Hear poet Lesley Curwen read poems for wave 17 of literary poetry journal iamb. Lesley Curwen wave 17 spring 2024 back next the poet Plymouth-based poet, broadcaster, sailor and winner of the inaugural Molecules Unlimited poetry competition , Lesley Curwen writes about loss in the natural world – loss she saw inflicted by the global capitalism she used to report on. Together with Jane R Rogers and Tahmina Maula, she collaborated on the pamphlet Invisible Continents . Lesley's solo work, Rescue Lines , was published by The Hedgehog Poetry Press in July 2024. A Wales Poetry Award finalist in 2022, Lesley has found homes for her poems with journals and publishers including Black Bough Poetry , Broken Sleep Books , After... , Atrium , Spelt Magazine , The Alchemy Spoon and Ice Floe Press . the poems Running free 00:00 / 00:59 rippled mane spits white beads sun gifts endless diamond flash on stippled flow sheets pulled iron taut a cloud-line shadows Plymouth slides south to Spain my boat tips and yaws I ride her like a gaucho rockinghorsebronco through seas finite but giant a cornflowerblue bling robe to cool a planet my boat and I plough through plastic, oil slicks, submarines shit, bodies, melted ice fleets of sardine, shark whale and cell-wide life in celebration, grief, what you will A parent never known 00:00 / 00:42 In the gym, mirrors meet at a dark seam where body is apprehended but face is half a line of flesh, a ghosting, nothing real. Impossible to see whose breath is misting glass. In this fashion, the unmet father/mother is present and concealed. The solid whole that lies beyond the join feels close, a step away, just missed. Faceless, the kin we lost and lose again. Ocean City 00:00 / 02:52 We are on the edge of the world. Always the draw of water’s tinselled margin, urgent roar. Tattered pigeons bleach bronze heads of mariners who left Mayflower steps flush with gold and hard tack. Spattered eyes look to ocean’s light its crooning, sweet unknown. Monuments to the infinite spivvery of seizing new worlds not new to inhabitants not worlds at all same planet, same air, same cursed seas. We are on the edge of everywhere at stone steps beyond pasty ‘n’ fudge shops decorated by a dozen plaques copperplate or fat capital. A toxic pink sprayed across the globe from here this nub and den of chancers, rogues astride their wooden barkys aching to leap over the edge. It is not the ocean’s fault. It skitters in morning sun without intent, tides swung by moon’s slide at gravity’s dictate. Blameless it sighs, waves rainbow-flashed by diesel meniscus sucking at particled air. No launches now from Mayflower steps though exploits persist. Three frigates anchored in the Sound, tankers hauling fossil juice, dark fin of nuclear sub. A multi-storied cruise ship squats the bay its orange shiplets bound for pirate shops. The ocean is not what it was. Neoprene swimmers lash arms through green soup herbed with heavy metals from dead mines fine solution of faeces from overflows swarms of plastic iotas rinsed and smashed by diurnal tides. In the dusty Minster clouds of purple fish swim sunlit glass. A creation window hurls scarlet atoms on cobalt sea. Harbourside, loud horns call. Another vessel docks in Plymouth’s endless back-and-forth. The swell licks iron ring in weathered stone, blurs a rusty edge. Publishing credits Running Free: Invisible Continents (Nine Pens Press) A parent never known / Ocean City: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Rachel Hafiza read poems for wave 27 of literary poetry journal iamb. Rachel Hafiza wave 27 autumn 2026 back next the poet Rachel Hafiza is a director of the Elmet Trust , which curates Ted Hughes’ birthplace. She's run eco-poetry workshops, and taught eco-poetry courses in the English Department of the University of Lausanne. Thanks to Bradford Producing Hub , Rachel has been able to begin A Field Guide to Belonging. This collection-in-progress scores her grandfather’s memoirs about the Upper Calder Valley in blank verse poems. These she echoes in prose poems that revisit sites described – while also, in encountering them, giving place to her Indo-Caribbean heritage. Rachel's early poetry appeared in Blackout Magazine , Offshoots , PAN : Philosophy Activism Nature and Land . With photographer Gilbert Paquet, she co-created Erratics: Greenland, Photographed with Poetry . the poems For Three Generations, We’ve Gone 00:00 / 01:29 I arrive late. Still cod fillets and smoked kippers juicy salmon steaks and the marled flesh of sea bream are beached on ice before me. Rimbaud criticized the texture of troubadours’ rhyme-rich verse but the fishmonger says – sea-fish not spawning yet water’s too cold. Fish, still fat. Makes him glad good trade. But a massive moon-roiled orgy will wreck the Atlantic stocks soon – and then, what crash? No haddock, no plaice, no choice kipper pairs his luxuriant drapery, unmade. Take stock the fish van brings notice of a faint marine breeze to this town square, whose nearest sands are Carboniferous delta sediments, once visited by wrasse, striped bluer than fisherwomen’s eyes. The scene fades. Cataracts gather. Tucked Up, Under the Jam Shelf 00:00 / 01:51 My grandmother makes jam but I have never seen her it is too