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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)

Hear poet Mary Ford Neal read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Mary Ford Neal back next the poet A writer and legal academic from Glasgow, Scotland, Mary Ford Neal is the author of poetry collections Dawning and Relativism , as well as an assistant editor of Nine Pens Press . Mary's poetry has appeared online and in print in a wide span of journals that includes Bad Lilies , After… , One Hand Clapping , The Interpreter’s House , Atrium , Long Poem Magazine , The Shore and Janus Literary . Her work has been nominated for both The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. the poems Mammina proves the existence of God 00:00 / 01:42 The day is on its hands and knees. Mammina basks on the balcony in great-grandmother dignity in all the quiet of a woman who has outlived her daughter, collarbones glistening, little cross flashing pink and gold among rivulets of August evening sweat as the sun finally loses its grip and goes down fighting, painting the duomo in eyeshadow colours. The whole horizon is made of churches. An ambulance squeals along an unseen street, not the smooth wail of the ambulances back home, but a desperate, discombobulated sound like the cry of a confused animal. Mammina makes the sign of the cross, lets loose a fast prayer. Her words are a string of small, round beads, tumbling one after the other. How can you be so sure anyone is listening? I ask in her bubbling tongue. My head is dusky with the sweetness the city gives off at the height of summer, and with all my days and nights at university. Mammina opens one eye, closes it, smiles back in her chair, takes a fat medjool date between leathery thumb and forefinger, squeezes it lightly, and says This perfect thing does not exist by accident. O California After Danez Smith 00:00 / 01:18 California’s an empty page, but scented like a candle so you have to write over someone’s idea of loveliness. No matter how delicate the fragrance, I could write a fist. I could write a swollen eye. I could write a lie. Perhaps a little blasphemy is okay. Bruises are not okay in California. Perhaps I bother about bruises but don’t even notice my snapped neck. Whatever you do, don’t move me. I’m resting on the lip of an ocean, and I want the ocean badly, but not this one. This one spits cold. I need the one so vast its edges are always gentle. I’ve told them that by evening I’ll be on a plane. I know if I could get to California it would sand me smooth. I know if I could get to California I could die big, die pacific, melt into the horizon like a god. We all fell silent except for the men 00:00 / 01:03 their solemn mahogany baritones closing around a keening гармошка, deepening, swelling, snaking between us, causing our skins to shed, winding around the hissing braziers, and it was as though all the longing in the earth’s bones sprouted, serpentine, charmed from sleep by Russian chords, and I decided just to dissolve into this longing, this sinuous lament, this отравление, uncoil myself from the hold of home, of language, of all my loves, and from now on my home would be this poison-apple moment, my language a dirge rich with consonants, and my only loves would be милый, любимый, Ангел мой. гармошка: a Russian accordion отравление: intoxication or poisoning милый: darling любимый: beloved Ангел мой: my angel Publishing credits Mammina proves the existence of God: Amethyst Review O California: The Shore (Issue 15) We all fell silent except for the men: Dust Poetry Magazine (Issue 7: Connection )

Hear poet Maxine Rose Munro read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Maxine Rose Munro back next the poet Maxine Rose Munro is a Shetlander adrift on the outskirts of Glasgow. Her poetry has been published widely, exhibited at the Stanza Poetry Festival, shortlisted for the SMHAFF Awards, and nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Maxine runs the First Steps in Poetry feedback programme, which offers beginner poets free feedback and support. the poems Finnman 00:00 / 01:12 My land is a constant, stripped by inconstant seas and I should know better: allure soon abandons all promise and beauty lies like an oily film on your surface. I have no use for fortune-tellers spinning gaudy futures – tall, dark strangers on narrow, isolated islands can't be true, but are surely puzzle and paradox. False, false man there is as much plastic in your offer as silver fishes in the sea. Now you tell me of your sunken treasures and hidden depths, but never your shifting, treacherous nature. I dream of your sea rising to enfold me, cover my mouth and stop my breath. I am lost and will go with you. But first come close, closer, let me see if, like waves meeting land, you break against me. The Finnman is a legend of the Northern Isles. Sometimes he can be benevolent, others he seeks to entice women down to his undersea world, only to turn them into his slaves. Let me sing a song of love 00:00 / 01:11 though we both know I'm not romantic. Though it could end in embarrassed mumbling and staring at our feet. I know I take time to get going, and often head off in a confusing direction , but just sit, and I'll do my best. Let my voice crack, wander between dialects like it does when I'm worried I'm an idiot putting myself forward for a kicking, a puppy wanting to pee all over the floor, shivery with terror, anticipating horror. I've written the words and rehearsed them a dozen different ways but none of them were as right as I wanted. It's funny how so very hard it is to do this, but let me try. Let me stand up before you, not quite look at you, let me sing the words I wrote you, edited over and over and over again. Let me sing this song – I love you. I'm glad I found you and no one else. Let's live all our lives together. There. I have sung my song. I hope you don't think I got it wrong. I hope you feel the same. Mother Tongue 00:00 / 01:04 If I were to speak with my mother's tongue my words would reach up out of the land, rooted deep in the language she learned sat at the knees of Viking descendants – the soil pressed against her bare skin: möld , a word that grew in her fertile mouth. To be dirty rich was möld -rich. To be nearly buried by the drink, möld -drocht. Her word for the Earth: Aert . Spoken with an ai , a rolling r , and a tih . Compact. Solid. And if she were to say 'from all the earths', well, this was her way of saying 'everywhere'. Stuck and grounded, both aert -fast. And that was how she looked to me, a woman who couldn't work with abstracts, their gush, their drift from the source. But my father, ah now, my father, he was one who was soothed by this. His words were dreams of the sea. Publishing credits Finnman / Let me sing a song of love: exclusive first publication by iamb Mother Tongue: Acumen

Hear poet Grace Uitterdijk read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Grace Uitterdijk back next the poet Counsellor and occasional musician Grace Uitterdijk from Northern Ireland enjoys writing poetry and short stories as a creative outlet. Her inspiration stems from a love of trees, the sea and all things wild. She's also interested in the lives of those she meets through her counselling work. Published in A New Ulster and Bent Ear Review , Grace loves to swing in her hammock, drink tea and read when she's not exploring Ireland's natural beauty. the poems In the middle of her ‘Dieu est au milieu d’elle: elle n’est pas étranlée…’ God is in the middle of her, she will not be moved Psaume 46:5 00:00 / 01:37 If I cut myself in half what would I find? What’s in the middle of me? Would it be a treacle sadness puddling round my feet? Or maybe I have a ball of glass in there. Hard, smooth, breakable. Would it be cosy in there? Could I cuddle up beside my heart or would it turn its back? What would it feel like to sit inside myself? Would it be like crawling into a hollow tree? Dark and wet and alive. Ancient. A womb of sorts. Would it be comfortable? If I could pull back my skin and let my heart fall into my hands, would it just be a throbbing organ or would I really see God there? Funny how that verse uses the pronoun ‘her’. God is in her. Not you, not me. Her. I would like to find her. If I did, I would run up to her and take her hands in mine And look in her eyes and shout, ‘Do you know what is in the middle of you? Do you know? Look, it’s God! Right there in the middle of you.’ Maybe she wouldn’t believe me. Maybe she’d turn her head, avert her eyes embarrassed by my spectacle. Maybe she would miss God because she didn’t even look. I would still tell her. Who knows when curiosity might catch her looking. Empty Space 00:00 / 02:06 Are you the man you dreamed you’d be? That’s a line from a song my friend wrote and that night it was floating round my head like it had nowhere else to go. I was driving home with loneliness in the passenger seat, and I remember thinking this feels like déjà vu, am I just stuck on repeat? The country roads were quiet, it was just a random night. Who knew space could ever feel this tight. Tears are a sort of currency but that night I didn’t know what I was buying. Maybe the desire to live even if just to do more dying. I had to stop in a car park, the tears were clouding my vision. Alone in a car in an empty space I was that space So empty I could just be replaced. For some reason I shouted ‘fuck off’ to a God I wasn’t even sure was real. I felt like my layers of skin were peeled to reveal the shreds of my humanity. Blood and water, water and blood. Is that all I am? Water and blood? I thought you promised there wouldn’t be another flood but what if every day is a flood and I am not the one being saved. Maybe I am just enslaved to this loneliness that follows me. Maybe my whole life is just one long damn fight to be free. If I’m not alone then why do I feel so fucking alone? When the noise is gone I sit there in the car park in the dark no longer even sure if I have a watermark to distinguish me from all the other lonely people in other car parks. I sat there crying until all the water in my body had seeped out of my eyes. Now I was left with blood. Life is in the blood, not the water. My tears had bought me one more day to live. Maybe tomorrow I would cry blood. I started my engine, reversed back out, drove home and got into bed. I’m not even close to who I dreamed I’d be, but I’m alive. Sometimes you feel alone in your own body 00:00 / 01:28 You are there and I am here. One letter difference and yet Can you see the insurmountable distance between us because I can? People say, ‘oh we are united, humans are all one’. Yeah, I've had moments like that, but can you not hear the story of humanity? You are there and I am here, and here is not there. There are two different words for it. I'm trying to be there, with you and yet you don't feel my nearness because the distance between those words remain. I'll try again. Talk to me and I won't understand but touch me and I'll know because touch is more visceral than words And wrapped in my arms here and there seem a little closer together. I know you feel alone. I feel it when our bodies collide, Slide to the left, away from your body, away from your pain. You can't bear to remain because you despise being here. It's ok; I'm alone too. I'm learning how to be here. I'll hold you tight until you feel safe again. Until your body is your own, until my body is my home, draining the distance between here and there. Press your body against mine, hold your head in my hands. Maybe we are less alone when we are alone together. Publishing credits In the middle of her: exclusive first publication by iamb Empty Space / Sometimes you feel alone in your own body: A New Ulster (Issue 99)

Hear poet Helen Kay read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Helen Kay back next the poet Helen Kay has poems in The Rialto , Stand and Butcher’s Dog , as well as in her pamphlet, This Lexia & Other Languages . She curates Poetry Dyslexia and Imagination : a creative platform for people with dyslexia and other forms of neurodiversity. A finalist for the 2022 Brotherton Anthology, Helen won both the Repton and the Ironbridge poetry competitions in 2023. On social media, she's known for her hen puppet sidekick, Nigella. the poems Bitter (from OE Biter) 00:00 / 01:37 The fox took away my old hens last night to feed its starving cubs. Its vampire teeth parted feathers, pierced the oesophagus and windpipe below the sinewy neck and severed the spinal cord, quick as birds that snatch worms or pluck a butterfly off a shelf of air. No waste; no signs, bar sequins of spilt corn on moulted feathers. Wearing his wife’s kimono, a QC beat to death a fox caught in the wire fence round his hen coop, blooded his baseball bat. I am not bitter, Foxy. The cruellest bite is the empty plate of death. I would bequeath you my thighs, breast and legs to plump up your bony kin. Worse things lurk darkly: two million hens gassed and eaten daily. We will chainsaw the coop, splintering tears of plywood on the earth. We will plant egg-smooth bean seeds in our hen manure and watch the sparrows steal red cherries. I will stir my tears in a glass of wine or let them fall to dry on a page of words. I will wear my fox socks, post #fox pics cross my fingers, bolt my door at dusk. Scrabble 00:00 / 01:08 Every night Dad and I clicked the tiles slick as casino chips. A whiskey soda lit his petrol-coupon glass to a sparkling chandelier. An ashtray snake-charmed a Silk Cut while he positioned the tiles, turned misspellings into jokes. Winning did not matter; it was our way of talking. We were both dictionary-dependent, lifting its cover like the lid of a Milk Tray box. We fished letters from a yellow wash bag, sliced them into so many meanings. Slotted in our chairs, we made order: ashtray, coaster, fag packet. My pen knitted lines of scores, filled the evening’s blank page, and always, upstairs, Mum, out cold, a burnt stub, empty tumbler, blank tile, jumbled-up bag of letters we could never put into words. My Brother’s Widow 00:00 / 01:05 Not wanting to waste things, she sows your tomato seeds, too late. The seedlings sprout in May, vulnerable and hairy, moving forward imperceptibly, as she is. Soon she has too many plants and gives me two. Neither of us knows which bits to snip, what to feed them, only that we are growing gently together, reaching out. Green leaves unfurl their fingered symmetry towards me. Constellations of yellow flowers hold tomorrows. I can catch your flamboyance in the way they crowd my yard. Sal has planted marigolds with hers, calls it companion planting. In a way, I won’t mind a lack of tomatoes. The absence of them, lurking round and red beneath the leaves, seems fitting. Publishing credits Bitter (from 𝑂𝐸 Biter): Live Canon Anthology 2022 (Live Canon) Scrabble: won first prize at the Iron Bridge Poetry Festival 2023 My Brother's Widow: longlisted for the Cheltenham Poetry Competition 2023

Hear poet Susan Fuchtman read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Susan Fuchtman back next the poet Currently living in Iowa, Susan Fuchtman writes poetry, memoir and short stories. Her work can be found in Plume , Emerge Literary Journal , Stonecrop Review , Stone of Madness Press , Reckon Review and elsewhere. the poems Weight Bearing 00:00 / 01:30 Before I took a breath, before my blood rerouted, while my eyes were still closed, my parents argued about their individual visions for me, and after hours, days, after questions and explanations, they stepped into each other’s dreams and chose my name. Adam and Eve’s first responsibility was naming the animals, and even then, before sin and brokenness, before the veil was torn to make things right again, sitting there in that paradise they proposed and compromised and did the best they could. I visited my parents yesterday, and if you were there, at first you might only notice their faltering gaits, knobbled fingers, and unwavering opinions, but as the day progressed, you’d see they’ve not forgotten how it felt to hold me, stroke my hair, kiss my baby cheeks, to sacrifice a lifetime— to give me a name. I thought about all the names written in all the world in all time— charcoal on cave walls, quill and ink on papyrus, blue ballpoint on number ten envelopes, crayon on school papers, typewriter ribbon on essays, sharpies on name badges, pixels on phone screens, fingers in red dirt— How does the earth bear the weight of them? Riders 00:00 / 00:54 I think you, meaning the gray-haired audience in a dark bar on the north side of Chicago, will like our arrangement of this song. The guitar glisses into space. From closed eyes I see stars pulsate down to a green pasture, mating-marked sheep grazing, dead tree in the center. Out of the ominous sky, lightning. Tree flares flame, grass too wet to catch. I open my eyes, sit back. Irrelevance hangs in the air like smoke. The singer’s voice softens to a whisper, tapping out riders on the storm like impatient fingers on a table, waiting for the next bright blaze. What If Wars 00:00 / 02:02 were fought by old people say, 60, who have retirement in their sights and grandchildren they hope to see grow up— so they take vitamins and do exercises or maybe yoga, and eat organic and get eight hours of sleep— what if those old people were dressed in camouflage and sent to basic training where they climbed over walls and crawled under barbed wire while live ammunition was shot over them and then, having demonstrated their fitness, were given guns and 50-pound packs and loaded onto planes to go to a country they may or may not be able to point to on a map, a place where they may or may not understand what is being fought over, a place so far away that they can’t come home for Christmas and little ones will cry and say, ‘I miss my Grandma.’ And what if the other side did the same, and the battlefields were filled with grandmothers and grandfathers and great uncles and aunts and brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers, all in camouflage and all with guns— You’ve already guessed this poem isn’t very clever because you know what would happen: The grandmothers would bring sugar cookies and the grandfathers would share cigars and talk about baseball or soccer, and the guns would be forgotten as big picture albums were pulled from back pockets. They would forget what they were supposed to be fighting about, and host each other in their respective homes, maybe a container on base here or a tent there or a foxhole in between. Because by the time you are old, it’s not that you’re so feeble that you can’t remember, but you know there are some things better not remembered. And by the time you are old, what you must remember is that time is short and life is precious and life is short. I apologize for repeating myself but it’s so easy to forget. Publishing credits Weight Bearing: Emerge Literary Journal (Issue 16) Riders: exclusive first publication by iamb What If Wars: won an Honorable Mention in the Sinclair Community College Spectrum Awards 2015 and was published in the awards booklet

Hear poet Darren J Beaney read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Darren J Beaney back next the poet Darren J Beaney cuts his own hair and loves punk rock and Marmite. He's one half of Flight of the Dragonfly , which hosts regular spoken word evenings on Zoom and in Brighton, produces the Flights e-journal, and recently expanded into independent publishing. Darren is the author of three poetry pamphlets: The Fortune Teller's Yarn , The Machinery of Life and Honey Dew . His newest chapbooks – The Fall of the Repetitive Mix Tape (Back Room Poetry) and Citizenship (Scumbag Press) – will be published in spring and summer 2023. the poems I was created without innocence 00:00 / 01:03 the philosopher named me lazy love child of tyranny. Conceived of invasion and rage. At my birth historic dreamers clustered around the womb only to wince at the struggle. A foolish cleric anointed my brow with sorrow, branded me radioactive and resistant. Nurture came with provocation and accusation as infancy turned battlefield. Playful years were slaughter and I grew into travesty. Indignation matured, associations curdled, I lived life wretched. I am little more than chronic, my own enemy. I look to scald the preposterous, denounce the bastard, punish false evidence, destroy the offensive. Now unbound I seek a new heart. I am not acquainted with angels, but I believe I am here to be loved. Love 00:00 / 00:30 on acid tastes like it looks vivid chaos blinding shimmering like sherbet overwhelming with glycerin whispers which vibrate the air as touch becomes hyperactive and the world smells demerara senses on acid in love warp and wrap each other into playful cat’s cradles knotting until rice paper lips eventually find a way I like this place 00:00 / 01:48 and could willingly waste my time here even though it smells of hospital corridors and the walls are balding as paint decays and plaster peels and the brickwork reveals clay intestines. Derisory light pinches though a ceiling sprayed with holes crafting a dingy prospect, somewhere suitable to commit crimes. Window frames nurse broken panes and a latch scalped from a swinging door lies like a fake island in a lagoon of impossible to dredge grime covering floorboards all but conquered by rot. The air has a taste resembling a cave, the description clings to my tongue as my mouth waters like it’s a dripping acid bath tap. I scrunch my eyes closed and catch a smeared breath to stop me taking a bite. I perch, painted into a corner by cobweb tusks. I purge with primeval ivy, flagellate with waning lost feathers. I whistle like an uncomfortable outsider looking for a sign to relax in damage. I imagine … and the obscurity of my thinking invokes an alternative picture, a chamber, a cell, a byre, a stable. An uninhabited room in a tower fit for young princes. I perceive possibility and space. I tell myself I make hollow history as I waste each minute, but I snub my meaningless words and sing to the shadows 'fuck off with your time'. I consider one more squandered hour as I unwind. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Fidel Hogan Walsh read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Fidel Hogan Walsh back next the poet Hailing from Ireland's County Cavan, Fidel Hogan Walsh has seen her poetry appear in many journals, including Poethead , Pendanic , The Irish Times , The Storms Journal , and in the University College Dublin Archives. She's been heard reading her work on the Eat the Storms poetry podcast numerous times, and was a featured poet on A Thousand Shades of Green . Fidel's poem What Peace Feels Like made her a winner of the inaugural Enlighten Prize (with Hambly & Hambly), which she won again in 2021 with her poem for you . Her first collection, Living with Love , was published in 2020, while her second – Time , a collaboration with photographer Julie Corcoran – launched Ireland's Culture Night that same year. the poems We Are the Night Lovers (save our souls) 00:00 / 01:00 A canvas showing off on a sweeping splendorous indigo sky crowded in bright twinkling trailing stars Waning nightmares seek solace in the silver crescent of a moody moon Nocturnal shift ends on a peeking pink sunrise whisking away dreams Death itself wanted part of A river lullaby lulls sleep on a meadows lush green grass in the dark shadows of love — we are the night lovers Travel Through Time 00:00 / 01:07 We are born of water in a white mist of sea & of everlasting memory Where land & ocean touch wild wind storms sing in a whistle of waves Loud natural eerie sounds erupt from ancient callings of man & of beast On a rough morning tide with poor visibility I see you out of reach You adrift of free movement wandering aimlessly where memories have no meaning I now must travel through time to bring you back to our sacred beginnings Surreal ~ 22nd May 2024 ~ The life you know, is no longer known. 00:00 / 01:08 the mountains half in shadow & hues of deep blue they beckon only then do i whisper out your name quiet quickening echoes take you to my outstretched arms nonexistence reality were we of this world & of our time the sea we dip down to those stormy crashing dreams the end we are no more / you / me / & of now what remains deep green lush mountains & a calm sea Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Kara Knickerbocker read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Kara Knickerbocker back next the poet Kara Knickerbocker is the author of chapbooks The Shedding Before the Swell and Next to Everything that is Breakable . Her poetry and essays have appeared in Poet Lore , HOBART , Levee Magazine and Portland Review , as well as in Pennsylvania’s Best Emerging Poets and Crack the Spine's Anthology: The Year 2020 . A Best of the Net nominee, Kara has received support with her work from Murphy Writing at Stockton University, Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and the Gullkistan Center in Iceland. She currently lives in Pennsylvania, where she writes with the Madwomen in the Attic at Carlow University. Kara also co-curated the MadFridays Reading Series. the poems If You’re Asking Why I’m Leaving 00:00 / 00:42 Because this row of brick houses ghosts with heads on backwards, because my skin sleeps under your nailbeds, because there isn’t a color red I’ve loved since the car crash. Because even birds fly south, and because without wings, your lips travel down just the same because I let you, because religion was the well-oiled machine of our bodies. Because thoughts of a baby’s open mouth, because I am egg yolk, Because I cannot imagine anything more breakable than if I stay. Etymology of a Middle Name After Airea D Matthews 00:00 / 01:16 Rose— of Latin origin, rosa, meaning fragrant flower, meaning my mother bloomed with me until I came out, pink & right for the world, the last precious baby dangling on the branch of our family tree, because after my brother & before me there was a seed that only bled where it was planted, never grew into a face, or name, & they crowned me Rosie, because my cheeks flush redder than they should be from petaling my way back to the womb, drunk-blushed attempts to stay long-stemmed, always wild & because a daughter is a beautiful thing, my mother tells me, though I know the letters sound more lovely in her mouth. O, Rose that grew from the concrete, rose into a woman— I wonder if she will ever accept there are thorns around my hips not by nature but by my own doing, if she fully knows I’ve buried bouquets from lovers because what other pretty hurt do you know that both stalks the living & adorns all the dead? Show Me How to Trace This 00:00 / 01:08 & if you had a map out of your body, where would it go? What is the point of exit you’d choose to leave yourself? I’d choose the wounds already claimed: the fried egg-shaped scar burned above my left knee, my crooked pointer finger like an almost question mark, or better yet straight from the new titanium heart— where a stranger sleeps at the wheel, keeping time. That slicing open drove me into questions I still can’t answer, like where is the intersection of my own skin & all that hides underneath? How to steer away from the bump in the road that lives in my chest, unmake detours into strange tomorrows. Pulse lines are wires that got crossed along the way & now I need a key to a home I’ve already lost. These blue veins were never routes that would carry me there. All the rivers I’ve known are muddied, emptying into the mouth of someone else. Publishing credits If You're Asking Why I'm Leaving: Pittsburgh Poetry Review Etymology of a Middle Name: Kissing Dynamite Show Me How to Trace This: Sampsonia Way Magazine

Hear poet Elizabeth Langemak read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Elizabeth Langemak back next the poet Elizabeth Langemak’s poetry has appeared in AGNI Online, Shenandoah , Pleiades, The Colorado Review, Literary Imagination , Sugar House Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal and elsewhere. Her work has twice appeared in Best New Poets: 50 Poems by Emerging Writers , and been featured on Verse Daily . Elizabeth lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and is the recipient of fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center and Breadloaf. the poems What Everyone Has Done vs What Everyone Would Do 00:00 / 01:36 Even taught hard and so long the truth is we have and would always back out again. I think. Really, who has not, is not still ready to erase their own name, to flip and come up new. Not unsing the Song, precisely, just stop singing. Like seeming stopover or changing clothes, like promised return but stepped or stepping out for good, into Gray: how simple it was and would be again. Each wolfthought behind us reappears fresh, everyone did and keeps flicking back hoods, revealing our faces changed and still changing. So many faces behind and beyond us. With lap-hands, with crossed legs, an upright spine of baked bricks and stiff, Virtue forgot us and never remembered. Unfooled and refooled by gnawing and guilt, each breath and Choice was and still would be lastingly fixed, decisions made wholly from cinders, from shadows and sparks hopped free of our fists. So here’s what we did, what we would still do despite having done: eyes shut and necks turned we reached and keep reaching shoulder-deep and our hands fell still falling on something blind but Beating O Beating and warm. We are pulling it into the Light. All My Questions Become Their Own Answers 00:00 / 01:23 When her legs struck out shuddering like fat lightning bolts. When my breasts turned to stones within stones on my chest. When I couldn’t tell hindmilk from foremilk, and my collapsed tent of gut held no guess. When she wouldn’t sleep and so no one would sleep, or vomit flew like a fist on the end of a long, gloved arm from her throat. When I knew better, but still. When over a phone, when in fever, when in the puce doctor’s office with my list and all I’d forgotten to write there. When I held her up to the mirror I looked like a person holding her question like it could be her answer if only she could coax it to speak. Is she sick. Should the doctor. What should I. Who should you. When I finally nippled a finger into her mouth would you believe I felt first punctuation squatting under her tongue full stop like a fat bud of cartilage, an unfused bone of statements from which all questions understand how to grow. I asked then, I keep asking: who planted this pea an inch under soil, who waits for that pea to lift its hand into the light, who knows what it will want to know. Conspiracy Theory 00:00 / 01:48 In Arkansas, the red-wings go down, nearly two thousand slapped out of the night. Beaks pointed, wings drawn to their sides as men shot from cannons, they land unseen, on their sides, like pepper shook out on a small Southern snow. They fall in a scene now cut from the movie. They fall together with a noise mistaken for gunfire, or soundless as dust falls, one to the ground at a time. One burrows up from the earth. Like a stone from a sling, one kills a deer with a crack to the head. When they’re poisoned or struck or sucked whole through the props of a low-flying plane, when they cramp, when wind ices their sails or God licks them with lightning, they fall. They fall from great heights, not as Icarus fell, flailing, but they duck into the dive and go down as though grateful, or, some say, they fell upright like jumpers whose chutes wouldn’t open, feet first toward accordion crush. Not every faller makes for the grass, but some plunge into the false skies of blue cars, some are delivered to doorsteps like badly thrown papers. Before you wake up, some are dog-gotten or swept downstream like small ships, one lands in a nest, one is not dead but crawls into the hand of a man dressed in orange. While you sip coffee and news of air travels over the ground, an enemy folds one into your bed. Most are gone by noon. Some were never there. Wherever they go to, they stay. Publishing credits What Everyone Has Done vs What Everyone Would Do: earlier version appeared as The Be Good in Yew All My Questions Become Their Own Answers: originally appeared as The Answer to Everything in Storyscape (Issue 19) Conspiracy Theory: Shenandoah (Vol. 63, No. 1)

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

Hear poet Heidi Beck read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Heidi Beck back next the poet Heidi Beck grew up in a small New Hampshire town – emigrating to the UK in 1998, where she now lives in Bristol. She holds an MA in English Literature from the University of Chicago, and an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University. Her poems have been published in The Rialto , Magma , Poetry Ireland Review, The North, Butcher's Dog , Finished Creatures , Under the Radar and The Alchemy Spoon . Heidi also has poems with The Friday Poem and And Other Poems . She was longlisted in the 2020 UK National Poetry Competition. the poems Hunting Season 00:00 / 02:35 A girl steps from a yellow bus at Loon Pond Road, anticipating a long walk home—down the hill, around the pond, past the swamp with the beaver dam, the final stretch just woods—with her heavy bag of books. It’s hunting season, and the men are out in pick-up trucks, stalking through the woods with ammo, scopes and shotguns, dressed in their camo, carrying coolers stuffed with cans of Budweiser, Coors, Tuborg Gold. The girl puts on a safety vest, flimsy fabric in fluorescent orange, begins to sing—Supertramp, Fleetwood Mac, all the lyrics to Evita —loud and long, so they hear she is not a deer, so loud she does not hear the pick-up truck slow behind her. It pulls ahead, stops, just past the swamp. Hello, Honey, where you heading to? She smells the beer as they corral her. Let us help, all smiles and hands. The book bag drops, the vest falls off, she’s on her knees, white rump to the air, trying to keep her tail down. She shakes her head, now fuzzy and furred, nose dark as dirt, everything narrowed. Her ears stretch, eyes widen, gaze becomes fixed, the world slows. She remains still, their laughter like an echo, then lifts herself on spindly legs, fragile bones at risk as she attempts to kick, hooves flailing. She tries to buck and punch, awkward in these limbs. Flanks damp, she spins, all panting ribs, spins again, falls. A girl steps out of the forest, arriving for dinner, late. They glare at her clothes, her hair, her wet, evasive face. She tries to describe how she was a deer. Stop! they cry, stop with your lies, your make- believe tales. Don’t bring this trouble here. All the Things Flying are Overwhelming 00:00 / 01:34 Even here, which feels like home, I need to be ready for the planes, the sucking sound and roar, the possible explosion— I’m mapping the trajectory of falling and flame while trying to track the flamingos, their splayed-out necks, the pink under wings as they jockey and speed, then they’ve gone too far and a flash of godwits whistling past, turning white turning black left white right black white black and he shouts You’re missing the spoonbill, just over your head! Didn’t you get it? and I swing my lens and there’s only an egret flapping to splash too late but then storks, Shit , my settings are all wrong, wheeling higher and higher, keep calm, find the pattern, pull them into the frame and keep on walking past the mountain of salt to Iberian magpies in the pine tree shade and don’t startle the hoopoe on the manicured grass, then the bright yellow spot of a weaver bird calling from the reeds by the lake, but look up, maybe an osprey or eagle, how the gulls squawk and lift in a tangle and a pintail duck crash-lands by an ibis, startling a grebe and everything’s flying and the crack of a golf ball and I flinch, remembering that man and the blood pouring out from under his hands. Family Bible 00:00 / 03:00 GENESIS On the first day I watched The Flintstones , The Jetsons , Sylvester and Tweety. I created sculptures from slices of American Cheese. I climbed up my slide and saw that it was good. EXODUS And so 2.6 million men were sent to Vietnam; another 40,000 fled to Canada. LOTTERY The Law said birthdates should be placed in capsules, mixed in a shoebox, transferred to a glass jar. NUMBERS The birthdates of three of my uncles were chosen. GEORGE He raised his hand when they asked who could type, and stayed behind the lines, tapping out words like defoliation. He didn’t know about the truce between Agent Orange and his chromosomes until he was nearly sixty, when we learned how acute lymphocytic leukaemia could kill you, and how quickly. HARRY He remained in combat, first with ‘the Gooks,’ who took out part of his intestine, and then with Benedictine and brandy and blackouts, with nicotine and nightmares. The hemochromatosis turned his skin grey, the liver cancer waited for the lung cancer to get him first. He died on the bathroom floor, haemorrhaging from a shot of chemotherapy. 1 PETER He once kept a pet duck and ordered a crocodile by mail. He could recite the statistics of every attack by a Great White Shark. He met the love of his life over there, Heroin. He married her, became a panhandler, settled down to a lifetime’s free access to methadone. 2 PETER He sits in a classroom of medical students at Yale, Exhibit A, a shrunken, shivery gnome in a beanie, insisting that everyone would be happier with Heroin. WIDOWS Katheryn and Antoinette. REVELATION On Christmas Day my father is on his seventh mission, flying cargo out of Okinawa, with seven Vietcong shooting at his tail. I visit Santa on his Throne in the belly of a Lockheed C-130 Hercules, the seventh child to sit on his knee. I beg him please could he bring me a Barbie. He gives me this Bible, full of Good News, instead. Publishing credits Hunting Season: Live Canon Anthology 2020 (Live Canon) All the Things Flying are Overwhelming: Finished Creatures (Issue 6) Family Bible: The North (Issue 63)

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