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Hear poet Robert Harper read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Robert Harper back next the poet Robert Harper’s poems have appeared in The Interpreter’s House , Prole , Acumen , Ink Sweat & Tears , And Other Poems and elsewhere. He's also had work featured in anthologies such as Fathers and What Must Be Said , A New Manchester Alphabet , The Every Day Poet , An Anthology to Seamus Heaney and The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry . Robert founded and edited the magazine Bare Fiction , and has recently launched online poetry magazine Disjointed . the poems An embarrassment of poverty After Michael Hoffman 00:00 / 01:09 At 1pm you sit and look at the poem. Among the other things you should be doing, you drink water to allay the sweat and read, squint at, your midnight endeavours, a tower of books leering like an old professor. You, compelled, or just desperate to let the thoughts flow, lay on your side unable to sleep. She, right there, like the painting you love and for which a light is always on. A thought enters your head. You tried too hard, yet held back and, subsequently, pushed too far forward. You wonder if the sleeping, the loss of it, curled like a cat in an empty box of paper, is what is up. You read it again. Embarrassment comes and you thank the gods for your humility, ask of the page – How dare I look at you and think of poverty? Obstacle 00:00 / 01:14 A boy sits alone (a roundabout) watching cars oblige as they dutifully trust an indirect route around the obstacle. He considers himself ‘obstacle’, traces his eyes via entrance to exit and nods his head. Half yes, half whatever appears on the road around him—obstacle. JCC 428H, Bangor 1970, Cortina Mk III, yellow and chrome trim. HFK 015E, Dudley 1967, the lost Ford Zephyr, abandoned, a yard monster. Dreams plagued with red trucks, green buses, black Austins to remind boy of time before his own existence. Dad, car, ahead, his birth. Obstacle. What is he looking for behind the seven inch sealed beam of a Hillman Imp? A connection to his beginning—an accidental merging where 2 people, going past obstacles, become stuck. How do others make such 00:00 / 01:31 Forked tongues. Unsure how to proceed, I detach my arm, look inside the open flesh for morsels hiding beneath the skin, quivering before the opportunity to be plucked or nurtured in the between state of draughty window by a slavish boy who wishes for nothing but new worlds and the road right in front of him. The road, full of signs, made up symbols to delay the choosing of the path, the leaving of one, one side which will not be taken, will take time. So I remove my leg and look beneath the skin; surely hidden there is knowledge of the groove, how one hops in and out needling the unsung sound — like a shellac 78 left in the heat of the sun to warp and throw you off the scent of music long lost; the jive and the rock, hard places rolling beneath your single step, out of reach of your one arm. I cannot see anyway so I pop out an eye, peel back the layers for clues — something observed but missed, known yet forgotten. It conjures nothing new, but I begin to understand the little boy whose appetite is itself ready to be swallowed whole. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Kate Caoimhe Arthur read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Kate Caoimhe Arthur back next the poet Kate Caoimhe Arthur lives in Co. Down. She spent some years in the Cambridgeshire Fens, where she was once Fenland Poet Laureate. She worked in collaboration with the fine art printmaker Iona Howard which involved a lot of walking in the Fens with Meg the dog. She has won the Fenland Poet Laureate competition and the Spelt competition. She has been published in The Tangerine, The Stinging Fly and Blackbox Manifold. She is working on her first collection. the poems MOTHER ... After the Studio Morison installation MOTHER ... at Wicken Fen (2020) 00:00 / 01:23 I am coming back inside / you the hayrick oikos I’ve been looking for / I know there are some changes I should make / need stilts now to lift these hems off the hostile earth / my basal body temperature dropped as my skin puckered up / I felt my skin ripple to a sheen in its tansy beetle phase / I made for the haywalls but the light fell on my oil-spill flanks / I knew myself reflected in the eye of a bird / braced and pushed files of keratin / -like needles along my back and sides / grew down and feather fold over fold / I flew up to a rafter near your apse mother / but all I could taste in my throat was beetles beetles / in my hunger I could feel my leg muscles extending / my claws contracting into nubby pads / I didn’t know what I was any more / but my lips wrenched back so my face was all teeth / at least part of me is shadow and needs to be dragged / I will be ready when the next one comes through Bewildered Mothers 00:00 / 01:09 like a nuclear facility in a suburban zone to an Artificial Intelligence operated drone is the nutrient-dense squalene-rich liver of the Pacific Great White Sleeper tucked tenderly by its other vital organs behind the plate-glass reflection sheening a baby-plump underbelly to the taste of an orca, specifically the Flat-Toothed Ecotype or the North Pacific Offshore these same Killer Whales who can pinpoint the precise location to disjoint unctuous purple lozenges slow-releasing of potency are those bewildered mothers propelled through coastal waters say, off San Juan Island, Washington, pushing and holding aloft its dead baby regardless of the state of decay for seventeen days bearing the carcass offering the ocean a chance to witness squint 00:00 / 01:04 I entered the cell slowly and delicately cringing to fit the space this action accorded with a version of myself I admired 4ft x 6ft subfusc but for a cross shaped slit through which meaty drops of candle flame or is it god steal either way I lap it up opposite a puckered flap through which food comes and shit goes I always wanted to inhabit another body and now here I am a woman constantly on the edge when the host is held to my tongue I swoon it burns through my body licking at the tips of my numb limbs they say I tether the church to the earth on which it stands Publishing credits MOTHER ... : After... (Dec 8th 2022) Bewildered Mothers / squint: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Alan Buckley read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Alan Buckley back next the poet Wendy Allen’s poems have appeared in The London Magazine , The North , Propel Magazine , Poetry Ireland Review , Ambit , Poetry Wales and The Moth among others. Her debut poetry pamphlet, Plastic Tubed Little Bird , was published in 2023 by Broken Sleep Books. the poems My Country A man is judged by his work ~ Kurdish proverb ~ 00:00 / 01:53 I hide the tampon within my fingers like I’m holding a tiny, fragile bird. Someone once told me this is how my hands should be when I run. On the side of an unstained trainer’s edge is a star. In red. On the edge. I think of the tiny celestial mark I draw in ink on my calendar, always inconspicuous. I pretend to look for my phone, pen, a date two weeks later. Inside my bag, a yellow wrapper the colour of cruel. A creased spring dress worn only to celebrate bloodshed. I whisper period to you in the hope you will turn around. You don’t. I shout it out 28 times aloud in my head. When I empty my Mooncup, the blood remains crescent lonely in the daytime bowl. I like the absolute discomfort this causes you. I envy the plastic backed sanitary sleeping bodies on their unfamiliar coastal beds, their one-night stand leaving them free for me to feel their single use guilt. A naked tampon in the cervix of my bag is exposed only by a useless string lifeline, the wrapper from the orange tampon flatlines at the bottom of my bag. Flame Use matches sparingly Instruction on front of matchbox 00:00 / 01:06 That the dinner party is ours is a bad start / I open the door / smile / take coats / observe new hair / enhanced romance between the couple we sit down with / every sentence I begin with I self-censor / make sure I’m not going to disclose too much / B notices but she’s got the headfuck rush from the Pata Negra I bought at Madrid Airport / I’m struggling after two glasses of wine and 12 drops of Rescue Remedy / I want to smoke too fast / exhale this shit sham of an evening / At eight seventeen and we’re one hour and sixteen minutes in / after melon and lamb and Hasselbach potatoes / here is the part when I want to cram soft sponge into my mouth like a gag / this is when B’s husband asks about my job / I'm lying on the table naked / exposed as he dives in with precision / cuts into the decisions I make laid out on the table / dissecting me in parts / judging and measuring and weighing and labelling / I want to eat trifle and cry The Error 00:00 / 01:11 It is Pelagos I always go to first at The Hepworth . From the front, the repeat, the shadows, the stitches transform my vulva into a perfect circle as you reach around my waist, from the side repeat, trace finger on back. I hear a moan from the centre (my voice) your cock is between my lips I am the opposite to hollow now the stitches are laced with immediacy they mimic breathing they rise – pause – fall I move to the side, hold my breath the sea stops moving – land locked, absent body. In the gallery we meet at cat’s cradle we begin on an elm flat base lick salt off plate, off body into the space, fold shouldered waves into me sea wall curves over arms – wrap around, repeat I look at Pelagos from the side I think of myself open mouthed an empty estuary the size of an unspecified sea, downy breathing I’m almost complete in this part. I am Pelagos . From the side from the side, make my strings dissipate. Publishing credits My Country: The Friday Poem (February 2022) Flame: The Dark Horse (Issue 34) The Error: Touched (HappenStance Press)

Hear poet Dominic Leonard read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Dominic Leonard back next the poet Dominic Leonard’s writing can be found in PN Review , Poetry London , the TLS , Pain and elsewhere, with two of his poems featuring in the spring edition of The Poetry Review . In 2019, he received an Eric Gregory Award. His pamphlet, Antimasque , will be published by Broken Sleep Books in 2021. He lives and teaches in London. the poems Seven Birds Passed Through a Great Building 00:00 / 01:00 Seven birds passed through A great building—I cannot Remember you always but I have been finding ways to Remember you enough. I have Loved only from a safe distance, Staring into sinks long enough To know the sense of spillage That comes with every act of Honesty. Seven birds passed Through a house of spectacle Through the light that lounged Around each of the great stupid Bells and I thought about how Profound it felt, hands thick And heavy on my stupid knees. When I say that once I dreamt You were a taxi on fire plunging Down every country road in England I am not being facetious I am testing my immensity. I am trying to manage my fear, Which is to say I cannot risk Heaven, or any attempt at heaven I Have made so far, not when each Line I find is a room gone dark just As I leave it and always the birds are Flown and I’ve missed it just, just. What is the wind, what is it After Gertrude Stein 00:00 / 00:53 An egg – lithe beast that could crack with any pressure, That gets yellower towards its centre, that hangs between The fingers. A ghost-vision, serenely bovine. Incubated, Stratified. A correct language of where it was, where it Went, how are we anchored by it. But, to wander with it – How the wind knocks my ham-fisted breath from me, Makes a pelt of it. And wedged is the wind, trickling Into and out of all my little compartments and rooms, A fawn in a field seen blurred through the rain at nearly Seven in the evening after stumbling from the house. Something to consider when deciding on materials to Rebuild the world from after testing its capacity for grief, Which is all this was. On forgetting the anniversary of a death 00:00 / 00:13 If that’s you hearing – out on the roof, astride your miscreant echo – you made this of me, didn’t you. Publishing credits Seven Birds Passed Through a Great Building / On forgetting the anniversary of a death: exclusive first publication by iamb What is the wind, what is it: Stand (Issue 223, Volume 17 No. 3)

Hear poet Alexandra Citron read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Alexandra Citron back next the poet Alexandra Citron was born in the USA but has lived in the UK since her early teens. Her poems have appeared in Mslexia , Visual Verse , Ink Sweat & Tears and And Other Poems , as well as in the Emma Press' anthology, Everything That Can Happen: Poems about the Future . the poems Learning to accessorise 00:00 / 01:46 Eighteen, tank-top and jeans, the girl from three doors down holds court one summer on the trunk of her white saloon, draped in python. Cross-legged, bangles jangling, she loops four feet of lustrous snake along her arms and waits to see how long it takes for us to creep forward. Wide eyed. Mesmerised: aliens landed in our neighbourhood. Go on, you can touch him and shy hands reach to take the inky-lacquered dare, tip-toe fingers along dark bands glistening like moonlit rain on bark. We stroke a rolling shudder of pulsing silk, a placid purr, black eyes holding back a spell. Undulating to a whispered song, she charms to summer incense of charcoaled meat and late mown grass. Boys slow their bikes. Fathers home in time from work pause latchkeys in the locks. She swirls patchouli-scented hair off tendrilled shoulders, cradling the thick ribbon of him cheek to scale, his tail languid across her thighs. I go to sleep those sultry nights dreaming of someday sliding into rooms, sophisticated, cool, smelling of dark flowers and wreathed with serpent. The Novaya Zemlya effect For Max and Ben 00:00 / 02:03 Boys, be wary of the peddlers of absolutes. But certain things are known. Take on trust that the earth goes round the sun. Is round. Requires oxygen and ice and like us a balanced diet. That it can be seen from space. That we have walked in space and travelled to the moon not once but six times. That the moon controls the tides. Turtles swim hundreds of miles to return to the same shore. That the sun comes up the same each day as expected. Most of the time. That where the sun doesn't rise for months it can seem to, a mirage reflected in the atmosphere, stained glass glowing in a desert of polar dusk when the sky is a mirror to what lies below the horizon. A hope of light. A prayer. That the mirror of the atmosphere only works at certain latitudes, like Novaya Zemlya, in winter, where once they say during sun-starved days, the reflection of a polar bear was sighted miles away. That forewarned is forearmed. That what is called sorcery at one point in time may well be explained at another. With time and particular quirks of mind. That pointing this out is not heresy, just as seeing the sun rise where it is not is not madness but a trick of light and physics I do not fully understand. And boys, that's okay. We breathe the laughter of uncertainties. Sometimes there's trust and sometimes the evidence of your own eyes and the element of surprise. Let Streetview take you home for the holiday 00:00 / 01:00 Hitching a white arrow up Saffold Way the trees are all too tall. It’s garbage day. The blue door to the old house stands ajar but should be orange and the street wider where in summer small feet ran over searing asphalt for a dare. The birch in the front yard’s gone with the brown Toyota and begonia beds. A man in shorts is heading to go in, his chores complete. I shadow his retreat back to the kitchen on his left. Ahead the L-shaped room and stairs, perhaps a cat scratching the corner of a chair. You are outside on the balcony, let’s say, just out of sight, calling us in from play. Publishing credits Learning to Accessorise / The Novaya Zemlya Effect: exclusive first publication by iamb Let Streetview Take You Home for the Holiday: Ink, Sweat & Tears

Hear poet Moira Walsh read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Moira Walsh back next the poet Originally from Michigan, USA, Moira Walsh now calls southern Germany home – her poetry finding homes in a variety of Austrian and German journals. She's the author of Earthrise , and with Wilfried Schubert, Do Try This at Home . A founding member of Kollektief Dellgart, Moira has co-translated contemporary poets such as Olja Alvir, Ken Mikolowski, Halyna Petrosaniak, Maë Schwinghammer and others. the poems White noise, they say 00:00 / 00:22 as if it’s all one color. But then there’s the Lake: a rainbow of sushing and loshing and ashing and flishing and sething and hayshing Apology to local vegetables 00:00 / 00:36 Sweet corn – hours old, stalk to table! Oak-leaf lettuce, garlic scapes! Beet greens, basil, cucumbers! I’m sorry. On days like these nothing can squeeze down my throat except, after dark, some good cheese and a weird combination of transportation starches. Removed 00:00 / 01:09 Small room, only the right twin bed mine, half the bookshelf, half the table and one chair so half time chair sitting I miss those tranquilisers sometimes wish I’d kept the ones they slipped in a small paper envelope for my test night at home when the ward went up in smoke someone set a bed on fire and I missed it Two weeks later the next arsonist nurses changed the sheets too soon fine ash everywhere home again for a night I missed that too If I were still delusional seeking connections at all costs I would feel responsible for incendiary absence Publishing credits White noise, they say / Apology to local vegetables: exclusive first publication by iamb Removed: [kon] (Issue 10)

