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

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

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

Hear poet Sam Henley Smith read poems for wave 11 of literary poetry journal iamb. Sam Henley Smith wave 11 autumn 2022 back next the poet A Person Centred Therapist with a special interest in bibliotherapy, Sam Henley Smith found writing poetry helped her process the death of her parents from COVID-19. Sam’s had work published in a variety of journals, including Anthropocene , Green Ink Poetry and One Hand Clapping . She was longlisted in 2021 for the Plough Poetry Prize, and commended by Jacqueline Saphra in the Winchester Poetry Prize. the poems Requiem Delphinus Delphis For Dad 00:00 / 01:02 I find you again, in the body washed in. You sailed out of this city single and sailed back betrothed, exchanged the brine in your bloodstream for love, found land legs and made family your amphibian home. Now, boat-teeth line the mouth of the muddy creek where the sea spat the creature out. Face up, fixed grin, unable to swim with or agin the tide. Time swallowed the whole whale of it and retching, the sea returns you to me in case I hadn't understood that you were gone. I have come to the wall to pray 00:00 / 00:55 to be with you. The stone is peppered with scars, an executioner’s wall – rows of hearts obliterated. You wouldn’t approve, I can hear you dismissing such display of affection as sentimental memorialisation. Hand-painted in pretty pink FUCK COVID on a heart is not your style. Yet in the insistent overwriting of a name, scribed again and again, I see your pain – determined to be etched forever as if you had held that husband’s hand and together had shouted your loves. A familiar route 00:00 / 01:31 I’ve researched it on the internet, how to brace my back between wall and chair right leg slightly forward, knees pinioned fondly around your together-knees. It’s my turn to raise you now Dad. British Red Cross has lent us the commode but Covid-style, we are alone. I struggle, ease you to sitting, gently ease, gently please , then a pause for breath. Another breath. And if the Tamar Bridge could swing it would look just like your legs as its long carefully engineered limbs manoeuvre in parallel, perfectly paced, another journey across a Devon river bed. The crooks of my arms are hooks now, nestled in your pits. And lift. And pivot. And lower. Gently ease. Gently please. And breathe. And breathe. Publishing credits Requiem Delphinus Delphis: Green Ink Poetry I have come to the wall to pray: exclusive first publication by iamb A familiar route: So we go about our days: Winchester Poetry Prize Anthology 2021 (Winchester Poetry Prize)

Hear poet Penelope Shuttle read poems for wave 10 of literary poetry journal iamb. Penelope Shuttle wave 10 summer 2022 back next the poet Penelope Shuttle lives in Cornwall, and recently published her 13th collection Lyonesse – an Observer Poetry Book of the Month – and her pamphlet Covid/Corvid , a collaboration with Alyson Hallett. Recipient of an Eric Gregory Award and a Cholmondeley Award, Penelope was shortlisted for both the T S Eliot Prize and The Forward Prizes for Redgrove’s Wife . She is president of the Falmouth Poetry Group, founded in 1972 by her late husband, the poet Peter Redgrove. Her radio poem set in Falmouth, Conversations on a Bench , was broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in March 2020. Penelope is a contributor to BBC Radio 3’s The Verb, and is currently at work on a new collection, History of the Child. the poems one day you said you felt unable to bear even little things of this life 00:00 / 00:39 but mild clouds hold you drawn water settling in the pail holds you the old walnut’s cracked and serviceable trunk these parched purple and white autumn cyclamen circling its gnarly foot hold you the sapling at breast height the wing that’s folded in mild clouds drawn water they bear everything for you Noah’s notes (preliminary) 00:00 / 03:12 there’s meaning in the various colours of doves the blood of a he-goat is so hot it can dissolve diamonds the spider is an aerial worm that feeds on air a drink made from the tears of a stag cures heartache bees are the very smallest of birds, born from the bodies of oxen the cat is a shadow animal, the Bible has never believed in cats the eagle will not converse with falconers but a she-wolf will take communion from a priest the blue-eyed phoenix lives on a diet of dragons hunting dogs are just as beautiful as the tallest medieval horses, the destriers, or the soul when it is first spied as some tiny thing, a maggot or a grub when the starling speaks in French, you must listen the hare may not always be a Christian the moth found on a young boy’s kimono sleeve brings sorrow hawks stare at one another without moving their eyes, this is how their young are conceived the dragonfly never stops working on the twelve volumes of his memoirs the pig takes mercy on the vineyard, and is the world’s best wet-nurse the he-wolf must be tricked into sleep, then bound with a rope made from the sound of an ant’s footfall, the breath of a fish and the spittle of a bird the snake is the best dollmaker you could ever wish for the elephant! he takes up so much room, he won’t tolerate the crocodile he’s so wise, how can I forbid him? the three-toed sloth is nothing but a bundle of leaves, and so is the brown-throated sloth with her iron jaw and massive clitoris the beauteous hyena is no more and no less than a Queen The lion is the strangest of messengers, with his Tsar’s face, the chakra of his tail give him your full compliance the swan bids the rain leave off with a swirl of her meekly-shaped wings the oriole is an unimportant bird but proud as a hornet the winter-sleeper ignores the moon, and the two little toads only the mouse comes in with the blessing of God reforming the calendar 00:00 / 00:54 january turns the other cheek february pulls the moon through the hole in its heart march blows such fine fanfares he’s crowned Trumpet-Major of the Trees april’s a dark horse in may the roses are great with child june wears a hairshirt of gorse july considers the lilies or glides in the longboat of light august has the gift of tongues september blames no one but herself october paints doors to war rooms red november sucks blood from the world’s wrist and december? he hides his light under a bushel Publishing credits one day you said you felt unable to bear even little things of this life / reforming the calendar: exclusive first publication by iamb Noah's notes (Preliminary): The Poetry Review (Vol. 106, No. 4) Author photo: © Katrina Naomi

Hear poet Sharon Philips read poems for wave 20 of literary poetry journal iamb. Sharon Philips wave 20 winter 2024 back next the poet Bristolian by birth and upbringing, now living in Otley, West Yorkshire, Sharon Phillips began writing poetry when she retired from a career in education. Her poems have since been published, online and in print, in anthologies and journals ranging from The Bridport Prize Anthology 2019 , Under the Radar and The Dawn Treader to Ink Sweat & Tears and The High Window . Her first pamphlet, Liven Yourself Up , appeared in 2024. the poems Prelapsarian 00:00 / 00:44 He is at his most beautiful. Motown is behind him, he’s too strong to be beaten, his cheekbones are sharp, acne scars all healed. At last he feels good about his face. He looks up with a grin, snaps his fingers to the bass line, pushes off the wall with his foot, leaps, moonwalks, spins, slides. He sings, easy, unforced, the songs that mark a decade. There’s no stopping him now, you’d like to think. The hardest thing about hospital 00:00 / 00:45 it’s not the obs trolley rattling me awake not the overhead light blink-blinking not the bleep of stalled infusion pumps not Rachel in the next bed howling whenever she pisses herself not the weary nurse who tells me these ladies are all quite confused not the maggot in my mind worrying why they’ve put me on this ward not cannulas dreadlocking my arms not the steroids prowling my nerves not my mouth gaping for words not the blotches on my brain scan it’s wanting my mum. Consider After Kim Moore 00:00 / 00:59 the early morning cleaners, who rise at five, who dress in the dark for fear of waking their children, who eat cold toast at the bus stop, who lug buckets and hoovers through empty offices, who wipe fingerprints from photos and neaten toys and mascots, who scrub piss and shit from toilet seats and floors, who fear their hours will be cut, who are desperate for money for food and rent and the gas bill, who wonder what it would be like to have a cushy office job, who sweat under sky blue polyester tabards, whose backs ache, feet throb, whose ankles are swollen, who worry they won’t be home when the kids wake up, who'll do it all again tomorrow. Publishing credits Prelapsarian: exclusive first publication by iamb The Hardest Thing About Hospital: Liven Yourself Up (Yaffle’s Nest)  Consider: Black Nore Review (August 26th 2024)

Hear poet Saraswati Nagpal read poems for wave 25 of literary poetry journal iamb. Saraswati Nagpal wave 25 spring 2026 back next the poet Forward Prize-nominated Indian poet Saraswati Nagpal is the author of debut poetry collection Drench Me in Silver . A co-editor of the Substack edition of The Winged Moon , she's been published in The Atlantic , Atlanta Review , Usawa Literary Review , SAND and The Hooghly Review , as well as in international anthologies. Saraswati's poetry has been nominated four times for Best of the Net, and once for The Pushcart Prize. A performing artist and choreographer, she's taught literature and creative writing for more than two decades. the poems If You Look For Me 00:00 / 00:57 You will know me by these strange eyes lit by a hundred ancestors’ fire-sight— this left iris locked on the underworld. I bleed from three wounds— empty mother-shrine, duty’s iron mantle, and of course, a woman’s ache for wings. I once feared the river of me, dammed it for the favour of cowards. Now my wildness spills beyond and deep— flowers flourishing in gashes, roots tethered in my vast acres, the Sun’s grace feeding me in her molten language of verse. At First Light After Marcelle Newbold 00:00 / 01:04 Bring incense, smoke of sandalwood, jasmine of longing in sweet braids. Bring petals of rose, red with hope to the bodhi tree sprouting sacred figs. Bring your feet, bare. Place your fated forehead on these roots, thick with sweat of sleeping ancestors. At first light, the tree is dreaming us awake in its hundred leaves of memory. Can you see the forest in your fingertips? Can you hear the rust and gold of the red earth’s song? Will you become a blessing and offer it your full and fragrant heart? Magdalene by Caravaggio 00:00 / 01:00 That face could be mine, could be yours. Chin tilted to a blazing world behind your eyelids, eros emerging as verse from the open mouth— And the belly, a maelstrom of flame-flecked yearning. You know, as she does— not even that which you seek will silence the ache, no salve for this ochre agony. For it is not in crossing the threshold but in existing on its liminal embers— this is where divinity floods the body, this is where the soul turns gold. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Phil Vernon read poems for wave 16 of literary poetry journal iamb. Phil Vernon wave 16 winter 2023 back next the poet Trained originally as a forester, Phil Vernon has done international humanitarian and peacebuilding work since 1985. His third collection, Guerrilla Country – forthcoming from Flight of the Dragonfly Press in 2024 – draws together his interest in landscape, peace and conflict. Phil's two previous collections, Poetry After Auschwitz and Watching the Moon Landing , are complemented by his version of the mediaeval hymn Stabat Mater (with music by Nicola Burnett Smith), which has been performed internationally. the poems The command ‘An order is heavier than a stone.’ 00:00 / 01:23 The magistrate, for fear his fear will come to pass, sends formal notes to regiments. The chief of police, sure they wish bloodshed over peace, calls out the words that make it so. The soldier puts in play his plan to teach these people what he understands. *** A simple mark, a sound or gesture sets in motion—everything. Block exit gates with bayonets. Cut through the crowd. Fire tear gas, baton, then live rounds above their heads— then lower. Aim at where the densest groupings are. Don’t shrink—redouble your resolve when they begin to flee. Send in the tanks. *** Inside, the image of the golden sanctum barely shimmers, pilgrims walk in silent circles, heel to toe, around the sarovar . *** How certain must they be, who utter these commands, the stage they stand upon and laud and idolise is crumbling in the sea? Where do their shadows go? And where do ours, who fail to prevent their words? The King’s Peace 00:00 / 00:57 To keep his peace, our king built temples, courts and palaces, and scarred the land he’d won, with ditches, ports and roads; determined how we die; and blessed us with his enmities. To teach us irony, he named his cousins lords and justices. Apprised of God’s mistake by priests and clerks, on pain of punishment he made us speak a single tongue. His word was written, maps were drawn. But laws and maps and roadways lengthened distances, and when he sailed, he left no instrument through which to see, but a kaleidoscope. We turn and turn its wheels but cannot make the fractured picture whole. Dereliction 00:00 / 01:14 We learned the forest long before we learned our books: heard woodlarks, cuckoos, jays, watched roebucks, martens, wolves, each in its place and in our secret places— hillsides, hilltops, streams and dips. We learned that trees brought down become a space for sunlight, seedlings, tillers, scents and sounds; that canopies of beech and oak and angled beams of dancing light make way for vistas, brambles, willow, birch, then beech and oak and angled beams of dancing light; that a loved and loving land is always moving tirelessly from sun and sound to quiet shade, from quiet shade to sun and sound. Our land’s become a hungry, dull-eyed fox made ragged and thin by mange and hunched in the edges hearing and seeing nothing; limping to nowhere, too tired to be afraid or unafraid. Publishing credits The command / The King's Peace: Flights (Issue 4) Dereliction: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Thomas McColl read poems for wave 17 of literary poetry journal iamb. Thomas McColl wave 17 spring 2024 back next the poet Thomas McColl lives in London and has published two collections of poetry – Being With Me Will Help You Learn and Grenade Genie . He's read as a featured poet at many events in London and elsewhere, including Hearing Eye , Paper Tiger Poetry , Celine's Salon and The Quiet Compere . Thomas has also been featured on East London Radio, BBC Radio Kent, BBC Radio WM and TV's London Live. the poems Susan Sharp 00:00 / 00:59 Susan Sharp was what my first employer, the local butcher, called the knife he’d use to slice the meat. By way of explanation, he said he spent more time with Susan than he ever did with his wife. ‘Tis pity she’s a knife,' he’d joke, but most of the time he was simply singing Susan’s praises – saying how much he loved her serrated, lop-sided smile, her blood-red lipstick, her lust for naked carcasses, and the ease with which she’d split a heart in two, yet always give in to his demands. On my first day, he threatened to slice off my hands when I went to touch her. ‘There’s only one commandment in a butcher’s shop,’ he scowled. ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s knife.’ Working at that butcher’s shop was my first job, and I didn’t even manage to last a week with that paranoid psycho freak, and Susan Sharp, his knife, who he’d fallen in love with and spent more time with than he ever did with his wife. Look at That! 00:00 / 01:01 'Daddy – look at that! a top hat on a tea pot,' you shout, as we stop just a little too close to a china display in the shop and, with a swipe of your hand, you make a fat pot-headed Victorian gentleman involuntarily doff his hat, and a second later, you realise why he doesn't do that – even though he's Victorian and you're a lady (albeit a little madam) – when his hat (which, foolishly, he'd had made out of posh china rather than plush silk) smashes into pieces on the floor. And while you sob and sulk at the realisation, I pay the bill for the damage, while keeping an eye out, as I'm carrying you, that you don't knock any of the many ornate objects crowded round the till, but instead your damned dinky destructive digit starts prodding the top of my face, and my invisible top hat (which, foolishly, I'd had made out of frayed nerves rather than woven silk) is once more pushed to the edge, and once more (just about) remains in place. Hard Tears 00:00 / 00:43 I often cried in front of you – sometimes when you hit me, once when, as you were teaching me to ride a bike, you let go of the handlebars and losing control I fell off, and once, when teaching me DIY, you gave me a heavy claw hammer to bang some nails into wood and I proceeded to bang my thumb instead. ‘For Pete’s sake!’ you said, disgusted. ‘You’re thirteen. Don’t you think it’s about time you managed to resist the urge to blub like a girl every time you get hurt?’ Well, I never cried in front of you again – not even years later at your funeral. Though I was devastated, the tears just wouldn’t come. I wish you could have seen it. You’d have been proud. Publishing credits Susan Sharp: Co-incidental 4 (The Black Light Engine Room) Look at That!: Ink, Sweat & Tears Hard Tears: Burning House Press

Hear poet Laura Lewis-Waters read poems for wave 20 of literary poetry journal iamb. Laura Lewis-Waters wave 20 winter 2024 back next the poet Secondary school English teacher Laura Lewis-Waters gave birth to her first son during the UK's COVID-19 lockdown. Small wonder then that motherhood, mental health and traumatic birth feature prominently in her writing. Laura also researches poetry as a means to raise awareness of rising sea levels; her forthcoming collection, Where Sea Meets Sea , will explore the changing East Anglia coastline through writing both confessional and imagined, as well as verbatim. Laura's debut chapbook, Bathroom Prisoners , was born in May 2022. Her second collection, Beneath the Light , arrived in March 2023. the poems The Faceless Lady at Covehithe 00:00 / 01:20 She waits near the edge. Wind catching at her white linen dress. She waits for the fishermen to tread the headland toward her. They’ll come at low tide to the morlog, to the sand and shingle banks for their bass and their sole. And she’ll call to them. Wondering why recognition then fear always flits across their features. They’re too close to the edge again. In the dawn, mist rises off the broads. They don’t hear the cliffs sigh and let go. They don’t hear her moan. She retreats to St Andrew’s. A boy in a red bobble hat weaves himself through tumbling arches around graves on their seaward tilt as though ready to go back. Every William – every John – every sailor – every fisherman. The sea was hungry this year. But she’ll not let her Matryoshka home fall. Somewhere a baby cries, or perhaps it is the wind or sea martins. The bobble hat has disappeared. She hopes the church still stands on its return. From the tower she watches the cliff crumble and creep inward. She cries into the night, but nobody comes. They stay away on moonless nights when milk and mist mingle. The babies are hungry. Come morning she waits by the edge, her face as flat and featureless as the sea while the fishermen’s wives hang their linen out to dry. Haze-bruh 00:00 / 01:01 The sea gives and the sea takes and when it takes, it is with fire it threads itself in sky, lets the air ride its brackish back like a thousand battle-driven horses charging to reclaim township, it is all the elements knotted together; double sheet bend against farmer country. Sometimes it crawls up unnoticed lapping up sand with unquenchable thirst, a love too strong for stratified silt. One winter, the sea devoured two bungalows; the bells of a 14th century stone church destined to toll beneath the waves. Its wilding rampage on yellow gorse- lined path wind-whips the tower; north-westerly, chipping at field-boys’ teeth at teatime. Another winter, it tucked away four houses, shop and bakery overnight its briny breath inhaling more than flat margin brown its craggy sigh raking shrinking cliff top and painting the silty clay horizon where the sea gives, and the sea takes takes. Living with someone else’s anxiety 00:00 / 01:09 is adopting it as your own it’s realising you have counted black linoleum squares 1,000 times sat on the bathroom floor incapable of standing up. It is learning magic tricks the way you learnt to ride a bike, slowly, painfully, rituals that have to be adhered to a couple a day at first until every little task that keeps you alive is riddled with them – it’s turning the tap on off on off just because you brushed your teeth and always stepping into a room with your right foot because if you don’t you’ll never conceive. It is being your own failure you feel selfish for acknowledging because you are the ‘normal’ one, the unmedicated one, reassurance that asbestos is not in the crumbling Artex one. It is filling in the gaps in the grout so one day the house can be sold as a show home when all you really want is to fall down those little hollows. It is slamming doors, crying, collecting swimming certificates faster than anyone around you, legs growing tired, throbbing beneath the water. It is befriending magnolia walls because your husband, best friend, sister, colleague are the ones that need you. Publishing credits The Faceless Lady at Covehithe: exclusive first publication by iamb Haze-bruh: Trees, Seas & Attitude (Black Cat Poetry Press) Living with someone else’s anxiety: Bathroom Prisoners (Written Off Publishing)

Hear poet Sarra Culleno read poems for wave 2 of literary poetry journal iamb. Sarra Culleno wave 2 spring 2020 back next the poet Sarra Culleno is a British writer, mother and English teacher. Author of Bonds: A Short Story Collection , Sarra has had her fiction and poetry published widely in print, as well as performed in audio-dramas, podcasts and on radio. Longlisted for the Cinnamon Press Pamphlet Prize and the 2020 Nightingale and Sparrow Full Collections competition, Sarra was also nominated by iamb for Best of the Net in 2020. She's a frequent contributor to Fevers of the Mind , Alternative Stories and Fake Realities , and co-hosts Write Out Loud at Waterside Arts. Sarra also performs as both a guest and a featured poet at numerous literary festivals. the poems Eidolon Tolling 00:00 / 01:03 The running tap might pour pounding froths of furor over your divested protests, drown your clamour. I cannot help but imagine your loud discord. Yet, when I check in, you're sleeping sound, mi amor. There's always your call-to-arms from another room. Conjecture presumes your disinherited roar, for fear your alarm may be sucked up by vacuum, your tumult aches covered with crackling hiss of chores. When hurly-burly bubbles from kettle rise up, under din, your siren alerts. It's like sad cats. If the rumble lasts too long for either of us, I hallucinate pealing cries bringing me back to small, smarting pangs of your dissonant phrases, vibrating dispossession, under white noises. Paradise Found 00:00 / 01:50 A spot in her garden is perfect for placing my face, so it's under her fig tree’s shading. On terracotta tiles my legs are sunning, as busying bugs buzz to jasmines, unstopping, while gusts from honeysuckle perfumes are puffing sugary breezes somehow, to me reaching. Persepolis’ Paradise, here a patch cultivating, by medlar and quince trees of home she is growing in the changing climate of England’s permitting. As if in the East, are passion fruits clinging over her washing-line leisurely draping under which we sit, her mint-teas a-sipping. On the horizon, Wembley’s Arch is bridging. On Harrow’s Hill, St. Mary’s spire’s soaring. Zooming Heathrow planes are low-flying. Bakerloo Line tubes behind bushes are swooshing like waves on an island resort softly washing rhythms ebbing, breaking, to-ing, fro-ing. I don’t know names of the colourings bursting through her lush greens, first hiding then popping, but I know how to keep from missing by blinking, printing the strobes of my camera’s shuttering each butterfly’s poised cameo fit-for-Vogue-ing, saving frame by frame my memory’s capturing, for when in the future my dementia’s time-hopping my infirm finale laps here will be looping. I hold it, the moment clear for reliving, rooting in her happy blooms, I’m promising. Burst 00:00 / 01:08 We enjoy our surface soapy membrane. Here, it is right and just to rove our sights over silky swirls of coiling spectrum hues, distance what’s inevitable, beneath and above, of happy's precarious precipice: on this bubble's thin skin. We breath honey scents from where the detergent's aroma is most perfumed. In big aeroplanes we wave stamped passports. Cornucopia shelves thrive shops and sweet spots. We gulp manna's syrupy foremilk till full to rest. Tête-à-tête, we eskimo-nose loved freckles close enough to see with bare eyes, then we sleep like babies. At this lucky alignment the satin sheets are slippery. The layer in-between is rendered in fragile-gifts, so one touch is the end. Publishing credits Eidolon Tolling / Burst: exclusive first publication by iamb Paradise Found: Places of Poetry Author photo: © Sonya Smith

Hear poet Shaw Worth read poems for wave 6 of literary poetry journal iamb. Shaw Worth wave 6 summer 2021 back next the poet Shaw Worth is a student living in London. His work has received three commendations in the Foyle Young Poet of the Year competition, appeared in the Waltham Forest Poetry Competition anthology close , and is forthcoming in World-dream. Shaw also co-edits Meanwhile Magazine . the poems Breaktime on the Toddlers and Tiaras Set 00:00 / 01:24 Today my two-year-old is Regional Beauty Supreme. She will be Princess Kansas. She will devour the world. Her two main hobbies are broad daylight and temporary teeth called flippers; we throw them in the summer river, we watch them dance like mayflies. Before she goes on stage they play Wichita Lineman for me and the soft string whine comes to get me, and these all-time winner women and the local bowling alley recede. I go back to my father, who hated me; he said our name was Resaca for fighting but I stayed here in the county to listen through the wire for the future, which is my champion daughter. At home I marry the mirror and try her lipstick on at dinner. I am the quality controller. She knows we need the money and she brings it back each Monday. I wash the dresses. We sing together every weekend. We storm like thunder through the waxed music halls, then I pass her the mic, and her glitter in their golf ball eyes makes the world see more clearly and the cinched March sun walk out to greet the judges and these endless plains, where we are unloading a pickup of trophies and rejoicing in endless victory. Dharma Talk 00:00 / 01:31 Ani Pema says we would prefer to remain asleep in the West. Just like that: quietly. And she laughs loud and jokes since her wisdom overflows. But distraction is freehand and creative, I think; while I walk in the shop I listen— I should be bolder at adding new people on Facebook, whose images I glide over nightly a fish through a reef, or a bored mountain goat, tripping on the space between crags. It’s so important, she says, to get out of this pool of steamy slash fictional nothing, of thoughts that crawl like sci-fi animals, of unwatched films & love poems— you are not who you think you are. You never were . But before I get discursive and freehand about dinner, I remember again that still I can breathe, and adopt a posture of repose in the air, like a fly on a thousand-petalled lotus. I twist my left hip & it hurts for a week; I bruise my calves on the flow of time, I get dinner, again. There are road stops on the path. On the four hundredth petal of my long trashy thriller, the gang climb the glacier in search of the body; the killer impersonates below. They find her, filled with love and righteous action, dig her out from the hard-set snow. Landscape as Guided Meditation 00:00 / 01:24 No, I’m serious. Imagine you’re fifty one hundred fathoms tall, big head up with blue generous Neptune, and your feet down in the Cape Cod lake where there were eels and you met your teacher. You have no pain and high dexterity. You think aloud with your shoulder blade the size of the province: it says don’t trust the work, do it again, you might just find that something in all this boundless space, these foamy bits of lake that lodge beyond the breath. Look, there’s Jupiter. I guess breath is the end of be all. You’re so massive you can’t float by. Uncombing your hair the length of Cape Cod will send a theta wave to Earth with the power to make the highways curl up on themselves then heal all beings of hope and fear. So do it. Go do the dishes and strike the bowl till it becomes a portal. Crawl through to a large non-conceptual room, the first of ten final perfections. We don’t need to list them here quite yet. The lake has dried up with waiting for you the wallpaper is Neptune imagined. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb