find a poet

Hear poet Michael McGill read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Michael McGill back next the poet Michael McGill is a writer from Edinburgh whose work has recently appeared in The Interpreter’s House , Lunate , The Haiku Quarterly and elsewhere. Michael also has work in the Scottish Poetry Library’s Poems by and for Social Workers anthology. As well as performing for Big Word Performance Poetry in Edinburgh, Glasgow and London, Michael has appeared in several episodes of BBC Radio 3’s The Verb. His work has also been featured on the Micro podcast . the poems Puppy Dog Man 00:00 / 02:01 I thought I saw a puppy dog. I did! I did! I saw the Puppy Dog Man! Baroompta-doo-da. Walk tall, Puppy Dog, Puppy Dog, walk tall – Hey there, Puppy Dog Man – Puppy Dog Man never understand; never understand, little Puppy Dog Man, never understand – Let's talk man to man, acrobat to magician, Devil to Christian, honest man to politician on the street, drowning in a sea of integrity, of humanity; 'Such things as these don't please His Majesty!' Baroompta – do do do. Hello? Oliver Speaking speaking. I was talking to the dog, Maury. Please, you're annoying me. Baroompta-doo-da. Lie low, Puppy Dog, Puppy Dog, lie low – Hey there, Puppy Dog Man – Puppy Dog Man take me underground; take me underground, little Puppy Dog Man, take me underground – New street! New street! I wanna live in a new street. I wanna live in your face. I wanna live in the warm puppy dog folds of your skin. Yeah, I wanna live there, man. Woof! Woof! Baroompta-doo-da – walkin' hand in hand with Puppy Dog Man … Pyjamas in the Snow 00:00 / 02:07 Free postcards were scattered all over New York then, filed in metal displays on the walls of clubs and coffee shops, and I’d collect them and tuck them away in my journal, stumbling around like a 1996 Hansel and Gretel reject, and it was January and everywhere was lit like a still from a Blondie video, and sometimes I’d order a Hazelnut Latte and a Sour Cream Mini Bundt Cake, and I’d write home using one of these postcards, back when home-whilst-travelling was a strange place, an exotic village elsewhere, a solipsist’s mirage, a narcissist’s daydream, and then I’d go to the Post Office on East 34th Street and watch these postcards take flight, because I was living life in Technicolor then, but, oh, that boy back at the hostel was a strange one, and he slept in the bed opposite mine in the dorm, and he’d talk about how much he missed ‘The Bay’ and I’d look puzzled, and he asked me why I’d never been to Ireland, and he laughed when I replied, 'Because it’s so far away,' and he seemed homesick and lost, and very sad, so I showed him my postcards, and one was RuPaul’s face in close-up, and he said, 'She’s gorgeous!' – but he’d turn shifty most evenings when a note was stuck to the door because he was late paying for his bed, and the word REMINDER would sit at the top of the page in cold black font, and then he’d disappear for a time and come back later looking dishevelled and used, and then the note on the door would disappear, and one day it was time to pack and head to JFK, and he wasn’t there so I left the RuPaul postcard on his pillow, and I never said goodbye – and back then Jackie 60 nightclub had a hotline you’d call, yeah, it was listed in Time Out , and one night I stood in a phone booth in the lobby of the hostel, and a recorded voice said the theme that week was Scotland and the dress code was ‘tartan tartan tartan’ and, oh, how I wish I’d gone to Jackie 60 in my tartan pyjamas, walking through Manhattan in the snow, but I never did. Celluloid Clown 00:00 / 01:11 'Your poem isn’t a fit for us,' the email read. I recall him emerging; black biro, yellow Post-it. I recall the usual questions: 'To and or to ampersand ?' etc., etc. What is to become of him, I wonder? He doesn’t fit anywhere, it seems. Still, he remains my three-line darling; long-lost relative of that scrawled first draft. 'Your poem isn’t a fit for us,' the email read. Yes, I know he ended up like a circus clown from some campy old film. You know the type of character: always a criminal in hiding (for what are celluloid clowns really, but painted criminals?). 'Your poem isn’t a fit for us,' the email read. In his final scene, he is led to the jailhouse. He hands over his dog (a Boston Terrier) to a young girl and says, 'Take care of him, Cheryl, he’s a good ‘un.' Then he walks away – fade to black. Publishing credits Puppy Dog Man / Celluloid Clown: exclusive first publication by iamb Pyjamas in the Snow: Anser Journal

Hear poet Jenny Wong read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jenny Wong back next the poet Jenny Wong is a writer, traveller and occasional business analyst. Her favourite places to wander are Tokyo alleys, Singapore hawker centres and Parisian cemeteries. Jenny's work has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions, as well as longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50. She lives in Canada near the Rocky Mountains. the poems When I Let the Dog Out in the Middle of the Night 00:00 / 01:43 Usually, he will come in, obedient after fulfilling his duties. But tonight, he ignores the open door, lingers at the edge of the deck where porch light slips beneath darkness like a shore into black sea. He looks at me, aging clouds in his eyes. Asks if I will join him. Asks to go further out into the night. I leave the house, take three steps, before hesitation begins to make its inevitable lists. The impending weight of an oncoming workday. The alarm clock that must endure two more hours before unleashing its insistent sounds. The vulnerability of bare feet in the dark. So I recall our bodies back inside, leave our longings outdoors to weather down into undistinguishable forms. We return to bed, but refuse our typical patterns, our usual positions for sleep. Instead. His head on my hand. My head against his side. We speak to each other through the small collapses of our ribs, release ourselves from the definitions of our daily shapes. Goodest boy. Quiet girl. Two beasts who understand that even the gentlest of breaths was never meant to be held for so long. The Cartographers 00:00 / 01:26 The cartographers say my nose is a landmark. A low bridge that is crossed in order to arrive at their first conclusions. From there, they sketch in my origins, guess the vowels that will untwist from my self-bound lips, predict the names of my indoor plants. They will not see the white in my hair is a tired moon threaded through night, or the salt-tinged oasis that wells across the parched dunes of my face in the dark. To speak up is a bend in the knee, an acquiescence to their crooked parallels and unwanted latitudes. So I do not give them words, feed them only silence, and they make small notes in the margins re: poor articulation. In a quiet corner, they assign a broken compass that must always point overseas. I am landscape locked in observation. A map of drawn conclusions and labels. But what is unable to be captured is the movement of their lips along my paper edges, and this weary shadow that grows whenever I am mouthed. What Really Happens When I Sit Alone At Parties 00:00 / 01:16 I plant a graveyard of feathers on my tongue. Watch them sprout into birds without wings. I could pluck up these flightless fowl, snuff out the flame of their beaks, find that charred wick of tongue beneath. A thread of unspoken words, waiting to be pulled. But it’s a pointless show. Those birds see there is no blue in the cave of my mouth, no hope for the freedom of sky. So they bury themselves beneath the roots of my teeth. Even there, I could dig them up, salvage their forms into aspirated syllables that pass for agreeable sound. But the birds have already begun their second evolution. Shedding feathers. Coughing up bones. Revealing slippery skin. In small, salty batches, they slide past scars where my wisdom teeth used to be, and add their bodies to the tangle of old things I hold in my throat. Publishing credits When I Let the Dog Out in the Middle of the Night: exclusive first publication by iamb The Cartographers: Hayden’s Ferry Review (Fall 2022) What Really Happens When I Sit Alone at Parties: Splonk (Issue 5)

Hear poet Alice Stainer read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Alice Stainer back next the poet Alice Stainer is a lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing on a visiting student programme in Oxford. She is also a musician and dancer. Her work has appeared in Green Ink Poetry , Atrium , Feral Poetry , After… , The Storms and The Dawntreader . Alice has been nominated for Best of the Net, The Pushcart Prize and the Forward Prizes, and recently submitted her debut pamphlet. the poems Firebird A ‘Golden Shovel’ after Fleetwood Mac’s Songbird (as sung by Eva Cassidy) 00:00 / 01:12 Hair severely chignoned, pearls choking your throat and always, a white-feathered bodice holding you in. But the heats of Brazil are simmering beneath—swans and songbirds are all very well, but you are a firebird. Fervid rhythms are hard to resist, Tito’s black eyes like cinders singing sparks for you alone, Margot, lighting you to dance like all of Covent Garden is watching. Pas de deux. Oh they don’t like it, though fluting your praises. But you know those flights between London and Panama bear the flame of your being, uncontained by a ballet score. Gradient 00:00 / 01:56 A glorious day, Dad, as you would say (that always made us snigger, did you know?) Pull on your boots—you do still need them?— army surplus from the funny shop in Hotwells. We scoffed, but you said they were ‘value for money’. Come on then, Dad—there’s a hill needs climbing. Plastic-pocketed map bouncing on my chest— I’ve learned its language as you did, and more: zigzag up a slope, flex with the contours, pick your way over hummocks. Skirt the bog but don’t cry over lost wellies. Vivid green patches have a forked tongue. Heather helps you to hang on. There’s one path I have yet to find, Dad— but I will. I will. Right, binoculars slung round my neck— chance of a ptarmigan, wouldn’t you say? Those chubby boulders of bird. Once, Mum and I saw a whole flock— consolation, we thought, for a stumbling day when the cloud came down. I remembered, you see, what you said about the hills. Now bog myrtle is spicing the air. Hurry up, Dad! We have got all day but still, this clarity of sky is precious. Mete it out like Kendal mint cake in the high places. My turn to lead the way—although in truth, you’ve climbed this hill ahead of me, and now will never leave it. Jane Austen's Teapot 00:00 / 01:24 Time to bring in the tea-things. Cups rattle like eager chatter; china-blue leaves twine about their rims; stems graft, tighten. The wooden caddy is plundered, yielding riches. Silver spoons refract the light, and in the exquisite pot brooding at the white cloth’s heart, the leaves infuse in swirling heat. Steeped then strained, the tea arcs into cups in a long, dark stream. One sugar or two? White sweetness to mitigate black bitterness. But let’s not talk about that. Round the table, a froth of muslin. Cups are cradled, alliances formed and fractured, fragile as porcelain. Then the ritual is over, the tea-things put away—until the next time. But look inside the pot: advancing up its ivory sides, a deepening stain. Will it ever be time to talk about that? Publishing credits Firebird: After… Jane Austen's Teapot: Paradox Literary Gradient: Atrium

Hear poet Tom Bailey read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Tom Bailey © Holly Falconer back next the poet Tom Bailey, a poet from London, has had poems published in The Poetry Review , berlin lit , bath magg , Propel Magazine , Anthropocene , Under the Radar , The North , Poetry News and the Munster Literature Centre's Poems from Pandemia anthology. Recently awarded the Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Prize , he was also one of several winners of the 2024 Guernsey International Literature Festival’s Poems on the Move Competition . His pamphlet, Please Do Not Touch or Feed the Horses , won the Poetry London Pamphlet Prize, and will be published in spring 2025. Tom currently lives in Edinburgh, and is co-editor of online poetry magazine And Other Poems . the poems Wheatfield with Crows 00:00 / 00:49 The field is on fire obviously. The horizon coughs up a mouthful of crows and the dirt track does not seem to know where it’s going. Funny, how often we are surprised by darkness, like the frontiersmen who went west for gold and found oil instead. Van Gogh once said that a row of pollard willows sometimes resembles a procession of alms-house men. Van Gogh once said The sadness will last forever. The sky is on fire also but it is a blue sort of fire, with a patch of white which is either a cloud or a moon. Poem Granada, Spain 00:00 / 00:53 Anyway frosts thaw in this spring sun, and the river comes melt-swollen down the mountain. Across the valley the plane trees hold up their hands to the light. Swallows flit and flicker in rings, and a pair of griffon vultures float their stillness in the heat. Something everywhere is surprised, and the river threads its noisy voice through the needle of itself. Somewhere a goat clitters over rocks. Somewhere a donkey brays in a field, and morning whittles itself into afternoon. All day a particular sunbeam has been searching for your face, not knowing yet that you aren’t here, that you aren’t anywhere. Please do not touch or feed the horses 00:00 / 01:40 Please do not touch or feed the horses. Please do not approach the horses or walk within five metres of their circumference. Do not try to speak to the horses or look them in the eye, and please do not attempt to befriend the horses. It is important not to interpret the facial expressions of the horses. Nor should you ascribe human meaning to the movements of the horses. Do not imagine the thoughts of the horses, or ponder the philosophical questions that the presence of said horses may or may not lead you to ponder. Please do not make use of the horses as simile, metaphor, or other such figures of speech. Please do not describe the horses in language inappropriate to their equine existence. Maybe you think you love the horses, but you must not lie in bed at night and let them fill your dreams: the sound of the horses cropping thin tufts of Timothy grass, the way their muscle-knitted flanks tense when a tractor coughs on the hill or the kissing gate swings shut. Please, friends, pass through this field. It is late. We have lost so much already. Publishing credits Wheatfield with Crows / Poem: exclusive first publication by iamb Please do not touch or feed the horses: Epoch (Vol. 70, No. 1)

