Hear poet Simon Middleton read poems for wave 10 of literary poetry journal iamb. Simon Middleton wave 10 summer 2022 back next the poet Simon Middleton lives in Dorset with his wife and small children. His writing has appeared in Envoi, IOTA, The Cadaverine, Firewords Quarterly and The Best New British and Irish Poets 2017 . His poetry has been shortlisted for The White Review's Poets Prize 2022 and The Magma Open Pamphlet Competition 2020. Simon's work was also highly commended in the Winchester Poetry Prize 2020, and has earned him the 2018 Bridport Prize's Dorset Award. the poems Daedalus III 00:00 / 01:18 The parameters of our prenatal world are governed by the gospel of The Pregnancy Bible where life is measured in weeks and foodstuff. (I feel uneasy likening embryos to food. Like Saturn devouring his children.) Still, Kate marks each new seven-day cycle with a new object of comparison: from the first, tentative days as a poppy seed to a kidney bean, from fig to peapod to lemon. It challenges my knowledge of fruit and vegetables. I was scuppered at week ten, when the baby was the size of a kumquat. The weekly shop has become a scientific exploration where the grocery aisle spans an installation of life. The Bible says, 'Fully formed, head to heel, baby will be the size of a small pumpkin.' Near term, I find myself standing absently at supermarket shelving, head tilted, imagining bodily features on a melon. Space Was a Material 00:00 / 02:18 Next time we see him, he is a still-life arranged in a plastic box. A Special Care Nurse leads us like a guide at a museum, where we stand, examining the thin rise and fall of his back. We stand as we did once in Hepworth’s studio, natural light alive against whitewash walls, our focus centred on a table with a plinth that held the polished form of an ‘Infant’. Remember how little air there was? How the whole fabric of our lives seemed to fray then re-thread, so the room felt pliant? And how, standing before ‘Three Forms’, we were told, For Hepworth, space was a material, distance a quality – as much a part of the composition. In the ward, machines draw his life on a screen in shallow peaks, as he lies beneath a knitted sheet. Remember how little air there was in Hepworth’s room? Seeing the child she shaped, knowing ours was forming in the dark of your womb. Was that the texture of longing? Or do we feel that now? Seeing his half-strapped face. The ventilator trunk. The scalp crowned with gingering blood. The newness of his body mapped by wires. Remember how the air seemed to cement, suddenly? As we found our hands parting a break in the air, venturing a terrified palm inside to trace the frightening space above his tiny form, afraid to cup a part of it, in fear we may dent the fontanelles, disrupt the shallow concertina of his lungs. Is this where we are now? Feeling the material of our lives tighten around us, as we wheel him in a tank through the world’s corridors. Isolette 00:00 / 01:13 Thank you for holding him while we can’t, for keeping him safe inside your little frame, for the solace in knowing, clear plastic crib, that at the end of a long white corridor, you exist to prevent his life from faltering, that an object of such sadness, with a most beautiful name, is there, whirring quietly like an undertide, like a holy mother, blessed altruist. Let’s praise these small mercies, despite their slightness: he’s warm, at least, we can still see him through your transparent walls, in your crystallising brightness, and we can pray the grey-lilac of his newborn form will settle, that his knotted pulse can harden, that the prone lightness of his body will brace. Thank you, small plastic island, for bringing him back. Publishing credits Daedalus III: IOTA (Issue 98 – 'Bodies') Space Was a Material: The Bridport Prize Anthology 2018 (Winner of the Dorset Award 2018) Isolette: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Stephanie Clare Smith read poems for wave 13 of literary poetry journal iamb. Stephanie Clare Smith wave 13 spring 2023 back next the poet Stephanie Clare Smith is a native of New Orleans, Louisiana, whose forthcoming lyric memoir, Everywhere the Undrowned , will be published in spring 2024 by the University of North Carolina Press. Stephanie's poetry and essays have been published in various journals including Bellevue Literary Review and Xavier Review . She currently lives in North Carolina where she's a social worker and mediator for families in crisis. the poems Small 00:00 / 01:18 Sleep is my friend, I tell myself. I don’t believe myself. I need more friends. What I have is Joni Mitchell songs stuck in my head. I really don’t know love at all. I make shapes with my body under the covers as though I am falling from a plane in the sky – a fetus, a windmill, a steak knife. Which shape survives a long-distance drop? The Times said a fetus – survivors fall small. In the morning, I wake like a clock. A chopper’s overhead beating the air. But this is not Nam or Afghanistan. The radio reports cops up above. A man dumped a woman out of his truck onto the avenue that feeds the heart of the city. Or else she jumped to escape the not-Nam/Afghanistan