Hear poet Christina Strigas read poems for wave 4 of literary poetry journal iamb. Christina Strigas wave 4 autumn 2020 back next the poet Christina Strigas’ work has appeared in Coffin Bell Journal, BlazeVox19, Feminine Collective, Neon Mariposa Magazine, Rhythm & Bones, Thimble Lit Magazine, The Temz Review, Pink Plastic House Journal, Twist in Time Literary Magazine and many others. Her collection Love & Vodka was recommended by CBC News – making it onto its 'Your ultimate Canadian poetry list' . Christina is a full-time public school teacher, and part-time course lecturer at McGill University. She lives in Montreal with her husband and two children, and is currently working on publishing two poetry books and a novel. the poems Measured Teaspoons 00:00 / 01:52 Who loves me anymore? People like to rehash old said shit, From five years ago … You punched a door, There’s still a wrecked hole to remind me. Pin their poetry on your forehead. Jinx, touch red, it’s identical now. Someone brings you red wine you smile taking about reading and writing you try to tell a joke fail miserably. Look around the room like a stranger. That’s not what I meant at all. Who loves me anymore? They see me with fugitive themes, Forgive me for always leaving, Flinch at the sign of my danger Writers like to play sex games in the day, hunting Adventurous and dangerous love. I can never tell who wants me, Damaged and wounded from giving away My secrets for cash or fantasies for free, Or if they do My ego never knows, Did you take out the garbage? I can never tell time anymore. It keeps rambling on and on like a song on the radio you can’t listen to anymore Indifferent to the wrinkles on my skin. It’s not Friday today? When was my birthday? I may be losing my witching powers, Maturing into the skin of my mother and father Perhaps they never existed, Maybe normality is flowing stillness into my veins, I have become what they feared. Old and out of date, Expired. I have walked into a party In the wrong era’s outfit, And when you try to explain it: The meaning of poetry, When they ask, Why you're wearing nylons with sandals, You keep repeating, Because I want to. Yet you realize no matter How you express yourself What you really want to say is: That’s not what I meant at all. 1973 00:00 / 02:55 i have authentic white tiny flowers in my hair the way i was supposed to live walking for my aunt, down the tiny cobblestone roads in the middle of summer, following the gorgeous bride, in the village, my parents were born and fell in love, singing Greek songs in the open air, watching how the Mediterranean sun plays golden tricks on my mother's short 70s crew cut. It's 1979 on the plane with my dad emergency landing to tend to the sick his father is dying and everyone is talking about olive trees. my hair is too short for Europe my knees too knobby but everyone loves my accent they say i'm beautiful i sleep at the top of the hill with my cousin Mimika and two other cousins have my name and moles. I find it weird that we all look alike yet no one sees the sun's brilliance like me or notices how the moon shines at twelve years old. they want all my clothes and look at the brand names while i care more about the sky and my grandmother's sad eyes. she likes to hug me like it's the last time she will every hug feels like her last hug. i felt death hug me when she squeezed and kissed me like that. we sleep in the afternoon or climb out the window to play with the hens. It's 1991 everyone my father loved has died I'm backpacking through Europe with my best friend and we visit my childhood but it's so long gone, i slept all through Paros Santorini saw all our dirty laundry Pensioni Andre had no mirrors so we hid well under the sun's rays. Every day lasted forever every love a lifetime. It's 1998 I'm three months pregnant in Agadir and doing some kind of pregnancy test it feels like this baby will live and he does. my life will never be the same again i'm a mother now. It's 2001 the ultrasound indicates it's a girl and i cry like a baby praying she'll stay warm and safe and never leave me stranded. with blood and tears. it's 2011 everyone sees Greece through the eyes of my children and we love each other madly every year every ocean brings us closer to death and the cup we were meant to drink together and finally alone is full of memories and our future is still full of dreams. he says no matter how old you are you are always young to me you never age. i love you. these are the years that grab me make me cry to our song and i sign death certificates. i grab hold of my soul and shake it a bit then i silence it. you thought you knew me but truly it's 1973 and the sun is the brightest i've ever witnessed and my mother's beauty haunts me. Dead Wife 00:00 / 01:05 I wrote you all the things I cannot tell your hazel eyes. I do not want to even look at you how unromantic of a poet like me. I wrote about— that time when Little Wing played in the 70s basement of Lily’s house on McKenzie Street. We did not know each other then you were at some other party playing spin the bottle, starting to brew your player moves, charming chess pieces. I spent my love on you like a gambler. I can’t I don’t want to be that girl That writes so many letters to her ex-boyfriends ex-lovers ex-husbands where they all have a conversation. They all have a substitute teacher when love calls. My ex was a teacher I killed myself for you like a murderer. I can’t I won’t wish for you to visit me refresh my six-year-old memory when love stumbles you sometimes forget to get up. I pretend your wife is dead. My reality has no filters. Publishing credits Measured Teaspoons: exclusive first publication by iamb 1973: Your Ink on my Soul (Underwater Mountains) Dead Wife: Coffin Bell Journal (Vol. 2, Issue 4) Nominated for Best of the Net 2020