Hear poet Pey Oh read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Pey Oh back next the poet Pey Oh (she/her) is a Bath-based poet from Malaysia. Her first pamphlet, Pictograph , was published by Flarestack Poets in 2018. Her recent work appears in harana poetry , Butcher’s Dog Magazine, Long Poem Magazine and The Scores – A Journal of Poetry and Prose . the poems Penang After Pablo Neruda, Sonnet XXVII (from Cien sonetos de amor ) 00:00 / 01:53 I do not love you as if you were the rasp of heat on my shoulder blades, or the endless cicada song in the night. The hush of humidity is as strong as a hand over my mouth I would lick the salt from. I do not heed the call of your secrets, as if from a distant city with its lure of neon and sweat. The loneliness of 2am stalks me, dark doorways with rusted postboxes, whose sentinels are worn men with bony limbs. I do not find hope from small altars on cracked pillars, ash dusting gilt letters. The burning spirals of incense do not carry the whisper of my prayer between us. Fire everywhere, wicks flare on oil and wax. I do not visit my ancestors' bones to hear the chanting of monks kneeling together on the marble floor, or to see the temple snake dazed by smoke make prophecies, lowering its double eyelid and tasting the air. I do not love you as if you were a mosaic of dragons or those filial tales on florid tiles. Distant hills call me to dusty steps of duty, winding around the tall spire. English is my Second Language? 00:00 / 02:20 Whispers, restless meanings, rocking the cradle. Sleep now, a lullaby of pictographs. Dancing with the seagulls in my first Encyclopaedia of Birds, white wings, black tipped, flashing in the blue sky, white dress, baby feet, flashing in that blue heat – flight and dreaming yoked together as the many-names-of-things. Second language, the ladder to my escape; the way out, the other world – I wrestled for it, asked for blessing; Exile is an English name. In banishment, a faint music still follows me: a bamboo scaffold, wobbly but strong, to build new rhythms in a journey – not home . I go to China, place of my ancestors; I clamber around and wind its golden dragons round my thumbs. Master its ways, gallop the horses of the steppes – on a high plateau, dance with Generals drunken and fat, in gold braid and red caps. I dream in tongues varied and few; in none, come the power of commonality – lonely fragments like us, seeking to be held close. First language follows me like instinct or a beautiful abstract; entirely open in meaning – a stricken mute maiden at my heels. I’ve learned to jump through the hoops now; I am my other tongue, whether right or sinister – bound like a confident wave to the sea. I feel the power and the draw of it; the sensual limning is a careful adornment of bare bones – talisman and relic for dissecting the myth: making it new. The Fox Fairy 00:00 / 01:12 Appearances are deceiving. How do you know I’m not one of those women with secrets. You know the kind – ones who take husbands – then slip out at night to run in the fields; dew wet and odorous after the passion, to hunt for mice. How do you know I don’t relish the crunch of small bones, the death snap, the warmth of raw meat? They’ve always said Fox Women have long black hair and never look in the mirror. How do you know I mightn’t have a fox mate in some mountain lair? His instinct cannot tell him I am fey. His is the innocent way of courting this tawny piece. A moon maiden dancing in the dew. A woman with secrets. Publishing credits Penang: harana poetry (Issue 4) English is my Second Language?: Pictograph (Flarestack Poets) The Fox Fairy: And Other Poems

Hear poet Ysella Sims read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Ysella Sims back next the poet Poet, writer and producer Ysella Sims has had her work featured in The Guardian , Brittle Star and the The Blue Nib Literary Magazine , where she was a contributing editor. Ysella produces poetry and spoken-word events, as well as the immersive poetry podcast, Tell Me Something . She published her first poetry pamphlet, you are here , in 2021. the poems Echo 00:00 / 01:45 They watch the screen as the sonographer traces slow circles on her belly and the room dulls to a thick, cloistered hush. In another room, smaller, colder the world rends, roils beneath the blue plastic sofa while they wait for the midwife to tell them, it doesn’t look good. In the weeks between, they lean against the cool bark of the witching tree on the heath whisper pleas into its tessellations stick stray feathers into the sand to arrange their wishes, just so. And when it is time, she lies still oh-so-still on the table holds her breath behaves. Outside, a morning of crows bare-branched, murdering the brumal air with clatter and chaws; a carnival flash of parakeets at the Richmond window. Sun breaking through dank in the gorse-crowned field to colour the sky sugared pink starling egg blue the sweet heft of a pear-sized ghost in her arms. I am turning into all the mothers 00:00 / 00:45 I am turning into all the mothers my younger self condemned; the ones that baulked at journeys, heights, the world beyond the door the diazepam-rattlers cake-offerers, stomach-ragers sobbers the confidence-tricksters told-you-so-ers nitpickers frowners the news-tutters jar-scrapers eavesdroppers sighers – all those felled by their children’s fingers un- – picking the strings. Folk Festival, 1982 00:00 / 01:21 All she remembers is that there was a coach brimful with men and women punchdrunk with Friday night and possibility, the air sun-ripe and sweet kids stacked amongst kit bags fiddles and sticks and as dusk fell a field of yellow and green where they pitched their tents and Big Sue, apple-cheeked and bangled, squeezed her brother into her bosom’s curve in the tent’s zipped orange glow a car park, pulsing with music and bells light spilling from the pub like it was somebody’s front room the electric scent of men their danced-in shirts the velveted whirl of women’s black-chokered throats childrens’ voices in the glow-wormed hedges and a scratchy-faced stranger pinning her, like a butterfly, to the August ground – her brother, reaching in to release her like she was one of his own. Publishing credits Echo: The Blue Nib I am turning into all the mothers / Folk Festival, 1982: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Loic Ekinga read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Loic Ekinga back next the poet Loic Ekinga is a writer from the Democratic Republic of Congo. He's the author of poetry collection How To Wake A Butterfly , and has had his works of fiction and poetry appear in Agbowò , Tint Journal , Type/Cast , Salamander Ink , Ja. Magazine , Poetry Potion , A Long House , New Contrast , Brittle Paper and elsewhere. Loic's experimental mini chapbook, Twelve Things You Failed at As A Man Today , earned him an honourable mention by J K Anowe for Praxis Magazine . A finalist of Poetry Africa’s Slam Jam competition, Loic is also a Kasala writer and teacher, and Best of the Net nominee. the poems For Black Boy 00:00 / 01:29 The black boy—still unfurling, puts his hand over his mouth and weeps. Be a man, we were just joking! Years later, a black boy he knew is said to stand at the entrance of the city—on a motorcycle, looking to feed his black children. Another black boy, the pointy-eared black boy, digs black holes with his black bare hands for anyone willing to pay for water. Another makes music and blames his infidelity on black pain. What happens after you climb a mountain and find no ram caught in a thicket? Years before, around the time the black boy—unfurling, wept into his hands -- they kicked balls on the golden sands of his grandparents’ street until Black God stroked the sky purple. They laughed into each other’s day and rubbed leaves against their black skins until they could taste the trees. There was a time, the night/black was the only thing worth fearing. There was a time when to live too long meant to die. The boys, now, stand on their blood every morning trying to be men, crying into their hands behind walls, away from their fathers' eyes. Nausea (ii) 00:00 / 01:42 This must be what it’s like to chase someone's love to the edge of the self: The groaning, the longing, the dancing At the precipice. The men who taught me love, taught me injury What happens in the body should stay in the body I open my chest, the pulp– the despair Someone, somewhere talks to a friend about me And says he was never a bad person, He was just never in love with me The first rainbow appeared out of regret. I apologise. I multiply. In my apartment, the ants are everywhere. So is the moss. I fall in love and everything aches. How do I say the tragedy meant to end me is growing teeth, without sounding like a poet in reverie? Because there are conversations too uncomfortable For even God, I wonder whether we will ever talk about this body and His plans What is the name of our disease? The men who taught me care, almost starved my mother to death. You tell me, How do I open my mouth into a woman’s without my grandfather marching down her throat? Do you see what ails me? What do our people call it? And for God’s sake, what is it with the longing? No One Is Writing Love Poems About Me 00:00 / 00:36 I say to her— out of nowhere, in a crowded bar, before she brings her mouth so close we eat the night Then I remembered that she had on my favourite T-shirt —black, polyester … two sprays of my cologne behind each ear. She glitters—gold rings within rings within rings In the hallway of my apartment building, she pushes me against the wall & proceeds to swallow the night whole Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Jonathan Humble read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jonathan Humble back next the poet The poetry of Jonathan Humble, a retired deputy head teacher who lives in Cumbria, has appeared in numerous print and online magazines and anthologies. He's published a short collection of his work – Fledge – and is editor of the much-praised, much-admired children's poetry website, The Dirigible Balloon . As well as delivering poetry workshops in schools for Wordsworth Grasmere, Jonathan was Poet in a Fridge for Radio Cumbria's Poetry Takeaway during the BBC's Contains Strong Language Festival in 2020. the poems Derek’s Theory of Quantum Stiles 00:00 / 00:51 Einstein phoned the other day. Wanted to speak quite urgently with my dog, Derek: said that Derek’s theory of quantum stiles was interesting but lacked empirical evidence and wasn’t supported by the mathematics. Derek disagreed: described the process of walking with me, taking the early morning river route along the side of the Kent under Cumbrian skies. Every gate and stile a quantum barrier, separating countless possibilities of constantly branching parallel universes: facts on the far side of each wall blurred, until the stile is crossed with a new reality created through observation … and sometimes, rewarded with a biscuit. Red Pencil 00:00 / 01:36 I am six years old, my pencil breaks mid-word in Mrs Foster’s class. So I turn to my friend Martin, show him the pencil and whisper, ‘Martin, Martin, my pencil has broke.’ ‘Use this,’ he says and passes a substitute, secretly under our desk. ‘But it’s a red pencil, Martin,’ I say. He smiles a smile. It is an ‘it’ll all be okay’ sort of smile and so I carry on, copying lines of words I cannot read, but which I try my very hardest to replicate, as neat and true to the original as I am able, at six, to do. At the finish, I look down at my page of writing; my teacher’s lines above, with mine in red below, and I wonder about the words I have written. I am happy with the result of my effort; especially the esses, which are smooth and curvy, and flowing and lovely. They are the best I have ever done. So, I walk twenty paces to Mrs Foster’s desk, clutching my paper with pride, and return ten yards with a slapped leg, my work in shreds in a basket, having a brand new perspective on the way of things, and on the reliability of my friend Martin. Early Morning Effrontery 00:00 / 00:59 I fear porcelain is not your milieu and your persistence in performing eight-legged running man dances up sheer white bathroom edifices under the gaze and malevolence of the attentive cat bastard flexing its tail on this toilet seat will prove an effrontery too far. Darwin’s theory of natural selection will happen well before adaptation occurs. Before the hairs on your scopulae develop greater adhesive powers and you are able to ascend unharmed, I suspect you will become terribly broken. So here I am again, 6:30 in the morning, offering toilet paper ladders in the bath tub, before I can shower in peace and the furry purry assassin, so beloved in our household, can be persuaded out of the bathroom to wander off and find something else to murder instead. Publishing credits Derek’s Theory of Quantum Stiles:Tyger Tyger Magazine Red Pencil: Atrium Early Morning Effrontery: Fledge (Maytree Press)

