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Hear poet Kimchi Lai read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Kimchi Lai back next the poet Kimchi Lai is a bilingual poet based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. She has performed at Urbanscapes 2018 and 2019, and won third place in the 2018 Asia Pacific slam at Lit Up Festival in Singapore. Kimchi's work has also featured on The KITA! Podcast, as well as Speak Easy on BFM. She self-published her first chapbook, Solace in Solstice , in May 2019. the poems Waxing Moon, Waning Lover Featuring《水调歌头·明月几时有》by 苏轼 00:00 / 02:21 明月几时有?把酒问青天。 Tonight, the moon is full. She smiles at me, her gaze illuminating the glass in my hand as if she knows I wish it was you I am holding instead. 不知天上宫阙，今夕是何年。 I wonder if we have met in a different dimension; or if we will meet in heaven. 我欲乘风归去，又恐琼楼玉宇，高处不胜寒。 I would sit with you under an arbour in the gardens. Surrounded by pillars cut from the finest of jade and sharpest of teeth, protecting us from the fierce winds that try to blow us apart. 起舞弄清影，何似在人间? But the air is still tonight, and you are not by my side in this life. So how dare I wish for your presence in another? 转朱阁，低绮户，照无眠。 The moon comforts me from my window. She is trying to coax me into slumber. 不应有恨，何事长向别时圆? “You see”, she whispers to me. “I shine brightest in the face of longing. What need is there for my light if your lover radiates enough warmth? What need is there for a full moon if you already feel complete?” 人有悲欢离合，月有阴晴圆缺，此事古难全。 Perhaps I will never see your crescent smile, or hear your gibbous laugh again. Yet I know this: we are under the same sky. And now whenever the moon waxes or wanes, I will know it is her saying that you are thinking of me. 但愿人长久，千里共婵娟。 Fatal Blossom 00:00 / 01:00 The sprig of leaves I planted the first night we spent together bloomed today. You cup one in your hand, petals the deepest shade of sunset at its final second before plunging into dusk, haphazard but stunning. Ignore the thrum beneath your feet; the tangled vines that pulse and hiss with poison and hidden truths cannot hurt you as long as you keep me near. Let them creep quiet and swift the same way nightfall creeps upon day, curling around your crown to whisper sleep into your temples. Do you understand? This garden started out an angry mess of ivy – it was never supposed to bloom. Do you like periwinkle? Focus on the flowers. I worked so hard on them. Romantic Sentence 00:00 / 00:53 Words are unconfined, not meant to be held. But once in a while I will get lucky and manage to catch some at the tip of my pen, just long enough for me to string them into an ink necklace. Alive with earnest grammar and passionate vocabulary; every dotted 'i' and crossed 't' quivering. Staining my fingers in haste I drape it around your shoulders, fasten the ends with a full stop. The letters startle at your warmth, smudging slightly. They tumble downwards in my clumsy locution and catch at your collarbone. The same way my breath does in my throat when I see them sigh and settle into your skin; dark blue biro etched across your chest. Oh, sayang. You were meant to wear these words. Publishing credits Waxing Moon, Waning Lover / Romantic Sentence: Solace in Solstice (self-published) Fatal Blossom: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Dominic Weston read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Dominic Weston back next the poet Dominic Weston makes wildlife programmes for television, runs over the Mendip hills, and writes poetry. His work has appeared in numerous print and online magazines, journals and anthologies, including Ink, Sweat & Tears and Green Ink Poetry . Once, he even slipped off the page into poetry film . Dominic's work veers into the natural world – often with a healthy undercurrent of darkness. Adopted as a baby, and having lost both parents to prolonged illness in recent years, Dominic treasures most the poems he writes about his family. the poems November 00:00 / 01:35 Scissoring volleys snip across the dripping field call and counter-call sewing lines of reassurance between fleets of long-tailed tits as they slip westwards from the cider orchard through the beeches to infiltrate a long thorn hedge Half the front leg of a roe deer is sheathed in mud-washed fur, a finger of matt bone protruding at one end, a black flinty hoof at the other – rejected by the nose of a curious hound articulated by the shunt of a cautious boot Ghost memories of deer appear along the Fosseway in the dun flanks of fallen field stone greenish with algae half-light fashioning their features Pale flashes on the path, peroxide husks look like Bambi tails not the fallen maize wraps from a squirrel’s overhanging store Thwud! Strikingly rigid and damp-dense Millie claps my knee backs with an over-long branch Labrador trots her pride in the mimic trophy – her own piece of Jane Doe Beneath our feet limestone knucklebones push up through the blackspots of let down sycamore palms yellowing gloves smooth the naked crevices November is the time when the ground is made. The Daedalus I Knew Inspired by the bronze statue Daedalus Equipping Icarus by Francis Derwent Wood 00:00 / 01:28 The father of Icarus is on his knees, left hand deftly lacing a leather cuff around his son’s bicep, while the right carries the weight of the wings It was not my father but my mother who knelt before her own boy wonder to tie the laces on my new school shoes and launch me into the world Daedalus’ rapt attention to his son as unimaginable to me as flight itself, a pantomime played out on a mythical isle, nothing I could know My mother sprang my father from the loveless island his parents confined him to determined that her own children would never see its brittle shores My father’s skills earned the salary that paid for tan sandals in the summer and black lace-ups in winter, that put food on the table year round So no, he never did kneel before me to tie my laces or straighten my wings, but he lent me his place in my mother’s heart and that selfless act let me fly And The Third Wish 00:00 / 02:41 It would be an unseasonably warm afternoon when I would turn myself inside out start to roll the skin back from my crown unrooted hair flopping down onto my chest the skin slinking over shoulders to the ground An unexpected easterly wind would rise making it a very good day for laundry so into the tub with it, and half a box of soda to scrub, scrub, scrub with the old bristle brush and then three times through the mangle The hottest part of the day would see me sitting in the shade on that stool from St David’s with its three clawing rhododendron legs me thinking about nothing in particular until my freed skin flapped bone dry in the wind Once the steam from pressing had dissipated I’d take out my reglazed glasses and look for the first time into every crevice and wrinkle survey the landscape supported by my fingers and audit my own hide for scars Out of the long-crushed grey shoebox I’d lift the gold leaf embosser I’d liberated from Reading Grammar’s library stores retired from inscribing Dewey’s digits on leather spines in favour of cold hard print Plugged in the mains and finally hot to its tip I’d parsimoniously press through foiled tape to fill in the full extent of every scar I’d found with a thin shield of gold, soon gone cold the chink in my cheek where it kissed the steel-lined typewriter case in the hall the dent in my forehead where it struck the brake lever of my Raleigh Tomahawk the grave accent over my right eyebrow inscribed by an open can of baked beans Then my hands, oh my hands! my pride, my strength, my means the scenes of countless crimes and remedies so many nicks, so many cuts, so many gouges painstakingly gilded into delicate koi scale gloves At the end of this burnished afternoon I’d slowly pack my tools away for the last time then burn my clothes in that rusting rubbish bin carefully step back into my newly sequinned skin and shimmer my way to Gomorrah. Publishing credits November: exclusive first publication by iamb The Daedalus I Knew: The Language of Salt (Fragmented Voices) And The Third Wish: Gallus supplement of Poetry Scotland (Issue 101)

Hear poet Katrina Naomi read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Katrina Naomi back next the poet Katrina Naomi’s poetry has featured on Poems on the Underground, as well as on Radio 4’s Front Row and Open Country. She tutors with Arvon and the Poetry School , and has a PhD in creative writing from Goldsmiths, University of London. Katrina’s fourth collection, Battery Rocks , won her the Arthur Welton Award from the Society of Authors, and was Daljit Nagra ’s Collection of the Month on Radio 4 Extra’s Poetry Extra. She's also received the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry, and with fellow poet Helen Mort, a Saboteur Award. the poems Fickle Lover 00:00 / 01:33 Ours is not a relationship of equals. You’re passionate, rough, violent. So much is an act – you’re always on display – I want you all to myself. Of course, you’re unfaithful, you swim with anyone, moshing their thighs, their breasts, knocking them out with your rush. At one time, I could choose whether to be in love with you. I do my best to ignore your conquests. Instead, I think of when you’re away, how you leave me gifts – razor shells, man o war, jags of glass – fragile reminders of your own tough love. I need your chill; can’t help myself. You swoosh round my brain, frolicking with neurones, make my skin fit me, tighter, tighter, after I’ve plunged right in. I’m going deeper. I can’t consider what you want – pinning me, scraping my limbs along rocks. I’ve learnt to say no. Despite your allure, I won’t go to you at night. But sunrise, I’ll be waiting for you, having shifted my day around your tides; my primitivism seduced – loving how you run, spuming, towards me. And if there were no sea? 00:00 / 00:55 no shushing of the pull / no shimmer of summer / no knowledge of splash / no repetition of clouds / no clouds / no splendour of kelp / no fish / no study of scales / no silhouette of oystercatcher / the moon on repeat / no islands / no need for ships / storms would laze in their beds / no Speedos / no coastal erosion / all of us living inland / no salt / no shells / no need to row / no Jaws / no glamour of rock pools / nowhere for the sun to swim / no rivers / rain unknown / no place to drown in the kelp forest 00:00 / 01:40 the first time she finds herself among brown strands between fear and wonder floating in this other world of upside down a place a person could wed herself to so much dank silence beyond her breath the gentle murmur of limbs in suspension their arc and splay there’s no peace like this in the dry country she’s like a body in a jar at the lab but keeps her Dutch colours sliding her mind through slender lengths of weed fabric-like plastic-like part translucent part shine like nothing else but kelp her restless hair goes on its own pulsing journey she forgets for blissed moments she can’t breathe here this isn’t air waves nudge overhead it’s like any place almost visited say a city say Seville and she talks half-seriously half what-if of how she might live here the kelp wafts in welcome displays its tentacles as she refuses neoprene longs for kelp’s beckon and touch longs to pass as a local a strange fish for sure but one who could belong Publishing credits Fickle Lover: Same But Different (Hazel Press) And if there were no sea?: berlin lit in the kelp forest: winner of the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry 2021 All poems: Battery Rocks (Seren Books, 2024)

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

Hear poet Nathan Dennis read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Nathan Dennis back next the poet Nathan Dennis is a playwright and poet of Floridian extraction. He is the Vintner-in-Chief of Wine Cellar Press, a poetry press dedicated to free and formal verse in equal measure. Nathan's work has appeared in The Knight's Library , Anti-Heroin Chic , The Cabinet of Heed and Serotonin. His upcoming chapbook, I Am Hades , is forthcoming from Exeter Publishing. the poems Waltz on the Adriatic 00:00 / 01:03 I’m running out of money. And the money I have, I’m burning on twelve euro Turkish Coffee. Sacking Constantinople, cup by cup, as a Deadbeat Doge seated outside myself in a composite memory of marrying The Sea, in the Drawing Room of Old Europe – where we turn our sins to museums, and make most serene our palaces of failure. My dwindling euro pays for more dwindling daylight, golden dusk that smudges off the cruelties of cold accounts: bank or historical. A sunset censor. A fuzzy shadow blanket. A halo of streetlights off the Basilica that washes our decay into the Adriatic. Venice: I weep the beauty of atonement as the stars tinker down a soft waltz on Piazza San Marco that I shuffle to in a twisting trinity of errors repeated, that somehow becomes more beautiful with each misstep. Blood Orange 00:00 / 01:23 I met a blood orange at the grocery store. I wore gloves when I picked up the blood orange. I wore gloves when I brought the blood orange home. I wore gloves when I took off my gloves. I asked the blood orange to get a test, But the blood orange said that tests were hard to come by And to trust her, because oranges are organic And I can trust organic. And the orange asked me if I had been tested, And I said no, but I wore gloves when I picked her up. So the orange said she wasn’t worried, so I shouldn’t be worried, But if I was worried, she would just peel herself. But I was very hungry. And her peel looked very clean. So I ran the blood orange under some water. And I lathered her peel until her peel relaxed. And I peeled her peel with nails clipped clean, Until the scent of citrus was screaming in my nostrils And the hemoglobin in the pith strained into my hands As rivulets, flooding the channels of my palm lines. And the death god that loomed so large in my mind Shrank so microscopic when looking at an orange unfurled, Asking me so kindly to eat. And vitamin C does a body good. Leviathan America 00:00 / 01:44 Danger! Danger! Harpoons are upon her – Us! Us! Leviathan America: Sperm whale, punctured and moored by her own spur, Bartered without care to any stranger. Danger! Leviathan America! At sea: Cannibal of Democracy. See how she grows fat: guzzling her krill Past her fill. Terror on the open sea: A fifty-foot blubber-laden danger. Stranger! Leviathan America! She: ravenous for ivory and oil, She: sells her calf to Ahab for a helm, She: stalks the seas for leaky heads of spoil. Have you seen that? A whale captain a ship? Watch the leviathan spear her own kin, Overladen with sin, she grows greater. Traitor! Leviathan America! Mutiny! Mutiny on the high sea! No barter left! She sold her sweet plunder. She sold all her oil for all her blubber. She sold her blubber for her ivory. She sold her ivory for her harpoons. She sold her harpoons for her ambergris. She sold her ambergris for drops of oil. And her ship rattles as the tempest howls, And her crew flees as the storm cleaves her bow. And all the sharks and orcas and krakens Circle the overladen cetacean With harpoons of her own perverse making. Lashing, lancing her till the chop foams red From her leaky head: weeping blood and dread Rancid failure: curdled over us – her! Hunted and drowned at our hand, our mother. Mother! Leviathan America! Publishing credits Waltz on the Adriatic: Neologism Poetry Journal (Issue 28) Blood Orange: Anti-Heroin Chic Leviathan America: Wine Cellar Press (Issue One)

Hear poet Pam Thompson read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Pam Thompson back next the poet A Hawthornden Fellow in 2019, Pam Thompson is a writer, educator and reviewer. She's been widely published in magazines including Atrium , Butcher’s Dog , Finished Creatures , The Alchemy Spoon , The High Window , Ink, Sweat & Tears , The North , The Rialto , Magma and Mslexia . Pam is the author of three poetry pamphlets – Spin , Parting the Ghosts of Salt and Show Date and Time – as well as full collections The Japan Quiz and Strange Fashion . Her fourth pamphlet, Sub/urban Legends , won the Paper Swans Press Poetry Pamphlet Prize in 2023. the poems Shoes for Departure After Marina Abramović 00:00 / 01:21 You are about to set off on your journey. What will you need? Map and compass? Or if you’re at sea – telescope, sextant – to track angles between you and the stars. Tonight Polaris is brighter. You are no stranger to True North. No one is awake to wave you off. Suitable clothing is taken for granted – the hood of your parka, fur-lined, detachable or your blue raincoat, as light as the song of itself, is groundsheet and sail, folds into the size of your hand, the hand which feels under the bed for the shoes for departure, hands which find shoes of pale carved amethyst. Putting them on is like stepping inside the Earth, and as you do, the room, your city, the galaxies, spin away and you are the fixed point, each foot, re-making gravity, hardly moving at all, travelling far away. Reading my mother’s diaries 00:00 / 00:59 admiring again her sloping handwriting. I have been trying to fill in the gaps in my memory. No that’s a lie. I have been trying to bring her back, to unspool her words and sentences until they loop themselves into her own true form. Mum, where have you been? All evening I've watched for the blur of your shape in the stained-glass panel of our front door. I have been a watcher at the gate. What kind of mother would stay out for so long, stay out this late? I have been reading my mother backwards, standing on the slope of my own life, looking down to that squiggly, tangled path. She is so far ahead, the sun’s bright, I’m shielding my eyes. In Whitby 00:00 / 00:53 on a January morning my heart climbs the 199 steps turns, takes a breath, and for seconds is terraces, the swelling North Sea, Inside St. Mary’s Church, my heart reads a notice, Do not ask the staff where the grave of Dracula is because there isn’t one and my heart smiles, moving very slowly between pews looking for, but not finding, a carved effigy of itself. Instead, is an offering and a candle that stays lit even in the day’s sudden gusts which blow inside and outside my heart in the abbey where it settles at last, in front of a statue of St Hild. Publishing credits Shoes for Departure: The High Window (Autumn 2023) Reading my mother's diaries: Sub/Urban Legends (Paper Swans Press) / winner in the Paper Swans Pamphlet Prize 2023 In Whitby: Mary Evans Picture Library

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

Hear poet Alan Kissane read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Alan Kissane back next the poet Alan Kissane is an English teacher in the Midlands, UK, whose poems have appeared in Allegro , Dissonance Magazine , Dust Poetry , Emerge Literary Journal, Epoch, Fahmidan, Kindling and Neologism. He contributed to Acid Bath Publishing’s printed volume, Wage Slaves , and is currently finishing an as-yet-unnamed collection of poems on politics and the self. the poems Bonfire of Inanities 00:00 / 01:17 I want to build the walls of a house I don’t intend to live in, just to use my hands. I want to breathe free and easy, all of the time. It’s not much of a dream but it’s mine. I want time to guide me forward, again. I’ve had enough of circles, curves. I don’t understand geometry. I want to see what’s in front of me. To have a ‘no surprises here’ sign tattooed on my eyelid door, in my clear light vision, like a worthwhile political slogan. I don’t want to be alone. I’m afraid of being given time to think, to feel. I want to read and consume words grown in fields of azure light. But I’m jealous of words; the way they connect and spark like I can’t, with people, resonating within. I don’t want to be crooked anymore, hunched over the weight of my own life. I just want to burn the unnecessary in me, like Savaronola. In a Glass Case 00:00 / 00:37 Footsteps, like fingertips, trace lines across this worn face, back and forth, sometimes lost, sometimes not, always crisscrossing, back and forth, like moments or thoughts, sometimes lost, sometimes not, like butterflies pinned to a board in a glass case in a museum, beautiful yet lonely, untouched, unfree, and gazed upon in awe before being forgotten. Up Here With the Rooks and Ravens 00:00 / 00:48 She sits in fury, her eyes torn from blindness, her robe rotten, a reminder of the so-called glorious resolution. Here the scales have truly fallen from her hands, the sword heavy, bowed, rusted and bitten by the querulous blood of backs slain in the name of something below, a war over numbers and paper: nothing and everything. This is this land now, a stain on a vast leaf of aged parchment floating on a lake of unbelief, with no way off. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Beth Brooke read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Beth Brooke back next the poet Retired teacher Beth Brooke was born in the Middle East, where she did important parts of her growing. She now lives on Dorset’s Jurassic Coast: its landscapes seeping into her writing. Beth's debut collection, A Landscape With Birds , will be published by The Hedgehog Press in 2022. the poems Man and Bird Ink on paper preparatory work for the Unknown Political Prisoner (1953) 00:00 / 01:02 'Speak to me,' says the crow, 'give me your story. Tell the roots and branches of where you chose to roost and build your nest.' The man settles the crow upon his chest, the needle prick of its claws a small discomfort in exchange for company, for the richness of the crow’s attention. 'I come,' he says, 'from the scent of the sea. I was seeded by the ocean in the valleys between chalk hills. 'In autumn the hawthorns of the inland slopes are bent by salt breezes and heavy with berries, crimson, tough-skinned against the blasts of winter. They were my roost.' 'I will go there,' says the crow, 'I will gather berries for you. The scent of the sea will be on them. It will comfort you.' Skin 00:00 / 00:31 I have begun to inspect the edges of myself, I notice that I bruise more easily than when I was young. I catalogue this, and the creases just beginning to be visible around my mouth. I think of my mother’s skin withered, transparent, fragile as tissue paper; the slightest move tears it, lets mortality in. The Taste of Summer 00:00 / 00:50 In childhood I ride the hill, stand on the pedals, propel myself to the top, throw down the bike, and flop exultant under a peach-fat sun. It hangs ripe in an endless sky heavy with the scent of August. I reach up, plunge my hands wrist-deep into summer's flesh; gouge out the fruit, cram my mouth, eat until I am nectar-drunk with joy. In childhood, chin and fingers sticky with summer juice, I ride down the hill. Legs stretched out above the pedals, I shake with laughter. I am eight years old and I can eat the sun. Publishing credits Man and Bird: exclusive first publication by iamb Skin: Green Ink Poetry (Discovery Part 2) The Taste of Summer: an earlier version of this poem appeared in Bonnie's Crew (Issue 5)

