Hear poet Daljit Nagra read poems for wave 7 of literary poetry journal iamb. Daljit Nagra wave 7 autumn 2021 back next the poet Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, Daljit Nagra has pubished four collections of poetry with Faber & Faber. He has scooped the Forward Prizes for Best Individual Poem and Best First Collection, the South Bank Show Decibel Award, and the Cholmondeley Award. Daljit's writing has also been shortlisted for the Costa Prize, and twice for the T S Eliot Prize. A Poetry Book Society New Generation Poet, Daljit has had his poems published by The New Yorker , the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement . He is the inaugural poet-in-residence for Radio 4 and Radio 4 Extra, presenting the weekly Poetry Extra programme. Daljit serves on the Council of the Royal Society of Literature, and teaches at Brunel University London. the poems Letter to Professor Walcott 00:00 / 04:48 Hardly worth calling them out , the old masters. Each time a cause gains ground, should their estate become glass house to alleged misdemeanours? Their body of rhyme can be felt, it propagates its own lineage. Should we read poems from a cave, half-witted by the missing forefather? I stand before the compressed volumes of verse across my shelves: who covered their tracks, who’ll outlive their flaws? Who’d topple the marble of some national bard, or gulag their name and the chela guarding them? How many writers, the world over, are behind bars for crossing a border of taste? It seems natural to harm art and the artist. Consider Larkin whose private views were amiss, who, if akin to his father’s brown shirt, who, if published by Old Possum's who laid rats on Jews … and I’ve lost myself, and the Work is no longer the work. If influence imparts bad genes, who to weigh in the scales of my nurture? Weigh Chaucer who forced a minor into raptus? Weigh Milton mastering tongues to bate his women like a whip? Weigh Coleridge pairing the horror of Othello’s wedded stares to those of a black mastiff? Weigh Whitman and Tennyson who’d cleanse by skin? If Kipling says we’re devils, may I weigh the man of If ? How do I edit the Frost-like swamp I’ve swilled – so many poets to recycle either side of this fireplace before sweetness and light. Before I’m woke, in tune with the differentiated rainbow and its crying flames. Should I calmly cease their leasehold if they’ve abused the canonical fortress? Or ride a kangaroo court on its flood of Likes? Take down each Renaissance Man to his manhood? But I hear the poems breathe: We can’t be judged by our birth, or judge our birth as Parnassian. And you, dear Derek. Your Adam-songs for an island sparked paradise from sanderling, breadfruit. Your spade dug the manor and bones fell up. The senate columns fanfared your arrival. They donned a black male and colour was virtue. You opened my mouth and verse came out. Your advocates cleaned your mess, their arms held down the age, as though gods roamed the earth to graduate girls. As though rape were the father of art. You were 'Dutch, n____', Brit, you were my Everyman! Why take on Caliban’s revenge? Your moustache a broom wedging its stanza of nightmare – in how many Helens? Did you lust after lines inspired by whiplash, taunted by sirens for your Homeric song? Intellectual finger-jabbing seems off the mark: in the papers Korean Ko Un’s erased, and who’d fly to a terminal if it was named for a serial pervert, Pablo Neruda? I bet they hunt the dark man, Derek, in pantheon death. Haunted or wreathed – how should you be honoured at Inniskilling? Well, it seems fitting you fall in the West where you carried 'our' burden. Beside the foul spot, I’d test my love again. You are in me: I’d never lose you, if I tried. I’d begin with these, your old books, anew. Now where on my shelves are you, travelling through the old world? Where’s your dog-eared Don Juan ? 00:00 / 01:44 00:00 / 01:44 Publishing credits A Letter to Professor Walcott: Times Literary Supplement (No. 6147) Author photo: © Martin Figura

Hear poet Matthew Haigh read poems for wave 1 of literary poetry journal iamb. Matthew Haigh wave 1 winter 2020 back next the poet Matthew Haigh is from Cardiff, Wales. He is the author of Death Magazine (Salt Publishing, 2019) and Black Jam (Broken Sleep Books, 2019). His work has appeared in numerous journals, online and in print, as well as in anthologies by The Emma Press, Sidekick Books and Bad Betty Press. He is co-organiser of CRASH: a quarterly poetry night in Cardiff focused on the experimental, surreal, humorous and strange. the poems A Luxurious Death 00:00 / 01:03 After years working as a makeup artist, I decided there had to be a death with a velvety finish. To be honest, our whole lives are unnecessary. The fabric of life is thick silver, fruitless. The person you love has a 100 per cent chance of embarking on a kitchen renovation project. We think of death as the heart of the home. Be vulnerable, be young. Death happens to everyone; it makes you laugh so hard you snort as your eyes well up with beeswax. The challenge is a familiar one: breathe new