dangerous: her hands extending close to a boiling pot, veins exposed brim-full of thick syrup, it churns and heats to scalding-lava hot she preserves, standing in the path of this volcanic caldera the sweetness of summer fruit the tart pinch of strawberries the blusher embrace of raspberries rich and chalky on the tongue these were pleasures they both knew otherwise, before fire blazed before a motorbike sacrificed a lad against a pub wall, before his brother stepped forward to take his place in the wake of war, in the face of a mother a mother who baked kindness into both of them even as they swelled with naughtiness like oatcakes mixed with bicarb that dry racked on a wooden creel, raised ceiling high a half teaspoon of salt of the earth clinks the pot turns jammy. Labelled jars reach the jam shelf. Fledgling Crow 00:00 / 01:39 I shadowed as late sun meets mill chimney I scored north of your nest, as I watch that O-shaped drill hole, sandblasted, yet coal black opening your eye to solar therapy to swifts, now hithering and thithering with synchronised wing tilts, then, a contretemps flap it’s your folks! Mum’s tail feathers fold directly her claws crimp sandstone, her beak clamps dinner Fountain Street, that all-you-can-eat buffet a wall-scaling snail, wheaked from a lintel a strayed clothes moth, ripe for the catch. Dad nabs a spider, focused on gnat-eddies nearing its web, spun between two iron railings. Like a man fishing a weir, he was ripped clear what offerings, this cornucopia compost-heaped carrot peelings, bilberries freighted from Eaves Wood. O Crow, what bounty plumps you! Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet J A Lenton read poems for wave 22 of literary poetry journal iamb. J A Lenton wave 22 summer 2025 back next the poet J A Lenton lives in Dorset, writes for a scientific publisher, and is the author of poetry pamphlet Kingdom of Mud . After studying English and Philosophy in Nottingham he received an MA in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London. Jack's poetry has appeared in Vice , The Cardiff Review , Amsterdam Quarterly , and on The Poetry Society's website. He was commended in the Bridport Prize for Poetry in 2023 and Magma Poetry Prize in 2024, numbered among the winners of The Poetry Society's Members' Poems competition in 2024, and shortlisted for the Society's Free Verse Prize in 2025. the poems Reproductions ‘When the caterpillar is fully grown, it makes a button of silk which it uses to fasten its body to a leaf or a twig. Then the caterpillar’s skin comes off for the final time. Under this old skin is a hard skin called a chrysalis.’ Gene Darby, What is a Butterfly? (1958) 00:00 / 01:19 We were pupaed in our parkas chilling outside the red factory where your da once hefted whole chunks of cow and pig, where the dead certainty of animal emerged in complex blends – soups, sausages and ready meals – the sort an eight-year-old could make. Did. A man isn’t his work you said, stink-eyeing me like a deserter. In that waist-deep grass, the perfect height for hiding in, fat-necked dandelions scaled the chain fences. We kicked off their heads, waiting around for nothing. I had a job offer, you had a hangover. You were all nerves, I was a ball of them – was this how escape felt? All my insides minced through this rusting fence’s mesh? I said, But they’ll crush me like a bug . We looked at the nursery of clouds, the two unthreading contrails. We looked at our feet, nettle, cleavers, bindweed. We looked at the peeling factory walls. They’ll crush you anyway , you shrugged. It’s how things get made . Family Value 00:00 / 01:28 Each time she came home, there was less of her. The doctor warned our family, Slow down . You ’ re taking too much . Watching the way he fingered her weakening pulse, you could tell he had eyes on her heart. It started simple. An ear went missing here (mounted on my uncle’s living room wall), A pinkie vanished there (joint-locked and tensed, a perfect coat-hook) What began at extremities broke into extremes: At Christmas dinner, she sat bewildered; she was just a torso propped up with pillows. I had to wine and dine her, holding her knife saying, It’s quite all right, do you remember the relic of this jaw, how it moves and bites? Others got the best of her. The neighbours rolled up her tongue like a Turkish rug. Her arse appeared at my mother's door gift-wrapped so lovingly with an unsigned note stating, You should keep this in the family . Truth be told, I snuck out an eye. She was past noticing. In my workshop, I cleared the cloud and realigned the sights. I still look through it, reviewing that world just beyond my grasp. The trail on my cheek, her garden’s path. Belongings 00:00 / 01:09 On my tenth trip around the sun, I was gifted a broken copper watch, given by Grandpa, a man I hardly knew, would never know – we were beyond repair. Fixing the workings was a waste of time, the battery was ancient, three vital cogs had fused into a knuckle. I hear his son, tongue clicking, What’s even a watch if it no longer works around the clock? Still, it’s on my wrist. I love its silence. The way the lean, long hand reaches out for the green-furred six. In a hundred years, it will still be arriving. I catch myself staring, willing it on, caught between the minutes. That this worn-out thing, so far beyond fixing, can still fix me, hold me still for a moment as the world spins indefinitely on, displays an older face still ticking inside this one. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Zoe Brooks read poems for wave 8 of literary poetry journal iamb. Zoe Brooks wave 8 winter 2021 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 Douglas Tawn read poems for wave 6 of literary poetry journal iamb. Douglas Tawn wave 6 summer 2021 back next the poet Douglas Tawn is a poet, actor and screenwriter whose poems have appeared in the in-trays, at least, of numerous literary journals. His first collection, The Collected Poems of T S Eliot, was disqualified from the T S Eliot Poetry Prize following accusations of plagiarism. Douglas holds a 100m swimming badge, and is now working on updating his CV. the poems 13 Birds in the Way of Looking (or The Parliament of Fowls) 00:00 / 05:52 I Following on from the Keats House they taxi over garden feeders the green chute’s permanent flash-spangled guitar licks ascend with a flourish of birds gone wild Para! Para! Para! Para! So we’re left to ask what to make of this ornithological hypotaxis? to wit: where do they belong? to whom do we owe the pleasure? are they not, these birds, out of sight? II ‘We know we are supposed not to leave, but suppose we had some friends to stay? They’d brighten up the place … ’ ( Letter to a Beefeater, the Ravens) III The kite where I come from is not I’d say something to write home about. There again, why write home when you’re there already? They’d say it should be taken as read. Everything has its place, just so the parakeets of London and just so there are no hard feelings, feel free to point them out when you see them. IV magpie silent eyes his pound of carrion starling spangles sky dark with murmuring crows nineteen amass numbering full murder they see the carcass and look no further V ‘Brighten up the place— What do you think we’ve been trying to do? I don’t wear the uniform for fun you know.’ ( Letter to the Ravens , a Beefeater) VI Flush with all heaven’s range blackbird beetles about the town ready to sing and define the age. Even the worms all dig her sound they love her style and critics agree she’s a bird of high renown. They offered her a record deal, all the fat cats in the yard, lining her up for their next meal. But blackbird caught them off their guard “Sure I’ll sign on one condition, so you just listen up hard: “In this deal you give permission for me to sing whatever I please with total freedom of expression.” Those foolish cats at once agreed: they signed up blackbird there and then and prepared for her first release. It was a jazz-fusion album. Didn’t do that well. VII I am not one for sorrow nor was meant to join the dance, signifying union of man, woman and song Oh boy, oh boy, oh boy, oh boy! passing under the stage the god, Hercules, whom Antony loved leaves only our senses dimmed and silver with age memories of beaten gold sickening and slow awake the sinning bird squatting greedy overhead like a secret. VIII Behold the fowls of the air: some of them do sow actually; nor did my first draft take into account the barn owl. Behold, they mount the sky; cross-winged embassies to heathen shores; yet why should foreign masters not call these birds native? Behold, the peregrine falcon, a native species; how did we figure that one out? Such divisibility buckles belief. Yet see how this open secret rewards the kingdom; her white cliffs shrink and her statues swell. IX ‘We didn’t mean to offend you. Maybe we could wear the uniform too?’ ( Second Letter to a Beefeater, the Ravens) X Well, that was the day he went completely cuckoo—riding high on Mellow Fruitfulness (I’m guessing the guest ale down the Wheat Sheaf). Real state, yet kinglier in his madness, somehow, he comes in raving about some bird. Now I like the guy, although it’s a pain this nonsense, bursting squawk-eyed mouth oozing in here, proper disturbed, crying “So you like sad stories? I’ll frame you one now: a real traga-doozy!” “Now I’m out on the heath having a blast: the birdies were pinging from tree to tree, the smell of sweet flowers swelled through the grass (my eyes were blurry, but they looked great to me). Then I hear a warbling cry overhead. I look up to find a bird wringing her wings, frantic: “Detested kite! My daughters! No feather stirs, no breath heard—I had hoped to see them grow full singers— here cracked—some parasite has thwarted us!” “At my feet lay two fractured crowns, her chicks. She cursed, forced to feed the alien brood perched over us. Some opportunistic fowl, some sterile conveyer of misuse, some stalking spirit of infestation had laid them there and waste to her daughters. Vile cuckoo! To sin against her singing sisters—” but he couldn’t go on. He crumpled, still muttering tortured slurs, tugging at buttons where his shirt choked him. XI Þhre crowes gaþered aboute a pyloonne “A straunge bowre!” proclaimeþ oone, “Grene leves yt wants,” spake anooþer “Eke he bereþ not swete fruyts nouþer.” “Yt carrieþ mens powre accross the dale,” Resouned þe þrid, “eke illumineþ wele Hire lyȝtsomme wodes, iwrouȝte on hye. Ek þes