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

Hear poet Courtenay Schembri Gray read poems for wave 13 of literary poetry journal iamb. Courtenay Schembri Gray wave 13 spring 2023 back next the poet Born and raised in the North of England, Courtenay Schembri Gray reared her head as a budding poet with a penchant for the macabre. Since finding kinship in the rich verse of Sylvia Plath, Courtenay has amassed a large amount of publishing credits. Her poetry collection, The Maggot on Maple Street , was published in 2023. the poems Charlie 00:00 / 01:18 His stubby fingers grope me, and I scream only air. I am a huntress, yet I despise the taste of flesh and blood. With his half-dead slant, the man buries my despair. Muddy waters slough the sin off my back while I violate my pear. Daddy’s belt loops around schoolboy errors, threatening to flood. His stubby fingers grope me, and I scream only air. Upon the eve of moonstruck men, I open my cervical lair. You heave rare meat onto the table, harder than you should. I am a huntress, yet I despise the taste of flesh and blood. You swaddle her like a baby, leaving only shoes for her to wear. When we first met, I don’t think you understood. His fingers grope me, and I scream only air. We stand on porcelain cracks, silent, with nothing to declare Somehow, despite it all, you found me like an earring stud. I am a huntress, yet I despise the taste of flesh and blood. You have turned me into a woman, but I will not share. Let’s leave the world with a gift, richer than others would. His fingers grope me, and I scream only air. I am a huntress, yet I despise the taste of flesh and blood. June Bug 00:00 / 01:19 With Bambi eyes all aflutter, I drink from the well of men. A paper lantern hangs from every bloody coat hanger. Under the cloak of 6 am, I am to be born again. Lost in a June bug cocktail, I fall for a Parisienne. He bought me roses, and I threw them in anger. With Bambi eyes all aflutter, I drink from the well of men. You know, I think about you every now and then. For a red-blooded man, you were placid in manner. Under the cloak of 6 am, I am to be born again. To my dirty photographs, you would say très bien . Rubbing coconut rum into skin, I would yammer. With Bambi eyes all aflutter, I drink from the well of men. Darling, I need you like I need goddamn medicine. Inside a chrysalis, I preach grief-stricken slander. Under the cloak of 6 am, I am to be born again. You left me with echoes of Non, je ne regrette rien . With starry thighs and coal miner skies, I languor. With Bambi eyes all aflutter, I drink from the well of men. Under the cloak of 6 am, I am to be born again. The Maggot on Maple Street 00:00 / 00:55 Shaken from my sleep by yellow taxi dreams; toothpaste is my cork, stopping the wine from sloshing around the great caboose that is I, way off the wagon, face down in the sludge. Moontime butter shoots me in the eye, hot syrup; that sticky pudding, fat with guilt and irony. O’ how I fabricate the lowest despair, the deadliest joy, finer than lace, as impure as rendition. Swear me a fishwife, an earwig, a flotsam woodlouse with but a cube of cheese to stay afloat. I must get back to the desk, to the coffee rings and grassy knolls. To the looking glass, without delay. Publishing credits Charlie: The Book of Korinethians (Pink Plastic Press) June Bug: Idle Ink (March 2022) The Maggot on Maple Street: Roi Fainéant Press (Oct 2022)

Hear poet Sarah Fletcher read poems for wave 1 of literary poetry journal iamb. Sarah Fletcher wave 1 winter 2020 back next the poet Sarah Fletcher is an American-British poet whose poems have appeared in The White Review, The Rialto and Poetry London. Her most recent pamphlet, Typhoid August was published in 2018 by The Poetry Business. She is currently working on the full-length collection, PLUS ULTRA. the poems Capitulation 00:00 / 01:42 i. Feigning the playfulness of Mother-May-I he asks for a days-of-the-cane throwback I refuse Back then I tendered my touch more dearly I lived in his kiss for so long I was born in it Now anechoic and him a guerrillista of nettles and wit I can give him what he came for and what he now resists ii. The decapitated photograph of a torso Sexless in the high contrast tender in the anonymous lust-trade is constant as static to my mind like my friend describing the sting her boyfriend draws from her heels tied and does she feel like a present as he tightens the ribbons so tell me what is your luxury and who delivers it iii. All the milkmaids inconsequential as achoo have jostled into wakefulness at his arrival they are burning their hems legs rising like the vim of popped champagne he says Thank You but I did not mean to