war in that truck. He fled on foot when the chopper hovered over. All day he’s at large like a storm in the sky. All day she’s out cold in a hospital wing. I feel all small; how she jumped or was dumped in the shape of log that rolled across the road that feeds the heart of the city. When a Horse Smells the End is Near 00:00 / 00:28 nostrils flare fist wide eyes shoot sideways halfway white a bad blows up bigger there nothing left to blind the view a storm stares through a round black sky a moon cut up a crack across the back of night and gallop gone to the edge foul the way it’s over Whereabouts 00:00 / 01:14 I dream I’ve gone missing. Wake up still here in this adopted state, out of place, nothing new. I throw back the comforter, count ten friends from home, lost or gone. Mostly gone. Mostly dope. They follow me to the sink like prayers. I cup my hands underwater. Wash my face, dress up my past, miss ten laughs. I drive to work, clip on my name. Be here for now. If I didn’t stay, if I’d kept on driving, someone here would call the cops, at least by Thursday. But it’s not a crime to just get gone. All I’d take with me is mine, low-key in my little car. I’d drive to other towns, all gone grey. Adopt every state. Take on new names. Hope, Mercy, maybe Shame. Maybe Eleven. The ten gone missing ride along with me and sing our songs. I stay put for now, feed feral cats, work overtime, eat out on Fridays. My little not-disappearing acts. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Giovanna MacKenna read poems for wave 7 of literary poetry journal iamb. Giovanna MacKenna wave 7 autumn 2021 back next the poet Giovanna MacKenna can be found looking at the black bits of life and finding ways to make them shine. Her work has been published by Nine Pens , Robida , Abridged , SouthChild Lit , Bear Creek Gazette , Brag , Tether’s End and The Speculative Book 2021. She can also be heard on the Eat the Storms poetry podcast . Giovanna is currently working with The Museum of Loss and Renewal Publishing on her debut collection. the poems Someone else’s ending 00:00 / 01:40 My father’s ending came first. It was surprising to him, to me. He saw it there, immovable before him as if all other life had been replaced by a gaping chasm of death, bleeding across his once-expected future. I kicked and screamed and wept and stabbed at it. He stepped calmly, readily, into its black, silent embrace. My mother’s ending was postponed, delayed by her flaming energy. She was affronted by death’s early arrival; the decade she had counted on, reduced to months. She was not pleased. Her ending nearly broke my life. She bare-knuckled her way to an extra year denied her ending, at the end clawed back a scrap of living from death’s sure hands. My mother stole the minutes, hours, days. She made death wait and wait and wait until with every slowing beat each failing organ an affront she keened for her life as it left her. Stranger 00:00 / 01:17 After your funeral, in a house weighted with people you had known and loved and loathed, I stood, under the narrow attic stairs and turned the pages of the book I’d made. The book with photos that showed you grow from bold-eyed infant immigrant, to blazing adulthood to crochet-wrapped and smiling in the hospice garden. Visitors flowed around me, bitter coffee and tiny meringue clouds flavouring their talk, easing discomforts. A woman I didn’t know hesitated as she passed. I grasped her hand, pressed pen to palm and asked, Will you write about my mother? Later, when there was nothing left but dirty plates and echoing rooms, I found the stranger’s words for you: She took me in. She taught me how to make an omelette, so I would not go hungry. hidden/object 00:00 / 01:07 It is the thing you find at the back of a drawer when clearing out your mother’s house. It is the object nestled in the dusty, fly-corpsed grey of a wooden corner amid layers of old receipts, rubber bands, dry pens and keys that have lost their doors. There it is, silent crouching, stealthy, the one small thing which at first glance, has no form other than its mystery. It is the fragment you salvage, dust off, polish slowly with the corner of her old blue cardigan. It is the thing you hold to your breast as you sink down onto the pins of your grief. Publishing credits Someone else's ending: exclusive first publication by iamb Stranger: Tether's End Magazine (Issue 1) Hidden/object: Things to Do with Love (Dreich Themes)