Hear poet Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig back next the poet Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig (MIMS) is a freelance translator, editor and author. Her poetry publications include her pamphlet kinscapes and the anthology The Joy of Living , which she edited to support the Maggie’s Centres . MIMS' work has been published by Dust Poetry Magazine , Dreich , Nine Pens Press and Visual Verse . She lives in Dunfermline, Scotland. the poems Breathe through my roots 00:00 / 01:20 nights of waking amid coal-smoked absence of air gasping dark horror mother’s voice guiding me back to surface where corals of plastic lungs grow on the desks of pulmonologists afternoons spent before metal dragons that spit healing vapours or in a body plethysmography diving bell connected by mic to the outside of effortless intake of nitrogen oxygen carbon dioxide a thing of course unless dad tears up when he leaves me in the Alps for expert strangers to reset my faulty pulmonary system close to the Eagle’s Nest where Hitler owned the mountain skies while Special Children’s Wards dealt those considered weak sedatives depressing respiration or let them starve a slow deliberate death meant to appear natural while German physicians in the 1960s still opposed ventilating neonates & the GDR let wee preemies suffocate or drown – at which point in this poem the girl in my womb kicks hard & hesitates to no madeleine 00:00 / 00:33 walking the dog down a window-lit street the wind delivers a familiar heady fragrance it draws my gaze to the back of a woman grey bob, dark jacket wide skirt swishing red brown white she unlocks a door and the thought this could be my mother now cuts right through my middle Tobi’s tales 00:00 / 02:26 Each morning we uncurl, you from your safe corner, I from bed, into this, our togetherness. Garden patrol, maybe a morsel of toast, buttered. Then we put on armours: harness, shoes, a coat. The lead, two-ended cord umbilical between us, we stroll: always expectant, in any weather. You rarely aim for straights but zigzags, backs and forths. The hour strays along. Each patch of grass, each leaf and stem hold so much information. They’re endless message boards, smells stacked on smells, scattered by strangers, not quite randomly. We walk, discovering: you stop, I stop, and vice versa. We dance, wait for each other. Sometimes you put your paws up on a wall and raise your nose, take note. Then you plop down onto all fours, stride on. You seldom share what secrets you’ve uncovered. Though we have some fixed routes – around the golf course, into the deep sea of the woods, down the old country lane filled with with feathered life and the occasional deer, each time we step out, it remakes us, we never walk the same path twice. The world is wondrous, frightful sometimes: feet, disembodied, stick out under hedges, canines off-lead bounce towards us fast, humans are nervous, or calm, open-hearted. You’ll be outside some more during the day with A., and then at sunset, we three go around the pond together, feed ducks and swans, play hide and seek before the great Forth amphitheatre, the bridges red, grey, white, the harbour’s crane, blue, Pentland wonders. At nightfall then, we tuck you in, cuddle, maybe hum a lullaby, until you’re quite relaxed. And soon, with twitching legs, huffing and puffing, a growl, a little whine, you tell us stories of your old home back in Bosnia, and with a deep intake of breath, just like a sigh, you bind yourself to us and us to you. Publishing credits Breathe through my roots: Visual Verse (Vol. 10, Ch. 4) no madeleine: exclusive first publication by iamb Tobi’s tales: kinscapes (Dreich)

Hear poet Nicola Heaney read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Nicola Heaney back next the poet Nicola Heaney is from Derry, and has poems in a number of journals across the UK and Ireland – including The North , The Cormorant , Crannóg , Skylight47 and Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal . Her poetry has also been shortlisted twice for the Bridport Prize (in 2019 and 2020). Nicola recently published Ulster Fairytales & Legends with The O'Brien Press, and is now working on her first collection. the poems Aviatrix 00:00 / 01:52 I Amelia Earhart popped in for tea on a hot afternoon in 1932. Destined for Paris, she landed instead on Gallagher’s field in Ireland’s North West. As out of place as her Lockheed plane amongst the grazing sheep and cattle, she stood in her trousers and leather coat, calm as a Sunday stroll in the country. 'Have you come far?' a farmhand asked. She grinned, wide eyes the colour of sky. 'America.' II Years later, on another island, in a different ocean miles across the world, she was found by another Gallagher, an Irishman conquering the Empire’s last colony on a rocky outcrop. He identified her by her bones, a bottle of Benedictine and a tube of hand lotion – a broken rouge compact, a woman’s shoe and the remnants of a pot of freckle ointment all pointed to her. But the scientists disagreed. 'It’s a man', they said. She stayed missing, despite Gallagher’s protests. 'It can’t be her – the bones are too long … Plus, this person survived for weeks, distilling drinking water in flames, living off turtles, fish and birds. It can’t be her.' The authorities closed the case, lost her bones. Gallagher died on the island. She’s still missing. III In an estate on the city fringes, a museum marks where she landed, its entrance bricked up against trespassers, windows long gone to teenage vandals. In the carpark, half-naked children play among caravans, weeds and burnt-out cars, running around with arms outstretched, trying to build enough speed to fly. Beachcombing 00:00 / 01:17 I Burrowed in black blistered seaweed that splits the beach in two a whelk shell lies empty. I don’t know why I notice it, rough bran mottled with cream, nothing like the shining white ones we used to collect. You taught me how to select the best. I’d bring them to you and you’d turn them over with long hands so similar to mine, red fingernails tapping for blemishes. At home, you’d coat them in nail polish until they shimmered like nebula, placed on the kitchen windowsill where I’d gaze up at them, forbidden from touching. II I pick the shell up, trace the ridges, turn it to expose iridescent white and pink within, like the innards of a fresh cut. Placing it to my ear, I listen to the churn of waves calling it back out into grey seas. I could take it with me, place it on the windowsill next to the sprig of shrivelled heather picked on a Donegal hill, add it to the cairn I’m building in my English kitchen – instead, I replace it gently between tidemarks in wet sand. False Monument 00:00 / 00:56 In Plaza Mayor, a bronze horse stamps on air, his belly filled with sparrow corpses. For centuries, they sought the promise of shade within, hopped onto his tongue, went deeper, fluttered down his throat, found themselves trapped, unable to fly back up into light. Hundreds died in his belly, suffocated by fiery darkness. Cardboard shelters fill the porticoes around the square, the city’s homeless hiding from the searing heat. At café tables, people sip coffee under shade of frescoed buildings, eyes hidden by sunglasses reflecting sky. During the war, someone threw a bomb into the horse’s mouth which opened its guts and belched out the corpses entombed inside sending them skywards, back into air. Publishing credits Aviatrix: Riggwelter (Issue 25) Beachcombing: Crannóg (Issue 52) False Monument: The Cormorant (Issue 4)

Hear poet Dave Garbutt read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Dave Garbutt © Brigitta Hänggi back next the poet Dave Garbutt is retired, lives in Switzerland and has been a keen birder since he was 12. He was born in North London, less than a mile from Keats’ House, and began his writing career while still at school. Recent publications to include Dave's poems range from Deronda Review and The Brown Envelope Book to BOLD! (an anthology on masculinity) and Sound and Vision . His poem Thirteen White Birds was shown at Leigh Spinners Mill in April 2023 as part of the Paper Birds exhibition. Dave's poem ripped was long-listed in The Rialto's Nature and Place 2021 competition. the poems Walk, Stand and Sit by the Hornbeam 00:00 / 01:30 Come with me into the moment the world relaxes We talk, chatting, gesticulating, not drowning. Here, the hornbeam catkins are out— wait. Stand. Sit. Still. Breathe. Watch. —Count six hundred heartbeats— A Great Tit calls, moves past, twig to twig it stops to sing— a bit early, but sunshine makes it right. Now more birds move, quiz twigs, parse branches, a Tree-creeper sings, a Dunnock from the hedge releases its ‘short unassuming warble’ my first for this woody place. Four Magpies swoop past. A Nuthatch hammers a hazelnut A Hawfinch sits and watches drops to the ground ... here is the world when humans are still— this world, without us, is the one we live in best. Water Vole 00:00 / 00:54 The first time I saw a water vole it didn’t see me, and I watched it for half an hour. I had time. I was running away from the last quarrel of my marriage, from the last quarrel of my life, into my last sunset. And this tiny whisker-twitcher, tiny grass chopper, reed wrecker, ate, looked, sniffed, groomed itself, sniffed, rested watched for sky-scares, watched for water-shrieks and for a few seconds slept. Then it slipped off its rest place, and swam, leaving me with a life still to come, and a future yet to happen. Magnol.i.am 00:00 / 01:20 Although I am but one cell budding into a line I am just as much a petal although I am spread, to wind & sun I am just as much a petal although I am creased, folded back by frost I am just as much a petal although there are bruises marking my satin white I am just as much a petal although I rest now, released, on the ground I am just as much a petal although a footprint crosses my silvery tongue I am just as much a petal although time pushes the bruises to cover me I am just as much a petal although I am dissolving to moss and leaf I am just as much a petal and tell me human with eyes and ears and hands and pen how about you? are you a petal now? or still a human? Since when are you both? Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Rachel Smith read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Rachel Smith back next the poet New Zealander Rachel Smith, a chef and Open Floor Movement Teacher, has made London her home. She's had work published in various journals and anthologies, including The North , Magma and The Book of Love & Loss . Her recordings of her text Bed Unbound toured Scotland on a bus as part of the Day of Access . Rachel's poems for iamb are part of her ongoing project, A Manual for Dying . the poems We die in stages 00:00 / 00:55 Claire wakes us at 6am. She’s already called Mike, so we all go to your room. You are still curled up, could be asleep, except your rattling breath is absent. We toast you with whiskey as the sun rises. You are soft dead, still warm. The undertaker comes after breakfast, takes you away. You are back early afternoon, laid out on your bed in your town clothes – moleskin trousers and Guernsey jersey. Ben and Penny come in to say goodnight. Penny says Antone is really dead now, eh . I know what she means. You were soft dead before, now you are dead dead. Firewood 00:00 / 01:03 We all knew Dad wouldn’t want a shiny coffin. But the pine ones are expensive and there’s not much money. So Matt and Mike turn Dad's woodshed into a workshop, get macrocarpa planks from the local sawmill, debate the design. Matt spends three days sawing, planing, sanding, worrying it’ll be too heavy, that Dad won’t fit, that the bottom will fall out. He fusses over the strips along the top: Dad was so good at lines. The morning of the funeral we test it out. Matt gets in and my cousins and uncles lift, shaking it slightly, laughing in the way you do when life and death are close. Matt gets out relieved, shakes himself, speaks at the funeral about Dad’s love of fire, says I’ve built you a coffin of the finest macrocarpa. Provisions 00:00 / 01:12 Six men – sons, brother, nephews, old friend – lift Dad from his bed in a blanket sling, swearing as they carry this body that does not bend around corners. There is relief when he’s in, that he fits. We put in earth from farms he loved. Roses, seashells, fern fronds. A bridle and dog collar. His radio. Rosary beads. Niall Fergusson’s 'Empire': That’ll give him something to argue with. Jamie makes him his cheese and onion sandwich. His teapot that drove us all crazy with its constant dribble but which we miss as soon as it’s gone. The half bottle of Jura from the night before. Tui sing. Father Joe says a prayer and the lid goes on. The men lift Dad into the hearse, silently. We are bound in this ancient rite, where carrying a coffin is still one of the most sacred things. Publishing credits We die in stages / Provisions: exclusive first publication by iamb Firewood: Magma 75