Hear poet Alex Smith read poems for wave 26 of literary poetry journal iamb. Alex Smith wave 26 summer 2026 back next the poet Raised in troubled Northern Ireland during the 1980s and with a foot firmly on each side of the Irish Sea, Alex Smith has taught at some of England's most socially deprived schools. His stark poetry appears in Twyckenham Notes , Tammy , Clear Poetry , Bonnie’s Crew , Abstract Magazine , Ink & Voices and Okay Donkey , as well as in his collection I dreamt I wrote another me . Alex recently ventured into non-fiction memoir, and a taster of this is forthcoming as part of The EDGE journal. the poems All that remains 00:00 / 01:25 So I tell group that sometimes the tightness feels like I’ve moved into the house across from you but the walls seem further away and I can't remember which memories are mine. I say there's no anger any more, that I've just opened my chest and let the trauma in, stood down, bald and stunned, with liver spots for eyes. They all seem nice, the perky one with Vaseline lips, she says things like ‘reasonable precaution’ and ‘You did all you could’. She’s good like that. At lunch, we spin stories of the worst we’ve ever seen and all the pain mirrors make us seem interesting like esteem is binary or something trite. VaseLinda tells us about the Baemba, about the growth hormone and that stress levels are highest amongst trauma sufferers and their smaller brains so I think – is danger excitement? Was it like that for you when you wanked while your dad hit your mum? They have their own codes here, like super spies, to protect us adults from what you went through at six, MAST STRAP Encompass Hollow. So cool to live in the limits of a penstroke. You smelled of lilac and the past. I promise that when I go, I'll give the chair a spin. Timber fences; empty freedom 00:00 / 02:43 You were five when the world shifted when you told me you wished we were never made. There was a time before those words when the world was broad and apropos of nothing. Those words changed the world, like pregnant did, when we lost some other words, and the ones in the hospital, the cancer ones. Since the words, in this new normal, we take a moment to breathe and fear the empty time. We were younger last week and the world came with us. Us, a couple with everything to prove to everyone else but each other. We’re the youngest in the waiting room, fearing the universal thump of timber fences; empty freedom. I asked a stranger why she had to deal with a cochlear implant and how is that fair? Asked another where she grew up, she said in C ward when my mother saw my wrists. It didn’t hit us then. Not until we cried about how good our friends were and how terrible the rest had been, did we see the control of words and smell the rain a day off. I can’t remember the beginning but I guess I’m here, and I hope to God the end is better. We wait on the amber light and ignore people again missed calls rack up I run my hand along the bathroom tiles undulating till the grout is thick with skin, the places where the rain gets in we overrun ourselves live in inference and spatchcocked time we make God in our own image and then damn Him for it, the latticed ornate last line full of yesterdays the first line since the diagnosis drinking boneyard lattes in prurient despair and I’m sorry your toast is burnt but there was this bit in this song on the radio and I just lost it for a minute ... In this new dawn, post-creation, the evolution of the eye is proof or disproof of God. But I can’t even complain I wasn’t told, I just didn’t listen. And here we are scared of the silence and open spaces just co-codamol and coffee in the car, the Adam and Eve of a rotten Eden. Here, amongst the women who look at me while they kiss their partners, I can’t shake the feeling I’m owed, we’re just a man and a woman not allowed to fall apart, and in all the blank years after the diagnosis, what’s left to worship but the words. The Visitor or Not Quite Flesh 00:00 / 02:31 I never thought you existed. You were a fight in another room, a moon landing, someone else’s problem. But now you’re here. Recumbent flotsam gone sour on our sofa. And now, it’s like you’ve been here the whole time, crouching behind lonely larder tins, nesting in the plaster cracks. You make us into you and your not quite flesh. I’d offer you a drink, coffee I suppose, but the cups are full with blister packs. You were in our bed this morning, muddying the womb of the place, warm and heavy as a sleeping child. You’re in the strangest places. I know you’ve watched me in the shower, squeaked love hearts on the frosted glass, grabbed ringside seats at our love making, left popcorn kernels for naked feet to tramp, each its own little death. I’ve caught you in mirrors, whispering imagined infidelities in her ear, retuning guitars an octave low, breaking all the major keys. Uninvited, you leaf through books, records, trip trap fingers delicately dripping scorn for still-faced ornaments, pronounce our poverty, pick your teeth with cutlery as she cries on vinyl floors. Sometimes, I want to kill you. Pitch you on your back, push a thumb each side of your pitted windpipe, squeeze the life and pulse until you pop gift air incontinent skin balloon. But what’s the point? Besides the dust, you’ve dislodged other things, embryos we hoped buried. We keep the kids out now. And other guests as you are a shy intruder. You hide in petticoats so they’d never know. You’re a secret bruise, cuff pulled down on red raw wrists, weak eternal canker, the moment just before a door slams shut. We know you will never leave. What discord then that we endure your tremendous vacuum, file your teeth and castrate you with acceptance. I wonder, if we were to take the shards of us and carve and mould some other selves, would you remember us and come again? Publishing credits All that remains / Timber fences; empty freedom: exclusive first publication by iamb The Visitor, or Not quite flesh: Okay Donkey (January 9th 2019)

Hear poet Laura Wainwright read poems for wave 3 of literary poetry journal iamb. Laura Wainwright wave 3 summer 2020 back next the poet Laura Wainwright is from Newport, South Wales. Her poems have been published and are forthcoming in a range of magazines, journals and anthologies. Laura was shortlisted in the Bridport Prize poetry competition in 2013 and 2019, and awarded a Literature Wales Writers' Bursary in 2020 to finish her first collection. She's also the author of New Territories in Modernism: Anglophone Welsh Writing 1930-1949 . the poems Elephant Slide in the Exclusion Zone After David McMillan’s photograph, Pripyat, Ukraine, October 2002 00:00 / 01:39 To forgive can sometimes mean to think of them as a child: a wisped head turned in a wheaten basket. Soft fists. A bumblebee in a foxglove. Out walking, my son points, says glove-fox corrects, glove-box. The young buzzing slip of words. The first seeding questions in the dark about dying. Each step on an iron ladder up to the height of an animal comrade’s back would be a magnificent circus act under a sun-striped tent of maple branches a tight-chested pause between its huge futurist ears and then the slide, fast down the stretched scooping trunk – a mural of air, block and sky in a second. Abandoned minder of layering leaves, the corroded matriarch in the exclusion zone is the colour of broken crows’ eggs. A single corvid mother checks the silence with her Geiger-counted call, she forgives. Noctua 00:00 / 01:05 A laundry huff of air and then a weight kneading my shoulder, testing a left nest. An owl has shaken me from a long wakefulness; her wing sweeps my ear. I am floored, but follow the track with the assurance of a falconer. Trees are lithographs in the hollowing light. Last week’s snow is peeling on the hills like old paint. What has to die tonight? When, with ungainly grace, the owl has gone, brief as a flower, I scan the needled taupe. I miss her painfully, like birdsong. Though she left me a capsule of odd bones. Noctua is Latin for ‘night owl’. It’s also the name of a constellation no longer recognised by astronomers. Post-truth 00:00 / 01:09 I only want to know I told them and tried again to see straight through the pane of glass to a reservoir of opaque depth with its own fickle climate and a bed (if it could be reached) of doors and roads, instead of silt, of pitched roofs and weathervanes. The wind changed. A fog blew in. A cormorant hanging its wings out to dry was Jesus on the water. On a sign, a stick-figure pleaded – wide-eyed, mouth round. Stay out. I plunged. I wrote down everything I thought I saw the complete picture. And it was utterly convincing Publishing credits Elephant Slide in the Exclusion Zone: Secrets & Lies (Burning House Press) Noctua: Poetry Birmingham (Issue 2) Post-truth: Finished Creatures (Issue 3)

Hear poet Wendy Pratt read poems for wave 20 of literary poetry journal iamb. Wendy Pratt wave 20 winter 2024 back next the poet Author, poet and editor Wendy Pratt lives and works on the North Yorkshire coast. She's written several volumes of poetry – her most recent collection being Blackbird Singing at Dusk – and her nature/landscape memoir, The Ghost Lake , was described by The Observer as ‘ remarkable ’. Wendy is also the founder and editor-in-chief of Spelt Magazine , which celebrates and validates the rural experience through poetry, creative non-fiction and poetry film. the poems Nan Hardwicke Turns into a Hare In memory of M 00:00 / 01:14 I will tell you how it was. I slipped into the hare like a nude foot into a glorious slipper. Pushing her bones to one side to make room for my shape so I could settle myself like a child within her. In the dark I groped for her freedom, gently teasing it apart to web across my palm. Here is where the separation ends: I tensed her legs with my arms, pushed my rhythm down the stepping-stones of spine. An odd feeling this, to hold another’s soul in the mouth like an egg; the aching jaw around her delicate self. Her mind was simple, full of open space and weather. I warmed myself on her frantic pulse and felt the draw of gorse and grass, the distant slate line at the edge of the moor. The air span diamonds out of sea fret to catch across my tawny coat as I began to fold the earth beneath my feet and fly across the heath, the heather. Sometimes I Pretend I am a Dog 00:00 / 01:51 When we are alone together I allow myself to become pack. We stop and I sit and you move about the place in silence. Sometimes we both lie down with our sides against the parched earth and let our eyes close. When people are near, I act as if I am also a person. Mostly it is just us and the Wolds or the chalk farm roads and wind turbines and rocks and cloud shadows, the fast pace of the sun over great distances. You do not look at the view as I do but you understand how to move within it. When I was a child, I hid under the teacher’s desk and would speak only in dog. I did not pretend to be a dog. I was a dog. I willed myself to canine. The family dog was my brother. I ate from his bowl, slept in his bed. I long to be that animal again. Sometimes I test myself to see how dog I still am. I run my tongue along my canines and feel for the movement of my ears. I slouch my back, and pull my knees up let my spine fall between my shoulder blades. Sometimes I climb a fallen tree or a boulder like that and it pleases me, and it pleases you to see me down at your level. This is joy. In these moments I feel as the earth must feel, and I feel as the glacial till must feel and what it might be to exist only in sensation. Eleven 00:00 / 01:16 I want you to know that we are happy. I want you to know that we laugh. That some days I think I have forgotten what you look like. That we sit on the patio drinking wine and sometimes we don’t think of you at all. That I can’t imagine you at the age you would be now. I want you to know that I keep your clothes near our bed, where I can see them. That your photo is faded and everyone in it looks dated, except you. I want you to know that sometimes I live in the days of your death. That sometimes I can smell the bereavement suite, sometimes the sound of the heart monitor wakes me and the sound of the fan whirring and the smell of toast on the ward and the squeak of trolleys wheeling drugs in the corridor and you in the Moses basket is all there is. I want you to know that on those days it is difficult to let you go again. I want you to know that today isn’t one of those days, I want you to know that today I carry you up to the cemetery like a goldfinch on my shoulder and that you bob away in the air and then back again, and that it makes me happy to imagine us this way. Publishing credits Nan Hardwicke Turns into a Hare: Nan Hardwicke Turns into a Hare (Prole Books) Sometimes I Pretend I am a Dog / Eleven: Blackbird Singing at Dusk (Nine Arches Press) Author photo: © James Thackeray

Hear poet Carl Alexandersson read poems for wave 22 of literary poetry journal iamb. Carl Alexandersson wave 22 summer 2025 back next the poet Carl Alexandersson (he/him), a queer spoken word poet based in London, hails from Småland, Sweden. He was Highly Commended for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award 2022, a runner-up for the Grierson Verse Prize 2022, and selected for the BBC Words First programme in 2021. Carl's work has been published in Atrium , Ink Sweat & Tears , Dust Poetry and elsewhere. His debut poetry pamphlet Förgätmigej // Forget-me-not appeared in 2023. the poems The cows on the ice 00:00 / 02:07 on clear winter days we'd ice skate on Sjöatorpssjön our breaths were condensed precise fast-paced as we'd circle the patch of ice we were told was safe safety is a decision others make * on this frozen-over lake decades ago Dad's childhood friend poured hot cocoa into his ice skates to warm his feet which worked briefly before backfiring nothing is as cold as heat fading * once, I fell through slipped from the pier and had to get draped in a tablecloth the colour of snödroppar in Swedish we have this saying det är ingen ko på isen there is no cow on the ice it means no danger everything's fine * once I poured hot cocoa onto the ice thinking it'd melt but it just stained * Dad always told me if I ever go further out on the ice I'd need to bring ice picks in case I fell in on Sjöatorpssjön I learned how to listen for cracks under skates for spring to break for danger * last summer, in the dark Dad and I heard our neighbours shout there were cows in the lake having escaped their farm for the cooling bliss of a summer night swim we stood and listened as they brought them ashore like we'd listen for the ice to crack * I'd like to not stain this ice this lake this life if I can * in the end the cows on the ice were saved safety is a decision others make. Wind-bent trees still grow 00:00 / 01:46 in a city centre park in Bilbao, my best friend reaches out and touches the trees we pass says man-made things are too smooth, too flat; unnatural. I think of things I have lost: laying down on grass, jumping from one rock to the next, picking wildflowers bringing them home which brings me back to summer days with farmor and farfar by Sjöatorpssjön reading Kalle Anka comics in the shade of an oak tree, holding the ground with my body; breathing it in. when did I stop going for forest runs, stop walking into the kitchen with grass-stained feet, carrying wild strawberries from the edge of the greenery? such sweetness in such small bodies. I read somewhere that twigs don’t always break at their weakest point; that it is more of a chain reaction of small breakages – and that rings out like my first phone. later on, my best friend leans back onto a patch of grass on a hill overlooking the city, closes her eyes, exhales deeply, feels ground against skin, and still, I don’t. instead, I look out at what’s been built below. but also further at the hills in the distance, overlapping each other, wild waves of green – And I do breathe it in. Skummeslövsstrand’s shoreline 00:00 / 02:29 At 5 / at the shores of Skummeslövsstrand / we would collect the washed-up jellyfish / and place them in piles / I don't remember / why. Generally / I think the why-nots are more important / why not build a tower of jellyfish / reaching all the way to the candy floss clouds? See / at 5 / that made perfect sense /... / I want nonsense to make sense again / pick up shiny things from the ground and keep them / draw badly with crayons / so as to grace the fridge / with this representative testament of my nonsensical existence! And then / I want to munch on snow / and feel the water melt / into me / hold your hand and not question it / ask you what your favourite colour is / and your top 5 animals / and if you remember / how quickly we could exit a building / for recess? It was a question of seconds / holding each other / so close /... / Once / we went there in winter / holding plastic shovels close to our chests / stomping through the snow / in order to reach the shoreline / finding that oceans don't freeze the way lakes do / the waves stay warm by moving Mom says / and we run / all the way home / empty handed / convinced / the holes we dug in the snow / will still be there tomorrow /... / In Cornwall, I am told / collecting trinkets from the shore / is common practice. The belief / that whatever the sea washes up is yours / to keep / washed clean / of any claims / belonging to the sea and the shore and the clouds and you all / at /... / Once, my brother got stung by a lion's mane jellyfish / so badly / we had to scrape his entire back / with Dad's credit card. During the car ride / home / Dad explained why / that works / and his words made sense /... / We had asked the sea to play / with us / and it had said no / there is nothing left / to collect. Don’t ask me / again . Publishing credits The cows on the ice: Dust Poetry Magazine (Issue 10) Wind-bent trees still grow: exclusive first publication by iamb Skummeslövsstrand’s shoreline: The Hyacinth Review (December 11th 2023)