Hear poet Deborah Harvey read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Deborah Harvey back next the poet Deborah Harvey lives in Bristol, UK, where she's co-director of The Leaping Word : a poetry consultancy providing creative and editorial advice for writers, plus qualified counselling support for artists exploring the personal in their work. Her poem Oystercatchers scooped first prize in The Plough Arts Centre's 2018 Short Poetry Competition , while her Conversations with Silence was runner-up in the 2022 Buzzwords Poetry Competition. Deborah's work has been published widely, as well as broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please . Her sixth book, Love the Albatross – out in autumn 2024 – is a collection on the theme of estrangement. the poems When an albatross crash-lands in a dream 00:00 / 00:43 Long ago I saw an albatross fly head-first into a dream so fast so hard it penetrated half a mile deep. Inside the crater a wreckage of feather and bone remains which over millennia became this fossilised skull you’ve found and which slicing open my right forearm you press into the wound holding the edges until they knit. We’ll keep this for later, you tell me we’ll talk about it then. Just when you get yourself out of one labyrinth 00:00 / 01:46 you find you’re in another, in fact, you’re not only in it, you’re accidentally helping to build it & trapping your children inside with you where you can’t keep them safe, I know, what a ridiculous promise that was. It’s the exits that are entrances that are the problem, they’re so difficult to spot & since the story starts with you already inside, you’ll have to think backwards. Maybe it’s that stone staircase that tunnels down, getting narrower with each step, till you squeeze into a room with walls the colour of smokers’ lungs, bare lightbulbs & abandoned fridges, where the glass in the portholes is reinforced with grids of wire. Or perhaps it’s that chute you saw in the museum of a coastal town, or maybe it was London, anyhow, it’s the same neighbourhood where a serial killer’s operating by means of secret passages through cellars & the guide says of course we’re not going down there & gives you a shove & you find yourself wedged between brick walls, dangling over a long drop into nothing. Or perhaps it’s the aperture of a shell that's the whorl of your newborn’s ear & you’re clattering round & round its spiral steps, desperate to find them & bring them out & you run through rooms to get to rooms to get to the one room in the house you’d forgotten about, where the creature who was there all along steps from the darkness & turns to face you, a shape in the mirror. Highly commended in the Slipstream Poets 2024 Poetry Competition, and shortlisted for The Plough Poetry Prize 2023 Your silence is all I have left After Rumi (1207-1273) ‘Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there.’ 00:00 / 01:17 so I’ll take it, make of it a field tucked in the gap between factory buildings and the railway embankment with views over the floodplain to the river, the hills, the high cloud mountains of another, older country. The shouting of jackdaws and rooks in the rookery the endless drill of motorway traffic won’t break its surface nor the bulldozers grazing empty farmland, digging foundations for a future town beyond wood and common. One day a sparrowhawk will come followed by rain that will wash the silence clean of hope and when I straighten up, stretch my arms and back I’ll find I’ve become its hollowing oak, its fox- trodden paths, the ditch, these stands of towering hogweed. By autumn I’ll be mist on its distant horizon in winter I’ll lie down and turn to mud looking up at the shapes the night birds make against the dark. Shortlisted for the 2023 Bridport Poetry Prize, and runner-up in the 2023 Frosted Fire Single Poem Competition Publishing credits When an albatross crash-lands in a dream: Ink Sweat and Tears Just when you get yourself out of one labyrinth: exclusive first publication by iamb Your silence is all I have left: Ticking Clock Anthology (Frosted Fire)

Hear poet Sam Henley Smith read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Sam Henley Smith back next the poet A Person Centred Therapist with a special interest in bibliotherapy, Sam Henley Smith found writing poetry helped her process the death of her parents from COVID-19. Sam’s had work published in a variety of journals, including Anthropocene , Green Ink Poetry and One Hand Clapping . She was longlisted in 2021 for the Plough Poetry Prize, and commended by Jacqueline Saphra in the Winchester Poetry Prize. the poems Requiem Delphinus Delphis For Dad 00:00 / 01:02 I find you again, in the body washed in. You sailed out of this city single and sailed back betrothed, exchanged the brine in your bloodstream for love, found land legs and made family your amphibian home. Now, boat-teeth line the mouth of the muddy creek where the sea spat the creature out. Face up, fixed grin, unable to swim with or agin the tide. Time swallowed the whole whale of it and retching, the sea returns you to me in case I hadn't understood that you were gone. I have come to the wall to pray 00:00 / 00:55 to be with you. The stone is peppered with scars, an executioner’s wall – rows of hearts obliterated. You wouldn’t approve, I can hear you dismissing such display of affection as sentimental memorialisation. Hand-painted in pretty pink FUCK COVID on a heart is not your style. Yet in the insistent overwriting of a name, scribed again and again, I see your pain – determined to be etched forever as if you had held that husband’s hand and together had shouted your loves. A familiar route 00:00 / 01:31 I’ve researched it on the internet, how to brace my back between wall and chair right leg slightly forward, knees pinioned fondly around your together-knees. It’s my turn to raise you now Dad. British Red Cross has lent us the commode but Covid-style, we are alone. I struggle, ease you to sitting, gently ease, gently please , then a pause for breath. Another breath. And if the Tamar Bridge could swing it would look just like your legs as its long carefully engineered limbs manoeuvre in parallel, perfectly paced, another journey across a Devon river bed. The crooks of my arms are hooks now, nestled in your pits. And lift. And pivot. And lower. Gently ease. Gently please. And breathe. And breathe. Publishing credits Requiem Delphinus Delphis: Green Ink Poetry I have come to the wall to pray: exclusive first publication by iamb A familiar route: So we go about our days: Winchester Poetry Prize Anthology 2021 (Winchester Poetry Prize)

Hear poet Deborah Finding read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Deborah Finding back next the poet Originally from North-East England and now living in London, Deborah Finding is a queer feminist writer with a background in academia and activism. Her poetry has featured in fourteen poems , The Alchemy Spoon , The Friday Poem and anthologies from Live Canon, Renard Press, Victorina and Fly on the Wall Press. She came first in the poetry category of the Write By The Sea Literary Festival Writing Competition 2022, and was commended in the Troubadour International Poetry Prize 2022. Her debut pamphlet vigils for dead and dying girls is forthcoming from Nine Pens. the poems amortisation 00:00 / 01:34 you explained to me that amortisation is the depreciation of non-tangible assets which are things like goodwill and loyalty and relationships you can depend on it’s a complex calculation to figure out what these things are worth, the factors that add to or detract from their value and how quickly they can be lost but I want to try, I always did I can show my workings out, in your spread sheets, under which we did, to an advanced level, excel … I write this as addictive additive, also when you said you would love me all of the days. like infinity plus one but plus one was the problem which leads us to the minus column your creative accounting of her to me, to her of me, every evasion a reduction of your credit score and now we disagree on the answer I show you a number in the red you tell me of future investments and paint me a unicorn valuation but it turns out amortisation is just the process of slowly writing off a debt on paper at least. so consider it done, books balanced, no net gain loving you was a zero-sum game dear ______ 00:00 / 03:24 My therapist told me to picture you as a scorpion in a guided meditation, in which she had me imagine – in a very visceral way – crushing you to death with my foot, till you were nothing but shit and dust. Now, I know what you are thinking: surely a real therapist would never suggest such a thing! but to be totally honest with you she is somewhat unconventional in her methods and only the week before this she had asked me to imagine finding a grave and looking down to see your lifeless body in the deep and open dirt – the knowledge of your death giving me back my own breath which I'd been holding all these months terrified that I could see you on every corner your dark hair swinging behind you in front of me a kind of ponytail PTSD. I wish I was joking. Anyway, back to you as a scorpion, did you know it’s said they're viciously venomous for no reason? Have you heard that fable about the frog and the scorpion, that ends with the scorpion saying, it’s in my nature ? Well, I don’t believe that shit. I don’t believe you were born like that to sting for the sake of it. But it doesn’t matter because you are that now and you should be approached with extreme caution and protective clothing, if at all and I learned the hard way that anyone who would keep a scorpion for a pet is a fool. There’s an urban myth that if you light a circle of fire around a scorpion it will sting itself to death horribly … for a long time I thought about how I could set your world on fire: trap you in a prison with only your own poison for company, and glass walls and spotlights for all to see who you really are. I texted your name so often that my phone still wants to gift it to me in autocorrect whenever I type the first three letters but this is progress, because for a while just the E would do it. One day I hope I can look at your name in black and white or even meet someone else with it, and not hate them on sight and though today is not that day I know it must be coming. I don’t think of you so much now and I wear a scorpion earring. Not every day but on those mornings where I wake up shaking or when the offence of an injustice is simply overwhelming. It helps remind me that it’s ok if a battle is too bloody to fight, that self-care sometimes means you don’t get to win even when you’re right and the day I grew up is the day I understood that the sun shines just the same on evil and good. Ah, scorpion … despite all I learned about you it’s not in my nature to claim you have no path to salvation but it does bring me comfort to know that at any moment any enemy can be crushed if only in imagination. distracted 00:00 / 00:42 today I did not want to write about desire I had loftier plans for worthier topics some notes about injustices and a page already half-baked with an idea about a town but you walked me home last night after dinner and before you took a cab so now my hands are your hands thinking dextrously of the five delicious minutes spent kissing you in the rain, our cold wet faces in refreshing contrast to our hot wet mouths tongues tasting intoxicatingly of our desserts and of not having kissed each other for a week Publishing credits amortisation: Live Canon Anthology 2022 (Live Canon) dear ______: exclusive first publication by iamb distracted: Hearth & Coffin Literary Journal (Vol. 2, Issue 1)

Hear poet James McConachie read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. James McConachie back next the poet James McConachie was born in the UK but has lived for the past 17 years in a remote farmhouse in Spain’s coldest, emptiest inland province. He's turned his hand to more jobs than he feels are worthy of mention, and is never happier than when finding himself lost at high altitude on horseback with only the wind, vultures and music of Hildegard Von Bingen for company. Aside from poetry, James has written prose for the Dark Mountain project , and has more in the pipeline. the poems first post 00:00 / 01:03 dry heave, I ball my fists or bang my head off the table, I might weep into the dark corner of our stupored soul for knowing and forgetting all those moments of nothing grace a mother wets a tissue, wipes a streak of blood from her child’s face yet swept into the fire the eternal touch of honeyed hand Iskander scores the sky to the east and for what? small fears the language or the naming of the land, or some fucking flags always the same shit reasons, always forgotten but sorrow filths up the crescent beneath the nails forever and it will be written we should. have done. better. dry heave, I ball my fists bang my head off the table, and weep again, this morning it seems there’s always time for another cold horror, another mother’s letter liebre 00:00 / 01:00 three days of gales and I’m meshed into a tousled briar, clearing the corral, all thorns the handstain fruit long wintered away oil can chimes giving it the full four clangs slices and scratches of maybes and should’ves the blood the wind and the want give life, their constant brutal diligence, the letters laid in winter’s bright book of hours the garden, knee deep in my dereliction, sees the sun as it lands but doesn’t stick somehow the sky, a haze of headaches and icy hostilities bustling up over the tops and away out on the campo, a hare flickers under the cloud shadow, shrieking across the field, almost dark I gather logs, the stars show again so heaven’s veil is torn just a little, at the hem longings 00:00 / 01:30 oneday, imma dance like a dervish out of the dark scoop gold pennies from the sky scatter quinces at your feet, found at last your cool hand in the bright bower, oneday oneday, imma song the things I shoulda said to the silence of the windless glade and if unheard, it will only hope to summon the breeze, to the daylong quiet shade, oneday oneday, imma shine the nightingale’s silver lyre pluck such tunes as only a god might whisper to a bird, all sighs and secrets, to leaven the unhurried word, oneday oneday, imma speak the mark and measure of this time the sneaking sand, the simple sorrows, the the supermarket savagery of war’s fire and lime, oneday oneday, imma swim all the way over the ocean to the very rim of the world, the paper cowl will shrink and shrivel, just as it should the forgotten face, the skin uncurled, that was my own, oneday oneday, imma find the boy who startled the stars, who shares my smile then inks together these battered bars drinks deep the rushing sap, beneath the ragged bark oneday, imma dance like a dervish, out of the dark Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Jenny Byrne read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jenny Byrne back next the poet A newcomer to writing, Dublin-based Jenny Byrne had her first poem published in 2020. Her poems have appeared in The Galway Review , Impspired , Dust Poetry Magazine , Drawn to the Light Press and The Madrigal – though Jenny still thinks her biggest achievement is being a mum to two lovely people. the poems Danseuse 00:00 / 01:25 I do not want to lament the day you died, each year, purging up the aisle of expectation to kneel and prostrate I am ready for the day to come and know there is no must, no proper, no should I may trace a fingertip across your scarf of orchid silk, allow jewels to glisten in my palm, scatter photos, hold linen to my face and breathe you in — less of you with time; but still, a tiger knows her cubs, animal instinct reciprocates This pace, once chaotic, stumbling, shape-shifting to satisfy others has slowed, is gentle; with desire to gratify fading I move, a rising relevé in satin slippers to my tentative, delicate rhythm I may look back from time to time as I lead myself forward towards my skyline I think you would raise a celestial hand, urging me onward. Love (Classified) 00:00 / 00:45 I don't write about love it's ours, it's private. Where we are queen and king passions force bloody battles some won many lost We grieve poultice womb wounds with salt purging the demented Orchid roots reach toward light and air epiphytes survive supported freely I don't write about love, it's ours, it's private. Sapere aude 00:00 / 00:59 The wise child omniscient, sensing, absorbing full up, engorged, overflowing No reprieve, corridors closed, dam bulging, deluge certain walks within the gilded mausoleum, sham, chaos mire Instinct knows what can and cannot be said perception is reality they say a ten-year-old cannot play with perception Sensitivity has no place in dysfunction systems are not made to be broken wise children, bearing all weights, eventually crumble. Publishing credits Danseuse: The Madrigal (Vol. 2) Love (Classified): Impspired (Issue 11) Sapere aude: The Galway Review

Hear poet Jim Newcombe read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jim Newcombe back next the poet Born and raised in Derby in the heart of the English Midlands, Jim Newcombe moved to London in 2006. Since then, he's lived in every quarter of the capital – enjoying an active cultural life of concerts and visits to theatre productions, museums, galleries and taverns. Jim's writing has appeared in numerous publications, and was shortlisted for the prestigious Bridport Prize, as well as for the Pendle Prize for elegies commemorating the First World War. the poems Eight Owls for Hieronymus Bosch 00:00 / 01:43 I Between the inward and outward wave upon the shore a rhythm in feathers that wasn’t here before called into being its substance and its law. II Between the masculine and feminine, between the how of her and why of him, came one with wings who shamed the seraphim. III Out from opposing poles that brought us here with eyes of sun and moon that knew no tear a tremulous presence maintained the biosphere. IV Between one nation’s customs and the next a primal entity that left the scholars vexed denied in its descent the doctrine of each text. V In the skewed trajectories of time and space it roosted aloof and in the darkest place rotated the clock of its expressionless face. VI The wood has ears, the field has eyes, and dawn reveals the eyes in every ear of corn that scans our thoughts, their verdict full of scorn. VII It is the decoy to all you think is true, to everything you ever thought you knew; the one note in its voice asks Who-are-you? VIII Both the signal to a secret and a lure, it hears the silence of a spider on the floor and sees most clearly when it’s most obscure. The House 00:00 / 02:16 Boundaries were defined by harsh words and bolted doors, yet by night I snuck past sleeping sentinels, the dark air pregnant with unanswered prayers, the page of each wall scripted with shadow, seeming to swell with pressure, as though something passed through it. Rain tapped at each window where the gloating stars peered in like patient voyeurs, the rhubarb blanched in moonlight as the clematis loomed, scaling the house, rending foundations I could not fortify. Spiders were hatched from cracked corners. I searched for clues, listened at keyholes for conspiracies, my memory mapped with creaking floorboards that betrayed my presence. I would spend hours in prayer and soliloquy trying to subsume the guilt I had inherited. Before they could be caught or killed the spiders would scuttle back to their dark dimension, as though a gash could suck up its own blood. Somewhere in hiding was the eight-legged mother of them all, her deftly strung web a grid of carcasses; wings, shells, corrupted husks mauled and festering. I couldn’t sleep for fear of it. Sometimes I would try the cellar door: deep and forbidding, that underground lair, where steps descend into a darkness that writhed with apprehensions. I couldn’t reach the light switch to dispel my suspicions which grew like rumours of a secret sin. One day I would confront whatever was down there and return victorious (if return at all) to where another, like me, would dare to descend along the cellar’s corpse-cold walls, dank and mildewed, the treacherous gloom now bristling, bristling and black with all that is unassumed. The Moon and The Sea From A Shake of the Riddle 00:00 / 01:00 VIII The moon and the sea – are they in harmony or at war? The martial marriage of the pale satellite and the brisk lush rasp of breakers – their sickly scurf and slosh, the weft and warp of crawling froth, and the pendulum tide like a nag gone berserk in its bridle, while the blind pupil of the milky moon dumb and vacuous, dimpled with craters, barren as the soul of an atheist. Holding dominion over the toiling water, that wormy, comet-scuffed wafer, that shrunken bauble of colourless light, still separate despite its travelled distance, its clean light of clinical intellect frozen from shadow, whose oblique brilliance does not illumine, but only reflect. Publishing credits Eight Owls for Hieronymus Bosch / The Moon and The Sea: exclusive first publication by iamb The House: Eunoia Review

Hear poet Jamie Woods read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jamie Woods back next the poet Jamie Woods, a writer from Swansea, has poetry in Poetry Wales , Ink Sweat & Tears , Lucent Dreaming and elsewhere. With his work centring on experiences of disabilities and cancer, Jamie has been commended in the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine 2021, and is now poet-in-residence at the charity Leukaemia Care. His debut pamphlet, Rebel Blood Cells , is available from Punk Dust Poetry . the poems The Silence of the Hospital Ward 00:00 / 01:49 Silence is elusive, is illusive. When your head is on the pillow and you think that it’s close you complacently relax and it scurries. Clocks ticking. The mundane drip of the tap, the one with handles for elbows that you’re too far away from to give a nudge off. The low-level buzz of electric light. The slow wheeze heart and lung churn of the IV pump and the siren when it’s nearly run out or you just bump the tube. Other people’s ringtones, message chimes, other people’s phone calls. Other people’s conversations. The excitement of family, the desperate anger. The admin of auxiliaries and nurses and doctors, the gossip of auxiliaries and nurses and doctors. The driving mechanics, the alarms, the beeps; blood pressure, oxygen count, your still-beating heart. Painkillers wearing off. The screams fly as wraiths through walls and curtains biting and snatching away dying hope. At night, at day – no time here, just numbers – the ward whispers sting with invasiveness, the rumbles of breathlessness and nasal congestion, the snores, the moans, hurt like needles. The shock, the pain, the begging. The trundle of the drug trolley, and the screams at night, my God, the screams at night terrify, terrorise. Clarion calls for carrion attacks. Not me, not this time. Clocks ticking. Headphones on, I sleep with the spoken word, smooth voices, TED talks and shipping forecasts, waking throughout, until Thought for the Day: unrested, unblessed, undead. Johnson’s Baby Shampoo 00:00 / 00:46 I get flashbacks now months later when I step out of the shower and bury my face in the towel I’m back in the showers at Singleton the water blasting furiously, too hot, with a precious locked door refuge from the dormitories let myself go, unheard, unashamed, the raging water and baby shampoo blanch away the fatigue from my dying broken skin cry into the towel until I’m ready to go back to a freshly made bed hospital corners, military precision, fake smiles distracting from coal-blackened eyes and I know I’m not there anymore, but it’s scalded into my brain and I can’t find the right type of soap I need to wash it all away. Wolf Alice & Camper Van Beethoven Live at the Adam Smith Institute 00:00 / 01:08 Had a dream last night and everyone was coughing In therapy today she forgets why we’re here Tell me about a recent social situation that made you anxious? I’ve not been in a social situation for the last two years Everybody’s going out for lunch these days So jealous of your new-found laissez-faire I buy tickets for a concert that I’m aching for But in my scared heart, I know I won’t go. Resell them at face value in a free-market economy The Adam Smith Institute must think that I’m ill. DOORS AT SEVEN. MASKS OPTIONAL. ADMISSION RIGHTS RESERVED. OVER 18s, WITH WORKING IMMUNE SYSTEMS ONLY. Last night there were two hundred people in the room. Walls sweat-shimmered, shoulders condensed, screaming tears, You’re a Germ , kinetic hormones released. Words now airborne, choruses viral. I stay at home in my germ-free convalescence Playing scratched old records for the left-behind. Publishing credits The Silence of the Hospital Ward / Johnson’s Baby Shampoo: Rebel Blood Cells (Punk Dust Poetry) Wolf Alice & Camper Van Beethoven Live at the Adam Smith Institute: Poetry Wales (Vol. 58, Issue 1)

Hear poet Zoe Brooks read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Zoe Brooks back next the poet Zoe Brooks returned to her native Gloucestershire to write and grow vegetables after 15 years in London. Her collection Owl Unbound appeared in 2020, and her long poem for voices, Fool’s Paradise , won the Electronic Publishing Industry award for Best Poetry eBook – it will be published as a physical book in 2022. Zoe is a member of the management team for the Cheltenham Poetry Festival, and as well as setting up and running the Poetry Events in UK & Ireland Facebook group , enjoys performing poetry. the poems My Grandfather and Uncle 00:00 / 01:04 My grandfather and uncle both returned to the earth with untimely haste. Although they worked it, broke its back for frost to bite into, dragged sedge from ditches, clawed back lambs from snowheaps, they did not inherit it. Unless it was in the length and width of a man's form. And it claimed them early, reaching up through the chest, pain filling the arms, which had gathered harvests. And still they loved it. And still they cursed on cold wet mornings as it worked like ringworm into their hands. In death they shall inherit the earth. Until this time they have been living on borrowed land. The Call 00:00 / 01:46 You want me to stay a hearthkeeper, a filler of stoves and a bearer of logs. But the forest calls and all the small unspoken things living there listen. You want me to be a guard dog, a lier by the fire. You place dead meat in bowls to comfort me. But the forest is stirring. Can't you feel its mossy paws rising up the walls? Can't you hear it? It scuttles in the attic and leaps on nesting mice, tears their little limbs and chomps on innards. You try to keep out its cold, but the roof insulation is red with the death of vermin. As you pull the rug over your head, I feel my tail grow bushy, my snout lengthen, my teeth turn iron. In the morning you will find my bed empty. Open the door and follow my trail, if you dare. Follow it up the hill, where the track skirts the ruined farm with windows black as the mouth of a gap-toothed hag. Follow it past the heavy cows to where the snow will not melt in the shadow of the birch trees, to the edge of the forest. I am waiting for you there. The Gypsies in the Room 00:00 / 00:43 It is the unstitching of the mind, we tell ourselves, watching as she slips further from us, like an old purse, the lining opening to reveal lost coins. Morphine and dementia see the gypsies in the room, silent in a row. The ancestors come to greet her, we joke, to watch over the journey we cannot take with her, not yet anyway. The coins jingle, crossing the palm of the ferryman. Publishing credits My Grandfather and Uncle / The Gypsies in the Room: Owl Unbound (Indigo Dreams Publishing) The Call: Obsessed With Pipework (No. 85)

Hear poet Jude Marr read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jude Marr back next the poet The Pushcart Prize-nominated non-binary poet Jude Marr (they/them) is the author of the poetry collection We Know Each Other By Our Wounds . Their work has appeared in many magazines in the US, the UK and worldwide. After ten years of living, learning and teaching in the US, Jude is now back in Britain working as a freelance editor and writing coach. They're looking forward to expanding their horizons on the UK poetry scene. the poems Live from the Billionaire Philanthropists’ Banquet 00:00 / 02:06 at this false table appetite is not loss: love cocoons blame while self- proclaimed good servants shave bottom lines and spin kaleidoscopes before the famished (slivered glass as thought salad) as well-tended hands offer bread to shrinking, wrinkled bodies the would-be unhinge their hearts, still filthy from a dream of delights meanwhile children, graveyard wraiths, stuff restructured bread into unlined mouths: their hands hang angular: their eye-skeletons are sockets of birds who sing, featherless in the graveyard of power-hungry minds, dark famine eats air: rainfall’s undelivered: a mess of struts rises around barred gold— three meals feed expectations: a bountiful garden, bread without errors, heart-table dreams and we say, let’s eat expensive: grind night like we grind coffee: remind the pot that we are appetite: but what terror of the rambling heart, rock-fraught and filthy, empties a child’s hand without touching? graveyard children make our sold-out hearts raw: we draw our hands from their hunger: we make coffee without touching the world. Solitary 00:00 / 01:07 spider on a cold expanse of glass: your padded claws, tiny to the human eye, never misstep: your leg-hairs hear the beat of winter’s wings— find my window’s crack and crawl in: my home’s dark corners do not hide a broom: make my room your own: spin filaments as sanctuary, silk strong enough to catch the light— cold-blooded spider: I know you do not fear winter’s beak: nature has made you predator and prey: stay of execution is my offering: all I seek is fractal consolation from the corner of my eye. Silence Will Not Save Us 00:00 / 01:14 word-heat rises, carbon-oxidised, as oily lies combust: on city streets we are still breathing, just: our children trusted us— masks act as word-catchers, trapping holy lies as halitosis, drowning saviour fantasies in spit: still, the unmasked spew their shit— jugglers, jousters, clowns conjure witty lies to please a crowd: word games to distract: even mimes may misdirect— in my silent room, I pass my cup from one hand to the other: I am the loner I declaim, my wasted words already ash— in my room, silent, I smell smoke. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Sharon Philips read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Sharon Philips back next the poet Bristolian by birth and upbringing, now living in Otley, West Yorkshire, Sharon Phillips began writing poetry when she retired from a career in education. Her poems have since been published, online and in print, in anthologies and journals ranging from The Bridport Prize Anthology 2019 , Under the Radar and The Dawn Treader to Ink Sweat & Tears and The High Window . Her first pamphlet, Liven Yourself Up , appeared in 2024. the poems Prelapsarian 00:00 / 00:44 He is at his most beautiful. Motown is behind him, he’s too strong to be beaten, his cheekbones are sharp, acne scars all healed. At last he feels good about his face. He looks up with a grin, snaps his fingers to the bass line, pushes off the wall with his foot, leaps, moonwalks, spins, slides. He sings, easy, unforced, the songs that mark a decade. There’s no stopping him now, you’d like to think. The hardest thing about hospital 00:00 / 00:45 it’s not the obs trolley rattling me awake not the overhead light blink-blinking not the bleep of stalled infusion pumps not Rachel in the next bed howling whenever she pisses herself not the weary nurse who tells me these ladies are all quite confused not the maggot in my mind worrying why they’ve put me on this ward not cannulas dreadlocking my arms not the steroids prowling my nerves not my mouth gaping for words not the blotches on my brain scan it’s wanting my mum. Consider After Kim Moore 00:00 / 00:59 the early morning cleaners, who rise at five, who dress in the dark for fear of waking their children, who eat cold toast at the bus stop, who lug buckets and hoovers through empty offices, who wipe fingerprints from photos and neaten toys and mascots, who scrub piss and shit from toilet seats and floors, who fear their hours will be cut, who are desperate for money for food and rent and the gas bill, who wonder what it would be like to have a cushy office job, who sweat under sky blue polyester tabards, whose backs ache, feet throb, whose ankles are swollen, who worry they won’t be home when the kids wake up, who'll do it all again tomorrow. Publishing credits Prelapsarian: exclusive first publication by iamb The Hardest Thing About Hospital: Liven Yourself Up (Yaffle’s Nest)  Consider: Black Nore Review (August 26th 2024)

Hear poet Dion O’Reilly read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Dion O’Reilly © Expressive Photography back next the poet Dion O'Reilly has authored three collections of poetry: Sadness of the Apex Predator , a finalist for the Steel Toe Books Prize in Poetry and The Ex Ophidia Prize (now the Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Contest), Ghost Dogs , which won a Pinnacle Book Achievement Award, The Independent Press Award for Poetry, and which was also shortlisted for both the Eric Hoffer Book Award and The Catamaran Poetry Prize, and the forthcoming Limerence , a finalist in the John Pierce Chapbook Competition. Her work has appeared in The Sun , Rattle , The Cincinnati Review , The Slowdown and elsewhere. A poetry workshop leader, Dion is also a reader for Catamaran Literary Reader , and a podcaster at The Hive Poetry Collective . the poems Old Black Water 00:00 / 01:37 Suzie, I want to tell you how frequently I pass the apartment behind the supermarket where we street-danced to the Doobie Brothers, light shifting as the fog lifted, front-yard roses iridescent in the salt-gray seaside morning. You died, what, ten years ago? Not at once, really, though pills took you quickly. It began, I think, when we were children: without knowing why, we wanted out of that rural beauty—the narrow valley and gleaming stream, summers spent diving off crumbling cliffs, as if nearness to death was the closest we came to leaving your stepdad's beery fingers, my Mother who loved to touch the sweaty chests of her daughters’ teenage lovers. Nowadays, everything is a different kind of dangerous: Rain stays away. June mist sucks away too soon, sunlight breaks through before it should. What I want to say, Suzie, is a moment, gone, fifty years, is just a moment, but you’re still here, unfleshed in brightness—elfin, jittery, wan— our arms looped as we turn tight circles, round and round, your eyes locked on mine. Dark Matter 00:00 / 02:02 We see so little of the world, a mere corner, they say, though today, nothing seems scanty— the oaks around the meadow, full of spiked leaves and fear- ful band-tails, life’s matrix pulsing every nerve—it’s more than more: it’s a slow explosion, even if its plenty is mere sliver next to the dark ether that sticks the planets, the stars, even our charged cells to its vision board. It hurts me— this seen beauty, the gleaming outsides of the world. I don’t know why, but inside every spring, a memory— some lost boy, the blooming weed he picked me, his warm hands, the longing, the pleasure. I know gratitude is popular, is inclined to go viral, but it’s whack-a-mole, this old need inside me, so when I hear dark matter—how I desire dark, how I yearn for matter— that intriguing reversal of uncertainty into mass and import— even in my golden-years- garden—meant to uplift me—it’s shadow I seek, the wormy layer, always there, year after year, closer and closer—nameless god, forgotten father, limbic odour of mystery, its source, almost remembered, familiar, beyond my reach. Wading in Soquel Creek 00:00 / 01:11 I still go there—vale of my childhood, nearly unreachable, water-carved furrow to the sea. When I wend around a certain curve, I see my old friend Kev, ghost-slumming at the water hole. He’s still fourteen, still smoking in a surplus jacket, rubbing ashes on his jeans, still bears the silence of the fatherless, never mentions why his mother left him to live with Gran’ma Muster in her motorhome. And I, too, kept my mother’s secrets, the way she rewrote my life with loops of cursive on my back— her whip, an instruction, in the only language she knew. Kevin, why don’t you wade with me again? Like I thought we would forever, listening to the water’s answers to problems we couldn’t name. Publishing credits Old Black Water: New Ohio Review (Issue 34) Dark Matter: won first place in The Letter Review Prize for Poetry Wading in Soquel Creek: Taj Mahal Review (Vol. 20, No. 2)