Hear poet Anila Arshad-Mehmood read poems for wave 13 of literary poetry journal iamb. Anila Arshad-Mehmood wave 13 spring 2023 back next the poet Anila Arshad-Mehmood (she/her) volunteers as a governor at a school and a trustee at a mental health charity. She has a professional background in mental health and wellbeing working with young people, and currently delivers safeguarding and mental health training to colleagues. Her writing focuses on her experiences of immigrant family life in an anti-cohesive lifestyle. Anila's interests range from reading, drinking coffee and petting cats to travelling as widely as possible to learn about other cultures and cuisines. An enthusiastic member of several book clubs, Anila considers poetry an abiding personal passion. the poems The World is Made This Way 00:00 / 01:09 When I scrunch my nose up Tight into my brain I feel something It's like a bad smell crawled into my mind to hold on to Why do we do the things we do To make others feel bad for their good You can be good Own your best Your strength is power And if you are better than the rest why is it Bad to feel good to feel bad to feel Something about me is triggered by you Not something is bad about you I'm letting you know I'm feeling something because of how you Present to me but it's me who feels the feeling Not you who is bad to be good in me forcing feelings on Owning my feeling My strength My best Better, smart, assured Because not everything is me and the world is different and we all have our Better and best self and skill and behaviour And this one can be mine It isn't yours But it's not bad to say Because the world is made this way Labyrinth 00:00 / 02:31 There's a ball of twine glowing at my feet I could pick it up, See if it leads me to the centre of the labyrinth. Or I could stay here, Try my way back to the door which I closed behind me. I didn't lock it but I didn't leave breadcrumbs, I was certain the way back wasn't needed, interesting or useful anymore. Going back or forwards, Forward or backwards. When you communicate differently what do you see A different reaction or an explanation that emotions exist Hide Exist inside your mind, nose, mind. I'm a woman with emotions, More than hate, rage, fear, rage, anger, rage, sadness, rage Curious, open, sadness, happiness, excitement, engaged, hopeful Open the door and check with the key Which key opens the door This behaviour means Empath: noun noun: empath; plural noun: empaths 1. (chiefly in science fiction) a person with the paranormal ability to perceive the mental or emotional state of another individual. Emotional perception, try on the jacket of his dear friend and coat yourself in their sadness, happiness, sadness, step away so it leaves you behind. Emotional perception so your eyes glaze with the tinted glasses on his dear friend see sadness, happiness, sadness. Emotional perception, try on a medicated maze of bars blocking the feelings of every dear friend so only you can feel numb and nothing – not their dear saddappiness. Empathic Guide. Twine in a maze of bloody chains and no need for breadcrumbs, step into the light and wander around without the twine. No map, no guide, no rooms, doors, windows, what comes next, explore, who says twine is the way to explore anymore? Still 00:00 / 00:49 the women who came before me Rose but how can I wonder how can I access my sass draw on words and steal back breath to rise above this smog engulfing me I am drowning in black squares zoom sequences and distant W A L K S dreaming of the time when I step back from the bitter twisted lies written in hashtags I’ll remember I didn’t run from discomfort even when it ran from me like women who came before me I want to fill with air and rise Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb Author photo: © Johanna Elizabeth Photography

Hear poet Carol J Forrester read poems for wave 17 of literary poetry journal iamb. Carol J Forrester wave 17 spring 2024 back next the poet Raised in rural North Shropshire, Carol J Forrester balances words and numbers by writing poems for pleasure when not working in finance. Interwoven throughout Carol's work is her passion for history – especially that of women and folklore. She's seen her poetry published in Ink, Sweat & Tears , Hencroft , The Daily Drunk , The Drabble and Eyes+Words , and her debut collection, It’s All In The Blood , appeared in 2019. Her second, Stone Tongued , was published in March 2024. the poems Dandelions Have Roots In Necromancy 00:00 / 00:53 and if you carry the soil-clotted plant between your palms it might bring you luck. As may the air-spun halos, when preserved in small pouches hidden around doorways, along hallways. Petals pressed by water against a patterned teacup, might dream you forward. The white latex leaking from a broken stem supposedly treats warts. A coven of tiny priestesses are little psychopomps, buzzing on their glorious golden knees, Artemis in their prayers. Day turns to night, and every dusk the moon rises full followed by the sun’s lion face at dawn, birth, death, renewal. All sunshine, and toothy leaves. The Birth Plan Is Abandoned 00:00 / 03:17 You will not react to the pain meds like your father, and sister do. It will be fine. They’ll let you sleep, for all of six hours, across three days, during a labour that refuses to comply with any actions taken. You will hear the words two centimetres from every midwife in the hospital. When they increase the oxytocin, it will drop your daughter’s heart rate, and you’ll be told not to worry. They will attempt to break your waters. Twice. Neither time will they need to change the sheets, except for when you throw up so hard you wet yourself. Speaking of which, a nurse will tell you only a few cases of labour result in the mother retaining urine. Lucky you, you get to be special. The nurse will doubt it until you have spent the last twenty-four hours weeing into bowls every twenty minutes, only for the catheter to drain a litre and half from your bladder. For the first time in your life, you actually feel every muscle loosen in your body. For a moment, you are utterly relaxed. They will bring your supper while your feet are still in stirrups. The third, or fourth time the heartbeat on the monitor falters, you will meet the consultant, who seems to think you’ll fight her on a C-section. By that time you won’t even know what she looks like, because your eyelids will not open. The anaesthetist comments when you doze on the surgical table. Your daughter shits herself on the way out. You can’t move your arms for an hour. The epidural goes higher than expected, and it makes you shiver until you rattle the bed. When you can’t lift them to cradle her, they have your husband feed the baby your colostrum with a syringe. Spend another three days fighting with your breasts to find a hold that fits her latch, and end up soaking in your own milk, her skin the colour of a tangerine. No one mentions how much blood you lost until seven days later when a panic attack drags you back to the hospital because you cannot administer the blood thinners yourself. Indigestion dogs you until your mother gives you bicarb dissolved in water, and you burp fizzy. Pain is a firework that keeps relighting month, after month, at all sorts of inconvenient hours. Then somewhere down the road, you pick up a book that tells you there was a study on bicarb being administered to pregnant persons an hour before inductions around 2016. That the number of vaginal births was higher by 17% but researchers were denied further funding because weak contractions were not a high enough priority. Funny that. Maybe I could have kept that litre of blood. Maybe there was more I could have done. Maybe the answer was sitting in my kitchen cupboard, in the garden, or in another space too domestic to be considered. How much power is overlooked among the thorns? Newborn 00:00 / 01:04 It all takes too long. Sheep too narrow, lamb too big, rain hammering on a tin roof scattering the quiet. Sunrise still sulks out of sight, out of mind. The farmyard a black mirror, midden cloaked in shadows until the security light catches on a fox scurrying for shelter. Knelt in the straw, concrete cold on her knees, her breath is mist. Knuckles tucked between the new-born’s ankles as she pulls it free. She lays it straight, rubs a fistful of bedding to its ribcage. Tries to scrub breath back into its body. Twenty miles away, her own child will be sleeping. Her husband’s mother holding her place until spring runs its course. She lays the lamb by the door, notes to call Bradshaw’s in the morning and tries not to carry it home to the empty room where the cot is waiting. Publishing credits Dandelions Have Roots In Necromancy / The Birth Plan Is Abandoned: Stone Tongued (Self-published) Newborn: Ink, Sweat & Tears

Hear poet Nathaniel Calhoun read poems for wave 27 of literary poetry journal iamb. Nathaniel Calhoun wave 27 autumn 2026 back next the poet Nathaniel Calhoun works on social and environmental projects, usually involving business and technology. At home in Aotearoa (New Zealand), he tries to write with a healthy mix of truth, doubt, discomfort and ambition. His poems have featured in The London Magazine , Iowa Review , Eclectica , Oxford Poetry , Guesthouse , Landfall Tauraka , The Literary Bohemian and elsewhere. the poems sputtering 00:00 / 01:47 decades before I could develop a taste for it my colleague said good friends enjoy silence together this was supposed to help me enjoy his visits in a way that I could not my noisy coevals rang each bell between one collapse and the next we managed like dilettantes oblivious then full of care if we hadn’t complicated matters this could have been a cake walk with clean countertops and fresh ingredients a case study bound for canon we know that and people who knew us know that they would testify accordingly verily dear sirs these two are a package deal whose efforts to punctuate silence needn’t succeed pauses are still a test and I should ask what were you saying were you finished but not insistently if one intermits to break the surface which has again been investing in skin or film or layers it splatters unreasonably like thick soup’s still cold first bubbles it was outcry over anything it was something to remedy it didn’t have a meaning that you missed it was meaning full pleading from the wild contour of high seas heaving and hiding dangers from view but uninterrupted and so perfectly silent warm regard is a good destination 00:00 / 01:06 shared history makes you part of me it’s one pathway into warm regard there when use value collapses after feeding our grit to a furnace having made everything retrograde our