Hear poet Carrie Etter read poems for wave 3 of literary poetry journal iamb. Carrie Etter wave 3 summer 2020 back next the poet Carrie Etter is an American poet resident in England since 2001, and Reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. She has published four collections – most recently, The Weather in Normal – and numerous chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, The Guardian, The Iowa Review, The New Republic, The New Statesman, Poetry Review and The Times Literary Supplement, as well as in anthologies such as The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem and Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK . Carrie also publishes short fiction, essays and reviews. the poems A Birthmother’s Catechism 00:00 / 00:56 How did you let him go? With black ink and legalese How did you let him go? It’d be another year before I could vote How did you let him go? With altruism, tears, and self-loathing How did you let him go? A nurse brought pills for drying up breast milk How did you let him go? Who hangs a birdhouse from a sapling? Eldest 00:00 / 01:28 Lean forward in shadow. The room is corridor opening into square, passage and purpose. On the distant bed, a spill of mottled flesh, the white cotton gown fallen to little use. You gape in the doorway. His body is positioned away, toward the window. You stare until he calls, calls you into mutual shame. Now you must gentle. The mind, relieved, packs away its unfinished question. The bowl of green gelatin has no scent. You hold it to your nose as he draws the cloth up with a tug, his grasp like a bird’s. No, not shame. Not now. Though he doesn’t know it, he will be glad when you sit down at last. This is your father. The room is white and inescapable. Paternal 00:00 / 02:24 A parent a plinth. The first week he regarded hospital as hotel. So the variables include the kind of stone, its consistency, the velocity of prevailing winds. What’s purer than an infidel’s prayer? How strangely, in the second week, the swollen limbs stiffened. And the effects of climate change: milder winters, more precipitation, two, three heat waves each summer. All American, non-Jewish whites are Christian by default. Incredulous, I realise his bicycle may rust and walk it to the shed. Such an ordinary act of reverence. The pulmonologist, the neurologist, the family physician. A bed is a bed is the smallest of bedsores. Blood doesn’t come into it. Ritual, of course, is another matter. A Midwestern town of that size exhibits limited types of architecture. I’ve yet to mention the distance. Come now, to the pivot, the abscess, another end of innocence. In every shop, the woman at the till sings, 'Merry Christmas,' a red turtleneck under her green jumper. I thought jumper rather than sweater, a basic equation of space and time. Midnight shuffles the cards. Translated thus, the matter became surgical, a place on the spine. Each night the bicycle breaks out to complete its usual course. A loyalty of ritual or habit. 'ICU' means I see you connected to life by wire and tube. A geologist can explain the complexities of erosion. The third week comes with liner notes already becoming apocryphal. Look at this old map, where my fingers once stretched across the sea. Publishing credits A Birthmother’s Catechism: Imagined Sons (Seren) Eldest: The Weather in Normal (Seren / Station Hill) Paternal: Divining for Starters (Shearsman)

Hear poet Nicola Heaney read poems for wave 5 of literary poetry journal iamb. Nicola Heaney wave 5 spring 2021 back next the poet Nicola Heaney is from Derry, and has poems in a number of journals across the UK and Ireland – including The North , The Cormorant , Crannóg , Skylight47 and Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal . Her poetry has also been shortlisted twice for the Bridport Prize (in 2019 and 2020). Nicola recently published Ulster Fairytales & Legends with The O'Brien Press, and is now working on her first collection. the poems Aviatrix 00:00 / 01:52 I Amelia Earhart popped in for tea on a hot afternoon in 1932. Destined for Paris, she landed instead on Gallagher’s field in Ireland’s North West. As out of place as her Lockheed plane amongst the grazing sheep and cattle, she stood in her trousers and leather coat, calm as a Sunday stroll in the country. 'Have you come far?' a farmhand asked. She grinned, wide eyes the colour of sky. 'America.' II Years later, on another island, in a different ocean miles across the world, she was found by another Gallagher, an Irishman conquering the Empire’s last colony on a rocky outcrop. He identified her by her bones, a bottle of Benedictine and a tube of hand lotion – a broken rouge compact, a woman’s shoe and the remnants of a pot of freckle ointment all pointed to her. But the scientists disagreed. 'It’s a man', they said. She stayed missing, despite Gallagher’s protests. 'It can’t be her – the bones are too long … Plus, this person survived for weeks, distilling drinking water in flames, living off turtles, fish and birds. It can’t be her.' The authorities closed the case, lost her bones. Gallagher died on the island. She’s still missing. III In an estate on the city fringes, a museum marks where she landed, its entrance bricked up against trespassers, windows long gone to teenage vandals. In the carpark, half-naked children play among caravans, weeds and burnt-out cars, running around with arms outstretched, trying to build enough speed to fly. Beachcombing 00:00 / 01:17 I Burrowed in black blistered seaweed that splits the beach in two a whelk shell lies empty. I don’t know why I notice it, rough bran mottled with cream, nothing like the shining white ones we used to collect. You taught me how to select the best. I’d bring them to you and you’d turn them over with long hands so similar to mine, red fingernails tapping for blemishes. At home, you’d coat them in nail polish until they shimmered like nebula, placed on the kitchen windowsill where I’d gaze up at them, forbidden from touching. II I pick the shell up, trace the ridges, turn it to expose iridescent white and pink within, like the innards of a fresh cut. Placing it to my ear, I listen to the churn of waves calling it back out into grey seas. I could take it with me, place it on the windowsill next to the sprig of shrivelled heather picked on a Donegal hill, add it to the cairn I’m building in my English kitchen – instead, I replace it gently between tidemarks in wet sand. False Monument 00:00 / 00:56 In Plaza Mayor, a bronze horse stamps on air, his belly filled with sparrow corpses. For centuries, they sought the promise of shade within, hopped onto his tongue, went deeper, fluttered down his throat, found themselves trapped, unable to fly back up into light. Hundreds died in his belly, suffocated by fiery darkness. Cardboard shelters fill the porticoes around the square, the city’s homeless hiding from the searing heat. At café tables, people sip coffee under shade of frescoed buildings, eyes hidden by sunglasses reflecting sky. During the war, someone threw a bomb into the horse’s mouth which opened its guts and belched out the corpses entombed inside sending them skywards, back into air. Publishing credits Aviatrix: Riggwelter (Issue 25) Beachcombing: Crannóg (Issue 52) False Monument: The Cormorant (Issue 4)

Hear poet Lucy Holme read poems for wave 8 of literary poetry journal iamb. Lucy Holme wave 8 winter 2021 back next the poet Originally from Kent but now living in Cork, Ireland, Lucy Holme is a poet and mother whose poems have featured in The Liminal Review , Púca Literary Journal and Re-Side. She also has work forthcoming in Southword , Marble Poetry , Poetry Bus , Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal and new online poetry journal After... . In April 2021, she was a recipient of a Munster Literature Centre Mentoring Fellowship with the poet Grace Wells, and is now studying for an MA in Creative Writing. Lucy's debut chapbook, Temporary Stasis – shortlisted for The Patrick Kavanagh Award – will be published by Broken Sleep Books in 2022. the poems The Haunted Kind 00:00 / 01:29 I can tell you all I know about awakening under scratchy winter blankets in the half-light of Sóller’s horseshoe bay. A view of the promenade, a 1950s sepia vignette. Off season. Tramuntana, olive-scented. Better with fewer bodies to watch our story unfold. Nights were cold in April although the days still had their welcome pockets of sun. We couldn’t gauge the depth of one another’s heart, so we handled them gently, like rare species. Bared faults before they were revealed, pushed shadows out. One night when I awoke, I felt a presence in the room that wasn’t you. Saw a pale hand turn the knob and then retreat. You said you sensed it too. Ghosts were all around us in the verdure, on the skipping sand. You told me of your cleverest friend, about your country’s complicated past. I kept my own history vague for fear of breaking the spell. The claims we make, early in the day, I just can’t lie and these are my worst traits. Laid bare, they shift like sediment on the shore. You take the sadness, add the words, mash them into something you can use, a cleansing poultice for old wounds. Best remember who you said you were, before the ghosts gather to call you out. La Yegua 00:00 / 01:38 Brown burnished gold, silken flank shivers with sweat. She comes near to sneeze, to stomp then leaves in a kinetic blur, a muscled sketch from Duchamp, I lay my palms flat as her muzzle sniffs and strong jaw chomp-chomps. She studies me. Lashes dark and wet, angles fine as cut glass. She resists form. After all, she is so young. They shout whoa pícara! Click their tongues when she rears and fumes. The bridle constricts blood flow, breath heaves as it tightens. Expansion curtailed, power diminished. I reach for her, but she eyes me with disdain. Turns to rise on hind quarters, lope like six beasts conjoined, across the prado. Every fly that lands creates a twitch that sends her in circles, proud breast raised skywards. She refuses to be scavenged, to be bled dry. Now I know her name, Carletta, I visit each sweltering day and build a life for her. Count the summers she has been on display. We greet each other as — not quite old friends — but something close. We are of a similar temperament: enraged by things we cannot convey. We speak a different language, but I can sight-read the low simmer, her impatience with her teachers. Against the rope fence, I hold her reins, white-knuckled, a luchadora they will try, and fail to tame. Altair Shines for my Beloved New Year's Eve, 2019 00:00 / 01:23 You are above him now, an eager light, just off starboard bow. Unbodied alpha aquilae, aflame. As I, far from inky ocean sprawl, search the city sky, mapping longing and loss. Shroud me in your polished glow, Altair, so I might have courage beyond tonight, onward to dawn. This year, grief cut me off mid-flight, when I had tried so hard to soar. It snatched what I couldn’t bear to lose, gifted unexpected treasures for which I had no room. Reason had me choose what I loved the best, resolve bade me solemnly to forget the rest. But if our eyes lock through you at midnight, we’re halfway back together. So tell me, eagle eye, nestled in the aether can you make us strong again? Can you help us plot our own small constellation, far from the flare of repercussions? To reconcile, so we might burn at full intensity once more? Just as you do. Altair, light the course home for my beloved, as he navigates the dark Atlantic path. Know that I am also at sea, pacing these cold corridors. Waiting for sorrow to loosen its grip on me. Publishing credits The Haunted Kind: The Honest Ulsterman (February 2021) La Yegua / Altair Shines for my Beloved: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Corinna Board read poems for wave 19 of literary poetry journal iamb. Corinna Board wave 19 autumn 2024 back next the poet Corinna Board teaches English as an additional language in an Oxford secondary school. She grew up on a farm, and her writing is often inspired by the rural environment. Her work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in And Other Poems , Anthropocene , berlin lit , Propel Magazine , Spelt Magazine , Atrium , Ink Sweat & Tears , Magma and elsewhere. Corinna won the Gloucestershire Wildlife category of the 2023 Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust poetry competition, and was commended in the 2024 Verve Poetry Festival Eco-Poetry competition. She published her debut pamphlet, Arboreal , in January 2024. the poems Picking up my prescription ‘Sometimes as an antidote to fear of death, I eat the stars.’ ~ Rebecca Elson ~ 00:00 / 01:00 There are no stars in this city. I nibble on concrete, sip cocktails of NO₂. I’m dying for a decent constellation. Would some of those neons do? Or the flashing red lights on a high-rise? I FaceTime Olivier in the Pyrenees. He points his camera at Ursa Major, Cassiopeia, Orion’s Belt … Star after star devoured through my screen. I whisper Merci , then sleep like a baby. When the woman in Boots tells me I’m glowing, I say it must be the new meds. I keep quiet about the stars. On the tube ride home, they twinkle in my stomach like a Tiffany’s heist. My uncle brings back a fox tail from the fields 00:00 / 01:09 He is carrying his rifle, brandishing the tail like a trophy. A week ago, the fox (was it this one?) got into the coop and slaughtered all the hens. My uncle is grinning. The tail is cleanly cut, bloodied at the end. It hangs from a nail in the big barn, swinging like a corpse on the gallows. For days, I'm scared to touch it. The fur is coarser than I expected. I comb it with my fingers, breathe in its musk, close my eyes and pretend it's whole. Later, I run wild with my cousins. We are foxes — and I, the eldest, am the mother, the vixen. Driven by hunger, I burn through the fields, my cubs left hiding in the ripening wheat. The wind ruffles my coat the wrong way. Too late, I pick up his scent. Field notes 00:00 / 02:02 1. field noun : an area of land, used for growing crops or keeping animals, usually surrounded by a fence. 2. Green as far as the eye can see, then the brook. Water-mint, pebbles bedraggled in weed. 3. A six-year-old girl with a net, a bucket full of bullheads. Friesian cows bellowing, tick of the fence. Where did the years go? 4. Before he died, my uncle planted a rowan tree – there in the tall grass. 5. When we first saw the barn owl, it could have been a ghost. It flew low over the field, wings whispering. 6. If I buried my heart, what would grow? Perhaps a sapling. 7. Today, I have counted three kinds of butterfly: marbled white, common blue, speckled wood. 8. Dear Field, Do you ever dream of picking yourself up and striding off over the horizon? Be honest now. 9. I don’t know what I’d do if you left. I love you, field. Please stay. 10. Are you crying or is that rain? 11. In the field, I’m a child again. All this green, all this sky. I could disappear. 12. Meadow foxtail, yellow oat, timothy. I am the field, and the field is me. I am , the field is . Publishing credits Picking up my prescription: Anthropocene (July 2024) My uncle brings back a fox tail from the fields: Modron Magazine (Issue Four) Field notes: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Polly Atkin read poems for wave 3 of literary poetry journal iamb. Polly Atkin wave 3 summer 2020 back next the poet Polly Akin lives in Cumbria. Her first poetry collection, Basic Nest Architecture , was followed by her third pamphlet, With Invisible Rain, which draws on Dorothy Wordsworth’s late journals to express pain. Polly's first pamphlet, bone song , was shortlisted for the 2009 Michael Marks Pamphlet Award, while her second, Shadow Dispatches , won the 2012 Mslexia Pamphlet Prize. Her second poetry collection, Much With Body, will be published by Seren in October 2021. Polly is also working on a non-fiction book that reflects on place, belonging and chronic illness. the poems Motacilla flava flavissima 00:00 / 01:39 When you came to us in the grey yard it was out of the darkest season the first bright day brightest of bright challenging to identify at the time the trees black streaks with sticky buds like rain drops against the grey-green fell you flew out of the lightless mouth of winter with the sun in you most yellow of yellows the sun in you the sun trailing after the spinning rock of your body blazing yellow spreading yellow with every dab of your tail the train of a comet the augur you were you must have flown into the darkness and found the sun by the thin arc of yellow escaping from the well where she had been buried I thought you must have carried the sun in your beak like a seed that you jolted and swallowed her yellowest of all yellows most yellow most bright you coughed her out from your perch on the splintering fence and filled your mouth with nest stuff instead you stayed with us chose us you built your yellow world in the cracks in our grey one lit up with yellow yellow glowed from the fissures in the slate they call you a migrant breeder when you turn to red a passage visitor you knit your home in the passage between houses the passage between one and another your yellow between your yellow lighting the way Still 00:00 / 02:11 For a while I was still. They made me still in a room with a castle view they taught my arms to lie still. It hurt to jerk pinned down. Still they live. My electric elbow. My stutter wrist. Knees skip on the spot. Feet stick reflect the kick. Running in sleep eyes rolling. Viscous movement. Stammering rest. My left leg crossing my right is terrified trapped its breathing