strenges ylonge do kepe armonye, Makynge a plesaunt noys of musique softe Yherd alounge þes þreds alofte.” Ech herkened, wel lykinge the melodye So þey set þem doon on thys steley treë. XII ‘This probably sounds like an odd request … ’ ( Letter to his Tailor, a Beefeater) XIII The parakeet’s cry retreats over the heath le beau oiseau sans birdseed is all I can think without calling on more authentic superficies (e.g. an MA in Creative Writing, fancy that!) Honk! Honk! That was a goose shrewdly complaining of the lack of water-fowl under discussion today, which is fair, and I think they will agree with me that truly these high-flyers are out of their minds. Les Poissons Puissants 00:00 / 01:04 I, a fish, I want to—hang on sometimes there’s the net (some say a soft cage) one doesn’t know one’s in it until we all are—too late. This is not ideal but we’re used to going unminded—now I’m under the dense cloud of a gunboat here to assert someone’s rights (not mine, I’m sure) under these waters. Dominion over the fish means you gotta let them have it. Where was I? Constant motion makes that a difficult question. Where going? Ditto. That dreadnought means life or wreck to someone. Been a while since one came down here, all noise until it isn’t then we get a chance to nip in and browse: you sink, we swim. Eventually you’re pulled up the sky dense with voices charged with all their differences left ashore—they sound the same to me. From Whitman to Dylan, Their Multitudes ‘(I am large, I contain multitudes)’ ~ Walt Whitman, Song of Myself ~ ‘I play Beethoven’s sonatas and Chopin’s preludes. I contain multitudes’. ~ Bob Dylan, I Contain Multitudes ~ 00:00 / 02:16 ‘Contain,’ we know, has its double sense (both to possess and suppress) parenthesis creates and contains multitudes, in equal parts, suggests copia is more or less the sum of its parts. Repetition multiplies and refines to the singularity from which it starts restarting similitudes; resonating decline. The Song of Myself is no more a song than repeated multitudes mean no more. Was copia their dominant mode all along? An epic rhapsody with an unsettled score? Apparent formlessness finds ease with tradition tracing a song to the Trojan diaspora while The Great British Novel might be on television a saccharine story in aspic vernacular. ‘Past and present wilt’ Whitman tells us wilting his own name into timeless self ‘wilt,’ too, suggests archaic future (ambiguous, but better, I think, than saying ‘melt’) leaving with us wilful tradition refusing the will to be traditional the voice withers in the songs of Dylan as the multitude he’s given have given all. History is the addition of what is lost (Today and tomorrow and yesterday too) to the sum of what is coming to pass (The flowers are dying like all things do) and the past is not what is meant by tradition. Dylan’s flowers wilt in and out of time in time to the off-beating Whitman’s feet: by and by, Lord, they walk the line. Oh my, America! your new-found songs revive the dead democratically each season’s bloom of virtuous carrion stirs equal hosts of union and confederacy: Oh pick out a tune, boys, of Raleigh or Drake They’ll be landing here soon, boys, and make no mistake It’s the song of our doom, boys, sing Lowell and Tate To the Land of the Free, boys— PAY THE TOLL AT THE GATE Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Scott Elder read poems for wave 2 of literary poetry journal iamb. Scott Elder wave 2 spring 2020 back next the poet Scott Elder’s work has been widely published in the UK, Ireland and elsewhere – his poetry having been placed or commended in numerous competitions in England since 2016. Breaking Away , his debut pamphlet, was published by Poetry Salzburg, while his collection Part of the Dark was published by Dempsey & Windle. A second collection, My Hotel, is due out from Salmon Poetry in 2023. the poems Dieppe 00:00 / 00:36 A quarter past two and you wondered if your body were a breeze or a breath of moonlight, if your children drew on the tide in the harbour or the dew-covered garden in their dream work. They lay like feathers in a single bed. And you, at once the lady in the window and the woman moving down the cobblestone lane to a pier beyond the bulwarks and pilings, blending, step upon step, your own colour and form into that nightscape. Here and Again After the song The Here And After by Jun Miyake 00:00 / 00:52 Half-sliced a lily on the table petals burning white on white there’s no saying who’s under that skin salt spray spindrift a taste of rust a drop of blood just name it it’s there a knife-slit away not waiting for someone to whisper come alive come alive instinctively twisting back to spawn to begin again the incantation the ragged waltz half-here half-gone you touch your lips to a lily’s wound this is sorrow it murmurs the pain is gone The Man 00:00 / 00:53 It’s only a dream but keeps coming back a highway ticking off concrete slabs the man steps in three saplings in his fist four thousand miles from Casablanca banyan trees a forest in his sack he hasn’t smiled for a decade do you know the way to Casablanca I ask he tries to speak he rounds his lips then something heavy falls this way I crumble to earth snowflakes cover my broken limbs he tells me to listen to the motor’s hum: toora loora looral snowflakes cover my eyes toora loora looral I try to smile Publishing credits Dieppe: Coffee-House Poetry – runner-up in the 2016 Troubadour Poetry Prize Here and Again / The Man: The High Window (Issue 12)

Hear poet Conor Kelly read poems for wave 16 of literary poetry journal iamb. Conor Kelly wave 16 winter 2023 back next the poet Conor Kelly was born in Dublin where he spent his working life teaching in a school. He now lives in Nova Scotia's Western Shore, Canada, from where he runs his Twitter (now X) site, @poemtoday , which is dedicated to short-form poetry. Conor has had poems published in literary magazines in Ireland, Britain, America, Canada and Mexico. the poems The Immaculate Conception 00:00 / 00:53 (Mary speaks) It happened at a feast in Palestine. When the meal was over and the remains were being cleared, somebody slipped on grains and spilled onto my lap enough red wine to make a patch of dress incarnadine. I’ve cleaned it often since, but it retains the faintest shadow of those crimson stains picked up some years ago in Palestine. And when my earthy father sent his seed surging with love into my mother’s womb to match and merge and predispose my fate, why should it, then, from Adam’s stain be freed and not from Eve’s distress at Abel’s tomb? Sometimes it’s hard to understand my faith. Through The Medium 00:00 / 01:27 It is quieter than I had supposed. Often I hear what may be a river, the sound of water infiltrating stone, but I can see nothing at all clearly. It is, if you will pardon the irony, like looking through a glass darkly. Perhaps there is nothing to see. I do not know any more than what I can discover in what is not quite darkness, nor yet light, but a kind of fog in which the dispersed vapours flow past me, continually. There is a faint sweet odour in the air, one which I find hard to identify although it reminds me of aniseed. But there is nothing there to taste, nor any object that feels tangible. I doubt this is either Heaven or Hell. It is far too cold, and there is no one with whom I can share happiness or pain. Not that either emotion excites me. Sometimes I can feel the mild dejection, a kind of post-flu depression. Occasionally, the desolation of unrequited conversation grates. And there are times, times I used to call night, when I crave the consolation of sleep. Most of the time, though, I just want to die. The Writing Spider Argiope aurantia 00:00 / 01:44 They left the poet's desk the way it was the night before he slept and never woke, the night before his final heart attack left one last sheet of paper on that desk half-filled with spider-like and scribbled words with some encircled and with zigzag lines leading to changes in the margins where his latest words were fatally ensnared. There are no spiders in the poet's house. A woman cleans and dusts it every day before it opens to the few who come to visit, for a modest entrance fee, and see the poet's desk the way it was the night before he slept and never woke; and see, also, the view from where he wrote of sunflowers wilting in the summer sun. There is, for those who wander round the back, behind the trash cans, near the café door, between a freshly painted metal bench and the next door garden's large camellia bush, a writing spider busily at work, its stabilimenta (those zigzag lines) catching the sunlight as it shines beneath the black and muted yellow banded legs. Desolation and determination: the poet and the writing spider both weave and unweave their patterns day by day. While every evanescent word evokes the emendation of essential loss, the ritual rebuilding of the web affirms a zest for life. Nevertheless, we all zigzag our way to certain death. Publishing credits The Immaculate Conception: The Irish Times (December 1992) Through the Medium: exclusive first publication by iamb The Writing Spider: The Rotary Dial (August 2016)

Hear poet Isra Hassan read poems for wave 16 of literary poetry journal iamb. Isra Hassan wave 16 winter 2023 back next the poet Isra Hassan is a Somali-American poet from Minneapolis. Her poems appear in Guernica, Poet Lore, The Waterstone Review, The Penn Review, and elsewhere. Her debut manuscript was a finalist for the 2023 Center for African American Poetry & Poetics Book Prize. She resides in Washington, D.C. the poems Sigh For Hoyo 00:00 / 00:42 a bodice for your being an accordion for your presence when was the last time you thanked your lungs air and i could you tell we’re biological sisters shared umbilical cords and crawling space dispelled from the cavern of a woman who introduced love to us before we saw the light we being us both we and we’ll always be a we we cried we sighed we rejoiced Of Thee, the Solemn Fluid Sings 00:00 / 00:21 Repentance drapes over a matriarch’s tear, her prayers sedating the quantum nocturne. With it, an avenue of light begins its harmony, murmuring of a kingdom come. Archetype The Ingénue 00:00 / 00:23 The abyss grins at me, I spit in its mouth, or perhaps, perchance, I am the spit in its mouth … Regardless, there and there, together, our wets worship each other. Publishing credits Sigh: The Wake (Vol. 21, Issue 3) Of Thee, the Solemn Fluid Sings / Archetype: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Charlotte Gann read poems for wave 22 of literary poetry journal iamb. Charlotte Gann wave 22 summer 2025 back next the poet Charlotte Gann is a writer and editor from Sussex who enjoys walking the South Downs in her spare time. Her first pamphlet was The Long Woman , which saw her shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award in 2012. Two full collections followed: Noir and The Girl Who Cried , as well as another pamphlet, Cargo . Charlotte also founded and runs online hub The Understory Conversation : a space for fellow writers to meet, talk and share in small groups and one to one. the poems The house with no door 00:00 / 00:38 The house with no door looks welcoming, with its wisteria and robins. I can see, through the kitchen window, a bowl of cherries. They’re the brightest, darkest, shiniest cherries. But that window’s shut and bolted. I move on round. I know I shouldn’t walk on flowerbeds. I keep thinking the door must be around the next corner. I’ve lost count now how many times I’ve circumnavigated. In the Classroom of Touch 00:00 / 01:36 This is how you hold a person , Mr Farnham says demonstrating. Your touch needs to be light but firm. Felt in the skin like a weight, a squeeze. No sudden movements, please. Still is best. The pupil he’s performing on closes her eyes, head slightly folded like a bird’s. She’s collapsed into his woollen front. See how my arms arc? the teacher asks his class. Hold each other like precious cargo. Never be rough. Don’t shove into the person you love. Don’t steal touch. Be clear about this: we give a hug. Thanks Lydia, back to your seat now. Giles–? The boy stares down at his feet, face pink. His worst subject. Mr Farnham waits quietly, bends his head, smiles. C’mon Giles , he says gently. The boy staggers down the ragged aisle between assorted classmates. Waits while this man opens his arms. Falls forward, hiding his face, his sobs. The teacher enfolds him carefully, whispers, You’re doing well, Giles . Calling Time 00:00 / 02:09 So I’d sit at my desk waiting and hoping and trembling before someone would say it – maybe me – A quick drink after work – and we’d go night after night, pint after pint after pint. We’d smoke sixty cigarettes, drink drink after drink starting at six when seven thirty seemed another, safe country but suddenly was upon us, then long gone and it’s more like half nine and our table a landscape of pint glasses and overflowing ashtrays after trip upon trip to the cigarette machine in the hallway and turn after turn to the bar for another round, another tray of toppling filled glasses and laughter and it still only Tuesday, say, and then the bar staff flashing the lights on and off and it must be after eleven and they’re calling a warning and stacking chairs at the other end of the narrow room and we’re the only table left and still we stay drinking and shouting until they call ‘Time’ and yank the noisy chain grille down over the bar and padlock it and turn the lights off and we grope our way blindly foghorning back up the stairs and even then not out into the night, contrite, rushing for last Tubes but into the hotel bar for residents only where the drinks are even more expensive and it’s just us two now usually and we order ‘A night cap’ then ‘One for the road’ lighting cold fags and slumping on that black-leather slidey sofa in this pot-planted environment with piano muzac playing softly and it’s hard now to keep my spirits up with you falling silent beside me so near and far away. Publishing credits The house with no door: The Lyrical Aye: Richie McCaffery Calling Time: London Grip (Summer 2022) In The Classroom of Touch: The Rialto (No. 81)

Hear poet Clare Best read poems for wave 26 of literary poetry journal iamb. Clare Best wave 26 summer 2026 back next the poet Clare Best writes poetry, memoir, essays and libretti, often working with composers, visual artists, and other writers. She's published three full collections of poetry, plus various pamphlets and collaborative works. Her first full collection, Excisions , was a finalist for the Seamus Heaney Centre Prize. Clare’s multimedia project Breastless is a creative response to risk-reducing surgery owing to family breast cancer. Her memoir, The Missing List , was a finalist in the Mslexia Memoir Competition . Her most recent book of poetry is Beyond the Gate . Clare lives in East Suffolk, England, between Tunstall Forest and the sea. the poems beyond the gate in memory of Sarah Everard and all the others 00:00 / 01:31 scots pine and resin-scented air out here giant oak next to the path we are walking sycamore in sun in shade holly crowding ragged elder sweet chestnut spruce fir douglas fir with us field maple half-uprooted beech out here walking sorbus domestica the service tree and elm rare elm blackthorn black with sloes with us out here hawthorn hazel leaning ash and we are walking ivy juniper cherry poplar copper beech and twisted willow so many hornbeam so many birch out here stripped leafless by fine sleet as we are walking ranks of cypress sapling larch branches creaking high above wild plum and wild pear we are we are scarred black-leafed still with fruit walking walking Late fig 00:00 / 01:22 mid- winter gift hangs in thin air after a fig-summer when I learned to gorge figs and goat’s cheese and honey with bread rich as Christmas pudding long summer of squeezing lemon moons over fine fig-slices to make fig-flesh bleed then feasting on it lemon-reddened after that I fear disappointment but this single fig-surpassing fig has fully perfect unsplit satin fig-skin purple-green darkly tender I reach up and the gift gives slightly to my carefully cultivated fig-touch does not resist a fig- knife cutting it against white porcelain this precious late fruit proves super fig-charged with intricate red-pink and butter-coloured ravelled riches and there at its centre a mysterious shady hollow the very heart of figness You play the piano 00:00 / 01:18 as if you came into the world playing as if blackbirds and nightingales will learn from you as if you don’t care you can’t see as if snow has stacked fresh light at every window as if the keys are green and red and blue as if I renew your eyes by listening as if music keeps you sane as if sleepless nights rose up and invented the fugue as if Bach lives inside your head as if to stave off blindness as if there’s no such thing as trouble as if buzzards circle over you as if you will never be silent as if devotion flows through arms and fingers as if this is your final rehearsal as if it rains as if the sun might shine again tomorrow as if you know we have to live like this and so we do as if your playing and our love can bind and heal this sorry world and you Publishing credits beyond the gate: The Friday Poem (June 2021) Late fig: Beyond the Gate (Worple Press) You play the piano: 14 magazine (2025)

Hear poet Michael Burton read poems for wave 23 of literary poetry journal iamb. Michael Burton wave 23 autumn 2025 back next the poet Michael Burton is a poet based in Todmorden in the Calder Valley, West Yorkshire. His poems have appeared in, among other places, The Interpreter’s House , The Honest Ulsterman , Ink, Sweat & Tears and London Grip , He's also read his work on BBC Radio Manchester, Chapel FM and various podcasts. Michael co-hosts monthly spoken word open mic event Gobsh!te at the iconic Golden Lion in Todmorden, and writes and performs as NotAnotherPoet. He's also one half of the band New Age of Decay , whose debut album can be found on various online streaming platforms. the poems Thanks to My Lower-intermediate Mandarin Chinese 00:00 / 02:15 I know that the girl sat across from me on the tram is unhappy with the boy next to her. I know that something has happened sometime before, after (or possibly during) their dinner but can’t quite make out the parts in between. I know the boy thinks what’s upset the girl is not serious. He does not say sorry or that he’ll make it up to her somehow (though, in truth, I may not have understood it if he did). I know there is something said about her mother. She was there with them earlier today or, if not, will be with them soon. The girl or her mother (or both of them?) have or had to wait a long time. There’s a coat, hat and pair of gloves also somehow involved in this and a phone call which somebody needs to make. The boy, arms now crossed, is insistent. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes what? I can’t be sure. The boy is or has been busy recently. The job. Her mother. The coat. The hat. The gloves. The phone call. The boy asks the girl how long something will be needed and how many times must something be said and then four characters, emotionally toned, one of those situational set phrases you can only learn when mastering the language. The boy then tells the girl he loves her. He reaches for her hand. She looks down. The boy kisses her firmly on the forehead and as the carriage doors open I picture the girl’s mother waiting. No coat. No hat. No gloves. Checking her phone and waiting outside in the cold. A Childhood Friend’s Critique of My Lifestyle Choices After Raymond Antrobus 00:00 / 00:54 you all changed / all strange tastes / new age / highbrow / holier than thou / you all head down / shy-faced round town / all flat cap / all man bag you all dressed up / all plaid / all sandals / soft lad / smelling all tea tree / Versace / you quit the smokes? / gone all woke? / all lame- arse jokes / all posh speak / all prim / all proper geek / you all scrawny / weak / arty chic / all desk job / all snob / away too long pal one of them now / all big city flat / think you’re all that but where’re your mates now? / what’s brought you back? On the Third Thursday of Every Month 00:00 / 01:43 Me and every man to ever have fallen in love with her meet to discuss how we are coping with her absence. For some it has been years. Many, now happily married, talk only of flashes in their wingmirrors or windows. For others their visions are a much more regular occurrence. Some of the group claim they only know they are truly alone once all the lights in their houses are out. One man confesses he carries her hair clip in his pocket, squeezing it tight as he walks. Another describes a recurring dream where she and him in full embrace fall from a cliff face to a city of red and amber lights. There is even a man she has never met who attends, dressed each time in the same misfitting raincoat, his fists pressed against his scalp as he speaks of her standing in the crowd, of running through town, up long narrow streets, only to lose sight of her right at the last. And then there is me and the curve of men beside me in the circle who sit and listen, sit and listen, red faced, dazed in a frown, as so often she said was the problem. So often, she said, the worst of all our problems. Publishing credits Thanks to My Lower-intermediate Mandarin Chinese: Cerasus Magazine (Issue 9) A Childhood Friend’s Critique of My Lifestyle Choices: exclusive first publication by iamb On the Third Thursday of Every Month: The Interpreter’s House (No. 78)

Hear poet Valerie Bence read poems for wave 14 of literary poetry journal iamb. Valerie Bence wave 14 summer 2023 back next the poet After completing an MA in Poetry with Manchester Metropolitan University (plus a year’s mentoring), Valerie published her first pamphlet: Falling in love with a dead man – poems which take as their source the art of Rembrandt. Her second pamphlet, Overlap , followed in 2022. Valerie has been shortlisted for The Poetry School/Nine Arches Press Primer series, the Fish Publishing Poetry prize, and longlisted for the Ginkgo Prize. Her poems have appeared in several anthologies, and she was delighted to contribute to the inaugural issue of The Storms journal. A mum and nonna, Valerie lives and works in Buckinghamshire. the poems Caitlin After Dylan Thomas’ death in New York, aged 39 00:00 / 02:13 So, it's happened, you shit of a man I love the bones of you. I can’t think for the howl in my head of our unborn babies I’ll never forgive you. I’m finished. No rules for us from that first day in the Wheatsheaf you lay your beer-swimming head in my lap proposed then and there stole me body and soul from Augustus. You always took what you thought was yours you had me in the raw, as far as you ever had me killed my soul, then killed your own. I love the bones of you. I used to think all men are swine. Now I know it. You bastard, you’ve left me squalid, what will become of us? I considered throwing myself out the bedroom window but decided it wasn’t a big enough drop I won’t make that mistake again. I hope you had your black socks on, darned with red wool so people would tut-tut over how you keep your wife impoverished you bad bastard of a wonderful man, you penniless slob I love the bones of you – and your voice, going on and on whispered endearments slurring in my ear – oh God! I always lose whatever I have, now I’ve lost you booming your poems at me when we weren’t in drink. At least it wasn’t me that killed you, although I’ve beaten and kicked you many times and you, the man that let me. Worse, I’ve torn your precious work in tiny pieces, flung them out the window like dark bats into the estuary. But even though I tramped out to the dawn mudbank to get them back before the tide did I’ll never know if you forgave me now. Well, you always knew you wouldn’t make forty I hope you’re happy now, you shit of a man. I love the bones of you. romancing the etch Rembrandt self-portrait with Saskia, 1636 (etching) 00:00 / 01:29 I remember the only time you let me share this intimate process I am behind you, not quite touching, watching fingertips I know so well work the surface of copper plate; take care with our hair, let the shadow of your own hand fall across my breast. I imagine these hands sharpening a quill, cupping my toes, drawing our baby. In mirror work, looking straight ahead, your hand moves ‘blind’, must draw in reverse – you see us backwards, as if we could turn back time before sadness made lines on our faces. The back of your head is rigid with concentration, you are rarely still this long and your reflected gaze watches me watching you work. With no change of expression you make myriad decisions – on pressure, what to leave, what to wipe away, which paper when pressed to plate will take up ink exactly as you want – then peel away revealing the reverse of the reverse. All this, your eyes in the mirror still hold mine. Red 00:00 / 01:27 There’s a red kite whose patch encompasses my house. I watch him most days, sweeping in slow circles, letting updrafts do the work for him, using his forked tail to steer the skies. On the first day of lockdown, as I drew back the curtains to let the grey in, he was the first moving thing I saw. So surprisingly low I could almost count splayed feathers on wingtips, eye on predatory eye as – just for a second – he seemed to peer into the bedroom. I think we’re quite close now; at least more than nodding acquaintances. When it snowed I considered wearing red, curling-up in the front garden to be as small as I felt. He might think me carrion – perhaps swoop upon me, take me to his eyrie. His little ones could be surrogate for mine. He could bring me small mammals I would learn to eat raw, my mouth and their little beaks bloodied red with the effort. I could teach his nestlings songs from Moana , number rhymes, how to play Jacks with leftover vertebrae, then at sunset we’d screech their names to a bleeding sky and I would tell them how the world used to be. Publishing credits Caitlin / romancing the etch: exclusive first publication by iamb Red: Overlap (The Emma Press)