life into a widow with a black pencil. Advice on how to die well? I start with skin butter, followed by nude lip loss. Christian Bale 00:00 / 01:11 Bale has become so milky that simply spending an hour in his presence probably leaves a faint gleam. The actor was determined to incorporate petals, seeds and fruits into his skin. He trained six hours a day, six days a week, for six months to bottle a happier future. Synonymous with physi- cal transformations, Bale developed plant leaves as his body adapted to changes in technology. He reportedly puts a soft little cushion between his face and a thistle. Ironically, American Psycho was interpreted as a moisturiser by many reflexol- ogists. The precise nature of his soothing presence is unknown, but the smart guess is that he is like a mountain of white lily. What Will Your Sims Do Now? 00:00 / 01:32 Like a good nephew, I save your computer from the skip’s slew of lifelong wreckage, lug its black lake-weight back to my room even though the tower is now a humming grave. Inside still live the pixel kids you abandoned to a timeless paradise, still frolicking poolside, spouting gibberish, clownish, in a summer that will never end. They know nothing of the absent God act you’ve pulled, these tiny Adams and Eves in cherry-print kaftans. I feed and clothe and shower them, strange skin cells you’ve shed in your swift exit, my head haloed by the screen’s Heaven- blue, the way yours must have been as you crafted your craved reflection. Here is the candy-haired mohawk girl modelled on your ideal. I push her around her little kitchen, fingers lingering on the keys that yours last touched. Her chip pan has caught fire. The girl’s face bursts open with tears. Scorched walls. Her kitchen is ruined. I can’t console her. Publishing credits A Luxurious Death: Burning House Press (November 28th 2018) Christian Bale: exclusive first publication by iamb What Will Your Sims Do Now?: Anthology of Aunts (The Emma Press)

Hear poet JP Seabright read poems for wave 16 of literary poetry journal iamb. JP Seabright wave 16 winter 2023 back next the poet JP Seabright is a queer disabled writer living in London. They have four solo pamphlets published: Fragments from Before the Fall , No Holds Barred , The Insomniac’s Almanac , Traum/A and the collaborative works GenderFux and MACHINATIONS . They have been published in journals such as The Rialto , One Hand Clapping , Fourteen Poems , Culture Matters , Under the Radar and 14 Magazine , as well as nominated for Best of the Net, The Pushcart Prize and The Forward Prizes. the poems Dungeness 00:00 / 01:04 The shingle glistens suggesting buried treasure under a bleached whale of a sky, grey smoke mingles with ashtray clouds, a nuclear desert crunches underfoot. The hum of the reactors is silent now, the world's contracted thus, blue-feathered birds curl and call over a dilapidated corrugated shack. Time stands still. Cronus and Chroma collide where stone solicits sky, the air itself imbued with solace and the metallic taste of sea. Stories of those who sought a living as scattered flotsam on a desolate shoreline, are lost in the rags of time. Dungeness is less a place and more a state of mind. Clothe the Night with Stars, My Love 00:00 / 01:43 in the sunshine. your horse. the forest. hungry and frail. the woods are washed. with the orb of broad waves. eyes disdain the world. and the cough of the poet sings of flowers in the stream. the autumn of the west. the splendour of the moon. this wilderness of death. so vast and beautiful. dust strobes. the self is still. our faith has dispersed. peacefully. noiseless and few. a gap in the clouds. an impossible sun. its curtain hangs with the heavens. abandon those who rest in the shade. wear the storms of men and brides. acrid in the stream. rainbow shadows. like a birthday. heavy and decorous. starlight wanders at the threshold. feeble yet found. clothing the night with stars. the calm of the sun. a servant of the past. a bright steed mingles in the water. streaming of stars. your screeching. eyes of the sea. winged with the bursting. overwrought and mournful. felicitas seeking the sun. one life of a day. a garden flower. the sound. and sometimes the heavens. murky and white. lovefull. Nocturnal Omissions 00:00 / 02:56 : I am a ghost of a chance : a weeping husk of a human : scattered remnants of once-functional behaviour : barely grasped : longed for : no longer attainable : I am my own undoing : an unravelling : this unbelongingness : this : this unwarranted fuckering bliss : this sickening lurch : I play paper scissors stone with my memories : each trauma crushing : cancelling out the next : the act of obliteration : a removal of meaning : how joyous! : a negation and a revelation : a quivering flatline : cut down to the quick and the dead of our own true selves : whatever that is : this : skeletal kiss : embryonic kick : fuck the shame away : in the dark : on your own : your phone’s flickering hiss : a faithful companion : outside : the city is on heat : your body a hot flush of mistaken identities : mixed media on rye : the city is a hex : your body a burnt match : fire flares the streets : your body stains the sheets : with thoughts of filth : nightmare ejaculate : lick your bones clean : and yet : it is darkest before the dawn : this : is a lie : sometimes the dawn never comes : sometimes the darkness is within us : some have darkness thrust upon them : the city is a hellscape : life is hard : don’t let anyone tell you otherwise : the utter aliveness of it all : this : this relentless existence : sometimes I think about dying : peace for our time : go home and get a nice quiet sleep : looking back on this half-century : a battlefield : these scars : wars fought : sometimes won : mostly lost : losing : still : the slow decline to senility : I ask for pity : as I age : for despite all best intentions : I come to closely resemble : the man I most despise : tomorrow never dies : but this darkness before the dawn : this what if this is all there is : and yet : lighter days are coming : is a lie : I tell myself : Publishing credits Dungeness / Clothe the Night with Stars, My Love: exclusive first publication by iamb Nocturnal Omissions: Impossible Archetype (Issue 11)

Literary magazine iamb is an archive of contemporary poets reading their own poems. It's also a quarterly journal of contemporary poetry from around the world. about iamb Part library of poets, part quarterly journal, iamb is where established and emerging talents are showcased side by side. Not just their words, but their readings of them too. Expect new poems, every three months, free to your device of choice. ~ Mark Antony Owen, Creator & Curator, February 2020 ~ how you can support iamb The simplest way is to share your favourite poets' pages on social media. You can also donate whatever you can afford to help keep this journal online, ad free ... and free to all. Thank you for coming, for reading, and perhaps donating. Above all, thank you for listening.

Hear poet Aki Schilz read poems for wave 2 of literary poetry journal iamb. Aki Schilz wave 2 spring 2020 back next the poet Aki's poetry and short stories have been published online and in print in Popshot Magazine, Synaesthesia, Ink, Sweat & Tears, And Other Poems, Mnemoscape, Birdbook: Saltwater and Shore, CHEAP POP and An Unreliable Guide to London. She was chosen by Roxanne Gay to feature in the Wigleaf Top 50 (2015), was a Queen's Ferry Press Finalist (Best Small Fictions), and won both the inaugural Visual Verse Prize (2013) and the Bare Fiction Magazine Flash Fiction Prize (2014). With Kit Caless, she founded the LossLit digital literature project and co-edits LossLit Magazine . the poems If he asks 00:00 / 00:57 A mouth full of applause Wedding bells stretched between two hands Rush of silk as traffic At midnight all the trains hover over the water in silence: love as a sixpence or a moon, there’s no difference when you turn them clouds have no meaning here or a single orange flower growing out of the platform (he left you, hang up the phone before he returns to kiss your mouth shut) Knucklebone pressed into the small of my back Step over the unsaid things If he asks say nothing say [circle] yes/no The Fall 00:00 / 01:20 I have clasped your edges so hard they leave grooves in my palms, deep as the grooves of horse-reins beneath the bridges on towpaths wasted with bracken and buddleia. These, and mine, cut across lifelines: a geometric interruption. I cannot document dropping you on a sunlit day, startled by the sudden noise of a narrowboat any more than I can document losing you but the fall happens as if both were inevitable. The first: a drowning of lungs, the plosion of capillaries, a haemorrhage behind your eyelids like a summer storm. The second: a smaller drowning though no less significant, this arcing towards water of hard edges and palm-deep cuts: the only photograph I kept of you after your death. Did you dive in after it? she asks me when I tell her what has happened. I am at a loss to explain, when I shake my head, why I didn’t. It never occurred to me I might be able to save you this time. Flystrike 00:00 / 03:29 Tipping point, the cracked rim of a teacup, your spikes turned inside-out. In my cupped hands you curled, gently, despite your pain. I could sense something was wrong: you shouldn’t have been out in daylight, wobbling down the garden while the dog barked a warning into the rain. It echoed sharp into the bay, and you fell sideways onto the grass as if the sound had hit you. Starry moss, your toes curling, the mud caked around your neck: it looked like a noose. We took you in. You trusted me to hold you and I took you to my chest, brought you close. I could see a single fault-line, a wetted rim, thick with crust. No blood. What lay beneath was invisible to me, but I could smell it. It filled the car when we rushed you in, the dog in the back straining to look under the towel, whining as we punched the co-ordinates for the local vet into the sat nav. You snuffled, pushed all your strength through your soft snout to suckle from the pipette. ‘Drink, little one’ I said, and you did. Your teeth clacked against the plastic and hope surged like a current through my chest. We sped past lavender rocks, the sea blurring between them, silver slices glancing off the windscreen and birds looping ahead of us, clearing the way. The vet uncurled you, a little too roughly. ‘Look,’ he said, and showed me where the skin of you was coming away. The maggots twisted up into the light like strange white roots. ‘We can’t save him,’ he said. ‘Would you like to leave the room?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘I want to stay.’ Something in my heart kicked out. I held it down, clamped my jaw shut. I wish he had been more gentle with you, wish the needle was not quite so big, that it could have been slipped into a spot that wasn’t under your chin, the whole thing in sight, right under your nose. Your nose, small wet thing that moments ago had sought me out, had tickled my palm as you took the water from me. I wished as the pink liquid flushed through your small body, I could touch you, stroke your spikes, curl you gently back into yourself. Instead, I clutched the towel to my chest. I said, ‘It’s OK little one.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry.’ The nurse snapped off her gloves. The smell was on my hands, in my mouth and ears, under my skin. In the waiting room, a naked dog was striking his cone against the wall. Publishing credits If he asks / Flystrike: written exclusively for iamb The Fall: And Other Poems

Hear poet K Weber read poems for wave 1 of literary poetry journal iamb. K Weber wave 1 winter 2020 back next the poet K Weber lives and writes in the midwestern United States. Her writing has been included in issues of Memoir Mixtapes, Detritus Online, Black Bough Poetry, Writer’s Digest, Moonchild Magazine, Theta Wave and others. Her most recent project, THIS ASSEMBLY, features poems written using words 'donated' by more than 165 people. the poems In lieu of flowers 00:00 / 00:42 These Indiana corn fields never apologize when their soil is turned or the crops burn. Whole trees remove their leaves. Some roots snap. Sturdiest trunks don’t know how many annual rings they have. Their birthdays are belated at best. There’s no haggling over who’s most forgetful or forgotten. I say “sorry” when someone runs over my foot with a shopping cart. I say “sorry” when the bruise of verbal abuse hits my ear; excuse myself for being alive, with deepest sympathies. Abundance 00:00 / 00:38 Another holiday passes in pay-it-fast-forward but in guilty rear-view was a million colors and textures long. So much glass and scuffed, new shoes. Decorations hung themselves when we walked by, unnoticed. Jesus wept. Those little glowing lights: electric bill a giant who’s wielding unnecessary stress. Left- overs became counterfeit nutrition through January. We did or did not loosen belts when it came to doubt. Commune and commute 00:00 / 00:41 No one put the salt outside your apartment building. I slipped in the parking lot while watching the frost- bit moon have another cigarette. No one put the salt down inside your apartment. I slipped into your bed- room, thawed my bruised hip in neutral sheets. I didn’t leave until the last cigarette after breakfast. I passed the salt trucks as I slid an hour; my grip was not slippery but each knuckle was sick as a ghost’s stomach. I started smoking the last of my cigarettes for the next three years. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Jane Ayres read poems for wave 20 of literary poetry journal iamb. Jane Ayres wave 20 winter 2024 back next the poet Jane Ayres re-discovered poetry while studying part-time for a Creative Writing MA at the University of Kent. Soon after, she was longlisted for the 2020 Rebecca Swift Foundation Women Poets’ Prize. The following year, Jane was shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, and became a winner of the Laurence Sterne Prize (she also picked up an Honourable Mention in the 2022 Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest ). Twice nominated for Best of the Net, once for The Pushcart Prize, Jane has had her poetry published in more than 100 publications. She's also read her work for Eat the Storms , Upload , The Blue Door , Ó Bhéal , Medway River Lit and iamb . Her first collection, edible , appeared in 2022. Her most recent work is micro-chap, my lost womb still sings to me . the poems Giving my ex-boss a hand job for £20 (mates rates) 00:00 / 00:44 His request took me by surprise since I’d only invited him round for coffee making it clear there was to be no more sex. But at the time I was working four part-time jobs to pay my rent and cover the bills. It really would be easy money (I told myself) and I was right because it took my gloved hand just two minutes to achieve the desired outcome – less time than it took to write this poem. Not a bad rate of pay and to be honest, I wondered if he might want to make it a regular thing, although he said afterwards he usually had it done professionally. final witness 00:00 / 00:38 this thing you did this thing this thing you did that splinters needles gnaws claws caws calls you out calls you in burrows deep deeper seeps leaks loops leaches feeds this thing that taunts haunts hunts preys takes fright invites the want to do a good thing the right thing because the time you had the times we had the time you have dissolving wilting tilting twisting this thing this thing we did requiem for an age-inappropriate lover 00:00 / 00:55 i see you my body becomes cotton & the trickling wound will not heal or shut the knot in my back is spreading loaded with sticky expectation wearing my coming & going dress / firefly-bright a handful of knitted moments / charred seeds just a little crush in the bluebelled forest hollow promises made easily the curve of your cheek / a buried moon / bone-white this hand / nettle-woven / pinking the sinuous hive blurring the tongue-choked lines scraping the chalky narrative i’ll walk for miles to keep our secret Publishing credits Giving my ex-boss a hand job for £20 (mates rates): The Friday Poem (May 19th 2023) final witness/requiem for an age-inappropriate lover: Cōnfingō Publishing (Spring 2021)

Hear poet Dorian Nightingale read poems for wave 16 of literary poetry journal iamb. Dorian Nightingale wave 16 winter 2023 back next the poet Dorian Nightingale has always been fascinated by the musicality and textural sounds of words. He draws inspiration from an eclectic range of artistic influences: everything from Caravaggio to Radiohead. A graduate of New Writing South (Creative Writing), the Open University (Psychology) and the London School of Economics (Comparative Politics), Dorian was nominated in 2022 for Best of the Net for his poem you. He's also had a number of his poems published in print and online. Dorian lives with his family in Sussex, England. the poems spellbound 00:00 / 01:03 forgive me. for if you were to ask what were my dreams and my goals, they’d remain undisclosed, all holed up, left untold. for i fear the fact that when they are spoken, if they should dare pass my lips and be there in the open, the merest hint of their uttering would prevent them from happening (or at least puncture ambition to the point of abandonment). the attainment of aims, it seems, spellbound by admittance. so i’ll tell you almost wants and nearly desires. the fire in my belly coming across not so hot. careful not to craft too particular replies – answering imperfectly, all seemingly unwise. and therefore don’t be surprised if my style seems apathetic, that i’m somewhat distracted, slightly compromised. i’m just protecting myself from some predictable fall. keeping in thrall to make the endgame, my prize. you 00:00 / 00:28 and i lock you in a box that i occasionally open, with that key i still pick up by the tip not the bow. a place where i stow your hair clips and your tutus, pairs of polka dotted socks and shiny buckled shoes. your name on tags, a name i’ve known since i was six. patterns saved of dresses that i was going to sew and stitch. day at the beach 00:00 / 00:55 dilly-dallying, shilly-shallying. my mind confined on this shoreline of mine. i’ve been here before, many times, many more. the brine in the air assaulting my senses, lining my gut with that same salted feeling. the same sort of feeling revealing my shy endeavour. a spoiling reminder that whatever the weather i’ll always foil the very first step, the very first dip in the saltwater wet. Fearful i’ll slip on the undersea flint and slit the tip of my toe or cut the side of my foot. i know, i know … biding my time, still afraid of that slice, never holding my nerve, never turning the tide. Publishing credits spellbound: Flights (Issue 10) you / day at the beach: Flights (Issue 5)

Hear poet Robin Helweg-Larsen read poems for wave 21 of literary poetry journal iamb. Robin Helweg-Larsen wave 21 spring 2025 back next the poet Anglo-Danish but raised in the Bahamas, Robin Helweg-Larsen was educated in Jamaica and at Stowe. He's lived and worked in the Bahamas, Denmark, Canada, Australia and the USA. Robin has had more than 400 poems published in various literary journals, including the Alabama Literary Review , Allegro , Ambit and Amsterdam Quarterly. His chapbook, Calling the Poem – on the art of summoning and working with 'The Muse' – is available to read online. the poems Camelot at Dusk 00:00 / 01:44 From under low clouds spreading from the south The red sun drops slow to night’s waiting mouth. Rush lamps are lit; the guards changed on the walls; Supper will not be served in the Great Halls With Arthur still away. Each in their room, The members of the Court leave books or loom To say their Vespers in the encroaching gloom. Lancelot, up in his tower, Sees the sunset storm clouds glower, Feels his blood’s full tidal power, Knows he has to go. In her bower, Gwenivere Puts a ruby to her ear, Brushes firelight through her hair, Feels her heartbeat grow. Guard, guard, watch well: For the daylight thickens And the low cloud blackens And the hot heart quickens To rebel. From his tower, caring not For consequences, Lancelot Crosses courts of Camelot, Pitying his King. In her bower, Gwenivere Feels his presence coming near, Waits for footfalls on the stair, Lets her will take wing. Guard, guard, watch well: If attention slackens When the deep bond beckons, Evil knows Pendragon’s In its spell. And as the storm clouds, rubbing out the stars, Deafened the castle and carved lightning scars, Drenched Arthur rode for flash-lit Camelot Where he, by Queen and Knight, was all forgot. Old Sailors 00:00 / 00:54 Two tars talked of sealing and sailing; one said with a sigh 'Remember gulls wheeling and wailing, we wondering why, and noting bells pealing, sun paling — it vanished like pie! And then the boat heeling, sky hailing, the wind getting high, and that drunken Yank reeling to railing and retching his rye, John missing his Darjeeling jailing, and calling for chai? While we battened, all kneeling and nailing, the hurricane nigh, and me longing for Ealing, and ailing?' His mate said 'Aye-aye; I could stand the odd stealing, food staling, not fit for a sty, and forget any feeling of failing, too vast to defy – home-leaving your peeling-paint paling too far to espy – all because of the healing friend-hailing, the hello! and hi! and, with the gulls squealing, quick-scaling the mast to the sky.' This Ape I Am 00:00 / 01:48 Under our armoured mirrors of the mind where eyes watch eyes, trying to pierce disguise, an ape, incapable of doubt, looks out, insists this world he sees is trees, and tries to find the scenes his genes have predefined. This ape I am who counts 'One, two, more, more' has lived three million years in empty lands where all the members of the roving bands he’s ever met have totalled some ten score; so all these hundred thousands in the street with voided eyes and quick avoiding feet must be the mere two hundred known before. This ape I am believes they know me too. I’m free to stare, smile, challenge, talk to you. This ape I am thinks every female mine, at least as much as any other male’s; if she’s with someone else, she can defect – her choice, and she becomes mine to protect; just as each child must be kept safe and hale for no one knows but that it could be mine. This ape I am feels drugged, ecstatic, doped, hallucination-torn, kaleidoscoped, that Earth’s two hundred people includes swirls of limitless and ever-varied girls. This ape I am does not look at myself doesn’t know about mirrors, lack of health, doesn’t know fear of death, only of cold; mirrorless can’t be ugly, can’t be old. Publishing credits Camelot at Dusk: The HyperTexts (2015) Old Sailors: Snakeskin (No. 146) This Ape I Am: Better Than Starbucks (Vol. II, No. X)

Hear poet Jo Bratten read poems for wave 4 of literary poetry journal iamb. Jo Bratten wave 4 autumn 2020 back next the poet Jo Bratten writes and teaches in London, but was raised off-grid on a farm in Ohio’s rust belt. She moved to the UK to study at the University of St Andrews, where she completed a PhD on the modern novel. Her poetry has appeared in Ambit, Butcher’s Dog, The Interpreter's House, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Ink Sweat & Tears and elsewhere. Jo is working on both her first pamphlet, and a novel about cicadas. the poems Sunset Over Watford 00:00 / 00:52 I am not terribly good at love. Yet I begin to think I could be, if love is loving small things: the moment when the second magpie lurches across the path; or the girl in the purple coat running towards the dog she doesn’t know; old men on the bench with sandwiches in the rain; the back of your neck; breathing you in quick, thick gulps, like cold water after bedtime; the smell of dying daffodils that still strain to hold their heads bravely towards the February sun as it sets over Uxbridge, Ruislip, Pinner, Hatch End, Watford – all bright and glittering in the smoky air. Amulet 00:00 / 00:57 In these times we tighten, fasten locks like lips, stockpile pills, believe our own haptic power to summon the fever-gods, draw blood to rub across the lintel, into apotropaic scratches cut into doors and walls. You touch me like a mezuzah, hang me by your heart, an omamori, a scapular, a locketed caul; hold me on your lips a cicada of jade, in your pocket like a hare’s foot, a whelk’s shell; I circle you like hag stones, word you a breverl: the skies are quieter, clean; a blackbird pauses, tilts her head, builds a nest. After Us 00:00 / 00:53 When the floods clear what will be left, washed up at our gate or lodged between the polite paving stones along our tree-lined road? Other people’s newspapers, bags for life, little rusted badges with an old slogan, lost socks and dreams, righteous anger bloated like a dead rat, effluent thoughts and prayers sludged blackly across our doormat’s smiling welcome; bits of ourselves we’d cut away and scattered in the river as fish food stuck now on the stern brick of our house, obscene in their pinkness, puckered like little sucking mouths, trying to get back in where it is so warm and so dry. Publishing credits Sunset Over Watford: Ambit Amulet: The Mechanics’ Institute Review After Us: Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal

Hear poet Jay Whittaker read poems for wave 10 of literary poetry journal iamb. Jay Whittaker wave 10 summer 2022 back next the poet Jay Whittaker is an Edinburgh-based poet who grew up in Devon and Nottingham. She's published two collections to date: Sweet Anaesthetist and Wristwatch – the latter chosen as Scottish Poetry Book of the Year 2018 in the Saltire Society Literary Awards. Jay's widely published in journals that include The North , Butcher’s Dog and The Rialto , and has recently had work accepted by The Poetry Review . Two of her poems appear in Bloodaxe Books' anthology, Staying Human . the poems Egg case 00:00 / 05:33 My left ovary is smothered in seven centimetres of cyst. A risk to be reduced. ~ A beachcombed husk in my palm, multiple crumpled chambers deflated and dried, bereft of hatched whelks. A self-contained nodule of nothing, pod of naught. ~ Wobbling on a wooden stool in the school biology lab, I clench my sharpened pencil, transcribe the handbag and curved horns into my exercise book. I will keep practising until fluent, ready to reproduce constituent parts in cartoonish simplicity – a handbag and curved horns. I lay my transparent ruler across the paper and draw straight lines, and label (best handwriting): Ovaries, Ampulla, Endometrium, Fallopian Tubes. But I don’t know them. Not viscerally. ~ And how much less interesting than the febrile atmosphere in the school hall on the day one hundred twelve-year-olds are herded in to watch the childbirth video . At the crowning, commotion at the front. The boy who faints will be taunted for years. ~ Imagine: my abdomen crammed with congealed jelly babies. ~ Sometimes I looked up and my mother was watching me, as though wondering what she’d done. ~ My mother told me: It was the bloody ants’ fault. I was pregnant with you. Your father was away. You know how I hate ants in the house. ~ I am possible. ~ Inexorable ant-march across a kitchen floor. No one to talk her down or reassure. Scrubbing. Safe to use ant powder inside when pregnant? Not sure. Read and reread the packet. Relentless. Ants keep marching. Need to empty the cupboard under counter anyway, in case the ants find it, find the flour and sugar inside. Visions of a never-ending ant army carrying their sugar lumps aloft, victorious, back to their queen. Lifting and bending – getting up and down – panicking about ants and – wet in her knickers – a pooling. Blood – I am choosing A punishment for leaving it so late to have a child. For thinking, in their cleverness, with their science, they were above this. The thought of her mother’s told-you-so triumph. ~ The GP said his wife took these tablets too; I would never have taken anything when I was pregnant, I even stopped smoking, I was so careful but I thought I was miscarrying — A risk reduced. I am possible. ~ Alone in bed, sleepless, praying to the god her husband denies. ~ She tells me when I am eighteen, have left home for a university ninety miles north, It was in the Sunday Times a few years after you were born. All the cancers in the daughters are at puberty; you’re safe. She tells me now because of course maybe you shouldn’t go on the pill . I am already on the pill. She tells me in such a way that makes it clear we won’t talk about it again. ~ A hunt for the unknown, the untold, the unnamed. In the Science Library, I turn the handle on a microfilm reader, not too fast (nausea). Oestrogen. Estrogen. Diethylstilbestrol. Diethylstilboestrol. Stilbestrol. DES. Leading me to the long shelves of Index Medicus , metres of cloth-bound volumes, to rifle Bible-thin paper. I school myself in libraries, their tools, fiche readers, bibliographies, catalogues, all they contain. All that was withheld. All that was never vocalised. All the swallowed words. ~ My inheritance: Great grandfather – dies of sarcoma. Grandmother – dies of breast cancer. Mother – exposure to DES in pregnancy. Two breast cancers. Dies of ovarian cancer. Me – exposure to DES in utero . One breast cancer (and counting). I am choosing. ~ Buried deep in my pelvis and scheduled for excision: tissue, but more than tissue. My snail shells, my coiled snakes. Mysterious, seen on scans, analysed by faceless medics, discussed in front of me in medical language by my partner and my consultant, doctor to doctor – I have no clue, really. I am excising a possibility. ~ Absence is a poke of pain when I bend forward too quickly, a stabbing gyroscope, a whirligig of knife-ache when I lie on my left side. ~ A risk reduced. From the 1940s till the early 1970s, synthetic oestrogen diethylstilbestrol (DES) was given to at least 300,000 UK women whom doctors believed were at increased risk of miscarriage. A clinical study in 1953 found DES did nothing to reduce such risk, yet it was administered until 1971 – when it was discovered that daughters of women given the drug were at heightened risk of rare vaginal/cervical cancers. Later research linked DES to greater risk of breast cancer in both mothers and daughters. Clearly something was up 00:00 / 00:42 Every time I drove, plink and ricochet, stones on metal like popcorn in a lidded pan. I blamed the untarmacked track, recent resurfacing on the main road – until a warning light came on – under the bonnet, rats had stashed birdseed in every crevice, nestled pebbles into crannies, built a cairn of stones on the engine. The shock of rat shit on the camshaft. Chewed wires betrayed them, building a haven of warmth and food in the heart of a machine I thought was mine. Canopy (Day 20: First chemo cycle) 00:00 / 00:46 Do tree tips tingle, niggle like my scalp? Most people’s hair (I’m told) comes out on day eighteen. White hairs work loose first, waft down. This late summer evening, my scarfed skull as bald and vulnerable as a fledgling’s, I stand under the row of sycamore, my neck sore from looking up to the abundance of leaves. Whatever happens to me, the earth is turning. At the same hour in winter, haven’t I stood in this very spot, watching bare branches implore the sky for light? Publishing credits Egg case: Sweet Anaesthetist (Cinnamon Press) Clearly something was up: The Rialto (Issue 97) Canopy:Wristwatch (Cinnamon Press)

Hear poet Sarah Wallis read poems for wave 23 of literary poetry journal iamb. Sarah Wallis wave 23 autumn 2025 back next the poet Sarah Wallis lives by the sea on the east coast of Scotland. Her most recent chapbook is Poet Seabird Island . She's also the author of Precious Mettle , which unfolds like a treasure hunt, and Medusa Retold , a long-form feminist retelling of the Medusa myth, set in a run-down modern seaside town. With a nomination for The Pushcart Prize and work forthcoming in Stand , Sarah is proud to have been published in The Scottish Poetry Library's Best Scottish Poems , Eat the Storms , The Interpreter’s House , Black Bough Poetry and Propel Magazine . the poems Amber Bears in the Danish Tuck Shop 00:00 / 01:06 An ancient civilisation’s glowing ruins, the spoils of prehistory are washing up on Danish beaches, translucent treasure looks like cola bottles from the sweet shop but are priceless gems and unlike gummy rings give sign and symbol of a society brokered long ago, who knows who else along the way may have lost such relics, toyed with the fragile forms of bear, elk and bird, cast them like runes or simply flung them into the sea refined pattern and handsome geometric designs lost for a time, the anonymous artist had patience and knowledge and an obsession with bears, catching a glint of amber fire, whatever your party, your pick and mix, let the resin shine again, let it spark, the amber bears are marching home through the dark. The Artefact 00:00 / 02:45 We walked miles, searching out a definitive signpost, like Land’s End, John o’ Groats, or Dover; the end of the line. Superstition kept us walking, staring down magpies as we looked for omens on the grassy path, twisting, turning between the neat lines of dreamers, reading their dramatic lines of poetry and strong Bible verses standing guard, the winged angels and Gothic letters steadfast, meant to last, to always point the way, Here Lies Mary Beloved of George ... and everyone would know, there was Mary, there she was, and – lucky her – she had been beloved. But where were you? Your blessed stone had been set, you were beloved too – but who could know that, since the words were spirited away ... We saw no one that first time, felt we were dreaming too, as you didn’t seem to be there – somehow lost, amongst the lonely headstones of the long since dead. The second time we saw disturbed earth, new graves appearing, fresh flowers laid. The third time the vicar showed up, sacred gardener, muddy and penitent, amen. We decided on a new stone. But once they were digging to set it, like archaeologists amongst the angels and the flowers, they hit upon something hard – the artefact – sunken down in its flowerbed and entered into a pact of hiding the past, as you always did, and the terrible warstruck things in it, a shadow reluctant to bring too much reality into the light. After much discussion, the man with two gravestones, thirty years apart, would share his signpost and the shiny, proud, Portland stone took precedence, standing for the two of you; husband and wife, reunited in death. The older of the two stones rides around in the car with us now, a grumbling presence, commentating on the driving, and crashing around in the foot well, side to side as we sit out the corners – until someone with the strength to do it can move the artefact again, perhaps to sit quietly in the garden by the birdbath or under the twisting grapevines waiting to ripen. Sent Tiny Stars from the Sea Echinocardium cordatum (sea potato / heart urchin) 00:00 / 24:05:16 A kick of spines like baby hedgehog once graced this brittle shell a heart shaped porcelain see-light-through star-marked path, a shape I mistook for crabwise, I thought it was a myth, strange albino no-coloured pincer mover decorated by a master etcher who dealt out constellations by the dozen, someone who wandered in starfish shaped dreams and drifted through the sand dunes left half-buried at the whim of breezes and joined the blue and flowers jellies of by-the-wind sailors. I exhumed the fragile white star-marked shell and recognised the constellation, sea-potato. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb