Hear poet Wendy Pratt read poems for wave 20 of literary poetry journal iamb. Wendy Pratt wave 20 winter 2024 back next the poet Author, poet and editor Wendy Pratt lives and works on the North Yorkshire coast. She's written several volumes of poetry – her most recent collection being Blackbird Singing at Dusk – and her nature/landscape memoir, The Ghost Lake , was described by The Observer as ‘ remarkable ’. Wendy is also the founder and editor-in-chief of Spelt Magazine , which celebrates and validates the rural experience through poetry, creative non-fiction and poetry film. the poems Nan Hardwicke Turns into a Hare In memory of M 00:00 / 01:14 I will tell you how it was. I slipped into the hare like a nude foot into a glorious slipper. Pushing her bones to one side to make room for my shape so I could settle myself like a child within her. In the dark I groped for her freedom, gently teasing it apart to web across my palm. Here is where the separation ends: I tensed her legs with my arms, pushed my rhythm down the stepping-stones of spine. An odd feeling this, to hold another’s soul in the mouth like an egg; the aching jaw around her delicate self. Her mind was simple, full of open space and weather. I warmed myself on her frantic pulse and felt the draw of gorse and grass, the distant slate line at the edge of the moor. The air span diamonds out of sea fret to catch across my tawny coat as I began to fold the earth beneath my feet and fly across the heath, the heather. Sometimes I Pretend I am a Dog 00:00 / 01:51 When we are alone together I allow myself to become pack. We stop and I sit and you move about the place in silence. Sometimes we both lie down with our sides against the parched earth and let our eyes close. When people are near, I act as if I am also a person. Mostly it is just us and the Wolds or the chalk farm roads and wind turbines and rocks and cloud shadows, the fast pace of the sun over great distances. You do not look at the view as I do but you understand how to move within it. When I was a child, I hid under the teacher’s desk and would speak only in dog. I did not pretend to be a dog. I was a dog. I willed myself to canine. The family dog was my brother. I ate from his bowl, slept in his bed. I long to be that animal again. Sometimes I test myself to see how dog I still am. I run my tongue along my canines and feel for the movement of my ears. I slouch my back, and pull my knees up let my spine fall between my shoulder blades. Sometimes I climb a fallen tree or a boulder like that and it pleases me, and it pleases you to see me down at your level. This is joy. In these moments I feel as the earth must feel, and I feel as the glacial till must feel and what it might be to exist only in sensation. Eleven 00:00 / 01:16 I want you to know that we are happy. I want you to know that we laugh. That some days I think I have forgotten what you look like. That we sit on the patio drinking wine and sometimes we don’t think of you at all. That I can’t imagine you at the age you would be now. I want you to know that I keep your clothes near our bed, where I can see them. That your photo is faded and everyone in it looks dated, except you. I want you to know that sometimes I live in the days of your death. That sometimes I can smell the bereavement suite, sometimes the sound of the heart monitor wakes me and the sound of the fan whirring and the smell of toast on the ward and the squeak of trolleys wheeling drugs in the corridor and you in the Moses basket is all there is. I want you to know that on those days it is difficult to let you go again. I want you to know that today isn’t one of those days, I want you to know that today I carry you up to the cemetery like a goldfinch on my shoulder and that you bob away in the air and then back again, and that it makes me happy to imagine us this way. Publishing credits Nan Hardwicke Turns into a Hare: Nan Hardwicke Turns into a Hare (Prole Books) Sometimes I Pretend I am a Dog / Eleven: Blackbird Singing at Dusk (Nine Arches Press) Author photo: © James Thackeray