Hear poet Marc Alan Di Martino read poems for wave 19 of literary poetry journal iamb. Marc Alan Di Martino wave 19 autumn 2024 back next the poet Marc Alan Di Martino is the author of Love Poem with Pomegranate , Still Life with City and Unburial . His poems and translations from Italian can be found in Bad Lilies , Autumn Sky , Rattle and several other journals and anthologies. Marc is also the author of Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems of Mario dell'Arco – the first English-language translation of the Romanesco poet’s work. Currently a reader for The Baltimore Review , Marc lives in Italy. the poems Runaway 00:00 / 04:23 My mother is sitting alone on a park bench in Villa Borghese, eating a sandwich. It isn’t an easy thing to find a sandwich in Rome in 1966. She's had to root out the Bar degli Americani on Via Veneto, near the Embassy, in order to find ham on white bread. No mayonnaise. Imagine that: a Jewish girl eating a ham sandwich on a park bench in Rome with no mayo. What's she doing there, so far from home? And where is home, anyway? Her parents’ home in Brookline, Massachusetts? That isn’t home. Not anymore. She ran away from that home and came to Rome via Paris via San Francisco. Anywhere but at the shabbos table with that tyrant her mother and her ineffectual father. A ham sandwich on a park bench is better than that, she says to herself as a dapper man appears dressed in a smart black suit. She notices... his teeth. Naively, she thinks he might be Marcello Mastroianni, her singular destiny to meet a movie star, fall in love and become his wife. Live happily ever after. The fantasies that run through a young woman’s head. This man is not Eddie Fisher. Nice Jewish boy. Dungaree Doll. This man is a smooth-talker. He wants to sell her something. Realizing she's American, he begins speaking in broken schoolboy English. He turns on the charm, and she is charmed. What is he selling? Wine—what else? You're in Italy, poor girl, eating a sandwich, all alone. He overwhelms her, makes her feel like Audrey Hepburn. She, in turn, is an easy target. Not like Italian women. To get into their pants you have to go through their families. He knows. He has two sisters. He’s always beating up guys in his neighborhood for putting their hands on them. He’s got a reputation. But everyone knows American women are unmoored. Why else do they come here? To get into trouble. To meet a Casanova. To have what's called a ‘fling’. (He learned that word in a movie.) Then they go back home and get married to a Rock Hudson or a John Wayne, have two kids and two cars and pursue their dreams of happiness. Europeans have history, Americans have dreams. That seems to him a profound insight. My mother crinkles the cellophane into a ball, rolls it in her palm, brushes the crumbs from her skirt. He looks at her knees, the skin boldly exposed, wonders what’s beyond them. She isn’t thin, he thinks, as he absorbs her body with his eyes. He isn’t subtle. You don’t need to be in 1966. All you need to have is charm, and he has excellent charm. She decides in that moment she will go anywhere with this man. She'll do anything he asks. She has nothing to lose, no one waiting for her on the other side of the ocean, no Eddie Fisher. Her brother is married to a German. Her brother the magician, who disappeared into a German woman and never came out. How she would like to disappear into this man, fall into the black hole of him, learn to curse her own parents in his tongue, allow the sensual inflections of Italian to evict the Yiddish gutturals lodged in her throat like fish bones. How she would like like to learn to trill her Rs, double her consonants, put a crucifix around her neck for the sheer pleasure of seeing her mother’s dumbstruck punim , bury her alive with Roman invective: li mortacci tua —fuck your dead ancestors—tear the crucifix off and flush it down the toilet, having exhausted its usefulness. She smooths her skirt, a little flushed. Cartography 00:00 / 00:28 There are maps of knowing and unknowing. Seven thousand species of bird locked in a glass cabinet, brightly colored males & unpretentious females. Almost every living thing on Earth has already perished. My daughter carries a dog-eared copy of Maus in her backpack. I have questions. She has questions. Arboreal 00:00 / 01:00 Leaf’s gold lies guttered, silhouetted to concrete: battle-borne, world-wounded, crenulated by a thousand woes, tossed and torn by turning winds & war-waging weather, stampeded, flattened, distilled into a constellation of shattered veins. Again merciless rains pour down, pound it into mud, in- to less than nothing- ness. It’s spun face down under a new dawn unlacing waterlogged gold to tattered filaments mutated, transformed by bare bludgeoning blows sky clear now crabshell-blue-to- sapphire. Sad fire leaks from lesions, spreads its net over the crackling street shedding evaporate mist of holy hell water, peeling off pavement, this ghastly arboreal face. Publishing credits Runaway: Baltimore Review (Spring 2019) Cartography: Orange Blossom Review (Issue 10) Arboreal: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Gill Macdonald read poems for wave 24 of literary poetry journal iamb. Gill Macdonald wave 24 winter 2025 back next the poet Gill Macdonald has enjoyed a diverse and wide-ranging career. Selling shoes, cleaning houses, painting murals, then on to film editing: first for documentaries, then commercials, then feature films – the most famous of which was Kubrick's The Shining , which Gill helped edit when the editor was taken ill. Poetry has long been a love of hers, so she was thrilled to have her poem Beech Wood longlisted in The Poetry Society's National Poetry Competition in 2024. More recently, she was a 2025 runner-up in the Ver Poets Ten-liners Competition. Gill's currently at work on a pamphlet, with her sights set