Hear poet Samantha Terrell read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Samantha Terrell back next the poet Nominated for The Forward Prizes and The Pushcart Prize, Samantha Terrell is the curator of international poetry series SHINE . She lives with her family in Upstate New York, and has had her poetry anthologised in Door=Jar , Eunoia Review , Green Ink Poetry , In Parentheses , The Orchards Poetry Journal and elsewhere. Samantha's many collections – most recently, Delta Function – have consistently garnered five-star reviews. the poems AI and the Animal Kingdom 00:00 / 00:59 Fabricatus intellĭgos , a man-made being with the capacity for intelligent processing and output It’s been said what separates Homo sapiens from the rest of the Animal Kingdom is intelligence – Reasoning Skills, Speech, Forethought. Turns out we’re not very good at Forethought, since we’ve created a being that renders the use of Reason and Speech as obsolete. All those crunching numbers, tabulating potential outcomes, answering queries, researching options – who needs ‘em? But what about relationships made around the water cooler? The client who becomes a family friend? Apparently creating Fabricatus intellĭgos has proven something else, too: Homo sapiens aren’t unique because of a boundless capacity for intelligence, but our boundless capacity for love. Fluidity 00:00 / 00:32 It’s not always easy to know what’s been taken from us, or what we have taken from others. Dignity is a fluid thing – one in the moment, and another in hindsight. We put words in each others’ mouths, then take them out again to suit us. We are wet clothes hanging on the line, in the rain, beginning to sag with the weight of double-saturation – not knowing how long we must hold on. Social Psychology 00:00 / 00:34 Another ink-blot test, this time for society, is sure to reveal our perception of reality. Forget the shapes for a moment. We can’t even agree on the parameters. The blur of lines one would only characterize as grey, another sees as black and white. Should the paper be held up, or laid down? Never mind, time to look. What do we see? To one, a ballot box; to another, a crown. Publishing credits AI and the Animal Kingdom / Social Psychology: exclusive first publication by iamb Fluidity: Fulcrum Review (Issue 2)

Hear poet Helen Laycock read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Helen Laycock back next the poet Shortlisted for The Broken Spine Chapbook Competition, nominated for The Pushcart Prize, and winner of the 2024 Black Bough Poetry chapbook contest, Helen Laycock has written five volumes of poetry. East Ridge Review made Frame their Book of the Month. Helen read a selection of poems from El emental when she was a featured poet at a Welsh festival. Her other collections include Breathe , 13 and Rapture . Helen's poetry has appeared in numerous journals, including After… , Lucent Dreaming , The Storms Journal , Fevers of the Mind , The Winged Moon , Visual Verse , Frazzled Lit and Ink, Sweat & Tears . the poems Reconciliation of Parts 00:00 / 02:35 At the dirtfall, there is breathstilt. The moon of my humerus is disc-sliced, as though cheesewire has separated all but the core, and the pain is pulled long … a bitter stretch of ether projected like a torch beam into a sinewy nightforest, petering into redshadow. This snipped-string puppet limb hangs white from a gibbet, creaking and swinging in the wind, dwindled inanimate. Hands are as useless as the grey hookbones of mangled sparrow wings. Fingerbacks flap, asphyxiated fish, ineffectively skimming the reeds, too late to hide. Broken things are heavier than whole – burdens purpose-weighted for drowning, glutted with thick silt dredged from ragged seabeds where dead things are buried, and the black in the fissure is not just a crack of colour but has compacted to coal. Some fractures are too dark to be goldlit by Kintsugi. Damage will not succumb to the numbness of slumber; pain is synonymous with moonlight. Sharp-edged metal stars wedge between incisors and tongueblood is issued by the dishful, weakening the flesh. After motley bloom and boneknit, the illusion is surface-perfect, but where fire has burned is an ashscar, indelibly black. Wreckage rarely finds a harbour, so dwells in the deepest places. Buckling 00:00 / 01:52 This stone has fossilised behind my ribs, in symbiosis with indented bonebridges, griefmarrow-clogged, heart abrading with each waterlogged brushbeat. This stone spurs into the ringing trunk of my throat, jagged promontories shredding each branched breath, damming plea, confession, release, a snarl of splinters skewering my tongue, each swallow shedding a clack of pebbles which settle in extremities, filling limbs with ballast. Stilling me. Toppling me. This stone has embedded its grit beneath my skin, hot peppercorns of hurt pocking at every slow move. I sleep on pokers. Grit-roughened sclera snag on raked eyelids. The slitted world is firebright; I am curling in its flames. This stone is carved with your name, and I will ferry it until it sinks us to mottle-flower and rest, unlit, unburdened, beneath a softmoss sky. The Shape of Me 00:00 / 01:38 Beneath this skin, I am trellised by crown shyness, spindled by ethereal thickets, curious root-taper and apical tip-probe burrowing distant contours with sustenance. I am forest. Shoals of one-eyed fish ride my current, darkeddying the stripped hull where tides begin, rounding skullboulder and bonebranch, reeds brimful. There is gold to be dredged. I am river. The brushing wings of wavesway are deepcaved until I listen; the gush washes the whorls of my shells. I pucker beneath air. Will discard furrowed driftwood. I am ocean. Interrupted lightning redforks my firmament, and nebulae gather in weathered lungs, stormcloud cording flesh. Formed in a starforge, elevated at death, I am sky. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Victoria Spires read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Victoria Spires © Peri Cimen back next the poet Victoria Spires started writing about two and a half years ago, and hasn't stopped since. Eight year old Vic would be very proud of the fact that she is finally living up to her childhood dream of having a book published. Aside from her debut pamphlet Soi-même (Salo Press), Victoria’s publishing highlights to date include Berlin Lit, Dust, Stanchion, The Winged Moon and The London Magazine. She has been shortlisted and commended in various competitions, and recently came Third in the Rialto Nature & Place Competition. When she isn't writing, she can be found playing with wrestling figures with her son (it goes without saying that The Undertaker is her favourite), running, or crouching down looking at something interesting. the poems Artemis of the Salt Works (Brine Shrimp) 00:00 / 01:16 The way you glide, if glide were both shutter and frame The way your bodies are a thing that moves, and stays in place The way you flute eleven simultaneous pairs of legs The way the space you make is always being rearranged within itself The way your separatenesses fit, as different imprints of the same feather The way fucking is – for you – a state of grace, which can be achieved alone, or together The way you are see-through, like the pleats of time made visible The way your face, if you have a face, is entirely abstract, beatific The way you synchronise with light The way you loop with the aimless precision of a rehearsing figure skater The way you (the skate) feathers you (the ice) Your soft lives, that begin and end with swim in one unbroken temporal chain The way you don’t need to believe in heaven, to describe it From a train 00:00 / 00:42 For a while, only field and trees – the world pleached, into a certain frame of reference by a letterbox eye. Few things change, except the particular angles and location of a pylon, the rain or not-rain in this or that envelope of sky. I expect this is how some loves arrive: the head idly resting at the windowpane, the almost unnoticeable re-arrangements in the interior set design. Until gradually it is suggested, that a great journey is underway, and has been, for some time. Mother-Substitute 00:00 / 00:59 There are 294 mothers in our solar system Astronomers are discovering new mothers all the time The smallest and most distant mothers will no longer be given mythological names All mothers are mythological On Earth, claims of the existence of other mothers have not been disproved My mother is called Lilith When I can’t sleep, I root for her nipple in the pale flesh of the window I display a fearful-avoidant attachment style entirely in keeping with her orbital eccentricity The composition of a mother depends on its distance from its own mother Some mothers are almost constantly volcanic Some mothers will never be knowable To mother means to measure time Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Fred Schmalz read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Fred Schmalz back next the poet Artist and poet Fred Schmalz is the author of collection Action in the Orchards , which explores intimacy and loss via encounters with contemporary art. His writing has appeared in Puerto del Sol , Zocalo Public Square , Places Journal , Diagram , Poetry and Oversound . Collaborating with Susy Bielak, the two mine social histories, texts and archives to create installations and actions that reflect the gravity and strangeness of contemporary cities. The duo's recent work has been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Grand Central Art Center. the poems Spring Triptych 00:00 / 02:27 on the concrete jetty a piping plover twice darts across the path first off the breakwater then alighting from a perch on the seawall curl where fishermen idle a group of kids flits and dunks they compare arm scars histories of love and neglect industry for the day’s first hours shared loose affiliation with the eddies’ swirl all of it behind them now cut loose from a flotilla they drift past the wreck away with them a wallet a phone a bag of clothes sinks as they lift with the tide gulls dive into the cove covered in algae staring into the surf stones tumble toward the mouth of the inlet * miles of hatched mosquito cloud columns fold and surge over the fields so thick they crowd the light wave on the hill’s crest pelt passing bodies the injured crawl through my hair to witness to warn teeth and mouth water poured into vessels the narrows of breath cover me in carcasses and with them flower petals flute down from the northern border * I hadn’t seen the woman who sings the sun up on the berm by the beach since before the park closed for months years ago though one morning in winter as I approached was disillusioned by another figure this morning she paces just north of her old haunt along the trail tiny frame and one leg hitch my heart rush at seeing her and nobody around to tell the lengths our bodies age around us muscles tender sag the lax of years mirrors a deep wildness beyond her a seagull beats a sunfish on a rock Basic Training, 1991 00:00 / 01:37 every morgue in Chicago anticipates influxes today a backhoe opens the meadow I climb down into the trench lay prone there a moment its fetid walls its worms recoil while the dead’s names go out in response I eat a vitamin a thyroid pill oatmeal my last orange my odds of dying drop in the night I can’t say what good crawling into a hole serves though I recall twenty-nine years earlier waiting for my brother in a recess at Fort Knox an absolute silence overcame me the trench anechoic save its peat leaching new light formed flat pale branches in relief against the sky beneath the tree I saw through the deaths to the persistence of the living lately I’m less sure than ever my brother rises and waits for me we may reach détente eventually this century will claim us both forever overnight men in blue coveralls begin laying to rest the dead never out of work I will be there after all what have I got to sleep for New Year's Eve 00:00 / 00:58 leaning over a balcony railing to shake the circular rug of breadcrumbs and seeds gathered and shed I've been thinking again of how a year closes and another sets out from home in the lightest perceptible rain nightfall comes slowly the foxes that play in the roadway trot off between houses soon the shops will shutter your daughters take spoons to devour the cakes we brought propped on round white plates they remind me of the palm-sized paving stones we pocketed last night on our walk home they are everywhere around us working loose in the freeze the thaw the freeze Publishing credits Spring triptych: Oversound (Issue Nine) Basic training, 1991: The Canary (Issue 7) New Year’s Eve: Oversound (Issue Six)

Hear poet Marc Alan Di Martino read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Marc Alan Di Martino back next the poet Marc Alan Di Martino is the author of Love Poem with Pomegranate , Still Life with City and Unburial . His poems and translations from Italian can be found in Bad Lilies , Autumn Sky , Rattle and several other journals and anthologies. Marc is also the author of Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems of Mario dell'Arco – the first English-language translation of the Romanesco poet’s work. Currently a reader for The Baltimore Review , Marc lives in Italy. the poems Runaway 00:00 / 04:23 My mother is sitting alone on a park bench in Villa Borghese, eating a sandwich. It isn’t an easy thing to find a sandwich in Rome in 1966. She's had to root out the Bar degli Americani on Via Veneto, near the Embassy, in order to find ham on white bread. No mayonnaise. Imagine that: a Jewish girl eating a ham sandwich on a park bench in Rome with no mayo. What's she doing there, so far from home? And where is home, anyway? Her parents’ home in Brookline, Massachusetts? That isn’t home. Not anymore. She ran away from that home and came to Rome via Paris via San Francisco. Anywhere but at the shabbos table with that tyrant her mother and her ineffectual father. A ham sandwich on a park bench is better than that, she says to herself as a dapper man appears dressed in a smart black suit. She notices... his teeth. Naively, she thinks he might be Marcello Mastroianni, her singular destiny to meet a movie star, fall in love and become his wife. Live happily ever after. The fantasies that run through a young woman’s head. This man is not Eddie Fisher. Nice Jewish boy. Dungaree Doll. This man is a smooth-talker. He wants to sell her something. Realizing she's American, he begins speaking in broken schoolboy English. He turns on the charm, and she is charmed. What is he selling? Wine—what else? You're in Italy, poor girl, eating a sandwich, all alone. He overwhelms her, makes her feel like Audrey Hepburn. She, in turn, is an easy target. Not like Italian women. To get into their pants you have to go through their families. He knows. He has two sisters. He’s always beating up guys in his neighborhood for putting their hands on them. He’s got a reputation. But everyone knows American women are unmoored. Why else do they come here? To get into trouble. To meet a Casanova. To have what's called a ‘fling’. (He learned that word in a movie.) Then they go back home and get married to a Rock Hudson or a John Wayne, have two kids and two cars and pursue their dreams of happiness. Europeans have history, Americans have dreams. That seems to him a profound insight. My mother crinkles the cellophane into a ball, rolls it in her palm, brushes the crumbs from her skirt. He looks at her knees, the skin boldly exposed, wonders what’s beyond them. She isn’t thin, he thinks, as he absorbs her body with his eyes. He isn’t subtle. You don’t need to be in 1966. All you need to have is charm, and he has excellent charm. She decides in that moment she will go anywhere with this man. She'll do anything he asks. She has nothing to lose, no one waiting for her on the other side of the ocean, no Eddie Fisher. Her brother is married to a German. Her brother the magician, who disappeared into a German woman and never came out. How she would like to disappear into this man, fall into the black hole of him, learn to curse her own parents in his tongue, allow the sensual inflections of Italian to evict the Yiddish gutturals lodged in her throat like fish bones. How she would like like to learn to trill her Rs, double her consonants, put a