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Hear poet Nichola Deane read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Nichola Deane back next the poet Nichola Deane’s first collection, Cuckoo , followed on from her pamphlets Trieste , a Laureate’s Choice, and My Moriarty , which won the 2012 Flarestack Poetry Pamphlet Prize, and was The Poetry Book Society’s Autumn Pamphlet Choice for 2012. Nichola’s poems have appeared in Poetry London , Archipelago , Magma , Oxford Poetry, The North and elsewhere. Michael Mackmin describes her work as ‘amazing’, while Carol Ann Duffy says Nichola is a poet who is ‘sophisticated and lyrically charged, precise and daring.’ Douglas Dunn goes further, calling Nichola ‘a future English Elizabeth Bishop.’ the poems ‘Hotel de la mer’, ‘Hotel de l’Etoile’ After Joseph Cornell 00:00 / 00:44 I have arrived here with my suitcase, full of the sea wind. I am unpacking, laying out on the bed, Black Rock, Port Madoc, Rhos Neigr, Caldey: small hotels of my childhood, rickety static caravans, the last pinks and purples in the west, the tracing of lines and faces and first names in darkening sand. I am looking at all that I made with mere pebble and shell in those fading oases. I am looking at my hopes and can smell salt. Cuckoo 00:00 / 00:34 When the buds on the birch disappear I appear so spooked, het-up, heaven-fretted, bejesused, souped up with all the may- bees in May, the new plight of the new ( Cuckoo , Cuccu ) to haunt us back, to the sleeping greenwood ( like that? how so? ) with a – wake for a voice, my loopy echo, a bit of locus pocus Anubis January, 2015 00:00 / 00:22 The heart will weigh – what after all its watching? Less than a sparrow’s, and then, then nothing at all: heart-in-the-branches, heart-in-the-split-bark, heart-in-the-nodding-wind. Publishing credits 'Hôtel de la Mer', 'Hôtel de L'Étoile': The Rialto (No. 84) Cuckoo / Anubis: Cuckoo (V. Press)

Hear poet A R Williams read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. A R Williams back next the poet Hailing from Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, USA, A R Williams has had his poetry published in various anthologies and magazines – among them, Anti-Heroin Chic , Black Bough Poetry , Fevers of the Mind , Ink, Sweat & Tears , ONE ART and tiny wren lit . He's editor-in-chief of East Ridge Review , and his debut chapbook, A Funeral in the Wild , came out in 2024. A R enjoys nature walks with family, the savour of good-quality coffee, and wearing black t-shirts. the poems Virginia Bluebells 00:00 / 00:35 growing wild in a wooded clearing where I go to dream, graceful, bowing clusters of sky-colored goblets dotting the ground haphazardly near a prattling creek, now bundled in my hand, for you, delicately wrapped in unadorned brown paper, to celebrate faint double lines— the promise of a new bloom. Alone in a Cemetery: A Golden Shovel ' … if I stepped out of my body I would break Into blossom.' ~ James Wright, A Blessing ~ 00:00 / 01:08 As I wandered the grounds, I pondered what it would be like if I lay down, closed my eyes, and imagined that I had merged with the earth, like rain into dry ground, and stepped beyond myself into an existence where, out in the wooded part of this cemetery, I became one of the venerable oaks, one planted long before my grandfather was born, long before his body was ravaged by illness, long before I learned of his condition, and promised to visit. If only he would have stayed till snow's break. So now, I ease into this dream, with roots extending, yearning, until we finally blossom. By Your Bedside 00:00 / 00:19 You lay in the hospital bed with breath heavy as iron, a face frozen like a retired pocket watch, and limbs as numb as the prayers uttered at your side. Publishing credits Virginia Bluebells / Alone in a Cemetery: A Golden Shovel: exclusive first publication by iamb By Your Bedside: Red Eft Review

Hear poet Elisabeth Sennitt Clough read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Elisabeth Sennitt Clough back next the poet Elisabeth Sennitt Clough is the author of the 2017 Saboteur Awards Best Pamphlet winner Glass , and the editor of the Fenland Poetry Journal . Her debut collection Sightings won her the Michael Schmidt Award, while At or Below Sea Level was a 2019 Poetry Book Society Spring Recommendation . Elisabeth has also written The Cold Store and My Name is Abilene , which is shortlisted for The Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023. Elisabeth's poems have appeared in Poem , The Rialto , Mslexia , Wasafiri , Magma , The Cannon’s Mouth , Ambit and Stand among others. the poems There was a door & then a door Poem beginning with a line by Ocean Vuong 00:00 / 00:54 The second door was oak, brawny with a heavy-duty handle & latch, the sort that could mutilate a child’s hand if pushed too much. This is how thresholds are reinforced in farming country. Give your prayers to the sky. The neighbours are out of earshot. What could a flappy city girl know about the ebb of backwaters? People here read shotgun holes like exegesis. Old mail piles up. All letterboxes are sealed shut. Some days even the windows shudder. Everyone’s forgotten the first door. Histerid 00:00 / 01:22 In a hardbacked book with charcoal-grey covers in an attic, above a small bedroom, next to an illustration, the error of a typeface places a hole in a word, His terid , so that it becomes owned. You are mine says the pronoun to the beetle. But the neglectful parent had let his terid go, its skinny legs toddling beneath its round belly in-between legs in crowded market places, through garden fences to the edge-of-town industrial estate and beyond – the place where all lost things end up – the Gymnasium of the Forgotten. There his terid crouches on a varnished floor at the end of a long wooden bench, next to Arthur, who’s sat next to Tom, willing someone to sight him, make a call from the black telephone: Hello, Mr England, we have located your terid, reported missing and suspected extinct in 1936. Please come and collect. The Arse-end of Summer 00:00 / 01:01 Like warlords, the neighbour’s firs cast darkness across my lawn. So much in my garden promised to blossom but never did. A section of wasp nest dangles from a tree like a slice of dried meat. The splatter of an heirloom tomato still decorates next door’s patio beneath a sign: trespassers will be composted . A wood pigeon repeats itself four times. I mimic it twice. Sunday afternoon alone in a rose-less garden, still in my nightie – maybe I’m no longer alive, but don’t realise? A motorbike engine growls out the miles over cracked asphalt, past wheelie bins stinking of yesterday’s burnt ends. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Julian Bishop read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Julian Bishop back next the poet A former environment journalist turned poet, Julian Bishop lives in Barnet with his family and dog, and runs a small media company. He’s worked for many years as both a reporter and a producer with the BBC, and also on ITV’s News At Ten. Julian's first collection of eco-poems, We Saw It All Happen , appeared in 2023, and his poetry has been published widely. He was a runner-up in the International Ginkgo Prize for Eco Poetry, and is currently writing a series of poems about masculinity, as seen through the life and times of Italian painter Caravaggio. the poems Lobster 00:00 / 00:58 Pepsi – it was the brand he grew up with – the sweet memory of it, the familiar tang of aluminium. Each night cradled in a cot of cans, suckled on bottles, sleeping on a seabed littered with plastic toys, tops spinning on the floor. Every one of them Pepsi. He dressed up in armour – it became a habit (with a Pepsi logo) – hung out with a pile of drifters, washed-up types who didn’t even look fine on the surface. They all drank Pepsi. He got a tattoo – festooned in red and blue, he soon became a brand ambassador, the extravagant fandangle spangled on a hand. But he threw it all away. Bottled it. Abandoned, he washed up on a beach – that’s where I found him. Junked, with only a Pepsi filigree. Even his mother had sent him packing. Sitting for Caravaggio 00:00 / 01:46 Ground floor of the Palazzo Madama – I walk into the blasphemous dark, black as a Vatican bible. The air hangs heavy with myrrh, hint of dead flesh. He wants an assistente – a boy to prime canvas, grind his earths and ochres. The pay – two soldi less than my age, dieci per una seduta . Then the Master appears, brighter than The Crucifixion, blinding rays of mezzogiorno sunlight stabbing a straw-covered floor. He thrusts towards me a set of predator’s feathers, angels’ wings cadged off Gentileschi. My heart flutters; just like the others his eyes strip me before I can undress. Shucked and pinioned, I edge onto a set cluttered with props: crumpled bed-sheets, bawdy musical scores, violin, plated armour, a dead flower. I don’t feel sweet like Cupid. Legs wide, an angel’s wing brushes my thigh – I’m his Love Conquers All, unadorned. My right arm aches from clutching arrows without a quiver. I grin. The Master spits grape pips as he paints. Although we never touch, I feel his fingers flicker over me. He spits another pip, his temper sweeter than the flesh of a maturated fig; Bellissimo Cecco, next time I make you a saint. Pangolin ‘ ... a splendor which man in all his vileness cannot set aside ... ’ Marianne Moore, fromThe Pangolin (1936) 00:00 / 01:07 Part botanical, part mechanical dragon – Marianne considered you more Artichoke than mammal, more plant than ant-eater, your pine-cone whorls Nestled snug among the jungle under-scrub. Ardently pursued for your aluminium Glossiness – armoured dinosaur, your snakeskin plates were scraped quite clean by Opportunistic traffickers; exotic crocs served up as mysterious elixirs to quicken Lactation or help drain pus. Alas, uncanny pangolin, maybe your foil-covered flesh Incubated more than a quick fix, your silver plates Stripped by unscrupulous poachers, Name made notorious by those who sickled open the last cans of your slatted metal backs. Publishing credits Lobster: Ginkgo Prize Ecopoetry Anthology 2018 (Ginkgo Prize) Sitting for Caravaggio: winner of the 2021 Poets and Players Poetry Competition Pangolin: runner-up in the 2020 Ver Poets Open Poetry Competition

Hear poet Annick Yerem read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Annick Yerem © Barbara Dietl back next the poet Annick Yerem is a Scottish/German poet who lives and works in Berlin. She's been published by River Mouth Review , Anti-Heroin-Chic , 192 Magazine , Green Ink Poetry , Sledgehammer Lit and more. Annick has also been a guest reader on Eat The Storms and Open Collab . Her first chapbook, St. Eisenberg & The Sunshine Bus , is due out in 2022. the poems St. Eisenberg & The Sunshine Bus 00:00 / 01:10 I am sure now that you were sending me signs Heavens opened and closed, heat blazed through me. The smell of freshly poured tar on the motorway, turbines, sunflowers, left right centre We stopped for a break near parched woods, found raspberry gifts, barley spikelets, wispy and gleaming like fairy hair The damp, green quiet after a big rain, fog hanging low in the mountains, blurred brake lights Midway, I lay down in a parking lot, crying on my dog's blanket, trying to make sense of what we were doing You were sending me signs: robins, rainbows, star fish trails That day, we drove towards your body, to that uncluttered, bright space which enclosed your darkness in those last, long years That room where, when you left, someone opened the vast window, so that your soul could find its way out Belonging After Brené Brown | For Ankh and Cate 00:00 / 00:45 You wordful mindsmiths, you seawitch patterned beauty along cat-eared shores. You fill cars with music, You send love over thousands of miles (I imagine) the air around you smells of sandalwood You are who you are, no need to feed those unkind fires You belong here, stand your ground, will a forest of breath and light into being. Then steady its roots with your ways, your wonders. When you call me six times at 1am, I think of One Art 00:00 / 01:06 I've made a science out of listening to the space between books, the silence between songs, tiny increments of time suspended mid-word I bring songs to this fight, make mountains of lingering doubt disappear, send arrows into apple trees. Say windfalls , say what you see, what you don't. Forgetting is so hard to master. It is not purpose, not spite, but years of fights and fears pulled to the surface of an unquiet lake. A code for your memories, how was your day, your breakfast/lunch/dinner, the last book you read? Tell me, what can I do to make this better? I offer sugarcoated words: take a pick, pick three. Say I love you . Mean it. Publishing credits St. Eisenberg & The Sunshine Bus / When you call me six times at 1am, I think of One Art: exclusive first publication by iamb Belonging: Bale of Joy (The Failure Baler)