fountainous array babbles unquenchably but no longer thirsting our waters grasping at what they should reflect or too willing to ripple too touchy to be still imagine not liking the notes you’re in a chord with through the right slab at certain angles there is no explanation for how light arrives I’ve sat there mesmerized it’s holy you can feed on it one of our claims to fame is we disembarked an intercity bus and the passenger in front of us complained to her phone that she’d had the make-out twins behind her for the whole ride amends 00:00 / 01:48 to signal contrition and begin stage one of amends-making set your vehicle ablaze and push it into a gully pull your eyes away from the shuttle and show enormous care for where the booster rockets land lay hands on the dam rail look over the lake and sense defeated steeples keening for the false cleanse of drought | you could befriend a raven until he brings you treasures you could string those into the jewellery of being deeply wrong and hang them in clattering strands before your face | we had a spirited disagreement about the moon which was new after all like I said there’s something off about a place where footprints never fade to conclude amends-making travel softly to her surface and smooth out the craters come back clean warm and happy | also it was the milky way not clouds I’m sorry but that was obvious at some stage you give your own heart the silent treatment for as long as you can and see what damage comes rescue parties pass by and you hold your breath they are not for you making amends is a laying down of wonder Publishing credits sputtering / warm regards is a good destination: exclusive first publication by iamb amends: Oxford Poetry (Issue 94)

Hear poet Doreen Duffy read poems for wave 12 of literary poetry journal iamb. Doreen Duffy wave 12 winter 2022 back next the poet Doreen Duffy, MA Creative Writing DCU, studied creative writing and poetry at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, University College Dublin, and online with the University of Oxford. Her work has appeared in many publications – among them, Poetry Ireland Review , Washing Windows Too , Arlen House , The Galway Review , The Irish Times and Germany's Beyond Words Literary Magazine . Doreen won The Jonathan Swift Award, and was presented with The Deirdre Purcell Cup at the Maria Edgeworth Literary Festival. the poems An Altered Landscape 00:00 / 01:33 They changed the flow of traffic along the quays we were seventeen Bernie Phelan got in a car with Rasher Mullen full of the joys of life We could see her throwing her head back gurgling, laughing but he forgot and drove the wrong way We could see her head being flung back her throat gurgling Someone made the journey to our house to tell us because we had no phone, back then Two days later we made the trek to her funeral in Bawnogue A flat piece of grass where people dance that’s what Bawnogue means But there was no dancing that day We climbed the fence and crossed the fields bundles of poppies splats of red where the diggers had thrown them aside four of us girls all silent, when we were never quiet They’ve cut the road straight through there now so I can hardly remember the long walk through the fields of grass or even where they were but I remember how she danced the night before, spinning and turning until the memory’s a blur How to press a rose 00:00 / 03:17 I Google ‘How to press a flower’ a sunflower fills the screen This star-shaped flower petals spread like an open hand bring me back to the image on the news fingers immersed in dust grasp and scrape among the rubble for someone’s wife, a child, a mother ‘How to press a flower’ ‘Pick all the petals off, lay them out face down like soldiers,’ The TV continues to spatter dystopian scenes of the darkest opera the barbarity of its sole composer buried in every image I leave the room to breathe when I return framed behind the glass this city, this country in black and white women and children walking towards borders a hollow caustic scene The thorns that remain clutched tight cause my skin to bleed, the people I see, become my own My mother walks across the screen Her knotted hand clutches her scarf her bewildered eyes searching My child muffled in her warmest coat the skin of the rose in my hand her velvet collar Her feet sweep through all our photos and memories littered on our floor My son, eighteen yesterday, clutches her to him just once And then, he turns to me, his eyes already reflect the fight seventeen years evaporate he goes to join the other teenage boys teenage boys with kissing mouths drawn into hard lines A dog that doesn’t understand Why his human boards the train And leaves him there alone Strains on the rope that keeps him there There is lace over the trees over the screen billows of smoke over a hidden thing Slanted rain washes birds from the sky their screams a painful slide on a guitar string A flame shoots across the sky at a hundred beats a minute A coin flicks in the air it spins and all eyes below roll A cluster of clouds in the sky form a star My red rose has turned brown the petals curl away the stem still strong holds its heavy head weeping, the colour drains away Gypsy Moth 00:00 / 01:01 In this November night sky tucked in the corner of a window in the radiology room a fully winged flightless moth is trapped She tries to vibrate her wings to fly The blue gowned child watches from the bed death still She waits The silence is frightening waiting for the sound is worse Cut between slats of MRI slices she isn’t here anymore Beneath celestial moonlight the pull too great she plummets into a spiral flightpath until radiant she touches the source of this light the energy of the sun and like the moth she has gone Publishing credits An Altered Landscape: Poetry Ireland Review (Issue 129, Ed. Eavan Boland) How to Press a Rose: Live Encounters 13th Anniversary Edition 2010-2022 (Live Encounters) Gypsy Moth: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet James Roome read poems for wave 2 of literary poetry journal iamb. James Roome wave 2 spring 2020 back next the poet James Roome has an MA in Poetry from Manchester Metropolitan University. His poems have appeared in Magma, Tears in the Fence, Anthropocene and Ink, Sweat & Tears. James' chapbook, Bull , is published by The Red Ceilings Press, and was a summer 2019 Poetry Book Society selection. the poems Fairground 00:00 / 00:44 We took a trip down to the fairground. I could smell all the fairground smells, the hot diggery dogs, the sweat-smell, see the Ferris wheel turning like a walrus. We ran there. All of us laughing. My dad smiling for what seemed like the first time in ages, since he topped himself. Like nothing was happening in the world. In the belly of the fair we found the candyfloss stall and the man behind the counter had no teeth. ‘Don’t let this happen to you, young laddie,’ he said and grinned at me, and I said, ‘No I won’t’. Then we all held hands together and walked into a furnace. Neighbours 00:00 / 00:44 It was summer and the rain was falling on the old green leaves when she came the first time, bear in hand, to ask for a cup of milk or sugar or something. And I said, What’s this a pet bear? And she looked at me, quizzically, as if to say, Of course it is, are you blind? I reached down to touch its soft brown breathing fur and it growled, showing me its teeth and said, Careful for I have cracked bone and torn the flesh from leaping tabbies. Where I come from, you wouldn’t last five minutes. And where is that? I asked. And the bear said, Next door. A Burning Hotel 00:00 / 00:38 The first thing I did was run past the flames and jump on the bed. Testing the mattress, right? Then the toilet flushed. Mike was standing there, topless. He nodded and I grimaced as if I’d been punched in the gut, then threw myself out of the window. Outside the hotel a fire engine was parking up. I watched it from my last good eye before it all went black. Anyway, Mike called it. The next day the world really did end. Publishing credits Fairground: placed second in the University of Hertfordshire Single Poem Prize Neighbours: Magma ( Issue 61) A Burning Hotel: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Michael Conley read poems for wave 13 of literary poetry journal iamb. Michael Conley wave 13 spring 2023 back next the poet Michael Conley is a writer of poetry and prose from Manchester, England. His latest pamphlet is These Are Not My Dreams And Anyway Nothing Here Is Purple , and his work has been highly commended by judges of The Forward Prizes. Michael's short fiction collection, Flare And Falter , was longlisted for the Edge Hill Short Story Prize, and he's a co-host of The Other: a regular literary night in Manchester. the poems Meat Sofa 00:00 / 01:06 The best way to sit on the meat sofa is naked. It warms to your particular temperature: the sirloin cushions yield like the inside of a cheek and the myoglobin stains your thighs a pleasant pink blush. The meat is beef, from massive bespoke cows, probably. Surrender to the dead hug of the meat sofa whispers the voiceover in the advert, sexily. When you move, the sound is not tired springs or groaning wood, but the welcome squelch of a knuckle rubbing a tired eyeball. In just a few days, it will have become a stinking liability, hot and juddery with maggots. The removal men will refuse to go near it. But for now it’s beautiful, undeniably beautiful; gamey, marbled, glistening on the patio. Curl up and sleep here: nobody deserves this more. At The Park, A Grown Man Has Got His Head Caught In The Railings 00:00 / 00:51 Possibly somebody loves, or at some point has loved, this man. But it’s hard to imagine right now. It’s hard to imagine that for most of his life he hasn’t been stuck at this ninety-degree angle, arms waving, jeans sagging at the waist. He’s so angry with the railings, with the mud under his boots and especially with the teenagers who are laughing at him from the picnic benches. You could empty a whole tub of vegetable oil onto his neck and lug him out by his belt loops but he wouldn’t thank you for it. And of course you can’t ask him what he was trying to do in the first place. He doesn’t know what his pain looks like from the outside. Ekphrasis 00:00 / 01:35 It’s unlikely that this painting, entitled Self Portrait Of MEL GIBSON Throwing Away Disposable Coffee Cup [By MEL GIBSON] is actually by Mel Gibson. How would it have ended up at this car boot sale, for a start, and besides everyone knows that neither professional actors nor anybody with right-wing views are at all capable of serious artistic endeavour. (Look at George W Bush, for example, his stupid little drawings, or Johnny Depp playing guitar.) To me, it seems worth more than the £20 sticker price: the blue background is as striking and pure as the memory of the first time you visited a nicer country and woke to the wine-dark sea, in the dawn. The majority of the frame concerns a photo-realistic rendering of Mel’s arm (or whoever’s arm). With those thick fingers crushing the white polystyrene, with the blood-red sleeve rolled to the elbow, it oozes masculine sex appeal. The silver circle of the wastebasket is a Blakean sun. I intend to buy it and slice off the bottom three inches where the aforementioned title is scrawled then hang it in my office cubicle where I will pass it off to interested colleagues as entirely my own work. It really gives you a sense of what's at stake, doesn't it I'll say, cryptically, and they'll nod. Publishing credits Meat Sofa: berlin lit (issue 2) At The Park, A Grown Man Has Got His Head Caught In The Railings: These Are Not My Dreams and Anyway Nothing Here Is Purple (Nine Pens Press) Ekphrasis: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Mark Fiddes read poems for wave 1 of literary poetry journal iamb. Mark Fiddes wave 1 winter 2020 back next the poet Mark has published two books with Templar Poetry: The Chelsea Flower Show Massacre and The Rainbow Factory . In 2019, he won the Oxford Brookes University International Poetry Competition, came second in the Robert Graves Prize, and third in the National Poetry Competition. He's recently been published by Poetry Review, Magma, The New European, The Irish Times, The London Magazine and Poem Magazine. He lives in Brexile in the Middle East. the poems After Delius On the occasion of not leaving the European Community, March 29th 2019 00:00 / 01:37 For an hour or two over breakfast the lethal Etonians were hushed on the day we meant to leave. Common or garden birds threshed a chorus from thin British hedges. A bog-standard UK sun rose up sixty non-decimal minutes before Europe to shake off a bleary March. Pigeons paraded along the gables in regimental medal regalia. New blossom reported for duty bunting all the pissed-up alleys. Not a chemist ran short of insulin and the growling tide of lorries failed to make a delta out of Kent. Hate was too hungover to fry up the Full English with trimmings in saucy tabloids and talk radio. On the day we meant to leave, a bird of unsettled status flew in to Devon from an African hot spot laden with unregistered eggs searching the lanes for spare nests and any true love crying “cuckoo.” El Pacto de Olvido 00:00 / 01:30 We walk the canal under plane trees, words in one pocket, silence in the other past palettes stacked for la cooperativa, the air thick with dust and late harvest. We talk of work, cards we’ve been dealt, the missing people, our grown children, whose absences now lengthen beside us. I explain how this hour a lifetime ago, Nationalists executed the men too unfit to march to the “work camps” in France, leaving the bodies somewhere over there to rot, dropped like sacks in familiar dirt. They thought nothing could be quieter than a country of unmarked graves. Once in step, we speak of nothing more. Someone’s taking pot shots at the rabbits. Swallows speed type through pylon wires. An irrigation ditch fills, a tractor stutters. Black damsons clack against dry mouths. Homewards we scrape, shale underfoot. The price of peace is always a bitter fruit. The Kodachrome Book of the Dead 00:00 / 01:55 Frozen in their Kodaks, our old folk wear slippers to protect the carpet from their feet. Colours leech. A tap drips. Dinner lingers in another room. A yucca erupts on the lawn. The lounge is an orgy of fakery: leatherette armchairs, plaster dogs, silk orchids, mock encyclopedias and more fringe than necessary on lamps, hairdos, lips, pelmets plus random tassels wherever there is dangling and come-hither velvet. If a grandparent smiles it is like a wolf had stopped by for tea and a slice of Battenberg. Parents vogue in folky knitwear surrounded by cigarettes and the Sixties. Is this how they will see us, our early years tucked into albums balanced on the knee like babies? Will pages crackle as laminates separate and we stare back red-eyed as hounds from blind pubs? Whereas our last few decades will click past in seconds on a screen, backlit, cropped and cherry-bright. There they can find us, between swipes, catching our breath, wiping the joy from our sleeves. Publishing credits After Delius: The New European El Pacto de Olvido: runner-up in the Robert Graves Poetry Prize 2019 The Kodachrome Book of the Dead: winner of the Oxford Brookes University International Poetry Competition 2019

Hear poet Lloyd Schwartz read poems for wave 4 of literary poetry journal iamb. Lloyd Schwartz wave 4 autumn 2020 back next the poet Lloyd Schwartz is the author of five collections, including the forthcoming Who’s on First? New and Selected Poems. His work has been chosen for a Pushcart Prize, The Best American Poetry, and The Best of the Best American Poetry. His other publications include Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose & Letters , and the centennial edition of Bishop’s Prose . Lloyd is the Frederick S. Troy Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, and Somerville Massachusetts' Poet Laureate. He was awarded the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, and a 2019 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in poetry. the poems Nostalgia (The Lake at Night) 00:00 / 03:10 The black water. Lights dotting the entire perimeter. Their shaky reflections. The dark tree line. The plap-plapping of water around the pier. Creaking boats. The creaking pier. Voices in conversation, in discussion—two men, adults—serious inflections (the words themselves just out of reach). A rusty screen-door spring, then the door swinging shut. Footsteps on a porch, the scrape of a wooden chair. Footsteps shuffling through sand, animated youthful voices (how many?) —distinct, disappearing. A sudden guffaw; some giggles; a woman’s—no, a young girl’s—sarcastic reply; someone’s assertion; a high-pitched male cackle. Somewhere else a child laughing. Bug-zappers. Tires whirring along a pavement ... not stopping ... receding. Shadows from passing headlights. A cat’s eyes caught in a headlight. No moon. Connect-the-dot constellations filling the black sky—the ladle of the Big Dipper not quite directly overhead. The radio tower across the lake, signaling. Muffled quacking near the shore; a frog belching; crickets, cicadas, katydids, etc. —their relentless sexual messages. A sudden gust of wind. Branches brushing against each other—pine, beech. A fiberglass hull tapping against the dock. A sudden chill. The smell of smoke, woodstove fires. A light going out. A dog barking; then more barking from another part of the lake. A burst of quiet laughter. Someone in the distance calling someone too loud. Steps on a creaking porch. A screen-door spring, the door banging shut. Another light going out (you must have just undressed for bed). My bare feet on the splintery pier turning away from the water. Crossword For David 00:00 / 00:49 You’re doing a crossword. I’m working on a puzzle. Do you love me enough? What’s the missing word? Do I love you enough? Where’s the missing piece? Yesterday I was cross with you. You weren’t paying enough attention. You were cross with me. I wasn’t paying enough attention. Our words crossed. Where are the missing pieces? What are the missing words? Yet last night we fit together like words in a crossword. Pieces of a puzzle. A True Poem 00:00 / 01:18 I’m working on a poem that’s so true, I can’t show it to anyone. I could never show it to anyone. Because it says exactly what I think, and what I think scares me. Sometimes it pleases me. Usually it brings misery. And this poem says exactly what I think. What I think of myself, what I think of my friends, what I think about my lover. Exactly. Parts of it might please them, some of it might scare them. Some of it might bring misery. And I don’t want to hurt them, I don’t want to hurt them. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I want everyone to love me. Still, I keep working on it. Why? Why do I keep working on it? Nobody will ever see it. Nobody will ever see it. I keep working on it even though I can never show it to anybody. I keep working on it even though someone might get hurt. Publishing credits Nostalgia (The Lake at Night) / A True Poem: Cairo Traffic (University of Chicago Press) Crossword: Little Kisses (University of Chicago Press)

Hear poet Lesley James read poems for wave 15 of literary poetry journal iamb. Lesley James wave 15 autumn 2023 back next the poet Lesley James is a writer from Wales whose debut poetry chapbook is A Walk With Scissors . She's been published in a range of literary magazines and anthologies, including BOLD , The Broken Spine , Full House Literary Mag and Spelt Magazine . She was shortlisted for a UK Very Short Story award by LoveReadingUK, and won Cardiff Writers’ Poetry, Flash and Article prizes in 2022-23. Lesley's words have also earned her two 2023 Best of the Net nominations. the poems Ways in which a cortado can prompt existentialism (No. 3) 00:00 / 01:09 In the pastel Caffè Nero that used to be my bank, a man nudges a scuffed skirting board with his toe as he moves a chair. It falls off. I realise they’re all fake. Held on by silicone or No More Nails. What’s important is the impression. Never mind the feeling of concealment and being duped. The Doric pillars rise. But not very far. What sits above the lowered ceiling, I ask a barista? Beyond the replicated coving? He shrugs and shakes his head behind the Perspex screen. Bank clerks, no doubt. In a stately two-tone world. Greying and cobwebby. You Don’t Know What I’ve Done With thanks to Rachel Long, Caroline Bird and Arda Collins 00:00 / 01:02 And they say that Polar bears are under threat, but I saw them – one grey one beige – shopping in Cardiff City Centre yesterday. I did one of Harry Styles’ tattoos – and they threw me out of art class aged thirteen. Lizzo chose me to be one of her Big Gurrl Dancers, and I said ‘No, bitch.’ You don’t know what I’ve done. YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT I'VE DONE. I invented squissors, scissory tongs to squeeze the slop from cat food pouches so you don’t get gunk all on your hands. And you know that gunk, the cat food stuff that drips all on your hands … I’ve licked that. I chose an elderly guy – seventy-five – to fuck to end my marriage – Yeah! I stole the cat – that cat, the one who lives with me – from his perfectly good home and made friends with his real mother. And I write it. I write it all. Like I’m writing us. Now. In The Drag Queen Vegan Café Ways in which a cortado can prompt existentialism (No. 5) 00:00 / 02:05 To unsheathe September’s lunaria seed from their waxy shields, you should first lick your fingertips. Take a single flat seed head between two fingers and a thumb, and make to snap your fingers. It falls apart. The crispy ovals flutter down. Catch the falling seeds. Some will jump away, and found the Honesty of two years’ time. Pearl lantern moons remain. On vanilla feet with toffee apple fur, the cat forgets we do this every year. He chases the papery housings like they are secrets I’ve been keeping from him, or his own free will. In darkness he practises sleeping round corners for when winter comes. But for now, everything is drag-queen vegan café, Banksy in Port Talbot, Frida Kahlo on blue brick. The buddleia points tourmaline fingers at pigeon-blood cosmos wearing bee earrings (clip-ons). The wingbeats of overhead sparrows purr like flicked open fans. Last night’s massive bedroom moth (critch-critch) has laid eggs from her orange furry bum, and left the building. Everything is voluminous, daubed-on, lipstick smeared, waiting to die. An apple drops. The astilbe is still. Publishing credits Ways in Which a Cortado Can Prompt Existentialism (No. 3): A Walk With Scissors (Infinity Books UK) You Don’t Know What I’ve Done: exclusive first publication by iamb In The Drag Queen Vegan Café: Full House Literary Magazine (Issue 2)

Hear poet Peter A read poems for wave 7 of literary poetry journal iamb. Peter A wave 7 autumn 2021 back next the poet Published widely in such places as Laldy , Spindrift, Poems for Grenfell Tower, A Kist of Thistles, A Kind of Stupidity and Bridges or Walls? , Peter A won first prize at the 2016 Paisley Spree Fringe Poetry Competition . During 2020, his work was anthologised in Words from Battlefield, Poets Against Trump , Surfing , The Angry Manifesto and Black Lives Matter – Poems for a New World . Peter's debut chapbook, Art of Insomnia , was published by Hedgehog Poetry Press in 2021. the poems Found in France 00:00 / 02:30 Though you would have to concede its picture perfect rural beauty here for the record are the things you wouldn’t like about the place. The middle of the countryside such a distance from anywhere. The crowded transport transferring from the airport. The open windows to keep the place cool inviting houseflies. The doorway dogs, the ever-darting omnipresent lizards. The lack of television. The steps, useful for others, which would be impossible for you. Around those steps the lavender which at home would aid your sleeping but here for you a nightmare, attracting wasps and bees. The spider’s improbably small body, impossibly spindly long legs, waiting in the shower room, patiently. Also the tiny white spider – I bet you never saw an entirely white spider! The mosquitoes, the hornets. The blood-sucking horseflies almost certainly lining up to feast upon you in particular. The bats awaiting the chance to be entangled in your lush long hair. The swimming pool that would be out of bounds for you. The conversation in which you would not wish to speak. The revelation before bedtime concerning the cleaner’s cat, its trophy mice and the minor flea infestation – successfully eradicated we think but let us know if you get bitten . As for me, the only aspect of the French place I do not appreciate is you not being here. After 00:00 / 00:54 After words their last have spoken and from here gone Afterwards it is said cockroaches will make the earth their own Do you see already some may be working to inherit behind the scenes planning preparing strategies awaiting the endgame from which all cockroach-types are due to benefit after the black rainfall/after the slaughter of words and laughter After Late night teardrop 00:00 / 00:40 I should certainly stop viewing old home movies, not because of their patchiness or participants’ awkwardness – that’s all part of their charm. Not because of their faded definition – I always liked the Impressionists. Not because they are silent cinema, recorded with the cheapest camera, but because they leave my heart haunted. Publishing credits Found in France: Art of Insomnia (The Hedgehog Poetry Press) After: Sci-Fi (Dreich Themes) Late night teardrop: The Wee Book of Wee Poems (Dreich Wee Books)

Hear poet JC Niala read poems for wave 8 of literary poetry journal iamb. JC Niala wave 8 winter 2021 back next the poet JC Niala’s poetry is influenced by her relationship with the land of the two countries in which she dwells: England and Kenya. She spent the growing season of 2021 recreating a 1918-style English allotment on a site at Oxford as a living memorial to the 1918-1919 pandemic, and to those who served in the First World War. Poems written as part of that project will be published by Fig under the title, Portal . the poems Brood 00:00 / 01:44 You were the odd amongst the keets. The one, who would as I nursed Okelo fall off the earthenware pot-turned-perch by the confusion of black and white spotted siblings on my mother’s veranda. And I did not name you. It was enough that you would not be eaten by my family at least but learn to forage and like a seamstress pick out dudus, from the fabric of soul underneath the bombax and bottlebrush trees. The overhanging roof descended to cocoon us, Okelo at my breast, born on the same morning you all hatched. You who would not be contained. Your bright chirps would unveil my mornings when still wrecked by broken sleep I would slip along, slowly to the outside and listen to the sound of Okelo’s suckles amidst your birdsong she would later mimic and sing, as she toddled on the silken sandpit near where I lunched, while she snoozed. The day you were taken Your mother, would have I am sure, uttered the same warning as when she pecked you back into line. Stay close. Do not go into the open green space. but you strayed and into the talons of Kite so swift you, your mother or I were caught on a breath and did not cry out. We watched you reduced to a cluster of feathers, picked clean. The mobile’s shadow hovered over Okelo’s cot. Okelo stirred, I leapt for her. Sprawl 00:00 / 00:30 Watch me grow. I suck it all in to feed the giant. Out of a swamp I rose like Omweri, Squeezed through poorly laid pavement. Still, I welcome those rich enough And those who put them up. Boundaries vanish. I swallow whole suburbs, kijijis. People forget that I once wasn’t here. Changes 00:00 / 01:11 Insects still tell the seasons here. Dusk, when the cicadas, an environmental tinnitus, obliterate thought with continuous sound soften into a lullaby above which the chorus of bullfrogs arise in a vibrato echo and then fall. Call and response, that talking drummers once imitated across the savannah. Beating out news on carved hollow trees skins tightened over cut trunks to produce sound. Messages that carried over lifetimes until they were dulled by walls of concrete that rise from swampy plains to bring Development. Now, ringtones cut through the night air like a panga shearing elephant grass. Yet just beneath the fired earth, red ants, termites crawl along their regurgitated tunnels up and down and through every building’s crack, dashed lines, urgency on parchment, an invisible shelter-trail to inside where I listen for the smell of rain. Publishing credits Brood: The Lamp Journal (September 2016) Sprawl: peripheries: a journal of word and Image (No. 4) Changes: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet May Chong read poems for wave 14 of literary poetry journal iamb. May Chong wave 14 summer 2023 back next the poet May Chong, a Chinese/Malaysian poet and speculative writer, has had her work featured in Strange Horizons , Uncanny Magazine , adda , Parentheses Journal and elsewhere. She enjoys spoken word (watching and performing), birdwatching and terrible puns. May's nature-themed micro-chapbook, Seed, Star, Song , is available as part of Ghost City Press' Summer 2020 series. the poems You ask the soil if you belong 00:00 / 02:10 What has always been whispered through other leaves grows bold, thunderclaps laterite-red: never. Transplant, hue and clay, your roots never the right length. Untrue/half-bred not hybrid, weed not plant. Be silent and show some gratitude for this flowerbed, for being at all allowed. If you protest, tear up taproots and leave, raw mandrake words and all. Never mind how we were all planted once upon a time. One more time. The loess left behind answers come home . You will be welcome and warm, one with brethren abandoned before seedcoat thoughts. Come home , you must return to ancestral yellow, mellow alluvium where no others are allowed. (But you have already torn/ been torn tongue from stem to survive. You feel the way you will wither, alone in a field of pinched heads.) Rocks whisper from where black dragons tumbled them riverwise. In your sap runs neverbelonging, mountain thrust into monsoon. We are all of us guests from nowhere. The knowing makes it easier to bear the stones. And still you want. You awaken. Again you ask the soil if you belong, and you should not be grateful for silence. Yet you are. Lockdown 00:00 / 01:11 Grant me space secured with key, myself and I. Walls of my own creation, closest to a one-man hug. A floor to take a stand on, because the letting in has meaning. Give me granite and blood concrete before those who have ripped 'moment' and 'wait' and 'just' from their dictionary. Swallow the deep diggers who think keys are only for those in hiding. My time has its meaning, its rhythm and combinations because bolts in the head are trouble and padlocks through the heart are worse. Ask the selves I debrided, husbanded, ribs toothed like tiger traps. Vulnerability has meaning, meaning let me slam the door closed and fling it wide to let you in, you who means something. And even now 00:00 / 01:19 A radish waxes defiant in the asphalt below JR Osaka station’s pedestrian bridge. A man thinks of its rich tresses, his granddaughter, the last time he felt like smiling. Near Wangsa Maju, a moth flies into a packed LRT. Small as hope, alive. A whole carriage holds its breath until it lands on a Bangladeshi worker's chapalled toe. Some nameless brown bird gurgles into the rain-soaked morning. Soon there will be sun and wind enough for everything to dry gorgeous. Silence is learning how to unlock love, unlock tears from behind teeth, loose them with the gasp of something born anew. You learn from your elders how to make broth from the good bones of a world and still, and still, and still— Publishing credits You ask the soil if you belong: Bending Genres (Issue 19) Lockdown: exclusive first publication by iamb And even now: Banshee (Issue 12)