on her debut collection. the poems Physog 00:00 / 02:20 I’ve missed your fine and lovely fun and frubtious fickle fulsome pretty witty smooth and hairy downright scary wrinkly wise and dutiful beautiful ugly smugly pimpled dimpled weird and wonderful mugs your fizzogs boat races and faces I’ve missed smiling blushing blanking frowning kissing scowling grinning and growling lips lined and luscious meaty and peachy rose red eat me or taut as twine pursed and rehearsed pining and prissy smiley wily Botoxed and refined And eyes glittery glassy angry and arty doe eyes duck eyes don’t give a f*ck eyes eyes that are troubled and muddy as puddles or shiny as stars translucent as bubbles jeepers creepers beady little peepers curious little sneakers sleepy and sly And noses shaped like hoses pink as roses fat as toeses honkers conks snubbed and sniffy proud as a prow haughty and whiffy hawkish shiny aquiline and fine or toffee nosed and up in the air and sprouting hairs like nobody cares And lugholes shell likes neatly curled or fearsome flappers proudly unfurled ears all two of them like satellite dishes filtering sounds and words and wishes Faces on screens we’re all there to be seen but a screen cannot kiss or hug or touch like the skin we’re in that we love so much More mobile than any phone more expressive and impressive than any Facebook Twitter or Instagram post influencer or virtual host that connection that spark in your eyes it’s life it’s living it’s being alive Real faces like weather are changeable unrearrangeable as infinite as stars in variety and form despite fashion and fakery they defy the norm fickle fantastic flawless warts an all nothing is as marvellous as you and I've missed you oh I have and I do Ask the Sky 00:00 / 01:41 Now I know one or two random things like the age of a turtle by counting its rings I know how to chase the wind with a kite and that hush when snow falls like magic in the night I know the sweet smell of a new baby’s head and the lazy warmth of a rumpled bed I know jazz and Jacuzzis how to grow jasmine make smoothies but when it comes to the how the what and the why you might as well ask the birds and the sky for if life is a story written in sand to be swept away by an invisible hand and love a rainbow made from wishes and sighs don’t ask me how many tears we must cry to keep it blazing – ask the sky I know quantum entanglement is not a form of strife and that 23 genomes make up the book of life I know about men with moon in their eyes warm hands cold hearts and kisses and lies I know the futility of hate and greed and the shattered lives of the helpless in need but if you’re looking for answers the how the what the why don’t ask me ask the birds ask the trees ask the sky I know about kindness and love you can’t fake friendship wine and laughter and making mistakes music and dancing sunshine and romancing Karma charisma and curry and cake I know the silent swoop of the barn owl’s ghostly wings all these and so many many diverse things but when it comes to the how the what and the why ask the birds ask the trees ask the sky not I Beech Wood 00:00 / 01:10 There’s only so much you can fit into the cabinet of days and navigating work traffic unforeseen delays time at last for a walk in the woods the whisper of winter is already in the air but summer still has unfinished business that final dazzling display the russet red yellow and pink colours of decay who but a tree could make dying so beautiful and rustling through the fallen leaves you leave the path find yourself drawn into a small wood a canopy of golden browns branches like crowns blotting out cloud and crowd and soft underfoot living earth not tarmac the dog snuffling like a truffle hunter in the leaf litter and as if the trees have taken you by the hand all those beehive thoughts melt away just the silence the in and out breathe the tall grey trees their roots and rhythms and mellowing leaves and you’re off the lead at last Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Devon Marsh read poems for wave 7 of literary poetry journal iamb. Devon Marsh wave 7 autumn 2021 back next the poet Since serving as a pilot in the US Navy before embarking on a career in banking, Devon Marsh has had his poems and essays published by The Lake , Poydras Review , Black Bough Poetry , Split Rock Review and River Mouth Review , and has been featured on periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics . Devon lives in the North Carolina piedmont, and is currently searching for a good home for his first full-length poetry collection. the poems Driftwood – Olympic Peninsula 00:00 / 01:24 Children throw driftwood into the sea, rebuking the wood’s audacity. Limbs and trunks lie ashore, bone-like rather than a severed part of forest. Yet the skeleton-white logs pay homage to shadow-black forms. Trees above wave-carved cliffs oversee the beach. Tall firs look ahead. The firs turn from the ocean, put breath into the sky. They look back and think again. Children cast pieces of trees to withdraw with the tide and feign they won’t return when we’re gone. Tall firs regard the sea. They look back and think of me, know I am of the