Hear poet Thomas McColl read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Thomas McColl 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 Courtenay Schembri Gray read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Courtenay Schembri Gray back next the poet Born and raised in the North of England, Courtenay Schembri Gray reared her head as a budding poet with a penchant for the macabre. Since finding kinship in the rich verse of Sylvia Plath, Courtenay has amassed a large amount of publishing credits. Her poetry collection, The Maggot on Maple Street , was published in 2023. the poems Charlie 00:00 / 01:18 His stubby fingers grope me, and I scream only air. I am a huntress, yet I despise the taste of flesh and blood. With his half-dead slant, the man buries my despair. Muddy waters slough the sin off my back while I violate my pear. Daddy’s belt loops around schoolboy errors, threatening to flood. His stubby fingers grope me, and I scream only air. Upon the eve of moonstruck men, I open my cervical lair. You heave rare meat onto the table, harder than you should. I am a huntress, yet I despise the taste of flesh and blood. You swaddle her like a baby, leaving only shoes for her to wear. When we first met, I don’t think you understood. His fingers grope me, and I scream only air. We stand on porcelain cracks, silent, with nothing to declare Somehow, despite it all, you found me like an earring stud. I am a huntress, yet I despise the taste of flesh and blood. You have turned me into a woman, but I will not share. Let’s leave the world with a gift, richer than others would. His fingers grope me, and I scream only air. I am a huntress, yet I despise the taste of flesh and blood. June Bug 00:00 / 01:19 With Bambi eyes all aflutter, I drink from the well of men. A paper lantern hangs from every bloody coat hanger. Under the cloak of 6 am, I am to be born again. Lost in a June bug cocktail, I fall for a Parisienne. He bought me roses, and I threw them in anger. With Bambi eyes all aflutter, I drink from the well of men. You know, I think about you every now and then. For a red-blooded man, you were placid in manner. Under the cloak of 6 am, I am to be born again. To my dirty photographs, you would say très bien . Rubbing coconut rum into skin, I would yammer. With Bambi eyes all aflutter, I drink from the well of men. Darling, I need you like I need goddamn medicine. Inside a chrysalis, I preach grief-stricken slander. Under the cloak of 6 am, I am to be born again. You left me with echoes of Non, je ne regrette rien . With starry thighs and coal miner skies, I languor. With Bambi eyes all aflutter, I drink from the well of men. Under the cloak of 6 am, I am to be born again. The Maggot on Maple Street 00:00 / 00:55 Shaken from my sleep by yellow taxi dreams; toothpaste is my cork, stopping the wine from sloshing around the great caboose that is I, way off the wagon, face down in the sludge. Moontime butter shoots me in the eye, hot syrup; that sticky pudding, fat with guilt and irony. O’ how I fabricate the lowest despair, the deadliest joy, finer than lace, as impure as rendition. Swear me a fishwife, an earwig, a flotsam woodlouse with but a cube of cheese to stay afloat. I must get back to the desk, to the coffee rings and grassy knolls. To the looking glass, without delay. Publishing credits Charlie: The Book of Korinethians (Pink Plastic Press) June Bug: Idle Ink (March 2022) The Maggot on Maple Street: Roi Fainéant Press (Oct 2022)

Hear poet Phil Vernon read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Phil Vernon 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 Julieanne Larick read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Julieanne Larick back next the poet Manchester poet and novelist Isabelle Kenyon is managing director of Fly on the Wall Press . She's had four poetry chapbooks published – most recently, Growing Pains and Potential . Isabelle has also published debut thriller, The Dark Within Them . Her poetry appears in IceFloe Press , Ink, Sweat & Tears and elsewhere. the poems Oranges 00:00 / 01:01 We are in Ali’s café at the end of the world – it must be for I am sharing scones with myself at sixteen our legs gangly under table and much the same, though one pair is wrapped in electric blue, and I find there is always an Ali’s café to be found somewhere. She says she is ready to understand, dabbing lip-gloss curves with napkin. I say she never will, sorry, some things, people, you just pass on from, like wraiths, better to shrug the last five years off like glitter. She says I am lying, of course, and I smile for I knew she would say it and we finish our tea like a stubborn, married couple. Previously published as Pomorandža A Common Phrase I Hate 00:00 / 01:13 I like you experimental hair strands traversing the colour spectrum, sheep-shorn at the base, wild deep, like your laugh. Lately, you've tamed nature to Mouse for a man who requires bread pre-chewed into starch. You mother-bird hop; I text silent space bars of an argument which is really about growing up and out as two separate shoots of grass one nestled in the same compost, one fidgeting for further fields. Previously published as Elegy to Lying Home 00:00 / 01:20 She gives him hair on his chest downy like the otter, playful and familiar. He gives her her lips from the pit of a plum, all spring and juice she finds herself delicious. She has found answers: why his spine is sculpted just so why his hands are warm bowls of milk. Previously published as Warm Creature Publishing credits Oranges: Perhappened Magazine (Issue No. 9) A Common Phrase I Hate: Passengers Magazine (Vol 4, Issue No. 2) Home: Passengers Magazine (Vol. 4, Issue No. 2)

Hear poet Devjani Bodepudi read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Devjani Bodepudi back next the poet Originally from North-East England and now living in London, Deborah Finding is a queer feminist writer with a background in academia and activism. Her poetry has featured in fourteen poems , The Alchemy Spoon , The Friday Poem and anthologies from Live Canon, Renard Press, Victorina and Fly on the Wall Press. She came first in the poetry category of the Write By The Sea Literary Festival Writing Competition 2022, and was commended in the Troubadour International Poetry Prize 2022. Her debut pamphlet vigils for dead and dying girls is forthcoming from Nine Pens. the poems Swans and Chariots / A Prayer 00:00 / 01:50 you explained to me that amortisation is the depreciation of non-tangible assets which are things like goodwill and loyalty and relationships you can depend on it’s a complex calculation to figure out what these things are worth, the factors that add to or detract from their value and how quickly they can be lost but I want to try, I always did I can show my workings out, in your spread sheets, under which we did, to an advanced level, excel … I write this as addictive additive, also when you said you would love me all of the days. like infinity plus one but plus one was the problem which leads us to the minus column your creative accounting of her to me, to her of me, every evasion a reduction of your credit score and now we disagree on the answer I show you a number in the red you tell me of future investments and paint me a unicorn valuation but it turns out amortisation is just the process of slowly writing off a debt on paper at least. so consider it done, books balanced, no net gain loving you was a zero-sum game You’re in the kitchen 00:00 / 01:02 My therapist told me to picture you as a scorpion in a guided meditation, in which she had me imagine – in a very visceral way – crushing you to death with my foot, till you were nothing but shit and dust. Now, I know what you are thinking: surely a real therapist would never suggest such a thing! but to be totally honest with you she is somewhat unconventional in her methods and only the week before this she had asked me to imagine finding a