crucifix around her neck for the sheer pleasure of seeing her mother’s dumbstruck punim , bury her alive with Roman invective: li mortacci tua —fuck your dead ancestors—tear the crucifix off and flush it down the toilet, having exhausted its usefulness. She smooths her skirt, a little flushed. Cartography 00:00 / 00:28 There are maps of knowing and unknowing. Seven thousand species of bird locked in a glass cabinet, brightly colored males & unpretentious females. Almost every living thing on Earth has already perished. My daughter carries a dog-eared copy of Maus in her backpack. I have questions. She has questions. Arboreal 00:00 / 01:00 Leaf’s gold lies guttered, silhouetted to concrete: battle-borne, world-wounded, crenulated by a thousand woes, tossed and torn by turning winds & war-waging weather, stampeded, flattened, distilled into a constellation of shattered veins. Again merciless rains pour down, pound it into mud, in- to less than nothing- ness. It’s spun face down under a new dawn unlacing waterlogged gold to tattered filaments mutated, transformed by bare bludgeoning blows sky clear now crabshell-blue-to- sapphire. Sad fire leaks from lesions, spreads its net over the crackling street shedding evaporate mist of holy hell water, peeling off pavement, this ghastly arboreal face. Publishing credits Runaway: Baltimore Review (Spring 2019) Cartography: Orange Blossom Review (Issue 10) Arboreal: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Victoria Punch read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Victoria Punch © Erika Benjamin back next the poet Voice coach and musician Victoria Punch is curious about voice and identity, the limits of language, and how we perceive things. She has had her work published in Poetry Magazine , Mslexia, Magma and One Hand Clapping – as well as in Christmas Stories: Twelve Poems to Tell and Share . the poems A cold striding 00:00 / 00:54 Bridled with ferns in April, a year uncurled. Up – yet feeling low on the blue fuzz of new rain – the brush of a wing on the eave The earth, it seems, has turned on the warming drawer and laid the plates inside, crockery carrots and cucumber, cutlery laid in lines and rows, potatoes, peas and purple sprouting broccoli babies The earth rises like dough. Proven, prickling with spring, the lick of blackberries prophesied, the implacable hedge, laden with strings of wildflower childlings, seeded by flight, small mice and hiding birds, a little shy I’m asking, but I can’t recall the question in the face of the morning an ode to the unexpected find 00:00 / 01:08 I marvel. oh my, oh you – small lime green lurker how did you – damp smirker – get there. armpitted and puckering gloop grip in my top sneak under my collar your squeaky sneaky ways and hazy origins amaze me you have umami, by the look of you tang of salt on my tongue, you tiny appetiser, so phlegmatic, enigmatic part of my one point five daily litres of mucusy nasal secretions little air crumb catcher, dust, dirt and pollen snatcher, crunchy bacteria beguiler you are crisper as you dry your quasi-spherically makes me queasy, I quease I am uneased by your tacky feel, your unexpected gloop your roundness – rolled who rolled you, oh green one? wherefore and what nose did you come from? oh how I’d like to know or maybe (s)not Last Flight on the Road 00:00 / 01:54 that morning – stung by cold blankets on and steam-breath in the air low motor hum of the old car, road ticker-taped and on for miles grey and dim in the husky half-light sidled by the frosted trees thick as thieves the trees stood, still and stoic, lime-cold leaning on the morning light that came in waves upon the air replicating pine for miles they lined the open, empty road we made our way along the road surrounded by the stream of trees counting down the miles and miles curled and hunched against the cold hats and coats and frosty air looking for the early light his silence was a kind of light he joined our vigil down the road cut through the still and lingering air the owl came softly through the trees I held my coffee long gone cold and I forgot about the miles I felt he stayed with us for miles orange wingtips in the light his face was braced against the cold level with my eyes, along the road he slipped like water past the trees gold and russet on the air I held his presence in the air carried it for miles and miles wings the colour of the trees wings the colour of the light eyes held fast along the road I forgot that I was cold his face – the air, his wings – the light I sat for miles in silence on the road I watched the passing trees and felt the cold Publishing credits an ode to the unexpected find: Invitation to Love – Issue 3 (the6ress) A cold striding: Magma (No. 85) Last Flight on the Road: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Kyle Potvin read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Kyle Potvin back next the poet Kyle Potvin is an American poet whose debut full-length poetry collection, Loosen , appeared in 2021. Her chapbook, Sound Travels on Water , won the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. Kyle's poems have featured in Bellevue Literary Review , Tar River Poetry, Rattle, Ecotone, The New York Times and elsewhere. the poems Do You Know Pain? 00:00 / 01:09 The slice of the knife The rock to the head The blow to the eye The lumbar puncture That spinal tap The mistaken try Or perhaps The prenatal jarring Pushing and bearing Perineal tearing The prick of the needle Poison-plumped veins White sores in the mouth Cold fog in the brain Then the burn of the beam For thirty-three days Day after day The high-energy rays Did you turn Up your eyes Write words in your mind Tap beats on your thighs To distract and deny Then return to this earth Forgetting it happened The aching and bruising The bleeding and writhing For the scarring is healing The hurting subsiding The hunger returns Tomato salted and ripe The slip of the finger The slice of the knife Mysteries of the Corn 00:00 / 01:22 Your priest of 20 years retires. Then your hairdresser. Elephants become sacred and the circus leaves town forever. Even the only queen you've known is blue, wearing sapphires from her dead father. Loss is the corn on your door: 16 rows 800 kernels. You finger each like a rosary bead: Hail Mary Mother of Yours lost in plaques and tangles. Glory Be to Your Father, livelihood lost to her care. Hail Holy Queen, watch over the teen shot near the corner and for the other who died of (conjecture). Our Father, remember the birch, lost to infestation, and the road around the lake, no longer traveled. Each year, the husk dries, decays a bit more. But you hang it anyway, a totem to stubbornness. After all, an ear to the ground is useless. You know what's coming. Sin 00:00 / 00:59 At eight years old, I dodged the sisters' eyes: ate my sandwich, then donned a saintly face, walked out the gate, past church and up the rise toward Horn's Variety, that mythic place. The path was new to me. I walked alone and genuflected to inspect a sheared- off branch, a mica fleck, a swallow's bone. I used a stick to write DAM HELL; then cleared away the words. Dust pleated in my skirt. I felt a breath unloosen in my chest, expanding, fearless in this wondrous dirt of disobedience, this fresh unrest. The church bells rang. I rose, denied the call. Picked freedom, sin, a red-hot fireball. Publishing credits All poems: Loosen (Hobblebush Books)

Hear poet James Nixon read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. James Nixon back next the poet James Nixon, who teaches at Arden University, is completing his doctoral research into the legacy of Arthur Rimbaud and hauntological poetics at Goldsmiths, University of London. He's a former Royal Holloway Emerging Writer Fellow, a Writer-in-Residence at Cove Park, and a Writer-in-Residence at Phytology, Bethnal Green. the poems Pillowtalk 00:00 / 00:50 The night is a cul-de-sac we’ve been chased into – the houses have foreign coin for eyes. The innocent quiet is not what it seems. Clerical figures carrying taxidermy for comparison roam the undercrofts of sleep slips into place like a contraption round my head. I have been alive today and not done much about it. I have drifted complacent I'm in crisis. Why your arm, slung across my chest, feels so real, I squeeze its meat to send myself some signal, clamp my body to yours. Cashier 00:00 / 01:42 ‘M A T T’. Rhymes with flat, as in deflated, as in a kept birthday balloon shrivelling & bleeding air, as in smoker’s lung. ‘M A T T’, as in not shiny, unremarkable. I don’t think you’re that, ‘M A T T’, but I can tell this shift has you feeling tragic, as in self-esteem, as in the future’s lost collateral. That I should not kiss you, ‘M A T T’, makes me want to smother you lovingly, but always with the idea of quietus in mind. ‘M A T T’ named in air quotes as if you’re hypothetical. Do people feel WELCOME wiping their feet on you ‘M A T T’? Do you wish to leave? Not just this store but this this life. Sea levels are multiplying ‘M A T T’. The planet is ready to belch all over us. Now is not the time to be passing avocados from your right hand to your left hand & mixing greys on your palette of sighs, but slinking from bed while your wife sleeps in & driving undramatic to some port town. As in lobbing your smartphone, ditching your car. As in deciding on an outgoing ferry that colour & thrill are still possible, while the sun is delivered and opened. As in an invitation. As in come away with me ‘M A T T’. The Weather 00:00 / 01:21 When my appendix was removed it was incinerated. There is nothing extra about me. The sun feathers through the blinds – my hip-scar shines like a hieroglyph. The house is climate. I test the acoustics with subtle applause and swan about the patio paved a healthy pink – hit the pool occasionally – – my heart small and hard. Alligators doze in the middle of roads beneath detergent skies. Palm trees droop like exclamations propped against the horizon. The tennis courts – A darker reflection in sliding doors at dusk looks like fire taking off its nightgown. Moths inhaled into the hurricanes of wheel arches are likely screaming on the interstate. And there are widespread riots in urban areas. But I hear blue whales have returned with calves to the Sea of Cortez. I drove through a storm at night but not recently. Sedate is the word – the weather is sedate. Publishing credits Pillowtalk: exclusive first publication by iamb Cashier: earlier draft was shortlisted for the Bristol Poetry Prize The Weather: earlier draft appeared in Ambit (Issue 234)

Hear poet Daniel Hinds read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Daniel Hinds back next the poet Winner of the Poetry Society’s Timothy Corsellis Young Critics Prize and commended in the National Centre for Writing’s UEA New Forms Award, Daniel Hinds lives in Newcastle. His poetry has been published or is forthcoming in a wide variety of respected titles, including The London Magazine , The New European , Wild Court , Stand , Poetry Salzburg Review , The Honest Ulsterman and Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal . Daniel was commissioned by New Creatives – a talent development scheme supported by Arts Council England and BBC Arts and delivered by Tyneside Cinema – to produce an audio piece based on his poetic sequence The Stone Men of Newcastle . This has been aired on BBC Sounds and BBC Radio 6 Music. the poems The Crying of the Gulls 00:00 / 01:08 Between the shadow line on sand of your parasol And the lapped slush beside the salt threshold Is her hunting ground that moves With the light and the tide. Her dark painted nails dip in the white pool Of Mr Whippy’s spilt beach bleach Like livid pupils, small in the sick waters Of her mascaraed eyes. Sometimes the swaying of the black fans Around her pink legs catches a man’s eye. But not even the most spasmodic twitcher Looks for long at her yellow lips, marked By a red beauty spot, And the long grey bruises of her arms. The thick muscle of her neck undulates, Jaw unhinges, and untouched by the waves Of arms, she lets the slick suntan grease Ease the passing. Between the beach’s squashed chips and faded newsprint She plucks and swallows a knotted spotted handkerchief. Ode to a Magpie / One for Sorrow O for a beaker full of the warm South ~ John Keats ~ Ode to a Nightingale 00:00 / 01:28 Keats can keep / his numb-tongued nightingale; / I’ll save my stolen silver speech / for my pale and black / kleptomaniac. / Magpie, your bad luck beak is slick / with Satan’s serpent blood / and was / silent, / when all the others bayed for Christ / on his wet-blooded bough. / When Noah took to his Ark, / you alone stayed, / and strayed / to see the world drown, / to hear the secret knowledge of its last words, / and drink down its last / best / breath; / and like Noah, / swallowed your sorrows, and became Bacchus’s bird, / with wine-dark wings. / When all the other blackbirds were put in a pie, / you stole the silverware, / and carved out a bad name for yourself. / The world gives good mornings / to the one who heard its last good nights, / who would not shelter, / or sing / for a god on his beam. / Bad luck bird – be trod upon. / Bridge / the starry silver stream. / Link us / to the weaver of worlds / and words. The Magi’s Camel With the voices singing in our ears ~ T. S. Eliot ~ Journey of the Magi 00:00 / 02:21 The fat god squats between back braes. Does not discern the soft gasp as hoof meets grit; Even the dust fears the determined, unerring hammer Of two dark nails. The murmur of cloth, creaking leather and dry lips, The gold of a weak winter’s sun, a thin wash for a parched place. The sense behind, of a conversation on direction spoken frank. This is a life with few gifts; noses closed to scent, Thick lashes shading even the season’s poor wealth. The murder of your bones by flights of carrion birds. The shaggy and silken fortress moves, Gains and loses territory with every step. Stamps the sand with an alien sigil. A creature with six hands; two to bear the whip, Four to do the work. The adoration of the magi is a tough love. The way always, of those of the hill And those who speak from the mount. Slick guts work the miracle; A drop will last a week. A drink lasts longest for those last to drink. Only the sight of a horse without rider, white and old as starlight, Running masterless among long grasses, cooled and stilled by night, Stirs the hard muscle of a young heart from its dry and steady beat. The blurred and furry pulpit makes its way across the desert. Magicians preach from the turret, but none here will follow the hard way. For all they say, only thick soles and spindle limbs know the hardness. They know the weight of all the far-travelled books of sorcery. The washerwomen and shepherds jeer, fling earth; They have their own magic to work. Yes, three kings, three trees, a star, a child, But two humps. Discarded crowns gain swift burial in the desert. No, the way back the same as the way there. Publishing credits The Crying of the Gulls: Travels & Tribulations: An Anthology (Acid Bath Publishing) Ode to a Magpie / One for Sorrow: Rewilding: An Ecopoetic Anthology (Crested Tit Collective) The Magi’s Camel: Southword (Issue 41)

Hear poet Eric T Racher read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Eric T Racher back next the poet Eric T Racher lives in Riga, Latvia. His poetry, essays and fiction have appeared in Socrates on the Beach , minor literature[s] , Exacting Clam , Your Impossible Voice , Literary Imagination , Keep Planning , ballast and elsewhere. the poems On the vanity and inevitability of the prefatory gesture or On the arche-sonnet as the always-ready of the sonnet 00:00 / 01:01 And this (therefore) will not have been a son- net. Parentage must name its apparitions (Desire as lex ferenda ’s lexicon.), attentive to their boundary conditions: the artifact as fact, the pharmakon as con (A figment of our propositions.), though preface, plough and pharynx feed upon the flesh of definitions and finitions. And thus for truth, truth-likeness, verse, verse-likeness: I, longing for horizon’s ‘no’, a vale of tears embalmed into mere Werkverzeichnis , rough-hew an end I cannot know, a veil descending on a valley of unlikeness. Perhaps the sonnet ends to no avail. On memory and the sonnet as a sanctum, or laboratory, of self and other 00:00 / 01:20 I could, I thought, I could just step right out onto the frozen surface of the sea in Vecaki, but something—urgency or doubt or love—metastasized throughout my body, held me still, it seems. Without an intimation of the sea, précis the flesh provides itself, a wave asea in these ascendencies, the breath will out. But here we are. So much, alas, is read into these sighs and silences that lance the air’s malignancies. The ear is ever the suppliant; the sky is ever dread. The sea is everything. The glint and glance of light on ice or wave revives. However, the sea remains a shadow, not unsought; shadow, or she, gave shape to something wrought. On rhetoric as constitutive of the body of the lover 00:00 / 00:55 If Love, from this unmetered mess, give rise to dwelling, ledgers, traces of exchange, th’inscribing of a line, harp-string, reprise of unkempt interludes in strange arrangements; if Love, replete with pleasaunce, living breast of marble arcing into night, should bind us on this threshold, us divest of vestments, or dithyramb the reason, heart the mind; if Love unvessel us, pianissimo our public burls, or us memento-mori and alm the threadbare self, all touch-and-go; then we translated are, transfigured so— anthimeria, anastrophe are more than figures, says chi ben amando more . Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Fiona Sampson read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Fiona Sampson © Ekaterina Voskresenskaya back next the poet Leading British poet Fiona Sampson has been published in 38 languages and received a number of international awards. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the English Association and the Wordsworth Trust, Fiona has 29 books to her name, and was awarded an MBE for Services to Literature. She is Emeritus Professor of Poetry, University of Roehampton, has served on the Council of the Royal Society of Literature, and is a Trustee of the Royal Literary Fund. Other honours include the Cholmondeley Award and Hawthornden Fellowship, as well as various national Book of the Year selections. Most recently, Fiona's Come Down was awarded Wales Poetry Book of the Year 2021. Fiona has also been a broadcaster and critic, editor of Poetry Review , and acclaimed biographer of both Mary Shelley and Elizabeth Barrett Browning . the poems At Lechlade 00:00 / 01:41 The church was full of dead bees somehow a swarm had gathered high inside a transept window back and forth the bees flew through the crossing their too low wrong note like a moan the building held as if holding itself moaning as it held the condemned bees passing to and fro in air that hung sacred etcetera between pillars but could not save them bees are angels too who will save us if we let them but now they flew uselessly offering themselves brown gifts in air above our heads and dead in the house of death on pews and on the red tiles of the aisle at the welcome table the steward refused to let us call the bee man we must wait till they’re all dead she said and I’ve always wondered why she wanted to deal death to the living bees in the gold church what fury or what loss would make you kill the life-givers the velvet singers in plain sight knowing no-one quite would dare stop you knowing we are obedient and that she could close the church against the life that comes flying in by accident as words do sometimes or a truth glimpsed in the high evening air Coming Of Age 00:00 / 01:08 In the beginning the waters covered the earth but before that earth was fire surely the air made fire turn to water air made water-fire like the Northern Lights flaming green and gold and blue through your iris in the beginning was like a game of scissors paper stone and I could not decide which to trust cold fists poking from anorak sleeves or paper blowing against the chain-link fence long mornings when maybe our teachers were bored too but we were igneous then we must have been cooling already for steam covered the sky the sea the sun when it settled on the window glass and still the sea was always at the foot of our day like a beginning like coming into language like God in the hymn books setting breakers of blue fire across the horizon At Mukito For Jaan Kaplinski 00:00 / 01:13 What’s here now when I come like Jaan’s sheep like Sappho’s lamb stepping down into the valley as the bright evening light slips and pools beside a wall along the water with the gnats and water-skimmers bright and dark falling across the stepping shoulders of the careful beast so quiet so inevitable little lamb of death calling the poet home although he called you first into the clearing with the pond the long-armed well the barn swallows and in the dark the nightingales sing inexhaustibly about the forest going on forever beyond the fence rail as poets do singing in darkness up among the wooden beams of habitation while the lamb comes to lie down at the threshold comes gently to your feet Jaan I didn’t call him here Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Estelle Price read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Estelle Price back next the poet From lawyer to classicist to charity worker to poet, Estelle Price won the 2025 Kipling Society's John McGivering Writing Competition , 2024 SaveAsWriters Group International Writing Competition (Poetry) , 2024 Passionfruit Poetry Prize , 2023 Mairtín Crawford Award and 2023 Welshpool Open Poetry Competition . Her poetry has been long-listed three times in the UK's National Poetry Competition, and placed or listed in several other prestigious competitions. Often writing from a feminist perspective on her East End past, Estelle has had poems in The Honest Ulsterman , bath magg , The Ekphrastic Review and elsewhere. Featured in Nine Arches Press' Primers 6 , she's working on her debut collection. the poems Blessings ‘It would be infinitely lonely to live in a world without blessing.’ ~ John O’Donohue ~ 00:00 / 02:22 Bless the fox that tears into your bins and scatters your shame in the street. This is not the worst that can happen. Bless the red at the corner of the sky where there is a rip. You are part of it. Bless the blood that wells into the phial to be sent for analysis. Bless your stooped father when you leave him, like a grieving swan, on his doorstep. He needs guarding. Bless the baby you miscarried and the mystery of where she is. Bless the hands that picked the apple you are eating. Somewhere those hands seek rest. Bless the Earth and the voices that sing her anthems in your cities. They are the planet’s prophets. Bless the man you divorced. Bless the man you married after. Both have gardens in your heart. Bless the cupboard you hide in when memory wears laddered stockings. Bless hope when she navigates your mind’s black canals and places her fingers on the lock-gates. One day you will open. Bless the new-born river when it trickles into the light. You are that river. Bless the man in the tweed jacket who delicately lied to you. He is a house by the ocean whose walls are cracking. Bless the stranger in the red coat who jostled you in the grocers. She is the woman you were when your mother died. Bless the boy driving too loud in his souped-up car on the bypass. He is your faraway son. Bless the moments that surge like waves drowning the shore you love best. You are an oyster shell above the high tide mark. Bless the woman you still can be, who waits in your life’s long grass for you to grip her hands and dance. her wrist 00:00 / 01:35 slender like a stick of bamboo. its bone an unexpected table-top balanced on a bed of wrinkles that crease and crinkle like a plate of over-cooked spaghetti. the skin thirsty. its texture roughed by eighty summers to the colour of toffee. freckles grown bold and sassy speckle her forearm where once a bracelet of daisies linked arms and danced a joy-jig until dawn. at the base of her thumb, a scar, napkin white, the pigment burnt lifting a feast from the oven. lean in touch can you feel the demands of steel cuffing her to a fence when the world wobbled on its nuclear tight rope? today she’s watch-less. it’s time to give up on earth’s beating drum. take a moment you don’t have long. rotate. be gentle this wrist is porcelain-frail. there you’ve found her shy-side split in two by a wand of blood. take your chance place a kiss where once a pulse purposed. cut through the hospital tag set free a prayer for your mother as her life softens to memory. Diva 00:00 / 02:17 Let the red curtain go up on the stage at Covent Garden and let it be you, Nan, skipping into silver footlights an audience of toffs in black ties and glitzy frocks clapping, conductor, down in the pit, his baton raised (but not for hitting). Let it be you whose ruby lips trill a Mozart aria who flings fear, like a cadenza into corners of the auditorium out-of-reach of echo. You, who bellowed from a stall down Petticoat Lane, flogging cast-offs from Chelsea. You who stood in factory-rain, a black-sequinned dress dangled off smoky fingers, telling the girl, who turned her perm away, to ‘try it on luv, it’ll fit like a glove, luv’ . Cos if it’s you, Nan, you can choose to be Mimi, Tosca, even Queen of the Night. but please don’t pick Carmen, I can’t watch you stabbed by a soldier or a husband who chases you down the stairs with a