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 Anna Milan read poems for wave 13 of literary poetry journal iamb. Anna Milan wave 13 spring 2023 back next the poet Currently based in Hertfordshire, England, Anna Milan has had her poetry featured in various publications – Butcher’s Dog , Under the Radar , Eye Flash Poetry , Black Bough Poetry and Ink Sweat & Tears among these. the poems The wind is not yet awake 00:00 / 00:47 Patience, eyas. The wind is not yet awake. Wait for its breath to rise and turn till you can scoop the air under pointed wing. Your eyes are not windows, but walls. Enamelled with anger, watchful, siege-ready; mistrust kept safe behind ashlar and buttress. Although the frosts snap at your feather buds the spathes will grow curved and strong. When the barbs lock firm to collar the wind then, eyas, we’ll be ready to begin. Eyas: a young hawk; especially (in falconry) an unfledged nestling taken from the nest for training money & sex 00:00 / 00:46 I’m doing it for me she says & though in a way that’s true she speaks the softened vowels of her great grandma who heaved out the bastard child of the earl of bath & wrecked her voice in the process so forever & ever after it had an echo of the master’s tenor like the bass notes below the hymn’s melody in the estate chapel on the big hill & when she’s in those killer heels doing it for her I can’t help but wonder how many male choirs are in the harmonics singing yes yes that’s my girl you don’t answer to god or man do you what a chance to write yourself your own sweet song girl House guests 00:00 / 01:01 My mother drew cedillas in lipstick on the mirrors, scrubbed the skirting boards clean, and left stands of autumn grasses growing right up against the patio doors. Afterwards, my sister came to throw wet leaves at the ceiling and do handstands in the kitchen. The first man I loved told me a lady never bares her feet until she is alone in her room. He always turned off the light with his thumb before he shut the door. The next one, a man with grey curls and eyes saddened by the sea, hammered nails into a newly decorated wall to put up a shelf, and heaped sand onto it in restless piles. Others roam about outside, waiting to come in. Someone once said to me, In the end, aren’t we all just guests in someone else’s house? I think it’s true, but these days, I am more careful about letting people touch the walls. Publishing credits The wind is not yet awake: Atrium money & sex: Butcher’s Dog (Issue 16) House guests: Under The Radar (Issue 25)

Hear poet Clare Proctor read poems for wave 7 of literary poetry journal iamb. Clare Proctor wave 7 autumn 2021 back next the poet Clare Proctor's poetry has appeared in Shooter , The North , The A3 Review and Finished Creatures , as well as in anthologies from Yaffle Press and The Frogmore Press. Clare's writing also featured in Handstand Press' This Place I Know: An Anthology of New Cumbrian Writing . She placed second in both the 2018 Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year and 2021 Ware competitions. Clare lives in Cumbria where she teaches English, and is a member of Brewery Poets. the poems This Woman Wears a Green Dress After Julian Cooper’s Bella Vista Hotel 00:00 / 01:09 This woman stands in the doorway, wearing a green dress. This woman wears a green dress, clenches her fingers. This woman clenches her fingers – her nails make crevices in the skin of her hand – this woman makes empty crescents on her palm. This woman is the body that makes a shadow on a side of the bar. Her body blocks the light trying to shuffle through the door, through the window stained with street dust. This woman breathes in the bar-room smoke, lets the clatter of an empty tequila glass fall into the back of her mind, lets its stickiness become salt, the salt of the sea breeze that she senses behind her eyes. This woman sees nothing. She is listening to the wind crossing a far-off ocean. Her green dress lifts in it. On Falling in Love with Poets 00:00 / 01:06 I have fallen in love with poets, with the spaces they hold within them like underground caves. I want to be lowered into those caves with a head-torch, reach my hands out to the walls, scarred with their stories. I want to fall into their voices, when they do not hesitate, but resonate, like the deep note of the viola. I love the idea of falling in love with poets, and in love with all that poets have loved; with their moments of climax, with their late-night tears, with their unchosen words that slip from their lips when angry or drunk or tired. I want to fall for their suffering, dip into it as if it is a well, wash in its dark water. I want to feel their pain, like splinters stuck in the skin of my fingers. I have fallen in love with the word – poet – how the two soft syllables shape my mouth. Sappho’s Leap After Felicia Hemans 00:00 / 02:24 The women are ceaseless. The women are ceaseless as the waves. The women are ceaseless as their own echoing sighs. The only way for the women to be still as the sea-bird hovering on the death wind, is for the women to throw themselves from cliffs. If the women want to jump from cliffs, they should dive in a perfect arc. The sun should be setting behind them or fingers of the dilated moon sifting over their bodies, the sea a molten silver. Their fragile forms should be the shape of a crescent as they dive, a flattering silhouette. The women can be gentle and sentimental or fierce and tragic, but at all times when jumping from cliffs, the women should be beautiful. Men may want to paint the women later. The women should hurl themselves into the sea because their love is unrequited. Their unrequited love must not be for other women, but for a man/sea god. The women’s pain should be private unless they are jumping from a cliff; they should cry in a pitiful fashion, a few tears on the cheek subtle as pearls. They should avoid ugly crying, or they may not be a fitting subject for a painting. The women should consider the weather, should pick a day that best fits their form and colouring. They should pair their outfit with the sun/moon/white cliffs. Their dress should flit around in the wind enough to expose bare legs and should cling enough in the rain/sea mist to delineate their breasts. The women should keep their hair long so that it can whip around their faces and stream behind them as they fall. The women should fall in slow motion, over and over again, into the mind of the man/sea god. They should never land on the rocks, breaking their body and shattering their face, neither of which would reflect well on the man/sea god. Women who are planning on jumping from cliffs should check the tides. Women jumping from cliffs should be recovered in one piece, their free dark hair pushed back from their pale faces, that should look at peace now that they can sleep forever in the unslumbering seas, dream about the man/sea god that they absolutely, definitely love. Publishing credits This Woman Wears a Green Dress: came joint-second in the Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year Competition 2018 On Falling in Love with Poets: Byline Legacies (Cardigan Press) Sappho's Leap: won second prize in the Ware Poets Open Poetry Competition 2021

Hear poet Carolyn Jess-Cooke read poems for wave 4 of literary poetry journal iamb. Carolyn Jess-Cooke wave 4 autumn 2020 back next the poet Carolyn Jess-Cooke lives in Glasgow with her husband and four children. Her prize wins include an Eric Gregory Award, a Tyrone Guthrie Prize, and a Northern Writers' Award. Her third poetry collection will be published by Seren in 2021, and her fiction has appeared in 23 languages. Carolyn's most recent novel (published as C J Cooke) is The Nesting . the poems Hare 00:00 / 01:31 I kept you in bed with me so many nights, certain I could hold the life into you, certain that the life in you wanted to leap out, hare-like, go bobbing off into some night-field. For want of more eyes, more arms I strapped you to me while I did the dishes, cooked, typed, your little legs frogging against the deflating dune of your first home. Nested you in a car seat while I showered, dressed, and when you breastfed for hours and hours I learned how to manoeuvre the cup and book around you. Time and friends and attitudes, too. We moved breakables a height, no glass tables. Fitted locks to the kitchen cupboards, door jammers, argued about screws and pills someone left within reach. I’ll not tell you how my breath left me, how my heart stopped at your stillness in the cot, and who I became when at last you moved. There is no telling what skins of me have dropped and shed in the fears I’ve entered. The day beyond these blankets, beyond our door, is known to me now, fragile as moth-scurf, its long ears twitching, alert, white tail winking across the night-field. Yesterday, I Failed 00:00 / 02:31 I failed, and the failing was great thereof. I failed all the way to the sulphur cliffs of cynicism, then bungee-jumped. I shot a hole in one in failure. I failed and changed the course of history. I failed admirably, catastrophically, unremittingly, relentlessly, perspicaciously, deliciously, spaciously, and with the dexterity of the common impala. I did not merely stall, pause, or change my mind – I failed, like any serious attempt at oil painting in a wind machine. I failed, but the crops did not. I failed in a field, and filed as I fooled. I walked right up to failure, kicked it in the shins, and insulted its mother. I fell in love with failure. We got married and raised a family of failures. I failed to the sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle. I failed in the key of D flat. I failed my heart out, I failed until my lungs burned, my brain rattled, my skin flapped like a rag against my bones and my tongue uttered only ‘failure’... I failed, much to the regret of the management. I went scuba-diving in failure, I camped under failure, I hiked to the summit of failure, I painted the floor with superglue while failure was sleeping and when it woke up ... I laughed. I failed in several languages. I added failure on Facebook. I failed from caveman to Homo Sapiens. I failed stupendously, outlandishly, biblically, savagely, juicily, Byzantinely, heroically, intergalactically. I failed in hard copy, fax, text, email, Skype and podcast. I failed to the soundtrack of James Bond. I failed as magnesium is to water, as the Apocalypse is to a Saturday morning lie-in, as Godzilla is to the streets of Tokyo. I failed, and I failed, but at least I tried. Newborn 00:00 / 01:17 What are you like? A minute old, you’re a sky-blue candle quarried from the fire, beeswax on my belly, then a nub of warm dough and in the basket by my bed you’re a bag of ripe peaches, soap-bubble fragile, a slow-waving field fattening with wheat and at the breast you’re a zoo of verbs mewling, snuffling, pecking, wolfing, then coiling into sleep, where you’re a water-wheel churning ancestral reflections in the journeys of your face until it’s morning and you’re unleashed light, a pinking pearl, a key turning in the lock of clocked breath filling our house with hows – how did the soul arrive there? like a stitched wish or the way the wind winds itself into the sea’s receiving skin or did life find you, invite you to climb to the nib of the wick and, if so, what flame set you alight? Publishing credits Hare: 2013 National Poetry Competition anthology (The Poetry Society) Yesterday, I Failed: The Stinging Fly (Vol. 2, Issue 13) Newborn: Inroads (Seren Books)

Hear poet Sue Spiers read poems for wave 17 of literary poetry journal iamb. Sue Spiers wave 17 spring 2024 back next the poet Sue Spiers was born in Cyprus and lives in Hampshire. She works with the Winchester Poetry Festival and spoken word group Winchester Muse , and edits the Open University Poetry Society ’s annual anthology. Sue has self-published three collections: Jiggle Sac , Plague – A Season of Senryu and De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da . Her chapbook More Than a Late-Night Drink was shortlisted in 2023 for the Dreich Classics Chapbook Competition. the poems Christ the Redeemer as a Flamengo F C Supporter 00:00 / 01:37 Look at that span, spreading arms wider than two articulated trucks, never raised above parallel to the horizon, as if to question the referee’s rule: that off-side pass was far too close to call or, poised to raise his hands and start a chant. Straight and tall on top of Corcovado with his Art Deco pleated underskirt, the gauzy drape of tunic past his knees, proudly wrapped in a scarf of red and black overlaid grey by soapstone and concrete. Can you find its logo of a vulture? Too stiff to bend his knees come Ash Wednesday, dance the Bota Fogo to samba drums when carnival erupts along the streets. A downturned mouth reminds us of the score when Papa pulled him off before half-time and team mates didn’t want to take his place. A hundred years since construction started, some ninety since the bishops blessed his toes, all that time watching over Flamengo and catching, from the corner of his eyes, the Maracanã pitch and glory goals. No doubt he’s inch for inch their biggest fan. Borgan Borgan 00:00 / 02:19 Wem come up from the country, north on the barges, show the ankle-biters the gurt city with its biggity-bigness, show um how suited folk make their daily kerching. First wem go to the nob-house with its grandioso fountain like coal bins leaking drench from a heighty-high pole. Wem hear the fakish gorstering from posho bints. In the whiny hovver wem sits toppity-top with hair rush past perilous lifts sliding up plastic-white office blockers, (self-spickandspan!), where the Pillpop factory makity-makes. Outside the shoutyloud theatre its bungaroush walls peep flint and pea beach like it needs a good overdo. Playfolk bodyshape in the streets with groundhats, canny-craicing. There’s a greenspace in the East by the trickity-trickle, birdhouses naility-nailed back-to-back like branch growers, caterwise over irontwissets there’s a wapple way beastride. Soon mother-wife’s purse opens for the gimcrack arcade, with tossitathome scraddle for her nosybitch bestie, son-elder wants a dolphin swoosh-ride and daughter-mid wheedles a dosset. Wem footsore of stepping and thinkity-think it’s bapmunch. Um call it a slum but Frumsted has the worldy-know eateries. Wem skittish by flitterfolk, um shun countrykins like wem. Mostity-most come from worldy-spread places like wem, A snooty-toity foodserve gets us an eatplace and a seegrub. Soon wem tuckity-scoff in to a tankbowl of snag-slub. Yum! Son-toddle eyedroops, wem juggered as wilty-wilts in dunes. Wem eyeball Borganners guzzle poppy-lite, ogle teleoptics, stridety-stride gormless and roofless. Wem skedaddle latty. Wheatfield with Cypresses (1889) After the painting by Vincent Van Gogh 00:00 / 01:28 The paint is alive with harvest Mistral; lines and curves of emerald cypress, the swirl of lemon-tipped wheat, mustard stalks, a suggestion of poppies low in the frame. One dark hill, out of kilter, as mountains pale towards turbulent cloud which sweeps eastwards, but where is the sun? Sky reflects water not wheatfield and there are no humans, no animals, nothing manmade, except the wheat; elsewhere a farmer, a scythe, a miller, bread from an oven. He visits the cypresses many times, sits at a distance, up close, working their shades on canvas trying to imitate what they give. He goes over and over his own imperfection; why no one wants what he offers. Who would buy anguish? Who would want these thoughts wrought in oil? Publishing credits Christ the Redeemer as a Flamengo F. C. Supporter: commended in the Ware Poets Open Poetry Competition 2022 Borgan Borgan: South (Issue 65) Wheatfield with Cypresses (1889): placed third in the 2019 Battered Moons Poetry Competition

Hear poet Gaynor Kane read poems for wave 15 of literary poetry journal iamb. Gaynor Kane wave 15 autumn 2023 back next the poet Gaynor Kane from Belfast, Northern Ireland, came to writing late in life, having finished an Open University BA (Hons) degree with a creative writing module. She's since had poems, fiction, creative non-fiction and visual art published in journals and anthologies in the UK, Europe and the US. As well as performing at several literary events – The Belfast Book Festival, Open House Festival and Cheltenham Poetry Festival among these – Gaynor's organised, curated and hosted literary events for various other festivals. She's also judged for the North Carolina Poetry Society, and was guest sub-editor of Issue Two of The Storms: A Journal of Poetry, Prose and Visual Art . Her poetry is published by The Hedgehog Poetry Press . the poems The Lock 00:00 / 02:11 I can’t resist the challenge of working out your code. Listen to the click, click, click of teeth nipping past the pin. Listen for the tock of the clock, as the dials rotate. Listen for ticks of numbers falling in place and your combo clunk. You meet my nose with coldness and the scent of blood, newborns, and his collection of copper coins. Mother’s gold charm bracelet with clover, wishing well, clog and key. Or her grandfather’s old toolbox, a cacophony of giants: chisels, claw-hammer, hacksaw, caulk. Your colour has me thinking of boulders along the edge of Belfast Lough, where O’Neill’s red hand alighted after being cleaved and hurled from sea to land. Or mountains of fossilised rocks, stacked at the docks. Coal carted, then scooped in spade loads into sacks. You are tugboat shaped, but my thoughts go large to Arrol gantries and liners nesting within skeletal stocks, until fully formed. Rivets struck like rhythmic heartbeats. Chocks lodged in place, to stop them slipping out to sea, until waters broke and ships were birthed by tugboat midwives. Everything was monochrome, chalk, smoke, firebrick, slack. Dunchers and dungarees, grubby hands and faces at clocking-off, men’s boots still gleaming with pride. Pride passed down paternally, reflecting on shiny surfaces, until the yard was boat-less, barren, and the gates all locked. Envelope 1) a flat container, usually paper; 2) something that envelops; 3) a natural enclosing. 00:00 / 01:45 I have felt hand-cut paper, folded; held letters of the heart. shut feelings away; sealed by cardboard button & green twine, soft-stamped beeswax & gummed saliva. I’ve safeguarded policies on punishment, the Eton mess of government contracts, procedures for lubricants & movements & bills for climate conferences & parties. I have been the surface for a botched plan over lunchtime drinks; sometimes binned & other times brought into being. I’ve been a tube of long thin glass encapsulating gas, creating neon light & illuminating bars with my brightness. I have been blindness of a field covered in snow. Blue ceramic of tiles, holding the reflective mirror of a pool. I have been the hedge squaring a lawn. I’ve been the breeze buoying a dancing kite. I’ve had a window & seen the curve of the earth. I might have been a musty prickled husk of Autumn’s conker or chalky sedimentary shell, cradling yolk & albumen. In my first life I was an emperor’s invitation within unbroken pottery. Hope 00:00 / 00:37 is a pile of chalky bones, dusted off and laid in formation. Fine drill bits whirr as holes are bored and granules gathered for DNA testing. A life takes shape, a skeleton reverse read like tea leaves. Smashed skull— all the lines of a messy story— until the puzzle pieces come together and somewhere a family hear a knock at their door. Publishing credits The Lock: Venus in Pink Marble (The Hedgehog Poetry Press) Envelope / Hope: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet April Yee read poems for wave 6 of literary poetry journal iamb. April Yee wave 6 summer 2021 back next the poet April Yee is a writer and translator of power and postcolonialism. A Harvard and Tin House alumna, she reported in more than a dozen countries before moving to the UK. April reads for Triquarterly , contributes to Ploughshares online, and mentors for University of the Arts London’s Refugee Journalism Project. the poems Kopachi / Pripyat / Vilcha 00:00 / 02:07 In the cloud that drifts online, I discover an image of myself, notebooked, remember I toured Ukrainian villages in April, the anniversary of their before and after, the date they understood dirty and clean , touched new energies released into air. My recollection floats ungraspable as air. The high-res photograph does not recover dead actions to the hippocampus, now clean as a blank notebook sheet. I remember the detailed email from my father after I said I’d go to Chernobyl that April. He cited a scientific study: Dear April, Mushrooms, exposed to soil and air, can remain radioactive for years after. For breakfast, the local hotel covered pasta in mayonnaise and dismembered hot dogs. I also half-recall the clean white shirt of an engineer. He’d keep clean our air in a then-future, now-past April with a steel sarcophagus to stop the embers from dispersing particles in global air. His metal tonnes could fully cover the Statue of Liberty, he intoned, after a meal of many courses. I marvelled, after, how he kept his white shirt so pristine clean. A visiting Japanese mother, face covered, gripped two Geiger counters an April and a half since Fukushima blew the air. She earthquaked her body to remember. Actually, I use records to pretend-remember. I Google articles I must have written after that trip, read emails maybe sent from air- craft raining pollutants over unclean nimbuses. I trigger cruellest April, places where every root was covered in irradiated air and nuclear embers. After, I wash my consciousness clean, allow the cover to contain all of April. Listening to Lola Flores 00:00 / 01:03 In your ghost berry house, you screw the leg still tighter in its wooden frame, the hoof suspended, question mark. Botanists peg the mulberry to man, their shots at life quick decades. No estás más, corazón. Silkworms spin threads from fruit before it spoils. You shear off fat, locate shrunk flesh. Off bone it falls. He plumps the fruit your maid slow boils to blood-gelled jam. In your arguileh’s crown, his coals burn orange hot, each breath you take cremation. Hide your father’s jamón bone in the slingshot shadow of the lamp you break, below the mulberries, their blinded lobes seen too in cemeteries of my home. West / East 00:00 / 01:53 My eyes are the hammered edge of a Chinatown butcher’s cleaver, heavy and heaved with momentum, not sharp. There’s enough sharpness in sheared bottles, wires embroidered with barbs, paid bills that slip inside the flesh. I heave my eyes on discards, cleaving past from present: Who touched this can, and can it buy my lunch? My butcher heaves his cleaver through a duck’s shiny body, and I see the X-ray of its bones, perfect whites circling congealed purple cores. The rice: free, my butcher’s Buddha plea. I swallow slowly, seeing with my tongue for paddy stones that seek to crack my teeth. I picked one time a book, heavy with large font: The Geography of Thought. A man inside theorised mankind’s mind cleaved in the age of the ancient Greeks, each fisherman hauling his solo catch while Chinese strewed rice across collective fields. West sees the thing; East sees the place the thing sits in. I can see I am now West: sifting, sorting, seeing the trash, and not the street the trash sits in. Someone saw this book as trash. Were I East, I’d be the rice, the duck, and the butcher, whole in every grain. Publishing credits Kopachi / Pripyat / Vilcha: Commended in the Ambit Poetry Competition 2020 Listening to Lola Flores: Ware Poets 22nd Competition Anthology 2020 (Ware Poets) West / East: Live Canon Anthology 2020 (Live Canon)

Hear poet Helen Calcutt read poems for wave 2 of literary poetry journal iamb. Helen Calcutt wave 2 spring 2020 back next the poet Helen Calcutt is the author of two volumes of poetry. Her first, Sudden rainfall (2014), was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. Helen's second work, Unable Mother , described by Robert Peake as ‘a violent and tender grapple with our cosy notions of motherhood’, appeared in 2018. Helen's poetry, journalism and critical writing have been published widely, and she is the creator and editor of acclaimed poetry anthology Eighty-Four – published in aid of leading suicide prevention charity CALM. Her newest pamphlet will be published in 2020. the poems Pale deer, soft-footed 00:00 / 01:33 The water is silk. She sings to me. The cold wind, the streets, the people flicker and shut off when the water falls, and I am naked within – singing of my dirt, how to know it. My eyes close ... in these few sacred moments when my daughters sleep and my loved one reads about Vikings and flayed skin. The water is like a pattering of milk. I want to stoop, and lick, and taste life again. I ask, did I give too easily today? was I good? baring my throat to the sky, the lit tiles reflect a deer, pale, and soft-footed. I run my fingers down my hair in St Water – I pray to her, choose me flow over, and over, and over me, touch me, heal heal until I am no longer meek or mild and I can run with my sins again. Grief is like a miracle 00:00 / 01:02 like opening your mouth for water, and finding rain. You stand for days outside the body of a silent church. Snow touches the stillness of the windows and you long for their acceptance, a few tears. You tell yourself the door isn’t closed: it’s open and weeping. Like the orange rose that never bloomed all spring then one day in autumn opened atriums of colour. Now all the roses gather and the door is open-armed. People think I am strange touching my lips to the wood, but ice is thawing to love inside my body: I don’t know how else to show my gratitude. Mytilini 00:00 / 01:12 Oldest of Seas, old friend, no one hears you slink back no one hears his own music anymore. Morning, soft heart, warm and unstartable expands from her threads at the earth's edge, unfaithful at last, brushing the ferns the anemone flowers. Light is longing to come home. In other worlds women tie knots in their bodice strings, sing songs, hang flycatchers from the moon. But here, where the sun hums in her socket where searoot and bloodroot insist on their comforting where the fire in the mountain wall torches our hands – like a bead of clear light the sea revolves through morning wind, and recognises us. Publishing credits Pale deer, soft-footed: The London Magazine Grief is like a miracle: Wild Court (April 8th 2020) Mytilini: Sudden rainfall (Perdika Editions)

Hear poet Louise McStravick read poems for wave 12 of literary poetry journal iamb. Louise McStravick wave 12 winter 2022 back next the poet Birmingham-based writer, poet and educator Louise McStravick says her writing is concerned mostly with extracting the extraordinary from the ordinary. Her recent work can be found in Popshot , Ink Sweat & Tears , Dear Damsels , Aphelion, Porridge Magazine and several other respected publications. Louise's debut poetry collection, How to Make Curry Goat , was published in 2020. the poems My sister was born a sunset 00:00 / 00:44 When children come out healthy, they are pink. Or the bit when pink meets red like that point in the sky when the sun reminds of its power to make us forget everything that came before it. Even if only a minute. This blood spilled sky an ending. Children are not yellow like a fully baked sun. They said she must have jaundice. My mother tells them her father’s skin holds the burnt ochres of a Caribbean sunset. They do not say sorry when they hand her over. A daughter’s guide to poaching an egg 00:00 / 01:17 Make the water rearrange its insides, shift shape as it is told, steam rise drip drip vinegar, sour the water to not let things stick. Watch it fight its way to the surface. It is not an easy process, such transformation, if not careful it can erupt, break onto skin that has already learned this is too hot, but does it again anyway. Turn the heat down. Don’t hold the egg too high or it will spread itself open, reveal itself, some things should be left to the imagination. Wand a whirlpool and crack it in watch it bring itself together, composed, despite itself. Let the bubbles teach it how to mature, push it to the surface, fully fledged yolk whole, unbroken, ready for charred bread. In one move, let the knife cut it open watch it pour itself out, ready for hungry tongues. Bake yourself some unicorns After Rishi Dastidar 00:00 / 01:19 Start your day with a cheese board; wear lycra to work; decorate your eyelids with glitter made from reclaimed rainbow tears; slay your greetings—wink with both eyes—say goodbye instead of hello; only consume things that are the yellow of the midday sun; defy winter, wear a bikini, manifest warmth; yoga yourself to a luxury holiday at least 8 times a day—the more you do it the more the universe receives; eat squirty cream for lunch straight from the can and inhale the gas after; go on a 24-hour lunch break—if your boss asks why tell her to read your daily horoscope; stop your thoughts at the click of a notification; order yourself a slice of knowledge; you’re owning it babes you’re shitting out that deposit with every reusable cup. You can do this! Start a petition to ban white bread; teach the bacteria in your stomach to recycle plastic; don’t eat anything that could look sound or feel like it could have been crawled on by anything that can be named. Keep going! You know you’re winning when you wake up and it isn’t raining. Publishing credits My sister was born a sunset: How to Make Curry Goat (Fly on the Wall Press) A daughter's guide to poaching an egg: Porridge Magazine Bake yourself some unicorns: Ink, Sweat & Tears

Hear poet Maxine Rose Munro read poems for wave 5 of literary poetry journal iamb. Maxine Rose Munro wave 5 spring 2021 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 Rachel Deering read poems for wave 13 of literary poetry journal iamb. Rachel Deering wave 13 spring 2023 back next the poet Poet Rachel Deering lives in Bath, England, with her cat, and works in the field of mental health supporting those who are homeless. She has a love of the natural world and what it can tell us about ourselves. Rachel is a director of writing website ABC Tales – where she also shares her own new poetry under username onemorething . She supports Signe Maene with Book Worm Saturday on Twitter, and can also be found tweeting poetry, art, nature, myth, folklore plus photos of her cat from her own account. Her first poetry collection is Crown of Eggshells . the poems Crow 00:00 / 01:07 My heart is a crow, its wingbeats, a pulse; the doctor declared it a medical impossibility, but these pills are seeds, I said, and this hospital bed, the black earth. Krähe, I called it – its name, the bark of its sound, ‘yes,’ I lie, ‘yes, every morning now seems to be a bright welcome to life.’ I am used to saying yes. In laboratories, crows have demonstrated their magic – this is how I wield stone to make water, this is how I bend metal to make food. A doctor diagnoses, and I try to hush the night sung inside my chest, of battles and their fields of dead, I do not tell anyone ‘no’, I understand cras, I understand how to endure today for the liberty of tomorrow. The Dead Want Their Moon Back 00:00 / 00:55 The toad winked an eye into the side of his head, unrolled his tongue and snatchgulped slippery the lozenge of a slug. The darkness said – do not steal the moon or the dead will find you and fetch it back, their pearly stone, their lifeless rock. Dew settled upon the toad’s cratered back, the seas no longer ebbed and flowed, owls were struck dumb. I weighed the night on the scales of absence until nothing was or ever could be marvellous anymore, I cut the moon into new quarters, I buried the light. Salamander 00:00 / 01:32 When it rained, you blamed me, and when your cattle died or the well gave up bad water – it was all my doing. So much so, that now you do not speak my name, fearing its mustard breath will flame a pouched poison and released, will fire and hiss if uttered. But I have never been that mysterious. Still, I speak in little clicks, undaunted, mutter the meaning of each star upon my back, upon the worm of my body. And I swim in the murk of aquatic dreams, sinewy, watered beneath the smell of pinewood warmed in the sun. Here, you ask me to put out the blaze I started and yet, I only know the cool of wet and stone. I think of the soft, round of my eggs, sticky as creamy mistletoe berries, and what if I could change my skin, regenerate the broken parts, so that when, scales falling away, I can reveal the white dove of my virtue, and how then, maybe then, you might again see the truth of me. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Mark Carson read poems for wave 21 of literary poetry journal iamb. Mark Carson wave 21 spring 2025 back next the poet Born in Belfast and educated in Dublin and Cambridge, Mark Carson has enjoyed an engineering career that's included sea-going with oceanographers, teaching in Nairobi, and running an engineering software company in Cumbria. He's published two pamphlets with Wayleave Press – The Hoopoe's Eye and Hove-to is a State of Mind – and a wheen of poems in various places such as Ink, Sweat & Tears , Smiths Knoll , The North , The Rialto , Orbis , Obsessed with Pipework , London Grip and Stride . Mark was short-listed for the Bridport Prize for Poetry in both 2009 and 2012, as well as for The UK's National Poetry Prize in 2014. His work has also been commended in the Troubadour International Poetry Prize, Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, and the Mirehouse Poetry Prize. the poems Möbius Strip 00:00 / 00:43 reducing her life to seventeen bullet points was simpler far than she’d somehow imagined and she had them graven in cursive script on a one-sided strip of her native silver given a twist by a cunning smith hammer-welded so the text is continuous with the tip of his finger he traces the edge of the strip with one edge and one surface, re-entrant and cursive like a nightmarish earworm, a catch in four parts, with recursive remorse and the cyclical tides of unable to finish The New Footbridge 00:00 / 03:18 It springs across the river like a slice of rainbow, arched as a vertebrate, golden in the sunlight and the mayor cuts the ribbon, the councillors are ready and they all march together, march across the Guadiaro. Is it not a great idea, a bridge so light and springy? The laminated timbers so pretty and so buoyant? The abutments are substantial, the footings thick and massive, and the bridge rests lightly, lightly on its ledges. * * * The rain fell heavy in the Guadiaro catchment, red with mud the river rose, covering the footings and the river surged and rose again, thrusting the abutments and again the turbid river rose, tearing at the handrails. Who could imagine the buoyancy of timber? Who would consider the drag loads on the structure? Who did the sums on the piddling little brackets, the tension, the shear, the bending and the torsion? The goats and the sheep retreated to the hilltops, watched as the racing spate tore the banks asunder, watched as the carcasses were tumbled down the valley, watched as the pretty footbridge wrenched itself to pieces. Where will it end, the bridge, and what the hell can stop it? Smashing through the gorges, crunching on the boulders, tossing under viaducts and swept across the weir, the stepping stones, past long-abandoned piggeries, until it crashes, snags against the Old Bridge. Snags and floats and traps the trunks of willow trees, of splintered, fractured alamos and olive brash and figs and oleander torn from sodden banks. It rises like a floating dam, the water flooding over terraces, creeping up the door frames, sluicing through the sockets and the fusebox, lifting tables, chairs, cupboards, sofas, floating in a tangle to the ceiling, twisting shutters from their pintle hinges, toilet doors and pictures, prints. Guitars from hooks. Cushions. Books from shelves, maps and guides from folders, useless telephone directories, magazines, a grim confetti, paper-porridge slopping in the slimy flow. There’s no transparency, just thick brown oxtail, rich in clay washed from the groves of olives, ploughed lands, hillsides scarified and naked. Quietly, it starts to settle, thick and smeary. Now the water’s reached the Old Bridge deck, crushing foliage up against the chainlink handrail. Abruptly the bridge gives way, the concrete pier collapses, prising its footing from the river bed. A hundred thousand tonnes of water make a charge for freedom down the valley, tearing the gable from the house below, scattering roof tiles. From the broken windows of the flooded houses, water spews. In County Clare 00:00 / 01:14 And if you should stay in the town of Lahinch after your dinner and a glass in the hotel bar walk out in the long evening on the road to the west and perch on the dry stone wall, your eye to the left for the drama of the sinking sun, and to the east where soon the figure of the girl will appear and walk past you firmly as though stopping for no one only at the last minute she’ll spin like a dancer, coming to a halt in a stylish chassé with her back to the wall beside you. Then you may learn her name, that she is walking to Le Scanoor, which you had thought was called Liscannor, and that her age is not to be revealed on a first meeting, and that she loves to dance, and that there will be a marvellous opportunity to dance with her, next week in Le Scanoor, if you were still to be around. But for all of this to happen, you must be a slender boy of nineteen with an open countenance, and time on your hands. Publishing credits Möbius Strip: Ink, Sweat & Tears (May 2022) The New Footbridge: The Hoopoe's Eye (Wayleave Press) In County Clare: Hove-to is a State of Mind (Wayleave Press) Author photo: © Jon Bean