Hear poet Carl Alexandersson read poems for wave 22 of literary poetry journal iamb. Carl Alexandersson wave 22 summer 2025 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 Carrie Etter read poems for wave 3 of literary poetry journal iamb. Carrie Etter wave 3 summer 2020 back next the poet Carrie Etter is an American poet resident in England since 2001, and Reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. She has published four collections – most recently, The Weather in Normal – and numerous chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, The Guardian, The Iowa Review, The New Republic, The New Statesman, Poetry Review and The Times Literary Supplement, as well as in anthologies such as The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem and Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK . Carrie also publishes short fiction, essays and reviews. the poems A Birthmother’s Catechism 00:00 / 00:56 How did you let him go? With black ink and legalese How did you let him go? It’d be another year before I could vote How did you let him go? With altruism, tears, and self-loathing How did you let him go? A nurse brought pills for drying up breast milk How did you let him go? Who hangs a birdhouse from a sapling? Eldest 00:00 / 01:28 Lean forward in shadow. The room is corridor opening into square, passage and purpose. On the distant bed, a spill of mottled flesh, the white cotton gown fallen to little use. You gape in the doorway. His body is positioned away, toward the window. You stare until he calls, calls you into mutual shame. Now you must gentle. The mind, relieved, packs away its unfinished question. The bowl of green gelatin has no scent. You hold it to your nose as he draws the cloth up with a tug, his grasp like a bird’s. No, not shame. Not now. Though he doesn’t know it, he will be glad when you sit down at last. This is your father. The room is white and inescapable. Paternal 00:00 / 02:24 A parent a plinth. The first week he regarded hospital as hotel. So the variables include the kind of stone, its consistency, the velocity of prevailing winds. What’s purer than an infidel’s prayer? How strangely, in the second week, the swollen limbs stiffened. And the effects of climate change: milder winters, more precipitation, two, three heat waves each summer. All American, non-Jewish whites are Christian by default. Incredulous, I realise his bicycle may rust and walk it to the shed. Such an ordinary act of reverence. The pulmonologist, the neurologist, the family physician. A bed is a bed is the smallest of bedsores. Blood doesn’t come into it. Ritual, of course, is another matter. A Midwestern town of that size exhibits limited types of architecture. I’ve yet to mention the distance. Come now, to the pivot, the abscess, another end of innocence. In every shop, the woman at the till sings, 'Merry Christmas,' a red turtleneck under her green jumper. I thought jumper rather than sweater, a basic equation of space and time. Midnight shuffles the cards. Translated thus, the matter became surgical, a place on the spine. Each night the bicycle breaks out to complete its usual course. A loyalty of ritual or habit. 'ICU' means I see you connected to life by wire and tube. A geologist can explain the complexities of erosion. The third week comes with liner notes already becoming apocryphal. Look at this old map, where my fingers once stretched across the sea. Publishing credits A Birthmother’s Catechism: Imagined Sons (Seren) Eldest: The Weather in Normal (Seren / Station Hill) Paternal: Divining for Starters (Shearsman)

Hear poet Nicola Heaney read poems for wave 5 of literary poetry journal iamb. Nicola Heaney wave 5 spring 2021 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 Lucy Holme read poems for wave 8 of literary poetry journal iamb. Lucy Holme wave 8 winter 2021 back next the poet Originally from Kent but now living in Cork, Ireland, Lucy Holme is a poet and mother whose poems have featured in The Liminal Review , Púca Literary Journal and Re-Side. She also has work forthcoming in Southword , Marble Poetry , Poetry Bus , Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal and new online poetry journal After... . In April 2021, she was a recipient of a Munster Literature Centre Mentoring Fellowship with the poet Grace Wells, and is now studying for an MA in Creative Writing. Lucy's debut chapbook, Temporary Stasis – shortlisted for The Patrick Kavanagh Award – will be published by Broken Sleep Books in 2022. the poems The Haunted Kind 00:00 / 01:29 I can tell you all I know about awakening under scratchy winter blankets in the half-light of Sóller’s horseshoe bay. A view of the promenade, a 1950s sepia vignette. Off season. Tramuntana, olive-scented. Better with fewer bodies to watch our story unfold. Nights were cold in April although the days still had their welcome pockets of sun. We couldn’t gauge the depth of one another’s heart, so we handled them gently, like rare species. Bared faults before they were revealed, pushed shadows out. One night when I awoke, I felt a presence in the room that wasn’t you. Saw a pale hand turn the knob and then retreat. You said you sensed it too. Ghosts were all around us in the verdure, on the skipping sand. You told me of your cleverest friend, about your country’s complicated past. I kept my own history vague for fear of breaking the spell. The claims we make, early in the day, I just can’t lie and these are my worst traits. Laid bare, they shift like sediment on the shore. You take the sadness, add the words, mash them into something you can use, a cleansing poultice for old wounds. Best remember who you said you were, before the ghosts gather to call you out. La Yegua 00:00 / 01:38 Brown burnished gold, silken flank shivers with sweat. She comes near to sneeze, to stomp then leaves in a kinetic blur, a muscled sketch from Duchamp, I lay my palms flat as her muzzle sniffs and strong jaw chomp-chomps. She studies me. Lashes dark and wet, angles fine as cut glass. She resists form. After all, she is so young. They shout whoa pícara! Click their tongues when she rears and fumes. The bridle constricts blood flow, breath heaves as it tightens. Expansion curtailed, power diminished. I reach for her, but she eyes me with disdain. Turns to rise on hind quarters, lope like six beasts conjoined, across the prado. Every fly that lands creates a twitch that sends her in circles, proud breast raised skywards. She refuses to be scavenged, to be bled dry. Now I know her name, Carletta, I visit each sweltering day and build a life for her. Count the summers she has been on display. We greet each other as — not quite old friends — but something close. We are of a similar temperament: enraged by things we cannot convey. We speak a different language, but I can sight-read the low simmer, her impatience with her teachers. Against the rope fence, I hold her reins, white-knuckled, a luchadora they will try, and fail to tame. Altair Shines for my Beloved New Year's Eve, 2019 00:00 / 01:23 You are above him now, an eager light, just off starboard bow. Unbodied alpha aquilae, aflame. As I, far from inky ocean sprawl, search the city sky, mapping longing and loss. Shroud me in your polished glow, Altair, so I might have courage beyond tonight, onward to dawn. This year, grief cut me off mid-flight, when I had tried so hard to soar. It snatched what I couldn’t bear to lose, gifted unexpected treasures for which I had no room. Reason had me choose what I loved the best, resolve bade me solemnly to forget the rest. But if our eyes lock through you at midnight, we’re halfway back together. So tell me, eagle eye, nestled in the aether can you make us strong again? Can you help us plot our own small constellation, far from the flare of repercussions? To reconcile, so we might burn at full intensity once more? Just as you do. Altair, light the course home for my beloved, as he navigates the dark Atlantic path. Know that I am also at sea, pacing these cold corridors. Waiting for sorrow to loosen its grip on me. Publishing credits The Haunted Kind: The Honest Ulsterman (February 2021) La Yegua / Altair Shines for my Beloved: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Corinna Board read poems for wave 19 of literary poetry journal iamb. Corinna Board wave 19 autumn 2024 back next the poet Corinna Board teaches English as an additional language in an Oxford secondary school. She grew up on a farm, and her writing is often inspired by the rural environment. Her work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in And Other Poems , Anthropocene , berlin lit , Propel Magazine , Spelt Magazine , Atrium , Ink Sweat & Tears , Magma and elsewhere. Corinna won the Gloucestershire Wildlife category of the 2023 Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust poetry competition, and was commended in the 2024 Verve Poetry Festival Eco-Poetry competition. She published her debut pamphlet, Arboreal , in January 2024. the poems Picking up my prescription ‘Sometimes as an antidote to fear of death, I eat the stars.’ ~ Rebecca Elson ~ 00:00 / 01:00 There are no stars in this city. I nibble on concrete, sip cocktails of NO₂. I’m dying for a decent constellation. Would some of those neons do? Or the flashing red lights on a high-rise? I FaceTime Olivier in the Pyrenees. He points his camera at Ursa Major, Cassiopeia, Orion’s Belt … Star after star devoured through my screen. I whisper Merci , then sleep like a baby. When the woman in Boots tells me I’m glowing, I say it must be the new meds. I keep quiet about the stars. On the tube ride home, they twinkle in my stomach like a Tiffany’s heist. My uncle brings back a fox tail from the fields 00:00 / 01:09 He is carrying his rifle, brandishing the tail like a trophy. A week ago, the fox (was it this one?) got into the coop and slaughtered all the hens. My uncle is grinning. The tail is cleanly cut, bloodied at the end. It hangs from a nail in the big barn, swinging like a corpse on the gallows. For days, I'm scared to touch it. The fur is coarser than I expected. I comb it with my fingers, breathe in its musk, close my eyes and pretend it's whole. Later, I run wild with my cousins. We are foxes — and I, the eldest, am the mother, the vixen. Driven by hunger, I burn through the fields, my cubs left hiding in the ripening wheat. The wind ruffles my coat the wrong way. Too late, I pick up his scent. Field notes 00:00 / 02:02 1. field noun : an area of land, used for growing crops or keeping animals, usually surrounded by a fence. 2. Green as far as the eye can see, then the brook. Water-mint, pebbles bedraggled in weed. 3. A six-year-old girl with a net, a bucket full of bullheads. Friesian cows bellowing, tick of the fence. Where did the years go? 4. Before he died, my uncle planted a rowan tree – there in the tall grass. 5. When we first saw the barn owl, it could have been a ghost. It flew low over the field, wings whispering. 6. If I buried my heart, what would grow? Perhaps a sapling. 7. Today, I have counted three kinds of butterfly: marbled white, common blue, speckled wood. 8. Dear Field, Do you ever dream of picking yourself up and striding off over the horizon? Be honest now. 9. I don’t know what I’d do if you left. I love you, field. Please stay. 10. Are you crying or is that rain? 11. In the field, I’m a child again. All this green, all this sky. I could disappear. 12. Meadow foxtail, yellow oat, timothy. I am the field, and the field is me. I am , the field is . Publishing credits Picking up my prescription: Anthropocene (July 2024) My uncle brings back a fox tail from the fields: Modron Magazine (Issue Four) Field notes: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Polly Atkin read poems for wave 3 of literary poetry journal iamb. Polly Atkin wave 3 summer 2020 back next the poet Polly Akin lives in Cumbria. Her first poetry collection, Basic Nest Architecture , was followed by her third pamphlet, With Invisible Rain, which draws on Dorothy Wordsworth’s late journals to express pain. Polly's first pamphlet, bone song , was shortlisted for the 2009 Michael Marks Pamphlet Award, while her second, Shadow Dispatches , won the 2012 Mslexia Pamphlet Prize. Her second poetry collection, Much With Body, will be published by Seren in October 2021. Polly is also working on a non-fiction book that reflects on place, belonging and chronic illness. the poems Motacilla flava flavissima 00:00 / 01:39 When you came to us in the grey yard it was out of the darkest season the first bright day brightest of bright challenging to identify at the time the trees black streaks with sticky buds like rain drops against the grey-green fell you flew out of the lightless mouth of winter with the sun in you most yellow of yellows the sun in you the sun trailing after the spinning rock of your body blazing yellow spreading yellow with every dab of your tail the train of a comet the augur you were you must have flown into the darkness and found the sun by the thin arc of yellow escaping from the well where she had been buried I thought you must have carried the sun in your beak like a seed that you jolted and swallowed her yellowest of all yellows most yellow most bright you coughed her out from your perch on the splintering fence and filled your mouth with nest stuff instead you stayed with us chose us you built your yellow world in the cracks in our grey one lit up with yellow yellow glowed from the fissures in the slate they call you a migrant breeder when you turn to red a passage visitor you knit your home in the passage between houses the passage between one and another your yellow between your yellow lighting the way Still 00:00 / 02:11 For a while I was still. They made me still in a room with a castle view they taught my arms to lie still. It hurt to jerk pinned down. Still they live. My electric elbow. My stutter wrist. Knees skip on the spot. Feet stick reflect the kick. Running in sleep eyes rolling. Viscous movement. Stammering rest. My left leg crossing my right is terrified trapped its breathing heart the hand of a metronome set too fast. I watch it swinging counting out frantic time to the patterned code of the carpet. I cannot feel it. I cannot control it. This is the blood’s attempt at communication. This is the body’s refusal. It throws its hands