grave and looking down to see your lifeless body in the deep and open dirt – the knowledge of your death giving me back my own breath which I'd been holding all these months terrified that I could see you on every corner your dark hair swinging behind you in front of me a kind of ponytail PTSD. I wish I was joking. Anyway, back to you as a scorpion, did you know it’s said they're viciously venomous for no reason? Have you heard that fable about the frog and the scorpion, that ends with the scorpion saying, it’s in my nature ? Well, I don’t believe that shit. I don’t believe you were born like that to sting for the sake of it. But it doesn’t matter because you are that now and you should be approached with extreme caution and protective clothing, if at all and I learned the hard way that anyone who would keep a scorpion for a pet is a fool. There’s an urban myth that if you light a circle of fire around a scorpion it will sting itself to death horribly … for a long time I thought about how I could set your world on fire: trap you in a prison with only your own poison for company, and glass walls and spotlights for all to see who you really are. I texted your name so often that my phone still wants to gift it to me in autocorrect whenever I type the first three letters but this is progress, because for a while just the E would do it. One day I hope I can look at your name in black and white or even meet someone else with it, and not hate them on sight and though today is not that day I know it must be coming. I don’t think of you so much now and I wear a scorpion earring. Not every day but on those mornings where I wake up shaking or when the offence of an injustice is simply overwhelming. It helps remind me that it’s ok if a battle is too bloody to fight, that self-care sometimes means you don’t get to win even when you’re right and the day I grew up is the day I understood that the sun shines just the same on evil and good. Ah, scorpion … despite all I learned about you it’s not in my nature to claim you have no path to salvation but it does bring me comfort to know that at any moment any enemy can be crushed if only in imagination. Aubade 2307 00:00 / 01:02 today I did not want to write about desire I had loftier plans for worthier topics some notes about injustices and a page already half-baked with an idea about a town but you walked me home last night after dinner and before you took a cab so now my hands are your hands thinking dextrously of the five delicious minutes spent kissing you in the rain, our cold wet faces in refreshing contrast to our hot wet mouths tongues tasting intoxicatingly of our desserts and of not having kissed each other for a week Publishing credits Swans and Chariots/A Prayer: For the Daughters Carried Here on the Hips of their Mothers (Fawn Press) You're in the kitchen / Aubade 2307: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Radka Thea Otípková read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Radka Thea Otípková back next the poet Though her first language is Czech, Radka Thea Otípková fell in love with English as a young adult. Her poetry has been featured in B O D Y , The North , Moria and Tears in the Fence . In 2017, her pamphlet The Edge of Anything was shortlisted in the Poetry Business International Book and Pamphlet Competition. Her poem Coup de grâce was shortlisted in the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition that same year. Thea won the Waltham Forest Poetry Competition in 2019, and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. the poems Tut’s Tomb Talks 00:00 / 01:17 I am waiting for you. Part of my wall will need to go to get you in. It will never heal, this is how they'll find me, small, perfunctory, unfit for a king, but I'll hold it all: chariots, thrones, trumpets, perfumes, precious oils, lapis and gold, and apricots, oh, apricots, I'll often imagine them perishing in the dark long after they have gone, I'll recall the odour of lamb changing in strength, from a mere waft to a putrid punch – who'd ever think in cessation there is so much life – no, no eternity's resins and balms can stop the bustle of dying in the jars housing your liver and lungs, or in the muffled echo of your anatomy's final sarcophagus. I'll never miss you. You will never not be with me and when even the deaths have died and there's nothing left but desiccated time, I shall still keep the breathing riddle of you inside your missing heart. Marble 00:00 / 00:45 Trace its veins and swirls. Speak of impurities. Say clay, silt, sand. Say chert. Say guilt. Forgive me. Send the light unstonily deep, let it spill onto its ashen wax. Mramor, marmor, marmo, marmori, go, look for it, find it in any language, any it, any us, any you, any torpor, any suspended hope, close its cold graceful finger in your warm, wet, mortal mouth and wait for it to prune. Coup de grâce 00:00 / 01:08 In the end his body puked him out as if it were only a stomach and a mouth. It didn't let him just slip away. But maybe it matters less than we think. Look at his mother. There she is. No longer tearing at the meat of what remains, but opening the window. The night is there. What can you do but make a simple gesture that might mean anything. Hand on chest. Fingertips on lips. Or just stand however gravity wants you to. The night is launching a skin boat. No prayers are heard. If you lean out a little, you’ll see it too. The night. The moon. The overflowing eye of a fish cooking. Publishing credits Tut's Tomb Talks / Coup de grâce: B O D Y Marble: Tears in the Fence

Hear poet Isra Hassan read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Isra Hassan back next the poet Holly Peters is a Creative Writing PhD student at the University of Plymouth. She held the position of Plymouth’s Young City Laureate from 2019-2022, and had her poem Artificial Moons featured in the Moths to a Flame: Art and Energy Collective installation at the Glasgow Botanical Gardens during COP26. You’ll typically find Holly hiding somewhere between the covers of a book, or out walking her crazy spaniels, Dotty and Booby. the poems Sigh For Hoyo 00:00 / 00:42 a river skitters in the dark wriggling like a lullaby’s shh I take the first rock; it weighs the same as the peach pit in my stomach. Clay rolls in the canyon of my palm, squishing between fingers, then shuddering back to shape. An audience of stones, I deliberate, the choice all mine. nothing falls fast in the waves, settling down for its final rest The second breathes dust, hot to touch, singed syllables filling my throat. You don’t have to ignore the craters: use your nails and crack them open. The river shapes beds from burdens: kneel down, whisper them gently. water ages slow, sighs as it swallows my offering Crumbling. I’d avoided the river for years – it no longer able to relieve me – yet I still gather the third rock that slices through the sand timer’s neck. The bank cuts into the hard white behind my shins and I cry as I litter