revive him you fucking dirty pigeon of a man The Garden of Love’s Sleep After Messian’s Turangalila 00:00 / 02:48 Dinner is poured Then: his hand on mine — Instead of sensation I receive The dream Of two green peacocks Pouring smooth grails of touch Each across the other Necks arched in extravagant, Romantic love. * Insomnia swells a congealing city Congests each head with phrases: "A horse called Horus or just Birdy” “A wine press named War on Earth”: Those haute couture contraptions from the ancién French regime * Áwake Who is with me? Whó Will unhook The colours’ ruffles from sunrise Each by each? When we talk about Manifestos I feel white Doves sprung from a Magician’s Sleeves on sleeves Release In this state And at this event * On open caboose On train to Vladivostok Mosquitoes are breeding quickly in the dark Clouds’ petticoats uncross Cross again Flashing the sun from which we cannot hide Which catches us Spoiled and sticky Like Love’s Sunday * The emperor’s clothes are very beautiful and they Are very real I remember them like the song That climbs back to me in snatches: Harbouring The antiseptic beauty ` Harpooning the August moon Haranguing the something something something Noon * Have we slept? I’ve found us Flabberghastly Clean and glamorose Like the courtesan who appears here And all other places in a new state age dress civility Having forgot the crashing sound of a beating door The stench of a night closing in Endarkening O Carrion! * At last Something beautiful arrives! The equal weightéd phrase That leaves your mouth and the sky At the same time The Judgment 00:00 / 01:37 ‘It’s not supposed to be like that’ he said and then accused me of embellishing it all. But I swore I told him nothing more or less than how it really felt. ‘Embellishing’s for dresses’ I explained, holding my ground. ‘Dresses,’ he repeated, looking down, ‘then what are you?’ I told him how I felt like rotting fruit, which is to say too sticky and browned-over at the edges; how my lips became a pith to be peeled off. And how we moved like we were drowning, but in the way a horse might drown, which is to say, showing resistance. Which is to say, still looking for some ground, some anything, something to stand on and start galloping. He sighed, and said that I sounded all wrong; it should be different, that with him, it would be different. ‘How’s it supposed to feel then, sir?’ I asked. He smirked and pulled me in, administering the Bible-black conviction of his kiss, the hands-in-hair pulp of his love. I felt my body pull; my legs go weightless once again. He whispered in my ear ‘like this.’ Publishing credits The Judgment: The Rialto Capitulation: Typhoid August (The Poetry Business) The Garden of Love’s Sleep: The White Review (Issue 26)

Hear poet Andy Nuttall read poems for wave 6 of literary poetry journal iamb. Andy Nuttall wave 6 summer 2021 back next the poet Andy Nuttall hails from Lancashire and is now settled in the North East of England where he's a social worker. A late bloomer (his first published poem appeared in Acumen in September 2020), he lives with Susan and pup Fraser. Andy intends to use all the remaining ink in his pen to write many more poems around diverse themes. the poems The Baker of Idlib 00:00 / 00:40 In Idlib Province a small knot of dough Has risen slowly to its oven spring, Delicately chambered and crusted gold. This day they will again have bread to break Together in the village and the children Who are left to play in the rubble Of their lives will savour a morsel of comfort. What will we give them next to dream of, I wonder? Perhaps the spot where blood smears stone And a man – a baker – lies dying, still proving himself. Cartimandua 00:00 / 01:21 Down the long colonnade of limes The plumed galea of centuries Swept by in martial lines, Forty miles south of Arbeia The great fort of the Arabs Where the wall meets the sea and sky. At Pons Teys , or the crossing ford, The Asturian cavalry paused, Surveyed the coursing water and led Their sandalled ponies through the shallows. Stood by the weathered soldiers Clasped their woollen cloaks a little closer, Unknowing why like loosened stones They had been flung so hard and far Into this northern frigidarium . In the northlands of Brigantes; Old realm of Cartimandua: Regina, loyal subject of Rome; Cunning vixen; self-indulgent snake And, just for good measure, That treacherous Celtic bitch. Tacitus spat her name through curled, Orator’s lips two millennia ago. To the victor echo the spoils; To the literate, as always, the last word. Iron 00:00 / 01:48 She makes her daily rounds for daily bread As the turning world takes up us all In its vast and intricate continuance. Labour has become for her the beginning And the end of all that is worth doing. Life after all is habit forming. She might be otherwise were it not. Were it not for the iron of her control Creasing back some semblance of order And form her determination might falter. Enter a bright, long-limbed, precocious boy, Flooding her world with effervescent joy, His treasure grows as he does notching Up the door frame, his worth accumulating. Lost to time the years work free of her raw hands Like a child’s spinning-top set loose. Gone the glee of that colour and movement, Of the youthful race run rapid to white water And where it slows to a stop in a still pool Much is undone. His milky adolescence Has thickened, curdled and gone sour. Doors open and close. Yard leaves scurry. She is stooped now in the galley kitchen, Sifting through a pile of strangers’ washing, Wishing for the weight of something nameless In her head to shift, to be set right: His appearing quite unexpectedly In time for supper, smiling down on her As fresh as the daffodils in her cut-glass vase, Each yellowing heart wrung out for him. Publishing credits The Baker of Idlib: Acumen (Issue 98) Cartimandua / Iron: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Leanne Moden read poems for wave 12 of literary poetry journal iamb. Leanne Moden wave 12 winter 2022 back next the poet Leanne Moden is a poet, performer and educator based in Nottingham, UK. She's performed at WOMAD, Sofar Sounds, Bestival on the Isle of Wight, the Fourth Wave Feminist Festival, Trinity College Cambridge, and the TEDx WOMEN event at University College London. Leanne was a semi-finalist at the BBC Edinburgh Fringe Slam 2018, and a national finalist at both the Hammer and Tongue Poetry Slam in 2016 and the Camden Roundhouse Slam in 2014. She took her first solo show, Skip, Skip, Skip , to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2019, and in 2020 published her second poetry pamphlet, Get Over Yourself . the poems Becalmed A Golden Shovel after Mary Oliver 00:00 / 01:50 I wanted to be the kind of someone who could always fix things. I clung to my competency like hull-side barnacles. To be loved, you must be good enough and I was, once. Back when the sight of the sea still gave me chills. Now, I don’t know what will become of me. I am a storm-sunk schooner, rigging unravelling. I am a boatyard ransacked by vandals, and I can’t find the box where I stored my secrets. I am so full of nothings; regretful ghostly half-recollections. Fearful of everything I can no longer do. Forgetting is a kind of darkness, a mist that thickens slowly, by degrees. It is so much harder to navigate when the stars are extinguished. It took so long to realise what was happening to me; on the journeys between the kettle and the sofa, years passed. Now, I am left alone to make catalogues of the missing parts. Understand this: there is no way that I can know what is absent. The blank space is this unmarked page in my logbook. A fog too heavy to ever lift again. If I was still a sailing man then maybe I could endure this forecast as a storm passing. But today, it feels more like penance than a gift. Creation with an Axe 00:00 / 01:00 A blazing, sanguinary wound of light, this reddish star – our sun – a brutal breach. The viscera of moonlight bleeds through night and stains the sky with triumphs out of reach. While shoulder blade tectonics move beneath the sinew soil of slowly shifting dunes, Creation swings its axe and grinds its teeth and softly hums an ever-changing tune. A god can give their body to the earth, their bones transferred to sediment and scree. A violent world demands a violent birth; the axe must bite the bark to fell the tree. A god can give their body to the earth; a violent world demands a violent birth. Humanity 00:00 / 01:00 This is humanity: sit back and let everything fall apart. It is ridiculous to assume we would want to help people we don’t even know. We will go out of our way to seal ourselves off from our problems. We will never think about others before ourselves. We can’t contemplate the future so we’ve stopped trying. We can’t imagine a world where there is hope. There is hope. We can’t imagine a world where we’ve stopped trying. We can’t contemplate the future so think about others before ourselves. We will never seal ourselves off from our problems. We will go out of our way to help people we don’t even know. It is ridiculous to assume we would want to sit back and let everything fall apart. This is humanity. Publishing credits Creation with an Axe: Hecate Literary Magazine (Issue 1) Becalmed: Dear Reader Humanity: Dreich (Season Three, No. 12) Author photo: © Lizzy Doe

Hear poet Ilisha Thiru Purcell read poems for wave 17 of literary poetry journal iamb. Ilisha Thiru Purcell wave 17 spring 2024 back next the poet Ilisha Thiru Purcell is a poet from Newcastle upon Tyne. She is one of the three poets in the inaugural Poets of Colour Incubator (2023/4) and was a Young Creative Associate with New Writing North. Ilisha performed at the 2023 Newcastle Poetry Festival and her work has appeared in publications such as Butcher’s Dog and Bi+ Lines Anthology and she was shortlisted for Nine Arches Primers Volume Seven. She is part of the group Brown Girls Write. the poems Coast | 00:00 / 00:51 I stand before the north sea and think that a coast | is a lie. I look for the definitive | separating the sea from the shore, water from land, wet from dry. Where is the cartoon | you see in children’s books dividing the yellow from the blue? I search for a | or _ or even a ---- telling us what is ours and theirs, but all there is is negotiation between the land and the sea. Haven’t you seen a chunk of cliff plunge into the sea toes pointed? Or how the water takes larger chunks out of the sand, ignoring the white |s on a map saying stay ? Germination 00:00 / 01:05 My shadow strikes out from my body/ as if I am announcing that now is the time the time is now/ I have been kept in time and now I am the keeper of it/ Meeting my own gaze/ I expand like the lungs of the city I rest my feet upon/ I smile a wry smile/ a “you can’t even imagine” smile/ A man on a child’s bike asked me where I got it from/ this crescent of grapefruit flesh/ and I replied my mother/ My mum/ who shines brightest in a sea of saris/ who circles my thumb with her forefinger/ like a planet in orbit/ My mum/ dressed in black, absorbing everything, is everything/ a river running to and from everything/ If these images could talk they would tell you that there is more than one way to pray/ more than one way to bless a journey/ Dust to Dawn 00:00 / 00:37 The last night I spent alone I couldn’t remember ever seeing daylight and all that came from my mouth was dust. This time I beat back the thoughts like dust off a rug, sank into this new shade of alone. I found within myself a light. Soon I will not need lamplight to protect me from the parts of my mind that have collected dust, I will be content and unafraid alone. Only alone can I watch the dust of my past dance in dawn’s light. Publishing credits Coast |: Bi+ Lines – An Anthology of Contemporary Bi+ Poets (Fourteen Poems) Germination: Sanctuary – Brown Girls Write Anthology (New Writing North) Dust to Dawn: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Glenn Barker read poems for wave 25 of literary poetry journal iamb. Glenn Barker wave 25 spring 2026 back next the poet Nominated for The Pushcart Prize, poet and reviewer Glenn Barker has had work in Fevers of the Mind , Dreich , The Heron Clan , 60 Odd Poets , Folkheart Press , The Fig Tree , The Starbeck Orion , Black Bough Poetry and Broken Spine Arts . He likes to write in a dance of language and immersive imagery, delving into the ambiguities of earthly life. As a reviewer, Glenn's attracted by poets whose work takes him deep into their own emotional reflections. the poems Imagine Yourself a Body of Water 00:00 / 01:03 that you might believe the rain was yours to gain that you could stop the wind and still it for a few moments, draw a flat calm over your surface, though ripples disturb its peace. You know it to be impossible yet you know how to dream and sense the water’s motion, telling you that all things hold a truth however fleeting, a sudden sharpness of attention in the gift of ciphers, like the vectors of migrating geese above, or the jackdaws nesting in your chimney. Fame, ubiquity, chance and fate are the teeth of your mortal ratchet, holding you prisoner by your own knots of reality and science, teasing the unblemished stream that still runs through your own unfathomable body of water. A Single Silk Thread 00:00 / 01:16 There’s freedom in your vision and movement, while Pandora holds the lid over her remaining good spirit. It’s a faith more than understanding that passes between you and me, connecting our life cords into one, each of us a single silk thread that braids the rope carrying our Fallen weight. Cassandra only sees your final fate, not what happens next, and the tarot, crystal ball, tea leaf and cloudscape are only the money tree chicanery of sea-front sibyls, telling you they know how and where the rain will fall. Listen out too for the enchantress who wants to bargain for your confidence and sell you an empty promise, from her tomes of cliff-edge incantations and spell books of absolute certainty. Nurture and sustain your life cords, feel them still secure around you and safe against your uncertain self, as long as you will it so. Just Say No 00:00 / 01:04 Let’s say that someone offers you the power of a god; would you want to swap your dreams for theirs. They might be more virtuous than mine, or sweat you in the night terrors of Victorian Whitby gothic, the ills of your true nature disclosed. Would you want my nightmares too? But we are not gods, and know the rainbow’s crock of gold passes through your hands, just as easily as your tooth faerie prizes and lottery winnings. Your dreams will always cast you a tide of enigmas, soaked in the ambiguity of Pythian prophecies that rarely resolve to anything in the morning. If you discern something tangible, be ready for the 10,000 hours practice to get you there, with perfection that last impossible one percent. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Perry Gasteiger read poems for wave 21 of literary poetry journal iamb. Perry Gasteiger wave 21 spring 2025 back next the poet Perry Gasteiger is a Manchester-based Canadian whose poetry is often described as visceral, haunting, and uncomfortable. Perry’s work looks at birth, growth, and death through different lenses to recast the mundane as extraordinary and, quite often, grotesque. Most recently, Perry collaborated with Canadian visual artist Rebecca Payne to publish a collaborative experimental book, Bruising Bone: life in bloom with Fifth Wheel Press in 2023, and hopes to do more collaborative, multi-disciplinary work in the future. the poems brick by brick 00:00 / 01:16 You know, most of us never asked to be a part of history and to be honest it was pretty boring work anyways: brick by brick by brick to get your cheque to buy the bread to feed the kids and who has two kids these days? In this economy! And that's how you make history: brick by brick by brick until your hands bleed and your nails crack and the cement hardens into the whorls of your fingertips and you think this would be the perfect time to rob a bank because there wouldn't even be any fingerprints left to leave. That's history in the making for you: brick by brick by brick until you're sat on the tallest chimney in the western hemisphere looking down on the earth and you're thinking, you know I bet god doesn't have fingerprints either and that's when the wind gusts and the present shivers beneath you and you're thinking you could maybe definitely stick a landing from 1,250 feet in the air if it came to it and pretty soon all there is between you and earth is skin dug into brick until it fuses, and when it's over and they peel you off the lips of history the pads of your fingers tear from your hands and believe me when I tell you: most of us never asked to be there. Inspired by the superstack in my hometown of Sudbury, Ontario, and a freak tornado that stranded workers at the top – just before they completed it. Leftovers 00:00 / 01:18 I eat leftovers on the day after my mother’s funeral. I eat them cold from the dish, pull plastic wrap back and dig in with my hands, tomato sauce and mashed potatoes crusting under my fingernails. What is left of a person once they’ve closed the lid on red lips in a bloodless face displayed for the sympathy of the living? A feeling, an inkling that your flesh and bones don’t quite add up, that you are something less than whole. Songs are sung for mourning ears as the dead lay deaf and happy while people cry into napkins and paper plates full of lasagna and warm gravy — the horizon screams as the sun sets her hair on fire and we let ourselves fall apart. In the bloody dawn of waking, I collect pieces left behind and try to fit them where you used to sit; but the pieces are still sharp, not yet worn to sea glass with our tears and I find myself back on the kitchen floor, trying to inhale your leftovers. two for joy 00:00 / 00:55 and when I came home I did not know how to love a thing which did not cut me down at the knees, did not know I was wandering streets lined with bitter ghosts, littered with bodies I used to wear, praying to the pavement, please swallow me, take me back where I belong , did not know what it was to slip into the warmth of place, to run my hands along the rough of red brick and press my face to broken stones and taste the earth, when I came home the sky opened up in proud baptism, drenched me in tears and I opened my mouth, let the rain fill me, watched the rot of me wash away, let myself die one last time, and woke finally to the cries of the magpies Publishing credits brick by brick: exclusive first publication by iamb Leftovers: Natterlogue (work by Natter Bolton night performers, 2023) two for joy: Ey Up Again (Written Off Publishing)