knife. Let it be bouquets of freesias, not punches, that fall round your frizzy hair. I can hear you yelling to stop ‘avin a larf but it’ll be fun Nan Trust me. I’ve got an Oxford degree. I know how to get creases out of consonants, how to bleach vowels. Your vibrato will be adored from Rome to Milan. No more whelks in Southend, no more whispers on the pier with your sisters, no more sharing a dodgem with Harry and his docker-fists. Even the King will love you (at least for a season or two). And in the end Nan, instead of wheeling the stall back to the lockup as if it were a pram full of ten children instead of Saturday nights at the bingo, I promise you’ll fly out the window (like I did) head west (goodbye Plaistow!) wearing the black-sequined dress – cos surely you must want to? Publishing credits Blessings: Ten Poems from Welshpool (Candlestick Press) Won first prize in the Welshpool Poetry Competition 2023 her wrist: Manchester Cathedral Poetry Prize Pamphlet 2017 (Highly Commended poem) Diva: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet JP Seabright read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. JP Seabright back next the poet JP Seabright is a queer disabled writer living in London. They have four solo pamphlets published: Fragments from Before the Fall , No Holds Barred , The Insomniac’s Almanac , Traum/A and the collaborative works GenderFux and MACHINATIONS . They have been published in journals such as The Rialto , One Hand Clapping , Fourteen Poems , Culture Matters , Under the Radar and 14 Magazine , as well as nominated for Best of the Net, The Pushcart Prize and The Forward Prizes. the poems Dungeness 00:00 / 01:04 The shingle glistens suggesting buried treasure under a bleached whale of a sky, grey smoke mingles with ashtray clouds, a nuclear desert crunches underfoot. The hum of the reactors is silent now, the world's contracted thus, blue-feathered birds curl and call over a dilapidated corrugated shack. Time stands still. Cronus and Chroma collide where stone solicits sky, the air itself imbued with solace and the metallic taste of sea. Stories of those who sought a living as scattered flotsam on a desolate shoreline, are lost in the rags of time. Dungeness is less a place and more a state of mind. Clothe the Night with Stars, My Love 00:00 / 01:43 in the sunshine. your horse. the forest. hungry and frail. the woods are washed. with the orb of broad waves. eyes disdain the world. and the cough of the poet sings of flowers in the stream. the autumn of the west. the splendour of the moon. this wilderness of death. so vast and beautiful. dust strobes. the self is still. our faith has dispersed. peacefully. noiseless and few. a gap in the clouds. an impossible sun. its curtain hangs with the heavens. abandon those who rest in the shade. wear the storms of men and brides. acrid in the stream. rainbow shadows. like a birthday. heavy and decorous. starlight wanders at the threshold. feeble yet found. clothing the night with stars. the calm of the sun. a servant of the past. a bright steed mingles in the water. streaming of stars. your screeching. eyes of the sea. winged with the bursting. overwrought and mournful. felicitas seeking the sun. one life of a day. a garden flower. the sound. and sometimes the heavens. murky and white. lovefull. Nocturnal Omissions 00:00 / 02:56 : I am a ghost of a chance : a weeping husk of a human : scattered remnants of once-functional behaviour : barely grasped : longed for : no longer attainable : I am my own undoing : an unravelling : this unbelongingness : this : this unwarranted fuckering bliss : this sickening lurch : I play paper scissors stone with my memories : each trauma crushing : cancelling out the next : the act of obliteration : a removal of meaning : how joyous! : a negation and a revelation : a quivering flatline : cut down to the quick and the dead of our own true selves : whatever that is : this : skeletal kiss : embryonic kick : fuck the shame away : in the dark : on your own : your phone’s flickering hiss : a faithful companion : outside : the city is on heat : your body a hot flush of mistaken identities : mixed media on rye : the city is a hex : your body a burnt match : fire flares the streets : your body stains the sheets : with thoughts of filth : nightmare ejaculate : lick your bones clean : and yet : it is darkest before the dawn : this : is a lie : sometimes the dawn never comes : sometimes the darkness is within us : some have darkness thrust upon them : the city is a hellscape : life is hard : don’t let anyone tell you otherwise : the utter aliveness of it all : this : this relentless existence : sometimes I think about dying : peace for our time : go home and get a nice quiet sleep : looking back on this half-century : a battlefield : these scars : wars fought : sometimes won : mostly lost : losing : still : the slow decline to senility : I ask for pity : as I age : for despite all best intentions : I come to closely resemble : the man I most despise : tomorrow never dies : but this darkness before the dawn : this what if this is all there is : and yet : lighter days are coming : is a lie : I tell myself : Publishing credits Dungeness / Clothe the Night with Stars, My Love: exclusive first publication by iamb Nocturnal Omissions: Impossible Archetype (Issue 11)

Hear poet Karan Chambers read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Karan Chambers © Paula Deegan back next the poet Poet, tutor and former English teacher Karan Chambers (she/her) has just completed the first year of a Creative Writing MA at Royal Holloway. Highly Commended in the 2023 Cheltenham Poetry Festival International Poetry Prize , she's had work in The London Magazine , The Honest Ulsterman , Gutter , Anthropocene , Butcher’s Dog , Mslexia , Propel Magazine , Under the Radar , 14 Magazine and Ink, Sweat & Tears . Her pamphlet woman | folk appeared in February 2025, and her second pamphlet with Atomic Bohemian is due in 2026. Karan lives in Surrey with her husband, three lively children, and a long-suffering cat. the poems hebridean spring 00:00 / 01:20 here is land like an upturned fist. darkknuckled. jutting. awkward angles & uncanny places. a stretch. rock & shingle. skerrystruck. between jawopen seas. here are its quiet hollows. its openreach heights. its spiked invitation. here is the gorse. furzespine prickle. brindlecoated. here is the heather. a restless unfolding. lingslung fire. smoulder & tongueflicker. here is a melody. scattering its way through the leaves. softkeyed promise. fertile ground sings to fallow. here are the women. working. & tending. & growing. & raising the bairns. & dreaming of more. here are the men at sea. except when they’re not. except when they’re shadowstood. landlooming. claiming what’s theirs. it’s fine if you’re willing. want makes flames of us all. but what if you’re not? what if your body can’t bear another. we’ve all seen his hands round her ankles. seen submersion in her eyes. i know how a woman drowns google tells me that summer 2023 is the northern hemisphere’s hottest summer in 2000 years 00:00 / 01:14 fish are dying from shropshire to sussex across the channel the loire has almost completely evaporated silver scales gasp in shrinking waters here reservoirs run dry gardens crumple under heavy heat & blackberries shrivel on hedges before we can stain t-shirts lips little grabbing hands purple clusters hanging parched listless i do my best to conserve resources turn taps off while soaping hands & brushing teeth take short showers clothes crack with dirt & sweat before i wash them my mind is air above hot asphalt shimmering late into the night i wonder what next summer & the ones after will bring how much difference can i make i’d like to believe but it all feels so futile a few weeks later the weather breaks & we dance in the muggy evening skin sweating even as rain slicks pavements i feel relief but then watch the news chest tightening as what seems like half a continent is washed away woman: drowned 00:00 / 00:28 silt-tongued, stonepocketed, her body a riverbed eroding its banks. surfacing with pondweed hair, she is pearleyed, staring, a glossy reflection want untethered. the drift of mouth of cheekbones seawards, lips & lashes currentstricken spurred into confluence a warning for all those who never learned to swim Publishing credits hebridean spring: Anthropocene google tells me that summer 2023 is the northern hemisphere’s hottest summer in 2000 years: exclusive first publication by iamb woman: drowned: woman | folk (Salò Press)