what’s left like ashes. soft drops melt like they were never there at all Of Thee, the Solemn Fluid Sings 00:00 / 00:21 Her teeth grind in time with the knife that slathers butter over his slice of bread. His dinner steams, fragrant with turmeric and all the time she has spent stewing over it. Not that he takes any notice. Whatever plate she presents him with – matsutake mushrooms, moose cheese, wagyu beef – his mouth waters only for the ample half-wheat bread. Her arrangement of lip-pink tulips has already been extracted from the table’s heart, so his bulging loaf can fill its centre. He takes his time massaging butter into the bread’s porcelain cheek. He cups his hand, its back arching, then spoons his dinner inside, letting the slice envelope it like skin. He chews it, mouth opening wide, tongue slopping. The crumbs cascade, shredded like the last slivers of her patience. Archetype The Ingénue 00:00 / 00:23 You won’t know which part of me you hold in your hands: my lower lip, a worn-down heel or knobbly elbow – because it’ll look no different to dirt. You’ll be given a watch-sized box filled with two palmfuls of what’s left of me, and even though I’m only saying it, those flakes, like tree bark, are my heart. All the rest, enough to fill a wheelbarrow, will be mingled with the remains of others. What was once kneecaps, earlobes, eyeballs will become part of the damp woodland floor. But in that forest, it will always be a part of me you hold in your hands. It will be earth, and worm food, a home for tentative tree roots, a world unravelling in the planet of your palm. Publishing credits Sigh: The Wake (Vol. 21, Issue 3) Of Thee, the Solemn Fluid Sings / Archetype: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Richard Jeffrey Newman read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Richard Jeffrey Newman back next the poet Richard Jeffrey Newman is the author of Words for What Those Men Have Done and The Silence of Men , as well as the translation, The Teller of Tales: Stories from Ferdowsi's Shahameh . Richard curates the First Tuesdays reading series in Jackson Heights, New York, and is on the Board of Newtown Literary . He's also Professor of English at Nassau Community College, where he recently stepped down to focus on his writing after a decade of service to his faculty union. the poems Just Beyond Your Reach 00:00 / 00:54 The prayer you say is neither seed nor plow, nor is it rain to quench your soul’s old thirst. The parched and blistered field your tongue is now bespeaks the long neglect about to burst, like rotten fruit thrown to chase from the stage a comic leaving dead words at your feet; and she, or maybe he, responds with rage, shrinking the room until the single seat that’s left is where you’re planted. Confront your god, shimmering and luscious, there, his skin— or is it hers?—a proffered gift, a prod to every hunger you have called a sin. Welcome each new taste; spread wide; bow low. Lose yourself till loss is all you know. This Sentence Is A Metaphor For Bridge #20 00:00 / 00:55 Imagine hell unfenced, yourself the unburned center of all that burning, every prayer you’ve ever said undone line by line, until the empty page is all you have. Enter there the path in you that is only a path, gather its shadows into a dance, a movement that ends with love, that keeps on moving till love becomes the rhythm, and you the fire, and the dance, the life you’ve chosen to make your loving possible. You thought you had to be the clench you’ve held where none but you could feel it. Give yourself instead to all that rises. Fill that cloudless sky with laughter. After Drought 00:00 / 00:58 Knees rooted in the bed on either side of your belly, my body’s a stalk of wheat bent in summer wind, a bamboo shoot rising, an orchid, and then all at once a cloud swelling, a swallow sculpting air, a freed white dove. You pull me down, but you are hot beneath me, and the gust that is my own heat lifts me away: I’m not ready. Outside, footsteps, voices. Two men. Giggling, we pull the sheet around us till they pass, but if someone does see, what will they have seen? A couple making love. No. More than that: they will have seen the coming of the rain; they will have seen us bathe in it, and they will say Amen. Publishing credits Just Beyond Your Reach / This Sentence Is A Metaphor for Bridge #20: exclusive first publication by iamb After Drought: The Silence of Men (CavanKerry Press)

Hear poet Tracey Rhys read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Tracey Rhys back next the poet With a New Writer’s bursary from Literature Wales, Tracey Rhys finished her first pamphlet, Teaching a Bird to Sing . Its theme of parenting a child with autism, told through poetry, would later feature in two touring theatre productions, and as part of an exhibition at The Senedd. Tracey’s work can be found in journals from Poetry Wales and New Welsh Review to The Lonely Crowd and Ink, Sweat & Tears , and she's no stranger to being long and shortlisted for poetry competitions – the Cinnamon Press Pamphlet Competition, Poetry Wales Pamphlet Competition and Cardiff International Poetry Competition among them. Tracey was also among the 20 winners of The Poetry Archive’s WordView Now! competition in 2020. Her first full collection, 21st-Century Bathsheba , will be published by Parthian in 2025. the poems Flood 00:00 / 02:07 Flood woke up on the wrong side of her bed, flowed over the bank with displeasure. There was power in her upsurge, the great swell of her being. Birds who waded in, the egrets and cormorants, recalled that once Flood was happy, but now was better. By better, they meant Ocean. Flood was broad and tidal estuary. She left a salty ring around their beaks and gave them shells. Flood was beautiful, they said. She should stop and feel it. But how could Flood pause when she was all reflection? Moon-driven, surging to sea. * Flood recalled her first taste of tarmac. Compared it to fennel. Preferred it to liquorice. She drawled, No need for glass when you have fibreglass. Or slate stacks, when you have those aching aluminium greys: the skeletons of automobiles. Ever since she’d drunk her first bollard, Flood had regretted concrete. The way it sunk into her pit and stayed there, trolley-bound for years. * Stories began circulating that Flood had been a stream, had thought big and got lucky. She was fast becoming folklore. It was true that she’d tried all the tricks; consuming lakes, spouting dams. I am braver than I know, Flood told the starlings. Bigger than is necessary. Beaks rippled in. The sun gave her prisms. Soon, she was run through with flowing, even as she was imbibed. I am always inside other bodies, she confided to the water rats on the underside of her skin. Interview with a Flood 00:00 / 01:41 I appreciate you must be busy … Well, I’m nothing without my fans. And your fans love you. Why, thank you. They want me to ask what your favourite colour is? My favourite colour is calcite. Pearly, like the inside of a tooth, all pulp and tusk. It reminds me of better days; snow quartz skies, rain on the way, white horses rising to pummel the hard brick houses. Where do you go on holiday? The fat berg. Everyone will be surprised by that! I think we imagined the Maldives … The fat berg is an island destination, a busman’s holiday if you like. Not everyone’s choice but I confess to enjoy oozing up through a drain grille, along waste pipes to vanity units, coating myself slick on the gunge loaded with hair in the trap. The limescale on the U-bend is a good day out. What keeps you going? It has to be the Blob Fish. Have you seen how ugly they look, dead on land? That nose! Almost human. 