Hear poet David Pecotić read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. David Pecotić back next the poet Born a poet nearly five decades ago, David Pecotić has had many adventures in the years between then and now: as seeker after truth, academic, partner, public servant, father and counsellor. Recently, tragedy reawoke in David a need to express himself in poetry. His poems have so far appeared in the Australian Poetry Collaboration and The Canberra Times . David lives in Australia, where he's in a complicated relationship with his daimon. the poems There are Days You Cross Hunted 00:00 / 01:08 There are days you cross hunted in rivers, shaded and breezed. Foot after sucked foot, this little can be a lot if it’s yours in the solid dark. Where you stand, others barely there move slightly unseen and you see to live is to live around yourself closer and finer and doesn’t take the eyes in a face. Where they narrow, they blow in. Where they long, they draw out. Such small round things slip through the net strings. Even at the last strung at the estuary’s edge. Inheritance 00:00 / 02:00 Out of time, I am become what I was: a fisherman off & on a black goddess island, where the fish that make dreams school their poison. Back on shore, I tell the bees the names of every gutted vision earned. A million glass wings beat sweetness in return. Further inland, I am the goat man, hoofed hard-on chasing every woody piece of arse, even my own. Up on the mountain, I’m his father, equally erect but frozen, the holy thief whose hungry mouth made the music. A dead ringer for shades who wings for tricks. Only in the forest dark can I reach down my throat to pull myself out, a vukodlach , wolf-skin turned inside-out, drum-like and ruddy. Village monster I kept down for so long, I had cut my hams, pricked my whole body with pins to prevent this: I cannot pretend after this operation I won’t walk about forcing your submission. Strigun —human by day, demon by night; held in check by my krsnik : the warlock gift with his hawthorn stick, that takes away, gives peace by piercing, the heart again. Hoarfrost Future 00:00 / 01:02 Winter is always colder half-broken— the frost bleeds out as a sacrifice to what comes. Today is as hard and cold, sparkling a sharp wet razor. So many melting facets, so much hoarfrost future. Glass candy hard on a ground we can’t feel getting warmer, so subtle the seasoning. I flow out the same, rhyming the solid ebb-tide— wounded words and eyes swallow unsatiated spongey beds of loved leaves. What does the sun-warmed wind mean to their delicate rise and fall? They tell me to my autumn and spring I don’t owe anything at all. Publishing credits There are Days You Cross Hunted: Australian Poetry Collaboration (Issue 34) Inheritance: Australian Poetry Collaboration (Issue 30) Hoarfrost Future: The Canberra Times (February 2021)

Hear poet Lewis Wyn Davies read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Lewis Wyn Davies back next the poet Lewis Wyn Davies is an emerging poet from an impoverished upbringing in Shropshire. His words have been published in Dreich , streetcake , VAINE and Free Verse Revolution , as well as in Broken Sleep Books' Masculinity: an anthology of modern voices and the Macclesfield Samaritans anthology, 100 Poems of Hope . Lewis has also collaborated with illustrator Saffron Russell on his debut pamphlet Comprehensive and the A E Housman-inspired A Shropshire Grad , featured on radio as part of BBC Upload, and been shortlisted for two literary prizes. the poems Son of a Hooligan 00:00 / 01:27 It’s another Saturday away from home and I'm hurtling towards the capital, picking up accents, mingling with tinnies, trying to hide my identity while all the boys wear Stoney badges on their sleeves. They sway together and fill the carriage with jarring songs about their Black heroes. They joke about their bird being in control back home and howl like the cavemen who first spoke of such roles. A couple of them spot the crest on my chest and ask if I'm in a firm. I suppose I am through birthright – my family tree has the same crass banners hanging from the branches directly above me. I ponder how I escaped the fate that befalls all these boys from all these towns. I think about my father and his brother – who wear the gear, watch the videos, read the manuals. Yet when a blue bird’s wing streaks across the Severn, or a robin’s red breast hops out of a nest, their ego is punctured. And I thank their mother for flying those banners, as the lads on the train bash cameras while marching out into Milton Keynes. The Last Time 00:00 / 01:02 No one knows the last time is happening as the last time happens. For example, today is my ex-best friend's birthday and I think about him more in five minutes than I imagine he's thought about me in as many years. I still see his wild eyes in every bottle of Captain Morgan and whenever I hear my favourite band’s biggest riff – or his. He used to pick me up and we’d sing and bitch hard in supermarket car parks deep into the morning hours, even with brightening skies warning us of our looming shifts. I’d Snapchat his rants and we’d ignite belly laughs that burnt so long they nearly made us sick. But I can’t tell you the last time we did any of this. And I feel as if he’s just made me laugh again after tearing out my heartstrings. To the Boy on Rhossili Beach, 00:00 / 01:30 As the final days of my twenties were spent hopping across Mordor terrain with my partner in hand – the breeze pulling me up by the hair and exposing my widow's peak, waves from Venezuela finally finding the trim of my jeans to seep and rest in, the pair of us planning our next blockbuster season together – you walked the shore with a spirit that channelled an abandoned bus shelter. We were on a washed-up stump, scrubbing sand off our exposed toes and watching your wounded figure crouch to etch a note, not knowing how right we were in our prejudice. When we finally approached, life is unkind at the best of times blared across the bay with you still in frame, and killed us completely as you slowly became just another human ant in the fifty-mile mist. Enter Shikari fan or hollow young man, you may not care to know that I wished for happiness every starry night in my forgotten cul-de-sac, or that my shabby street cat watched on as I cried in silence (I certainly wouldn’t have given a fuck about some stranger’s better life at that time). But it might be worth knowing we replied with love. Publishing credits Son of a Hooligan: Free Verse Revolution (Issue XII: Ancestors) The Last Time: Masculinity: an anthology of modern voices (Broken Sleep Books, 2024) To the Boy on Rhossili Beach,: Dreich 11 (Season 6, No. 71)

Hear poet Louise Longson read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Louise Longson back next the poet Widely published in print and online, Louise Longson is the author of Hanging Fire and Songs from the Witch Bottle: Cytoplasmic Variations . She won the inaugural Kari-Ann Flickinger Literary Memorial Prize with her upcoming collection These are her thoughts as she falls , and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. She was also Highly Commended in The Hedgehog Poetry Press' second A Proper Poetry Pamphlet Competition in July 2024. Translated through the twin prisms of myth and nature, Louise's poetry brings together her personal and professional experiences – she's worked for many years with survivors of trauma at Rape Crisis, as well as with charities focused on alleviating loneliness and supporting mental health recovery. the poems Drowning on Dry Land 00:00 / 01:41 We go in a drought year, and she remembers a sacrifice that was made to the god of Water, when the village was buried under the flow that ate the river and the broad pale fillet of rock where she used to bathe and fish. Huge metal bulldozers rumbled like tanks, planes practiced overhead for a dam-busting raid over the water, unaware of the irony. Twisting streets she walked to school and clean white stone houses became slack and rubble. The foundations of her childhood crumbled away with them. In this dry summer of baked mud, the reservoir breaks its silence. The village has come up, gasping for air. Her memory gushes out in a flood of nostalgia that is hard to bear. It is a hunger, remembering. An ache that hurts more than all the forgetting. By spring, it will slip back beneath the water and she, too, will be gone. Only a pile of sad stone remains; the shaped and faced remnants of a former beauty. History will hold them; both no longer existing and existing at once in an ellipsis of space, a lacuna of fluid time. Battered Woman 00:00 / 01:03 That’s what she was called, back then, like something you’d get from a chip shop. She was the chicken on a spit with the life cooked out of her. Pasty skin, pied with bruises ebbing in colour from Baltic-blue-black to sick mushy-pea-green. Dried ketchup in her nostrils, split lips. Told by her mother she’d made her bed and must lie in it, she could have her cake but couldn’t eat it. Knowing her place is in the queue, waiting her turn until he shouts. Who’s next? Wrap her up in words: newspaper stories said she screamed so quietly the neighbours never heard. Nobody saw her until she slipped back into the waters; disappeared with the slap of tailfin and quicksilver flash. I trawl for her in my dreams. How I Find and Lose My Mother 00:00 / 01:29 Hope is what keeps her going down the street, to the unremarkable house that, like her, needs a new coat of paint. To be repointed, given an extension. I only had twelve weeks. She comes with a shopping bag and a social worker. It’s a crash course in redemption. Pass, and we can leave together. Fail and we will be sent off discretely in different directions. We were never left alone. Each moment of interaction kept in a detailed logbook. You were to be picked up, hugged, fed, changed into a non-risk situation. But, sleep deprived, there were two things I could not keep: my anger at bay and you. Now, forty years later, she tells me her story. History scrapes me, scribing pain onto my scrimshawed bones. Here I am. Unbroken, whole, and as perfect to her as the day she walked away, alone. We only have twelve weeks. Publishing credits Drowning on Dry Land: The High Window (Summer 2023) Battered Woman: Songs from the Witch Bottle: Cytoplasmic Variations (Alien Buddha Press) How I Find and Lose My Mother: Allegro Poetry Magazine (Issue 30)

Hear poet Christopher Arksey read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Christopher Arksey back next the poet Writer and voice actor Christopher Arksey's debut poetry pamphlet, Variety Turns , appeared in January 2024. He's had poems published in Anthropocene and The Friday Poem , as well as in the anthology, Companions of His Thoughts More Green: Poems for Andrew Marvell – while his poem Ceremony was Carol Rumens' Poem of the Week in The Guardian . Christopher lives in Hull with his wife and two sons. the poems Nil 00:00 / 01:03 As each left more arrived. Old friends, colleagues, church regulars joined to say goodbye. I gave up my seat and perched on the windowsill, edging in and out of last conversations. A one-time congregation of sorts. Some dredging holiday stories and office jokes to keep it light, stifling croaks of laughter. Some were all prayers. While others warmed their chairs in sniffled vigil and waited for the next to take their places. Your life’s work concentrated to one room. In their faces flashed sides I’d not seen in you. Roles outside of mum and wife, the ones that rounded up your life, were now diminishing in full view: loyal companion, beloved boss, true believer. My singular loss humbled by multiple thefts, as each arrived and more left. The Laugh 00:00 / 00:37 It was like you’d surfaced after a spell underwater; spent and roused at the same time, breathless towards the inevitable big reveal of your long-delayed punchline. Then you let fly – the laugh of someone twice your size – with such potency it rocked your frame and sent you seeking my arm for balance, stopping short of doubling over from the strain. Only this soundless record of it exists. And I forget the joke, but I’ve got the gist. Tried Praying 00:00 / 00:20 While time travelling in Google Street View, I spot your try praying sticker. A year or two uproots the bay tree and plants a new For Sale sign, while pansies bloom in the entrance. Not one of these made a difference. Publishing credits Nil / Tried Praying: Variety Turns (Broken Sleep Books) The Laugh: The Friday Poem (November 4th 2022)

Hear poet Jeremy Wikeley read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jeremy Wikeley back next the poet Jeremy Wikeley is a writer and poet. His poems, essays and reviews have appeared online and in print in publications including New Welsh Review , The Observer , Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal and The Friday Poem . Jeremy's poems have also been anthologised in three collections from The Emma Press. Originally from Romsey in Hamsphire, Jeremy now lives in London, where he works in the arts. the poems Train to Cambridge After Louis MacNeice 00:00 / 00:48 Beyond the window the sky is turning pink and it’s more surprising than that song I wrote about how surprised I was that the sky was turning pink. It’s turning slowly, like it’s enjoying itself, as if there’s no hurry. The evening is encouraging the sky to follow it, and the sky is following, in its own time, pink and pacing itself while the train and I are racing to get ahead of the turning of the world only to find no matter how hard we try to push ourselves we are always a sleeper behind the evening as he strides along outside, crushing the sun under his thumb, mixing red dust with wet clouds and swiping dark streaks across the cheeks of the sky. The Vandals Remove the Ark of the Covenant (as told by the Ark) 00:00 / 00:33 Carnage! And then we were rocked across the Mediterranean – a box in a box in a box … over the chopping winter sea until a strange tongue told us we’d come to Carthage. And they plonked us down on the edge of the quay, as if we were any old package. Which we are! A box in a box in a box … under tarpaulin on African docks in Carthage. Poetry in Wartime 00:00 / 01:08 If this was a war I could be sad for myself. What bad luck (I’d say) to get caught up in this. So, the inevitable conscription into the most statistically dangerous wing of the armed forces (half the bombers didn’t make it back) would be more bad luck, like the hole in the kitchen ceiling. If this was a war, I would be worried about dying, not other people dying and the very possibility might make the uncertainty tolerable. If it were a war, every survivor would have a different set of stories, or at least there would be enough variation in our experiences for them to bear the repetition. As it is, nothing we do seems very important and because we don’t know what’s working, we don’t know what’s worth it, or what kind of world will come next. All I know is I will have to live in it. And it’s right, it’s right, it’s right. I’m not saying it’s not right. But like everything right, it is unbearable. Publishing credits Train to Cambridge: In Transit: Poems of Travel (The Emma Press) The Vandals Remove the Ark of the Covenant (as told by the Ark): exclusive first publication by iamb Poetry in Wartime: From the Silence of the Stacks, New Voices Rise, Vol. 1 (The London Library)

Hear poet Bill Sutton read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Bill Sutton back next the poet London-based Cumbrian poet Bill Sutton (he/him) creates visceral, abstract reflections of nature in his work. His poetry has appeared in Anthropocene and new zine Overgrowth . In 2015, Bill and his brother formed music project Slabtoe, which has released several albums and EPs. Bill's recently lent his poetry/song-writing abilities to the BFI-funded short film The Leerie , and his debut screenplay Corpse Road will be produced later in 2022. the poems Helton 00:00 / 00:22 to see stars, the hulk of barn, the rise behind and silent. to see rain, smoke wrapped, the valleys slope and dreaming. to all orbits, a ripple, and the quiet fields sleeping. Lend The River Rain 00:00 / 00:32 The lights on the hillside are a constellation, scattered. A half-remembered conversation; a friend lost, a family gathered under a winter sky, whose clouds are torn and tattered. 'It’s just a shadow cast from a different day, but none of that now matters … ' I lend the river rain. It lends it back again. Black Barn Rise 00:00 / 00:23 shadows in the mist, an echo where a wood once was. moon cold mist, settled on the river's twist. above and behind, black barn rise, there, where an echo of a wood once was. Publishing credits Helton / Lend The River Rain: exclusive first publication by iamb Black Barn Rise: Overgrowth (Issue No. 1)