heart the hand of a metronome set too fast. I watch it swinging counting out frantic time to the patterned code of the carpet. I cannot feel it. I cannot control it. This is the blood’s attempt at communication. This is the body’s refusal. It throws its hands up. Listen to the hidden. I am not paying the right attention. You say stop frowning. I do not know I am frowning. My forehead aches with trying. With shaping the mouth for a motion like speaking. Radiant somebody says confusing alarm with wellbeing. No one can interpret the language of my blood’s blind panic. The figures add up to nothing. The pressure keeps building clicking up a shifting scale. For a while I was still. They made me still. In a room where I could not move for wanting. Now I am matter and current flux radiant energy dripping ticking. Leeches 00:00 / 01:38 Leeches have three hundred teeth. Leeches leave a bite mark like a peace sign. Leeches excrete anaesthetic when they pierce your skin, like Emla cream. Leeches are precious. A medicinal leech is hard to find. We are listening to the radio on the drive to the hospital. Natural Histories. A half hour of leeches. A leech is doctor. A leech is a fiend who sucks you dry. A leech is a bad friend. A good leech will save lives. Leeches are curious. Leeches migrate around a body. Victorians tied strings to their leeches and let them roam, mine the body’s unseen continents, drain what they couldn’t control. I consider the grace of leeches. The diaspora of leeches. The harvesting of leeches to extinction. An old man reads a young man’s poem, in which a leechgatherer on a lonely moor becomes a beautiful cure: the last leech in England and I think of him now – as I lay on my bed, a needle in each elbow crook, the cold saline dripping in, the hot blood dripping out – skulking in a pool on the weary moor, a small striped ghost very beautiful, very precious, very good. Publishing credits Motacilla flava flavissima: Watch the Birdie: For the Sixty-seven Endangered Species of Birds in the United Kingdom (Beautiful Dragons Press) Still: With Invisible Rain (New Walk Editions) Leeches: Gush: Menstrual Manifestos for Our Times (Frontenac House) Author photo: © Adam MacMaster

Hear poet Sinéad Griffin read poems for wave 18 of literary poetry journal iamb. Sinéad Griffin wave 18 summer 2024 back next the poet Sinéad Griffin has been published in Poetry Ireland Review , The Irish Times , Under The Radar , The Four Faced Liar , Hog River Press and elsewhere. One of her poems was recently included in the Poetry Jukebox installation at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. Thanks to an Arts Council Agility Award in 2023, Sinéad is now working on her debut poetry collection. the poems View from the Dunes 00:00 / 01:06 Run hip-high through seagrass to the hollow, lie on the slip face of dunes, perfect angle to observe heaven. Hear breakers hush, windward side, by the hole for Australia dug with an orange spade. Fern plumes in place of daises, hands sticky with forest scent, intoxicated by the shape of some boy’s name, he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, we never stop on not, crave feelings we can’t fathom, dream one day we’ll walk other realms. Castletown days of tide, not time, we don’t know the Wexford shore will tumble, the slope of illness to come. For now, all the world seems nothing, but a few big thoughts away. Letter from Dublin 00:00 / 02:14 Remember us as city schoolgirls, brown uniforms, scratchy gabardines and knee socks on the Quays. I’m in Dublin this late June evening, the footpath all bar stools and al fresco food, so continental even the seagulls curse in three languages. Burglar bars still gird low-level glass, metal shutters rattle closed at dusk, only the charity shop window invites with a teapot, cat jigsaw, jade skirt, a snorkel and flippers green as Liffey wall scum. Do people still river swim? A string of rosary beads makes me think of O’Connell Street Mad Mary, she’d dance, sing, proclaim, our traffic island Doris Day. We never crossed at her spot, scared off since she tried to talk to us about God. As per usual the Quays are insane, elbow-out-the-window taxi drivers shout blame up Ormond Quay. The traffic flow opposite to how it was in those days. Sure look. Buses of assorted colour, doors flush to pavement, not like our navy and cream old favourites, bubble-nosed, open rear platform and pole, no door, years before health and safety was born. You taught me where to grip the pole, swing on once the bus left the stop, dodge the conductor if we were lucky, scamper box steps at the back, sit and stare like we’d been there forever. Capel Street, tonight I join the boardwalk, bounce timber planks, feel the suspension. Rewind. Reverse flow. The 26 is leaving Aston Quay before time, you leap the platform turn and smile. Figment or a memory, now I’ll never know, but you pull away and I have to let you go. August 00:00 / 01:07 I sit with my parents, drinking hot coffee in the strong sun of their back garden. My father in T-shirt and shorts, welcomes the warmth, my mother is shrouded in cotton, doubly shaded with a parasol and floppy hat, since medication makes her sensitive to the light. They tell me about a neighbour’s dementia, a cousin’s husband’s angina,   they tell me they bought Lotus biscuits in Dealz. We don’t mention my sister, how August was ours, a year minus five days apart. All the while I watch a white butterfly turn in flight, zig-zag the grass, like a slip of white paper, a note that flits away, like something I meant to say. Publishing credits View from the Dunes: The Waxed Lemon (Issue No. 2) Letter from Dublin: South Dublin Libraires Online (May 2023) August: The Four Faced Liar (Issue No. 2)

Hear poet Frances Boyle read poems for wave 19 of literary poetry journal iamb. Frances Boyle wave 19 autumn 2024 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 Author photo: © Curtis Perry