4,000 feet under the sea they don’t look half bad. I live by that. What are you afraid of? Jugs. What advice have you got for our youngsters, starting out? Get yourself a spot, it doesn’t have to be nice. Grow into it. To be small is no small thing. I always felt as big as I could be. As if the air was with me, walls parting at the dam. Shame 00:00 / 00:43 Though she’s old enough to have forgotten all the embarrassing beginnings, Flood lets them in at night, which is when the wind rushes at her edges and the riverbank is audible in its silver spoons. Flood remembers her great shames, burns with them. Her vast stupidities. Didn’t she once boast to the moon that she had the bigger tides? She pours herself into the earth, spreads herself thinner than vapour. Nothing will find her until morning, when the tinny glug of her belly will answer the flushing loos. Publishing credits Flood: Poetry Wales (Vol. 56, No. 3) Interview with a Flood / Shame: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Ken Cockburn read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Ken Cockburn back next the poet Poet and translator Ken Cockburn spent several years at the Scottish Poetry Library before going freelance to work in education, care and community settings – often in collaboration with visual artists. His most recent collection is Floating the Woods . Ken's also the man behind the pamphlet Edinburgh: poems and translations , which features work written for the guided walks he leads in the city’s Old Town. He also translated from the German Christine Marendon's Heroines from Abroad . the poems Hands 00:00 / 01:37 These hands have buckled belts and fastened buttons These hands have howked the tatties from the ground These hands have handled cutlery and weapons These hands have picked the apples from the bough Hands to hold a pen or blade Hands to strike and cup a match Hands to give the eyes some shade Hands to take another catch These hands have spooned out medicines and teas These hands have painted watercolour scenes These hands have tinkled old piano keys These hands have worked industrial machines Hands to turn another page Hands to hoist and set the sails Hands applaud those on the stage Hands with dirty fingernails These hands in tearooms picked up cakes and fancies These hands have sharpened pencils with a knife These hands held partners at the weekend dances These hands have mapped the progress of a life Hands to scrub and peel potatoes Hands to cup a baby’s head Hands to knit a balaclava Hands to smooth the unmade bed Hands to give a proper measure Hands to stitch the binding thread Hands up when you know the answer Hands to shush what’s best unsaid Ward 00:00 / 00:48 I keep my diaries in a large bookcase my mother told me crossly, years ago, she was now giving to my sister. Fine, fine. I left with what did belong to me, returning sooner than expected when, days before the move, my father collapsed. I went to visit him in hospital as he convalesced and took my daughter who, at eighteen months, was still innocent of past and future, caveats, grudges, grip and slow release. Let property wait. The ward dispenses all we need for now. Rodney 00:00 / 00:58 At that school at that time there was no choice: rugby. Skinny, tall and slow I was put in the second row, scrummed and pushed on cue. Asthmatic, on cold days I wheezed until my lungs gave in. I was keen. I wanted to be good enough for the first fifteen unlike Rodney, disinclined to bother. Played at full-back to avoid set pieces, on the whole, he was left untroubled. Once we were on the same team; a breakaway left only Rodney between the runner and our line. 'Tackle him!' I shouted, but he stood his ground and the ball was touched down. At that moment I could only admire his simple refusal to play the game. Publishing credits Hands: part of Lapidus Scotland's Working with ‘Hands’ and Living Voices Ward: exclusive first publication by iamb Rodney: Poetry Scotland (No. 101)

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

Hear poet Mary Mulholland read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Mary Mulholland © Xavier Bonfire back next the poet Mary Mulholland's poetry has been published in Mslexia , Magma , The Interpreter's House , The Rialto and Under the Radar . Highly commended in the Bridport Prize for Poetry and The Rialto's Nature and Place Poetry Competition, she was also longlisted in the UK's National Poetry competition. Mary founded and co-runs Red Door Poets , and is co-founder and editor of The Alchemy Spoon . Formerly a transpersonal psychotherapist, Mary holds a Newcastle University/Poetry School MA in Poetry. Her published works include What the sheep taught me , two collaborations with Vasiliki Albedo and Simon Maddrell ( All About Our Mothers / All About Our Fathers ), plus a new pamphlet is on its way from Broken Sleep Books. the poems Heading to the swamps 00:00 / 02:00 The fruit bats flew off at dusk. I went to the harbour, bought a prawn salad, but a gull snatched my first forkful mid-air. Now, heading back, empty, to the Airbnb, seagulls yeowing, chuckling over my head my phone rings: you’re in a coma. I stop midway across the bridge, the sea far below dark and cold, so many stars, and all I can think is where do the bats go by night? At first I’d thought they were a cloud of crows. I force you back to mind, wonder if you’ll survive, but we all die sometime, and this’d save divorce. I’m having an adrenaline rush. It’s as well we have a half-world between us. I’m no good with invalids. And hearts need to be looked after. Mine can’t be broken. You say love’s a basic need. I don’t need needs like that. Yet once we had dreams. On a beach you read me Jonathan Livingston. We were so young. After that, seagulls divebombed me, followed me home, waited on my sill. Seagulls have this wide range of sound and elegant social behaviour. I don’t like seagulls. When I broke with you, the first time, you argued your way back. It was autumn. Even fruit bats get amorous in autumn, making love, feasting in the swamps until dawn, then off. Like us. Always coming and going. And you now drip-fed. The cold rips through me. Does it take this for me to learn I love you? What the sheep taught me 00:00 / 00:41 All day I have watched the ewes, Trying to see as