forest even as rhythmic waves pound within my veins. How many will pulse the shore where I stand rooted to a spot on the sand? I take evergreen breath from the sky, look back, breathe again. I watch my heirs, relish their audacity. My children throw driftwood into the sea. Own Fault 00:00 / 01:36 Last night’s rain bowed the stream. Water cranes to peek above the rim, see beyond the channel of its world. On green hillsides, scattered orange firs resemble derelict sculpture, ignored rather than poisoned, like a forest erected when we built bridges that threaten to collapse from negligence. How could we fail to maintain our means of traverse? I would find another way to you, swim a raging torrent, tasting with each dip of my face the rusted tang of failure. Distracted by thoughts of a crossing I won’t make, it’s a verdant tree, lovely with life I curse when I misjudge my cast. This is my own fault, no one else to blame for a hook sunk to its barb in this summer’s terminal growth. Wade ashore, cut the leader, leave the mayfly perched above the current. Its name — Ephemeroptera —gives a nod to its day in the sun. Tie on line, knot nymph to tippet, eye the yellow slice of sky backed by faience, by cobalt. I wade in, cast again, try not to squander light. Around me, trees agree on a color for night. Storm 00:00 / 01:18 On the porch, close to 10pm. Enjoying red wine, lingering rain, thunder moving off, songs of at least three types of frog. Lightning flashes at greater and greater intervals, building tolerance for a gap that will carry to the next storm. This is when I replay our conversation wonder why you wondered what I meant. And also wonder if I should remark to you, inside, about the storm as it subsides. Something obvious, a point of sure agreement. The darkness rather than what’s in it. With no flashes I see the sheen of the screen. Pixeled black covers the yard, drowns the pond, obscures field and forest and sky. Night tries to mist onto the porch like rain, pool with shadows. The candle keeps it at bay. I’m on the bright side listening to frogs, replayed conversation, and receding thunder until it’s time to blow out the flame. Publishing credits Driftwood – Olympic Peninsula: River Mouth Review (Issue 4) Own Fault / Storm: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Scarlett Ward Bennett read poems for wave 2 of literary poetry journal iamb. Scarlett Ward Bennett wave 2 spring 2020 back next the poet Scarlett Ward Bennett is a West Midlands poet whose debut collection ache – published by Verve Poetry Press in 2019 – has been nominated for a 2020 Forward Poetry Prize. She was nominated for Best Spoken Word Performer in the 2019 Saboteur Awards, and came third in the Wolverhampton Literature Festival Prize judged by Roy McFarlane. Scarlett runs several poetry workshops, and hosts the 'Versification' poetry evening in Cannock. A self-confessed hedgehog lady, she volunteers for West Midlands Hedgehog Rescue. the poems Culling Season 00:00 / 00:44 Somewhere in a town that is best known for how deep it has dug underneath itself, where the addresses are earthy like “May Dene” and “Old Fallow”, and roads fling themselves lethargically around woodland bends, a pot hole rips the gut out of an exhaust on an accelerating Ford with all the viciousness of antlers on bark. After all, it is rutting season, and it’s all I can think of lately; feuding stags butting skulls, concrete tearing out metal piping, and the way my neighbour boasted to me this morning of the fawn he shot through the eye socket. We’re going to have to talk about it at some point 00:00 / 00:46 aren’t we? Except, I don’t want to. Can’t instead we talk of dandelion manes; the way they nose their way through cracks in the pavement, only to be scattered in infinite directions when kicked violently enough, scorned spores spiraling; frantic heads of fine-spun lace dizzying themselves away, as though away is the only place far enough from that damned kicking boot. Can we focus on the flowers and not think of anything else – not of how I ran home to my mum’s house, shame dampening the crotch of my underwear, and not of the beads from my snapped bracelet that I clutched tightly in my fist. What Is True Of Spring 00:00 / 00:54 is true also of ourselves. Learn from her; how she unfurls her flowered fists, waits for buds to burst from the end of branches, like beading blood on kneecaps, or lacquer slicked at the end of knuckled hands. Heal from your wounds womb first; blood is no omen of death, but of the pact we make with life. Even fossils dream of dawn, brittle from singing themselves hoarse clinking away under all that soil like forgotten coins in a deep pocket waiting to be unearthed. What if none of us ever stopped singing, the same way an oak remembers its notes of green once April comes back around no matter how much white winter had buried it in? Publishing credits All poems: ache (Verve Poetry Press)

Hear poet Nina Parmenter read poems for wave 17 of literary poetry journal iamb. Nina Parmenter wave 17 spring 2024 back next the poet Nina Parmenter is a poet and working mum from Wiltshire. Her debut collection, Split, Twist, Apocalypse , was published in 2022. Nina's work has appeared in journals that include Magma , Raceme , Honest Ulsterman , Obsessed with Pipework , Atrium and Ink Sweat & Tears , and has also been nominated for both The Forward Prizes and The Pushcart Prize. Nina describes herself as easy to manipulate – but only if you're a dog. the poems Blooming 00:00 / 01:09 A celandine went first, and if we had ever looked, we would have known it was a freeze-frame of a live firework, we would have expected the violence that sparked from the inside out, the heat petalling sweetly, each stamen springing a hellmouth. A rose caught, thorns spitting pop-pop-pop from the stem, the leaves crisping, and as an afterthought, the buds, like charged kisses, lipped the flames to ragwort and vetch. An oxeye daisy burst, white-hot in its eagerness. We dialled nine-nine-nine, but our words fell lifelessly away, and as day bloomed into evening time, the honeysuckle, its lashes glowing in the last light of the sun, tipped a long wink to Venus and blew like an H-bomb. Where Does Darkness Come From? 00:00 / 00:47 The bee is a soft eclipse at the heart of a clematis, the noon lighting a constellation on each cluster of her fur, and the bee suspects it is she who brings the darkness, but she knows it like the catacombs of her hive and feels no remorse. Imagine a sweetness you would die for. Imagine shunning the sun even as it brightens the space you leave behind. Imagine your honey-drunk mind willing you into the umbra. Imagine the sugar stars waking. The Conversation We Don’t Have 00:00 / 01:09 The headache, I realise, is a clenched jaw. I tense up, release, stick my tongue out, waggle it, roll my head so determinedly that a conversation falls out, pink and slippery. It has been hiding behind my uvula. Close inspection reveals that it is self-contained, self-sustaining, high fat, low sugar, terrifyingly fresh. And although my stomach aches at the meat of it, I reach out a finger. Give it a poke. It tenses. Darkens. Grows somewhat huger. Along its flank, eyes appear. It stares. Angrily, I scoop it up, and stuff it back down my throat. I relock my jaw and head out. Publishing credits Blooming: Split, Twist, Apocalypse (Indigo Dreams Publishing) Where Does Darkness Come From? / The Conversation We Don’t have: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Amelia Loulli read poems for wave 4 of literary poetry journal iamb. Amelia Loulli wave 4 autumn 2020 back next the poet Amelia Loulli is a poet living in Cumbria. A pamphlet of her poetry was published by Nine Arches Press in Primers Volume Four . Her work has twice been shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize, and longlisted in 2020 for the Rebecca Swift Foundation's Women Poets' Prize. Amelia is an MA Writing Poetry student at Newcastle University, and was recently selected by New Writing North to deliver creative writing workshops to young writers as part of their Inkubator scheme. She's currently working on a pamphlet of new poems, as well as a verse novel. the poems Teenage Mother 00:00 / 01:18 they talk to me, the day you were born, as though another me stepped out and never returned, my very own double image, retreating, and for years I only know knees of the dirty kind, hands which would struggle to pick up a small stone, a halo fastened at the neck. There is a world in which I never had you, the handle to my parent’s bedroom door was missing, leaving behind a small square eye hole, just above bed height. I carried love around with me like milk in a shallow bowl, watching it lapping the sides, each drop bleaching my skin, there were days I broke our home with only a few words, I am not your mother. Mother has gotten itself stuck in my throat, grown like a tumour or a foetus but faster, from poppy seed to broad bean until it’s swollen so hard I can’t say anything more. In your bunk bed, behind your back, I lie, holding on to your plaited hair like a rope. First Blood 00:00 / 01:11 The dolls are bleeding, all of them leaking, red and black from their forever open mouths, what can we fill them with? I don’t like the way they look at me like they expect something more. Since you’ve been gone, they’ve started touching themselves, running their plastic fingers up their own shiny thighs. I don’t know how to stop them, so I wait for you to come home, whilst they slide their tongues around their lips and look at each other, eyes growing big. Last night I filled an egg cup with baking soda and vinegar, and tried to clean their faces, you were still gone, they wouldn’t let me near, until I promised to pour the vinegar away and bleed with them, so I did, legs touching, my bled fingerprints forming like wax seals upon our skin. Broken Waters 00:00 / 01:22 Most people drown without making a noise or splashing. See me here Baby, watch me lying out plank, below the surface, all that stillness, all that peace, see how long I can breathe down here alone. You must trust me, I am your mother after all, don’t think about the firefighter who lies to the woman on the phone inside the burning building, says he’s on his way up to save her, then hands her brother back the phone, tell her you love her, knowing all his tears won’t be enough to quiet the flames, I am your mother after all, I am made to do this. When the mother harp seal leaves its cub, nobody calls it a mistake, I have been at this much longer than twelve days – just let me float here a while, Baby you will still remember my face. It will be the same one you wear every time life cuts in such a way – the serration drags the exact formation of ripples upon its shape. Publishing credits Teenage Mother / First Blood: Primers: Volume Four (Nine Arches Press) Broken Waters: Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre Weekly Poem (July 25th 20219)

Hear poet Clarissa Aykroyd read poems for wave 1 of literary poetry journal iamb. Clarissa Aykroyd wave 1 winter 2020 back next the poet Clarissa Aykroyd grew up in Victoria, Canada and now lives in London, where she works as a publisher. Her poetry has appeared in UK and international journals such as Black Bough Poetry, The Interpreter's House, The Island Review, Lighthouse, The Missing Slate, The Ofi Press Magazine and Shot Glass Journal. Her pamphlet, Island of Towers , was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2019. the poems I dream the perfect ride 00:00 / 00:36 It was raining and the cheap black gloves chafed my hands. The reins and curved neck’s crest, a wave. I blinked the rain, I was horse and river – we flowed the jump but my clumsy mouth-jag scared the horse and I had to dream sunlight to calm him. He listened with his mind, breathed, so black and sleek and slicker than a seal in the patience of the rain, the white noise of the rain, his cantering a mountain beneath me, breaking the earth, living-deep. Amrum 00:00 / 00:22 Cloud spiral. Here – pale bone of the light. Sand riddles hissing – at my feet, my neck. Rising now the rosehip moon. The sky, bitten. All flags torn. Watson on Dartmoor 00:00 / 00:53 I first saw it in sun, edged with yellow like the dragged note of a violin: and yet, and yet something just out of tune like the faintest rot beneath the sweetness. It’s not of the earth, the moor. You drive as though ascending – to hell; mist rolled in, the wet air choked me. The light walked backwards and vanished. The grey tors grinned down on us. Holmes would love this, I thought. The touch of drama. And then came the gates of Baskerville Hall. Well, you know the rest. But the moor, that space, that’s what I can’t explain. How it was not of this world. How its clouds were close enough to touch, and yet its skies were high enough to elude my faltering translation. Publishing credits I dream the perfect ride: exclusive first publication by iamb Amrum: Island of Towers (Broken Sleep Books) Watson on Dartmoor: Ink, Sweat & Tears (July 1st 2017)

Hear poet Susie Campbell read poems for wave 12 of literary poetry journal iamb. Susie Campbell wave 12 winter 2022 back next the poet Susie Campbell's poems have appeared in many UK and international journals, visual poetry anthologies and exhibitions. Currently studying for a practice-based poetry PhD at Oxford Brookes University, Susie is the author of six poetry pamphlets – I return to you , Tenter and Enclosures being her three most recent. Her newest work, The Sleeping Place , will be published by Guillemot Press in 2023. the poems A Deictic Miracle, This Boxwood Prayer Nut Exhibit: Waddesdon Bequest, British Museum 00:00 / 01:41 To hold and be held, an uncracked walnut, a little earth. There is something strange about this richness, growing into its own boundaries, rank and subtle as a hunted creature. Time has become a strongbox of interlocking branches. Global complexities, plumbed with pipelines of gold, are reduced to wafer-thin discs, slotted one into the other, light bevelled into a compound syntax of mortise and tenon. An articulation of honest wood, it holds the shape and hard veins of the forest by fitting it to the palm: an armillary sphere circling an internal sun, opened by flicking up a tiny hinge secured on its pin. Ahead, glimmering through a tiny screen, carved and fretted to this terrestrial cage, a thimble saint with his trembling hound bows before the stag. Kneeling here, prayer beads in hand, an intricate system of shadow blows from antler and slender branch to form the cross, thorn-sized and lifted to the wooden sky, as outside bends to imitate this reconciliation. if magic 00:00 / 01:24 if such ordinary box jar tin or burlap and if tested unbought night finds an opening past neighbours fought for squeaking and scratched open by tiny razor- sharp and left beyond and further how the night is done with moss and damp and squelch and how quickly attaching themselves to dark are wet marbles if tied up in a pouch and with mercy new-opened and sticky and still smelling of sleep as sap is and here a soft clink of word against word could be taken for protection a charm new-minted from darkness against theirs ours some dispensable such brittle claims across this globe of glass could be soothed or silenced if won by this as talisman Hush 00:00 / 01:43 A hill beneath and a filled-in door. This bench, its damp wooden flowers. A dead tree stripped clean and time fucking stops. You reach a corner of you are there. You are there. An edge of grief you can park in an empty tongue. The fields are empty. That’s near enough. You expect you have come here to honour the dead. An open field looks like battlefield words: gone, absent, missing. You come to hold it in memory but it becomes spongy underfoot. You do not mean to remember her, the time you brought her here. A list in a notebook of useful words: Blank Nil Null Hush-hush Ssh Shush Sodden ground but your body remembers so you try to follow even as it is hardening and solidifying, becomes a whole, no longer possible to enter nor be held by it. Nil. Null. Hush. Ssh. Shush. You cannot enter nor explore its spaces nor the dead in their apophatic silence that gap in words. Listen. Hush. Publishing credits A Deictic Miracle, This Boxwood Prayer Nut: Shearsman Magazine (125/126 – Autumn/Winter) if magic: Stride Magazine (December 2021) Hush: Tenter (Guillemot Press)

Hear poet Kim Harvey read poems for wave 1 of literary poetry journal iamb. Kim Harvey wave 1 winter 2020 back next the poet Kim Harvey is a San Francisco Bay Area poet and Associate Editor at Palette Poetry. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. You can find her work in Poets Reading the News, Rattle, Radar, Barren Magazine, 3Elements Review, Wraparound South, Black Bough Poetry, Kissing Dynamite and elsewhere. She won The Comstock Review’s Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award 2019, and placed third in the Barren Press Poetry Contest in the same year. the poems Standard Credibility Inquiry for Displaced Plant Life 00:00 / 02:23 Are you now or have you ever been considered an invasive species? How long can you survive in the desert without water? Have you ever lied to the U.S. government? Are you lying now? You let me know if you need something to drink. To what fungi have you been exposed? Are you infectious? Do you carry contagions? Are you viable? How much attention do you require? Are you wild? Tell me why you are afraid of fire. What is your country of origin? Do you seek the shade of others? Do you plan to uproot established trees? How far back can you trace your seed? Are you a clone? Are you barren? Are you a weed? Will you reproduce incessantly and choke the perennials? Why were you harmed? When were you harmed? So you were witness to a violence. Are you damaged at the cellular level? Under what conditions will you wilt or wither? How did you escape? And where have you been since? On whom or what do you depend? Are you a hallucinogen? Are you medicinal? Are you lethal to domestic animals or people? Can you be bought and sold? Are you illegal? And the Plant Answers Back [Redacted]: (muffled, inaudible) …my sister was burned part of me died too I don’t know how I got out I will tell you I flew I was a samara on the wind I can still feel her like a phantom limb [ ] I could [ ] smell her [ ] singed skin [ ] raining down around me [ -------- ] Even now I hear her howling Light & Shadow ‘The best way to know God is to love many things.’ ~ Vincent Van Gogh ~ 00:00 / 02:17 A hawk takes a snake in its talons, flies to the top of the trees, aspens I think, above the canyon. Can we agree the snake is dead now? Your words, shards from a broken vase I turn over in my hands, crush fine like millet into the fallen leaves. Stop brooding on the form of things. Think of Van Gogh. Modest blue room. Towel hung on a nail by the door, bowl and pitcher, water if you’re thirsty – absinthe green spilling in through paned glass like a sickness. Loss, a lamp lit long ago. Wasn’t it you who told me blue was the last color to be named in every language? Show me again in moonlight the hollows of you – the places where your body starts and stops. I remember you told me about Van Gogh, how he ate yellow paint to try to get the light inside him. How when he died his body was laid out alongside easels and brushes in a room full of yellow dahlias and sunflowers. How, in the end, it wasn’t just the light he was after. What he wanted was to drink turpentine, to choke on black cadmium and lead. What he really wanted was to die eating his paints, breathing them in, every color, all of them – orange, sienna, crimson, ochre, gypsum, lapis, gold, cobalt blue. Winter Solstice Incantation 00:00 / 01:00 Snapdragon petals, pink and yellow, rose hips, gold paint chips tossed over my shoulder. Hellebore and phlox, candles to burn through the long pitch-black. This spell’s being cast at last light and you’ll come back through the mirror’s crack like Lazarus from the dead tonight if I can just find the right words. Close and closed, what you were to me and a door slammed shut between this world and the next. Outside, a wild wind whips through the trees, whispering its warning—what’s done cannot be undone. Slippery as winter ice, you’re gone. Publishing credits Standard Credibility Inquiry for Displaced Plant Life: Poets Reading the News (September 14th 2019) Light & Shadow: The Comstock Review (Fall/Winter 2019) – winner of the Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Contest 2019 Winter Solstice Incantation: Black Bough Poetry Christmas / Winter Edition 2019 (Black Bough Poetry)