Hear poet Carl Alexandersson read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Carl Alexandersson back next the poet Carl Alexandersson (he/him), a queer spoken word poet based in London, hails from Småland, Sweden. He was Highly Commended for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award 2022, a runner-up for the Grierson Verse Prize 2022, and selected for the BBC Words First programme in 2021. Carl's work has been published in Atrium , Ink Sweat & Tears , Dust Poetry and elsewhere. His debut poetry pamphlet Förgätmigej // Forget-me-not appeared in 2023. the poems The cows on the ice 00:00 / 02:07 on clear winter days we'd ice skate on Sjöatorpssjön our breaths were condensed precise fast-paced as we'd circle the patch of ice we were told was safe safety is a decision others make * on this frozen-over lake decades ago Dad's childhood friend poured hot cocoa into his ice skates to warm his feet which worked briefly before backfiring nothing is as cold as heat fading * once, I fell through slipped from the pier and had to get draped in a tablecloth the colour of snödroppar in Swedish we have this saying det är ingen ko på isen there is no cow on the ice it means no danger everything's fine * once I poured hot cocoa onto the ice thinking it'd melt but it just stained * Dad always told me if I ever go further out on the ice I'd need to bring ice picks in case I fell in on Sjöatorpssjön I learned how to listen for cracks under skates for spring to break for danger * last summer, in the dark Dad and I heard our neighbours shout there were cows in the lake having escaped their farm for the cooling bliss of a summer night swim we stood and listened as they brought them ashore like we'd listen for the ice to crack * I'd like to not stain this ice this lake this life if I can * in the end the cows on the ice were saved safety is a decision others make. Wind-bent trees still grow 00:00 / 01:46 in a city centre park in Bilbao, my best friend reaches out and touches the trees we pass says man-made things are too smooth, too flat; unnatural. I think of things I have lost: laying down on grass, jumping from one rock to the next, picking wildflowers bringing them home which brings me back to summer days with farmor and farfar by Sjöatorpssjön reading Kalle Anka comics in the shade of an oak tree, holding the ground with my body; breathing it in. when did I stop going for forest runs, stop walking into the kitchen with grass-stained feet, carrying wild strawberries from the edge of the greenery? such sweetness in such small bodies. I read somewhere that twigs don’t always break at their weakest point; that it is more of a chain reaction of small breakages – and that rings out like my first phone. later on, my best friend leans back onto a patch of grass on a hill overlooking the city, closes her eyes, exhales deeply, feels ground against skin, and still, I don’t. instead, I look out at what’s been built below. but also further at the hills in the distance, overlapping each other, wild waves of green – And I do breathe it in. Skummeslövsstrand’s shoreline 00:00 / 02:29 At 5 / at the shores of Skummeslövsstrand / we would collect the washed-up jellyfish / and place them in piles / I don't remember / why. Generally / I think the why-nots are more important / why not build a tower of jellyfish / reaching all the way to the candy floss clouds? See / at 5 / that made perfect sense /... / I want nonsense to make sense again / pick up shiny things from the ground and keep them / draw badly with crayons / so as to grace the fridge / with this representative testament of my nonsensical existence! And then / I want to munch on snow / and feel the water melt / into me / hold your hand and not question it / ask you what your favourite colour is / and your top 5 animals / and if you remember / how quickly we could exit a building / for recess? It was a question of seconds / holding each other / so close /... / Once / we went there in winter / holding plastic shovels close to our chests / stomping through the snow / in order to reach the shoreline / finding that oceans don't freeze the way lakes do / the waves stay warm by moving Mom says / and we run / all the way home / empty handed / convinced / the holes we dug in the snow / will still be there tomorrow /... / In Cornwall, I am told / collecting trinkets from the shore / is common practice. The belief / that whatever the sea washes up is yours / to keep / washed clean / of any claims / belonging to the sea and the shore and the clouds and you all / at /... / Once, my brother got stung by a lion's mane jellyfish / so badly / we had to scrape his entire back / with Dad's credit card. During the car ride / home / Dad explained why / that works / and his words made sense /... / We had asked the sea to play / with us / and it had said no / there is nothing left / to collect. Don’t ask me / again . Publishing credits The cows on the ice: Dust Poetry Magazine (Issue 10) Wind-bent trees still grow: exclusive first publication by iamb Skummeslövsstrand’s shoreline: The Hyacinth Review (December 11th 2023)

Hear poet Sue Butler read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Sue Butler back next the poet Reflecting, towards the end of her career as a General Practitioner, on the gift and the burden of intimate connection with so many lives, Sue Butler took up walking and creative writing, considering these unpredictable forms of meditation on life in all its grace, pain and peculiarity. Sue's poems have appeared in One Hand Clapping , Spelt Magazine , Poetry and Covid , the Hippocrates Prize Anthology, and the Whirlagust series from Yaffle Press – publisher of her pamphlet, Learning from the Body . the poems Equality for Boys 00:00 / 01:25 Did his mother make him up, brush and pinch his cheeks and lips, paint him, rosy, healthy, hearty as the other boys at parties? Did they ask him if he knew his underwear was on display to girls with hormones all askew, did his armpits need a shave? Did they tell him if he tried he might just get in to medicine. Men needed to be qualified to study beside the women. Did his patients call him nurse and his seniors call him dear? Did they say 'What a waste' when he married and then, when he carried on, suggest a nice little job – family planning or child health – should suffice Obstetrics wasn’t for men. Did they check who would take his calls at night? Did school phone him to say his child was sick? Or they were looking for an extra for the history trip? When he came home in time to lift his bath-warm son to drip on his knee, discuss how yellow ducks floated and real ones flew, and heard the work phone ring, did he begin to see their point of view? After cataract surgery 00:00 / 01:24 Daily she wakes to the infinite variations clouds play on the sun, the sliver of light between blind and wall no longer a slur of soft pastel but sharp as a quartz vein through a cobble, bright as the bowl of the half scallop she picked from the beach in Clachtoll. She sees the jut of the light switch, its small hooked shadow, the unblinking screws on either side, how it has the look of an owl, how when someone crosses the landing, the door flaps, briefly supplies wings. She tests the bad eye, the nicotine sheen that persists, remembers their first home, smoke-stained cupboards that even three scrubbings could not make clean, closes that eye to make all bright again. A three millimetre incision, narrow as a baby tooth. Her vision become falls of sari silk, surf breaking turquoise in the sun, light splintered, gathering, soft and precise as hoar frost. The work of women 00:00 / 01:54 The doctor keeps the stitches small and even as she was taught in school by the sisters, working by hand down the long length of a skirt, and back to make the French seam. A single lamp lights her work. The cone of starch white light picks up the smallest pucker, every crooked stitch, standing at her shoulder as Sister did, pushing her wire rimmed glasses down her nose. She stitches the slow completion of the birth, the return of the mother from the inundation that swept through her. Beyond the light, mother and baby begin to learn their separation – the breathy warmth and chill of mouth rooting for nipple, clutching, letting fall; the cushiony curves of cheek and breast; the astonishing, instant fit of fist and finger. Voices spill from the corridor, calm the havoc of other births, transform parents into grandparents, fade unnoticed beneath the absorbing catch on skin of needle, lips, fingers. Nearly done. The doctor thinks of the nuns as she cuts the last stitch, how they prayed together for each other. Beneath her gown, too small yet to tent the flesh, her baby stretches, rolls, settles back into dreams. Publishing credits Equality for Boys: Learning from the Body (Yaffle Press) After cataract surgery: One Hand Clapping The work of women: 2020 Hippocrates Prize Anthology (The Hippocrates Press)