they do, everything at once. I think best sequentially: it’s getting towards evening. The sheep know this too, they’re starting their sunset corral of the field perimeter, practising for the national, leaping like antelope, even the large one bearing triplets, she soars over the electric fence, she’s made of spring. All those fences I could have jumped. I take a run. The shock sends me flying. Flypast 00:00 / 01:46 He hands me a canister decorated with sunflowers. It is November. I peer into a hole, the size of a fifty-pence piece. Inside is just over half full, its weight approximate to a bag of flour. Pale grey, the cremulator has produced a texture more silt than sand, and I am lost in staring: that speck is her laughter, that’s her at the proms, dressed for a ball, with a fractured skull on her way to the point-to-point she’d invited me to but I was busy revising the middle ages. That dark fleck is her holding babies, never her own, and that, ‘if you’re cold put on another jumper’, their chilly lakeside house. My brother-in-law clears his throat. Last night he said he gives wood-ash to a neighbouring potter for the kiln; it creates a fine sheen in the glaze. Has anyone used ash of a loved one? Three fighter jets burst overhead, fast and low. We look up. Cloudless blue, after a wraith-like early mist. He circles the cherry, scatters her lightly, and each of us does a round of the leafless tree whose base flickers with tea lights. She’s a circular skirt of powder. A breeze lifts her briefly, almost a flamenco, then drops to silence. Overnight drizzle will vanish her to earth. Publishing credits Heading to the Swamps: Fourteen Poems to say I Love You (Candlestick Press) What the sheep taught me: What the sheep taught me (Live Canon) Flypast: Mslexia (Issue 105)

Hear poet Elizabeth M Castillo read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Elizabeth M Castillo back next the poet British-Mauritian poet Elizabeth M Castillo is a writer, indie press promoter, and two-time nominee for The Pushcart Prize. Her writing reflects the various countries and cultures she grew up in and with – exploring themes of race, ethnicity, woman/motherhood, language, love, loss and grief (often with a dash of magical realism). Published widely in the UK, USA, Australia, Mexico and the Middle East, Elizabeth has bilingual debut collection Cajoncito: Poems on Love, Loss, y Otras Locuras to her name. She'll add debut chapbook Not Quite an Ocean in December 2022. the poems Ghosts 00:00 / 00:45 I tell my children there are no ghosts in this house. I press a kiss into their cheeks and foreheads and leave them to the peaceable mercy of sleep. No ghosts, I say. Except the one that lives in the stain on the bathroom floor. The lady that swirls around the bottom of your mother’s teacup, in amongst the sediment. The ones you plastered into the walls. No ghosts, except the one that lies in bed between us. The one hidden beneath the flowers in the garden. The two I folded between the pages of my passport. The one that stares back at me from the bathroom mirror when I brush my teeth at night. Zot dir, or a short history of Mauritius 00:00 / 01:47 Ou koné ki zot dir? So many things mon tann zot dir they say / they say the dutchman came / he ate the dodo / curious bird / stupid bird / zot dir independence will be won by the wits of the indian / papi inn dir / nu bizin alé / nu bizin get out / zot dir Le Père de la Nation has the ear of the queen / they say / things are better in Australia / In UK / In SA they don’t say créole zot dir coloured / Mo matante inn allé last year / 65 / before the riots start / labas tou prop / she said / labas seulman ena bon dimoun / nice people / they say / zot inn met bann lekor / under the mountain / enba la ter / they say / Mauritius is still the star of the indian ocean / they say parti socialis pu sauv nu zile / zot dir / ten thousand rupees / c’est rien / they say / sorti la! / sorti la! / kifer Kaya pann res trankil ? / they say / the hungry tourist / come down / devoured our coastline / the south / the east / is all we have left / Ramgoolam / they say / has lined his own pockets / they say it once / they say / look to the horizon / thick and black / we blame Japan / zot dir / the island is retracting / inwards / they say / nu zil pé vinn bien gran / no more beaches / no fish / ban pecheur / zot disan / has pooled down by the river’s mouth / Jugnauth / zot dir / his hands live under the table / so bann kamrad / their coffers are full / faratha from six / to 25 rupees / they say / we have no language / they say if bis don’t kill you / hopital will / they say / pa kozé / stop saying all the things we saying / res trankil / dernié fwa kiken in kozé / so disan / his blood / it runs beneath the mountains / out beyond the reef / into the sea / that you left behind / The Other Woman 00:00 / 02:16 The sun has set, and at this hour, shadows hang between the daylight and the trees. There, the sudden scent of blood, scent of man , carries to me on the breeze, the wind howling through, falls silent at my feet: 'good hunting, milady,' it whispers, then retreats. There is a darkness in this forest, an end that rivals death itself, in the mist about my ankles. Even lizards know they would do well to hide inside their hovels, and underground. Dirt crunches beneath. Treacherous soil! Leaves plunge downwards, to be eaten by the earth. The naked trees testify: this forest is deadly, and will swallow you whole. I hear footsteps racing, running, in thundering lockstep. Flash of black. Flash of teeth. There are dangerous games afoot! Surely it’s time to turn back. Surely it’s time to go home. I am well beyond my borders now. She can’t catch me, she can’t catch me, here, where I lurk and linger on the periphery just out of sight, just beyond her mind’s eye. She knows I am here, her veins course with rage, and vengeance. But she does not know where. She is death. She is danger. But the line has been crossed, the threat prowls within her marked territory. She may think I have lost, but this no longer bears any resemblance to a fair fight. No, now two legs, not enough. I drop down onto four, draw strength from the thousand invisible heartbeats, the lifeblood, the microbiome of the forest floor. There is fear, and some fury, encrusted under each hungry claw. The hunt smells of my father, champion long before I had ever heard of this sport, and I wonder: would he be proud? There is sweat at my temples, and my wrists are bound to stop them from trembling. I step, crabways, low and feral, without shadow or sound. Your ears twitch and you shudder, your neck craning to see what you and I must learn the hard way: the deadliest thing in here is me. Publishing credits Ghosts / Zot dir, or a short history of Mauritius: exclusive first publication by iamb The Other Woman: Glean & Graft / Descent (Fresher Publishing) Shortlisted for the 2021 Bournemouth Writing Poetry Prize

Hear poet Kathryn Bevis read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Kathryn Bevis back next the poet Hampshire Poet 2020-21 and founder of The Writing School , Kathryn Bevis won several awards, including first prizes in poetry competitions run by Poets & Players and Against the Grain Press. Shortlisted for the Nine Arches Press Primers scheme, Kathryn was longlisted for the National Poetry Competition. Her poems appeared in print and online, and were broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Kathryn also designed and delivered ACE and county council-funded Poetry for Wellbeing projects for adults in mental health and substance misuse recovery settings, as well as in prisons. Her debut collection was The Butterfly House . the poems starlings 00:00 / 01:50 in the beginning is the skydeep and the skydeep is shapeless and hollow and blankness dwells there and the bodyus broods over the belly of the horizon clinging to skeletons of trees and we say let there be wavetrail and there is wavetrail and we divide the wavetrail from the skydeep and the outpour from the inshrink and we call the wavetrail WE ARE and we call the skydeep IT IS and we say let there be curlsmoke in the midst of the skyswim and let it divide the WE ARE from the IT IS and we fashion the curlsmoke from the skyswim and it is so and we call the curlsmoke ONE and the skyswim we call MANY and we say let the breakwave be heard among the MANY and the pebblerush also and we call the breakwave FLESH and the pebblerush we call SPIRIT and thus it is then we say let the SPIRIT be divided into the skybright we will call LIGHT and the outsnuff we will call DARKNESS and let DARKNESS bring about a great shitting upon the earth and we say let DARKNESS herald the downpull and the stenchsweet, the dirtroost and the clutchheart and so it goes glory be to the skydeep and the bodyus the curlsmoke and the skyswim glory be to the breakwave and the pebblerush the dirtroost and the outsnuff for we are the MANY we are the ONE Tidal Race For Ollie 00:00 / 01:29 This morning found you capsized and sinking in the campsite kitchen, bloodless, clammy, haunted by the world and all its doubles. They hauled you off in their blue-light bus and I rode beside, squeezed your shoulder tight, willed you back to yesterday. Drowning here, the reflected twin of everything swims in your eyes, pulls you far from reach. They wheel you out and in, from scan to scan, pump dye around your veins and brain to find the chink that let the shadows seep inside. Hours slide behind this green curtain and still you get your sums wrong, still believe in clones of fingers, faces, clocks that press at the corners of your eyes, maintaining they exist, insisting on their right to be here. Come back. We’ll grip the cliff edge while the seal’s sleek head lifts above the water’s surface, melts to gloss again. Gannets will plunge, gold-hooded, into the tidal race and splash to scoop out cloud-marked mackerel, flaring silver in the sun. Matryoshka 00:00 / 01:20 We’re all in the family way. Full of ourselves. In the pudding club, my dear. On our shelf, we gather dust like dandruff and listen to the sound of human children growing. Their girls – once born – are great squishy, smelly things that pule and puke and shit the sodding bed. Not ours. We are a nest with all our pretty chicks inside. We are the hatchling and the egg. Each of us is mother to a daughter who is pregnant with the next in line. Our bodies rhyme, like the faces of the moon. All except our smallest. We don’t talk about it but let me say it softly: she was born with no space inside. That’s right. She’s wood all the way through. It’s not that we judge her, understand, but we know (as only mothers can) she’ll never get to split herself in two, she’ll never have to bear the others as we do. Publishing credits starlings: winner of the 2019 Against the Grain Press Poem Competition / Fenland Poetry Journal (Issue 4) Tidal Race: shortlisted in the 2020 Live Canon Single Poem Competition / Live Canon Anthology 2020 (Live Canon) Matryoshka: commended in the 2021 International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine / 2021 Hippocrates Prize Anthology (Hippocrates Initiative)

Hear poet Ben Blench read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Ben Blench back next the poet Amsterdam-based freelance copywriter Ben Blench writes poems and songs to escape his day job. He's translated two books – Why I Love Tattoos and Why I Love Sex – and has had a poem published by Broken Sleep Books. the poems Alt text for a photo of an out-of-phase moon 00:00 / 01:02 Frost on the treetops in the foreground A baby-blue sky, clear except For one small scrape of cloud In the top right corner Which isn’t a cloud at all But a midday moon Eight trillion tons of rock Disguised as a thin foam disc All awkward in the cold like I’m not sure I belong here Perhaps I should get my things And quietly slope off Half gone, half forgotten But at the same time half not Listen I think maybe This isn’t making much sense Let me try to spell it out: It’s easy to miss a thing As big as love first time But you must keep looking, don’t stop. Anthem for a resurrected planet 00:00 / 01:33 Our pockets are stuffed with cash And we are wandering along a beach At the end of the day, a wonderful day No sickness, no sweat, You and me on the up Striking out into life like the first day, And you say kiss me, you hideous brute . Through clean air we can see for miles And it is a picture of togetherness The landscape triumphant, unmolested Filled with contented mothers Babies cradled in their arms Everything well built And I just know that this time it’s going to last Every nation’s flag is flying with a supreme lack of arrogance That drowns out the advertisers’ claims The sun swells with slow pride As if all the systems that conspired to bind us Have seized up and dissolved, as if We have turned off the TV and thrown open the curtains And for the first time in years we don’t feel like getting drunk Finally, an upstanding woman is in charge of things And there is change on the wind Safe streets and clean rivers, everywhere bursting with life And we’re all on our bikes, riding Towards some beautiful unbordered country. In the park 00:00 / 01:11 I want to tell you how weird it is to become a father. Like suddenly finding yourself sunk on a long, stone bench, the evening sun falling bronze on your shoulders, the church bell calling: time to go. Part of you leaps up and jogs away, over the bridge towards a bowl of noodles, maybe, or a toastie. Part of you coughs last night's cigarettes into the grass and mutters, I don’t feel much like food . And the other part just sits there, tying and retying the laces in your two-hundred euro shoes. Up on the disused chimney the stork clatters her bill and all you can think is, I’ll set off in a minute. I just need a minute. Just give me one more minute . This kind of thing can go on for quite some time. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb