tight to my budding chest. Inside my own head most of the time, I enjoy conversation with myself. Silence wraps me in a bubble. I stand on the edge of the high-board, toes curled over the ledge, naked urge to make the jump: an unobserved leap into dark. Emboldened, I climb metal stairs towards the death slide, bare-footed, alone with fear. I sit with my hands crossed at the top, stare down the vertical drop. Senses alive to cicada wings, pine resin, cold starlight. I lean back. Nobody is there to witness my fall, that weightless feeling: knowing I might leave the confines of the narrow black plastic, smash into French grey concrete or fly. Then the rush of water, it cuts me in two. The pain only adding to my sense of triumph as I walk, legs shaking, towards the main pool. Sit on the water jets, one by one. Watching moonrise over the candyfloss hut, I soak it all up. Waves of pleasure rippling my flush pink face. Granny Loved To Squeeze It 00:00 / 01:10 Grandpa Freeman was as tall as he was round. I remember his neck the folds of flesh, that huge blackhead nestled at the join. How Granny loved to squeeze it. For years she’d been trying to pop it out, puffing on her cigarette, sweat beaded on her brow. We used to encourage her, watch in awe as she tried, their arguments always ending in a squeeze. A punishment he seemed willing to endure until the day it came out, that plug of grime. Years of dead skin and dirt gathered in one expansive pore. WHOOSH! It flew across the kitchen, left a crater as big as my thumb. But after that day, there was nothing left to do, Grandpa seemed deflated, their arguments less heated. And not long after, he died. On the day they let the children out 00:00 / 02:05 On the day they let the children out it was a Sunday towards the end of April. Nature had taken over the intervening weeks: swallows raced along narrow streets, house martins nested under every eave. Butterflies danced in pairs, on pavements, decorating the path to the river unabashed and blousy. Bees hummed a new tune, saddle bags full of pollen as they tumbled past waving flower to flower. Dazzle of dragonfly keeping pace with our pram, parakeets squabbled in giant palms by the old Muslim wall. Familiar rustle of silver birch leaves shivered down the city’s spine, two heron slipped past the repurposed police station, hawk-drawn circles overhead. We couldn’t help but look directly at the sun, similar to the crows, worry melting in the uncorked springtime air. Wood pigeons cooed to us like newborns from struts of the old iron bridge, the opal Xúquer river, gurgling below our feet. Sugar canes creaked and cracked birdsong so loud, it seemed nature had been dialled up especially. A white dove, branch in its beak flapped overhead. We scuffed our feet, the hour allotted over too soon. On the day they let the children out peals of laughter joined in joyful riot, their animal selves unlocked, at last, parents blinked, all startled deer: a safe two meters from each other. The Spanish government relaxed lockdown on 26th April 2020 so that children were allowed outside for the first time, for one hour, accompanied by one parent. Publishing credits Moonrise over the candyfloss hut: Perhappened Mag (Issue 1) Granny Loved To Squeeze It: exclusive first publication by iamb On the day they let the children out: Born in a Pandemic (IceFloe Press)