up. Listen to the hidden. I am not paying the right attention. You say stop frowning. I do not know I am frowning. My forehead aches with trying. With shaping the mouth for a motion like speaking. Radiant somebody says confusing alarm with wellbeing. No one can interpret the language of my blood’s blind panic. The figures add up to nothing. The pressure keeps building clicking up a shifting scale. For a while I was still. They made me still. In a room where I could not move for wanting. Now I am matter and current flux radiant energy dripping ticking. Leeches 00:00 / 01:38 Leeches have three hundred teeth. Leeches leave a bite mark like a peace sign. Leeches excrete anaesthetic when they pierce your skin, like Emla cream. Leeches are precious. A medicinal leech is hard to find. We are listening to the radio on the drive to the hospital. Natural Histories. A half hour of leeches. A leech is doctor. A leech is a fiend who sucks you dry. A leech is a bad friend. A good leech will save lives. Leeches are curious. Leeches migrate around a body. Victorians tied strings to their leeches and let them roam, mine the body’s unseen continents, drain what they couldn’t control. I consider the grace of leeches. The diaspora of leeches. The harvesting of leeches to extinction. An old man reads a young man’s poem, in which a leechgatherer on a lonely moor becomes a beautiful cure: the last leech in England and I think of him now – as I lay on my bed, a needle in each elbow crook, the cold saline dripping in, the hot blood dripping out – skulking in a pool on the weary moor, a small striped ghost very beautiful, very precious, very good. Publishing credits Motacilla flava flavissima: Watch the Birdie: For the Sixty-seven Endangered Species of Birds in the United Kingdom (Beautiful Dragons Press) Still: With Invisible Rain (New Walk Editions) Leeches: Gush: Menstrual Manifestos for Our Times (Frontenac House) Author photo: © Adam MacMaster

Hear poet Sinéad Griffin read poems for wave 18 of literary poetry journal iamb. Sinéad Griffin wave 18 summer 2024 back next the poet Sinéad Griffin has been published in Poetry Ireland Review , The Irish Times , Under The Radar , The Four Faced Liar , Hog River Press and elsewhere. One of her poems was recently included in the Poetry Jukebox installation at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. Thanks to an Arts Council Agility Award in 2023, Sinéad is now working on her debut poetry collection. the poems View from the Dunes 00:00 / 01:06 Run hip-high through seagrass to the hollow, lie on the slip face of dunes, perfect angle to observe heaven. Hear breakers hush, windward side, by the hole for Australia dug with an orange spade. Fern plumes in place of daises, hands sticky with forest scent, intoxicated by the shape of some boy’s name, he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, we never stop on not, crave feelings we can’t fathom, dream one day we’ll walk other realms. Castletown days of tide, not time, we don’t know the Wexford shore will tumble, the slope of illness to come. For now, all the world seems nothing, but a few big thoughts away. Letter from Dublin 00:00 / 02:14 Remember us as city schoolgirls, brown uniforms, scratchy gabardines and knee socks on the Quays. I’m in Dublin this late June evening, the footpath all bar stools and al fresco food, so continental even the seagulls curse in three languages. Burglar bars still gird low-level glass, metal shutters rattle closed at dusk, only the charity shop window invites with a teapot, cat jigsaw, jade skirt, a snorkel and flippers green as Liffey wall scum. Do people still river swim? A string of rosary beads makes me think of O’Connell Street Mad Mary, she’d dance, sing, proclaim, our traffic island Doris Day. We never crossed at her spot, scared off since she tried to talk to us about God. As per usual the Quays are insane, elbow-out-the-window taxi drivers shout blame up Ormond Quay. The traffic flow opposite to how it was in those days. Sure look. Buses of assorted colour, doors flush to pavement, not like our navy and cream old favourites, bubble-nosed, open rear platform and pole, no door, years before health and safety was born. You taught me where to grip the pole, swing on once the bus left the stop, dodge the conductor if we were lucky, scamper box steps at the back, sit and stare like we’d been there forever. Capel Street, tonight I join the boardwalk, bounce timber planks, feel the suspension. Rewind. Reverse flow. The 26 is leaving Aston Quay before time, you leap the platform turn and smile. Figment or a memory, now I’ll never know, but you pull away and I have to let you go. August 00:00 / 01:07 I sit with my parents, drinking hot coffee in the strong sun of their back garden. My father in T-shirt and shorts, welcomes the warmth, my mother is shrouded in cotton, doubly shaded with a parasol and floppy hat, since medication makes her sensitive to the light. They tell me about a neighbour’s dementia, a cousin’s husband’s angina,   they tell me they bought Lotus biscuits in Dealz. We don’t mention my sister, how August was ours, a year minus five days apart. All the while I watch a white butterfly turn in flight, zig-zag the grass, like a slip of white paper, a note that flits away, like something I meant to say. Publishing credits View from the Dunes: The Waxed Lemon (Issue No. 2) Letter from Dublin: South Dublin Libraires Online (May 2023) August: The Four Faced Liar (Issue No. 2)

Hear poet Frances Boyle read poems for wave 19 of literary poetry journal iamb. Frances Boyle wave 19 autumn 2024 back next the poet Frances Boyle (she/her) is a prairie-raised Canadian writer, long settled in Ottawa, Ontario, whose third collection is Openwork and Limestone . Her debut, Light-carved Passages , was republished after ten years in 2024 as a free, open-access eBook. With her poetry published everywhere from The Fiddlehead and The New Quarterly to The Ekphrastic Review and The Honest Ulsterman , Frances has received a number of prizes – among these, This Magazine ’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt, and Arc Poetry Magazine ’s Diana Brebner Prize . She was a long-time member of the editorial board of Arc Poetry Magazine , and is now on the boards of The League of Canadian Poets, and VERSe Ottawa, which runs the VERSeFest international poetry festival. the poems The Whole Tall World 00:00 / 01:07 A column of light, not steady but scintillating. I listen for its faint scratchiness, its syncopated silences, its airy breathing. Exhalation of pores, the inhalation of mountains and the sea’s unceasing bellow-lungs. Surf, like horses that rear and mane- shake, rush in, retreat. And spume a spiraling cylinder. A rising, a lifting, finest droplets hovering on the air. What tuning will bring me past static to clarity, to that thrum of silence, voices chiming, twining, a braid of sound within that space between breathing, behind the exhale, pulling the inhale into animate energy, that silent moment that might be death but for the animal compulsion willing our squeezebox lungs to echo ocean, and breathe. Water and Stone ‘When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert ... Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless Earth.’ ~ Robert Macfarlane, Underlands ~ 00:00 / 01:23 Inside your house, the radiator ticks, floors shift and mutter. The skeleton of struts and beams is clad with plaster and paint. You’ve adorned the walls with more paint —on canvas, on paper. A visiting friend admires the art, the book-crammed shelves. Talk turns to what she’s read, what you haven’t. Excuses for uncracked spines. Your dog’s steps are halting now, nail- clack on hardwood more syncopated than staccato. You hear him sigh. In the driveway, a crunch as tires compress the snow. A squirrel traverses wire and bare branches. The tremble at leafless ends. You feel the slow flow of tidal rock how the current supports you, carries you. Pacific Rim Park, 1984 00:00 / 01:04 An amble of half a mile down to the beach, green on both sides as I carry my pack. I emerge to wave- rush that washes out speech, and set borrowed tent on the sand near sea-wrack. I came on my own to wrench from the mire of my shame over deeds which should have stayed hidden. The campers next site watch me struggle with fire. That woman craves quiet they shush their children. I beachcomb for hours, sand under my feet. Pared down to sorrow, guilt grows slowly leaner. My feeble campfire still gives me some heat while grit, whipped by wind, works to scour me cleaner. Lone nights under canvas deliver release; slow rot, woody moss-scent their own kind of peace. Publishing credits The Whole Tall World: Prairie Fire (Vol. 41, No. 4) Water and Stone: Rust & Moth (Autumn 2022) Pacific Rim Park, 1984: exclusive first publication by iamb Author photo: © Curtis Perry

audition for iamb AUDITIONS REOPEN 20th-26th Sep 2027 Thank you to all 160+ poets who auditioned in 2025. The standard of writing and reading was impeccably high. Come back to this page on Sep 1st 2027 to see how you can submit your audition next time around. There'll be more than 115 places available across eight waves spanning 2028/29. See you in 2027!

Hear poet Dominic Weston read poems for wave 15 of literary poetry journal iamb. Dominic Weston wave 15 autumn 2023 back next the poet Dominic Weston makes wildlife programmes for television, runs over the Mendip hills, and writes poetry. His work has appeared in numerous print and online magazines, journals and anthologies, including Ink, Sweat & Tears and Green Ink Poetry . Once, he even slipped off the page into poetry film . Dominic's work veers into the natural world – often with a healthy undercurrent of darkness. Adopted as a baby, and having lost both parents to prolonged illness in recent years, Dominic treasures most the poems he writes about his family. the poems November 00:00 / 01:35 Scissoring volleys snip across the dripping field call and counter-call sewing lines of reassurance between fleets of long-tailed tits as they slip westwards from the cider orchard through the beeches to infiltrate a long thorn hedge Half the front leg of a roe deer is sheathed in mud-washed fur, a finger of matt bone protruding at one end, a black flinty hoof at the other – rejected by the nose of a curious hound articulated by the shunt of a cautious boot Ghost memories of deer appear along the Fosseway in the dun flanks of fallen field stone greenish with algae half-light fashioning their features Pale flashes on the path, peroxide husks look like Bambi tails not the fallen maize wraps from a squirrel’s overhanging store Thwud! Strikingly rigid and damp-dense Millie claps my knee backs with an over-long branch Labrador trots her pride in the mimic trophy – her own piece of Jane Doe Beneath our feet limestone knucklebones push up through the blackspots of let down sycamore palms yellowing gloves smooth the naked crevices November is the time when the ground is made. The Daedalus I Knew Inspired by the bronze statue Daedalus Equipping Icarus by Francis Derwent Wood 00:00 / 01:28 The father of Icarus is on his knees, left hand deftly lacing a leather cuff around his son’s bicep, while the right carries the weight of the wings It was not my father but my mother who knelt before her own boy wonder to tie the laces on my new school shoes and launch me into the world Daedalus’ rapt attention to his son as unimaginable to me as flight itself, a pantomime played out on a mythical isle, nothing I could know My mother sprang my father from the loveless island his parents confined him to determined that her own children would never see its brittle shores My father’s skills earned the salary that paid for tan sandals in the summer and black lace-ups in winter, that put food on the table year round So no, he never did kneel before me to tie my laces or straighten my wings, but he lent me his place in my mother’s heart and that selfless act let me fly And The Third Wish 00:00 / 02:41 It would be an unseasonably warm afternoon when I would turn myself inside out start to roll the skin back from my crown unrooted hair flopping down onto my chest the skin slinking over shoulders to the ground An unexpected easterly wind would rise making it a very good day for laundry so into the tub with it, and half a box of soda to scrub, scrub, scrub with the old bristle brush and then three times through the mangle The hottest part of the day would see me sitting in the shade on that stool from St David’s with its three clawing rhododendron legs me thinking about nothing in particular until my freed skin flapped bone dry in the wind Once the steam from pressing had dissipated I’d take out my reglazed glasses and look for the first time into every crevice and wrinkle survey the landscape supported by my fingers and audit my own hide for scars Out of the long-crushed grey shoebox I’d lift the gold leaf embosser I’d liberated from Reading Grammar’s library stores retired from inscribing Dewey’s digits on leather spines in favour of cold hard print Plugged in the mains and finally hot to its tip I’d parsimoniously press through foiled tape to fill in the full extent of every scar I’d found with a thin shield of gold, soon gone cold the chink in my cheek where it kissed the steel-lined typewriter case in the hall the dent in my forehead where it struck the brake lever of my Raleigh Tomahawk the grave accent over my right eyebrow inscribed by an open can of baked beans Then my hands, oh my hands! my pride, my strength, my means the scenes of countless crimes and remedies so many nicks, so many cuts, so many gouges painstakingly gilded into delicate koi scale gloves At the end of this burnished afternoon I’d slowly pack my tools away for the last time then burn my clothes in that rusting rubbish bin carefully step back into my newly sequinned skin and shimmer my way to Gomorrah. Publishing credits November: exclusive first publication by iamb The Daedalus I Knew: The Language of Salt (Fragmented Voices) And The Third Wish: Gallus supplement of Poetry Scotland (Issue 101)

Hear poet Zannah Kearns read poems for wave 12 of literary poetry journal iamb. Zannah Kearns wave 12 winter 2022 back next the poet Freelance writer Zannah Kearns has had her poems featured in Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal , The Dark Horse , Finished Creatures , Under the Radar , Ink, Sweat & Tears and Atrium . A members’ winner in a summer 2021 competition run by The Poetry Society, Zannah co-runs the Poets’ Café – a monthly open mic in Reading, Berkshire. the poems High Tide in the Morning 00:00 / 01:13 It strikes me the moon controls more than our tides just as these children surge into my room, my bed crash into my heart, flood me with chatter, their energies zingy as sea spray. Lockdown: the house is awash with unfinished projects, dirty socks scrunched-up sheets of abandoned drawings. I’m scrolling news that’s rolling in story upon story too many names, too many splashes. I can lose hours gazing at friends’ pictures their perfect reflections mirrored in lakes but we’ve all of us blown far out to sea, swung on each wave at the whim of the moon. Under sunlit windswept skies we cast off into this day its dip and swell into its lull helming as best as we can. Love as a Mutt 00:00 / 01:25 We run — our laughter bouncing against bricks and the fence we threw mud at last Wednesday. We run with faces turned for a moment to the sun, feeling its glow as a kiss on our skin, held for all memory. The Earth has halted her turning to say our names. Then, coats flapping with busted zips we’re away again — hair unbrushed, fingers raw, some nails bitten to bloody quicks, but none of it matters because now snow falls! Gentle flakes spiral through air stilled. Skin bright, breath visible, our small hearts are as hot as baked potatoes. We spread our hands while the sky pegs out her grimy sheets. Near some dustbins, a mangy dog cowers, all ribs and bald patches. Some throw stones, but Jamie tosses her coat, scoops the mutt — ears cut off, bones a collection of loose rods she can hardly keep in her arms. I’ll call him Princess. Bet you can’t keep him. But Jamie, smiling, doesn’t hear. On Holding On and Being Held 00:00 / 01:31 In Aviemore, I climbed a wall of ice glittering in the winter sun — an edifice of glass. I led the route, kicking crampons to make shelves, reaching up with yellow-handled axes, chipping holds; scaling a ladder, right then left like Jack climbing his beanstalk through the cloud, snowflakes falling so thick they looked furred. And my heart full. It’s the first time I’d ever winter-climbed. Everywhere, white was all I saw so, even though I was several storeys high with nothing much to hold me if I fell, something about the surrounding cloud, the mountain’s bowl like a cupped hand, felt substantial. I, who am often consumed by fear, had none. Sometimes now, far out on one of life’s edges, I like to remember that day on the mountain when the tips of my toes were hooked in its snow, how the flat of each boot rested on air. Publishing credits High Tide in the Morning: Locked Down | Poems, Diaries and Art from the 2020 Pandemic (Poetry Space) Love as a Mutt: Under the Radar (Issue 25) On Holding On and Being Held: The Dark Horse (Issue 43)