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

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

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

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

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

Hear poet Clare Proctor read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Clare Proctor back next the poet Clare Proctor's poetry has appeared in Shooter , The North , The A3 Review and Finished Creatures , as well as in anthologies from Yaffle Press and The Frogmore Press. Clare's writing also featured in Handstand Press' This Place I Know: An Anthology of New Cumbrian Writing . She placed second in both the 2018 Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year and 2021 Ware competitions. Clare lives in Cumbria where she teaches English, and is a member of Brewery Poets. the poems This Woman Wears a Green Dress After Julian Cooper’s Bella Vista Hotel 00:00 / 01:09 This woman stands in the doorway, wearing a green dress. This woman wears a green dress, clenches her fingers. This woman clenches her fingers – her nails make crevices in the skin of her hand – this woman makes empty crescents on her palm. This woman is the body that makes a shadow on a side of the bar. Her body blocks the light trying to shuffle through the door, through the window stained with street dust. This woman breathes in the bar-room smoke, lets the clatter of an empty tequila glass fall into the back of her mind, lets its stickiness become salt, the salt of the sea breeze that she senses behind her eyes. This woman sees nothing. She is listening to the wind crossing a far-off ocean. Her green dress lifts in it. On Falling in Love with Poets 00:00 / 01:06 I have fallen in love with poets, with the spaces they hold within them like underground caves. I want to be lowered into those caves with a head-torch, reach my hands out to the walls, scarred with their stories. I want to fall into their voices, when they do not hesitate, but resonate, like the deep note of the viola. I love the idea of falling in love with poets, and in love with all that poets have loved; with their moments of climax, with their late-night tears, with their unchosen words that slip from their lips when angry or drunk or tired. I want to fall for their suffering, dip into it as if it is a well, wash in its dark water. I want to feel their pain, like splinters stuck in the skin of my fingers. I have fallen in love with the word – poet – how the two soft syllables shape my mouth. Sappho's Leap After Felicia Hemans 00:00 / 02:24 The women are ceaseless. The women are ceaseless as the waves. The women are ceaseless as their own echoing sighs. The only way for the women to be still as the sea-bird hovering on the death wind, is for the women to throw themselves from cliffs. If the women want to jump from cliffs, they should dive in a perfect arc. The sun should be setting behind them or fingers of the dilated moon sifting over their bodies, the sea a molten silver. Their fragile forms should be the shape of a crescent as they dive, a flattering silhouette. The women can be gentle and sentimental or fierce and tragic, but at all times when jumping from cliffs, the women should be beautiful. Men may want to paint the women later. The women should hurl themselves into the sea because their love is unrequited. Their unrequited love must not be for other women, but for a man/sea god. The women’s pain should be private unless they are jumping from a cliff; they should cry in a pitiful fashion, a few tears on the cheek subtle as pearls. They should avoid ugly crying, or they may not be a fitting subject for a painting. The women should consider the weather, should pick a day that best fits their form and colouring. They should pair their outfit with the sun/moon/white cliffs. Their dress should flit around in the wind enough to expose bare legs and should cling enough in the rain/sea mist to delineate their breasts. The women should keep their hair long so that it can whip around their faces and stream behind them as they fall. The women should fall in slow motion, over and over again, into the mind of the man/sea god. They should never land on the rocks, breaking their body and shattering their face, neither of which would reflect well on the man/sea god. Women who are planning on jumping from cliffs should check the tides. Women jumping from cliffs should be recovered in one piece, their free dark hair pushed back from their pale faces, that should look at peace now that they can sleep forever in the unslumbering seas, dream about the man/sea god that they absolutely, definitely love. Publishing credits This Woman Wears a Green Dress: came joint-second in the Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year Competition 2018 On Falling in Love with Poets: Byline Legacies (Cardigan Press) Sappho's Leap: won second prize in the Ware Poets Open Poetry Competition 2021

Hear poet Aysegul Yildirim read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Aysegul Yildirim back next the poet Aysegul Yildirim's poetry has appeared in various international magazines. Most recently, she contributed to Anne-thology: Poems Re-presenting Anne Shakespeare . An academic working at the intersection of environmental humanities and sociology, Aysegul has published a poetry pamphlet titled Plants Beyond Desire . the poems uproot 00:00 / 01:10 Her only childhood memory about plants is picking up flowers. Dahlias from grandmother’s garden; a tiny medley of purple dead nettles, camomiles, vervains, brought home from park visits with mum. By the end of the day, they’d always be in the rubbish bin. Years later, she got put in a tiny medley of humans packed in an aeroplane, never to come back. Those left behind are still tired from grief, even though the plane has not crashed yet. By the time the purple on the hands was cleared, dead nettles flourished. Nobody had cried for them, ever. Later, the idea of home has gone for us all, tiny corruptions magnified. Except for the roots. The Long Stay 00:00 / 01:52 I follow the threads of the dark grey carpet for some time. ‘Fix it before moving out,’ I answer myself. Something creeps through. I start measuring the cold surface of the confined space with my flesh, at once, and wear it. Fits me perfectly, I think, except for the spiders who want to escape. They breathe surprisingly loud. I spoil their fantasies by staying fat and awake. The love-hate relationship. Includes giving space and pesticides. I need to go out. Putting on my coat, doing up the windows, on the doorstep I calculate: if I leave now, the performance. Unforeseen contacts. Time is kaleidoscopic in this stone-built body. I have the eyes of a housefly. The carpet’s cleaning will be reduced from my deposit. My only connection with the anthropocene. My solitude is my image. If vision requires distance, I must have been doing it all wrong. Let’s start again: I need my coat when it rains. I need water too. I can’t unlearn the language of solitude, I can’t speak two languages at a time. It’s real. And it’s dark. I take off my coat. Feel the soft feel of the carpet. The grubby, quiet softness. re-root 00:00 / 00:46 Someone told me to burn sage indoors but the true magic is that no two leaves are identical. And the fact that I took a dry leaf from where it waits for me in the mud. It was the beginning of winter in Falmouth and sometimes you need that moment of acknowledgement of your image by the assemblage of the holy cliff. I’m not able to speak their language. I was receding endlessly. The leaf stayed with me nevertheless. He just fell down, he thinks. But he only had to leave himself gently to the ground. No two fallings are identical. Some- times you need to root faster than you can fall. Publishing credits uproot / re-root: Plants Beyond Desire (Broken Sleep Books) The Long Stay: exclusive first publication by iamb .

Hear poet Caitlin Stobie read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Caitlin Stobie back next the poet Born in South Africa, Caitlin Stobie holds a PhD from the University of Leeds where she lectures in Creative Writing. She's won both the Douglas Livingstone Creative Writing Competition, and the Heather Drummond Memorial Prize for Poetry. South African literary journal New Contrast named Caitlin one of the country’s ‘rising stars’ in poetry. Her debut collection Thin Slices appeared in November 2022 – the manuscript of which was shortlisted for the Melita Hume Poetry Prize. An earlier version was also shortlisted for the RædLeaf International Poetry Award. the poems Five Ways of Looking at a Period 00:00 / 01:48 I A ruined pool party. Cat-scratch in the pants. Thighs tight and plastic-wrapped. Luxury cotton towel sex. Soggy apologies like I’m-on-my . II Peach’s pit-flesh. Cherryburst anemone. Pomegranate plasma. Beet-cloaked clover. Hibiscus nimbus. III Brings muddy sleep, long as gumtrees. Quenches anxiety with slippy lip sap. Approves full-bellied foods, potatoes, ginger root. Pulls distraction’s tubers and unearths certainty. Teaches how to stand being lonely. IV When eggs crack jokes about coming first. When proteins drag blush over queenly cheeks. When lipids birth another month’s dead doulas. When sickle cells group under coven moons. Hello, capillaries. Hello again, iron age friends. V Cramping coloured like conception’s twinge. Craving the ever-ready chocolate advent. Carving papayas with turmeric fingers. Wishing for its mercurochrome tinge. Then, sudden puddle of thank-fuck . Ngiyakuthanda 00:00 / 00:36 In Zulu there is no difference between like and love. Between 'I want to hold your hand' and 'Can I see your ring finger?' Between wanting to know where you stand and wanting a one-night stand. Between the sheets, between two lives, just one phrase makes it come together. I’m still not sure whether open interpretation makes love easier, or just lost in translation. Even Birds For Faith 00:00 / 01:12 We arrive in Cambridge after a long night’s flight: eighteen twenty-somethings with a hangover of Africa. What really matters, the man says, is everyone’s comfort. We wouldn’t want anyone to be out of place. Don’t ask and don’t confess potential transgressions. This is a tour, after all. So I keep clear of the line, sick, tight with my truth. Faith is still too but later that night she knocks on my door and cries for skin she’s never been in. These queer constructs: towers cut on ancestors’ backs. We discuss spectrums of shame. Late dawn is lilac phosphorescence crossed with migrating shadows. There’s no snow, just white ash. Surely the others see; they must sense our bent. Even birds know silence is also an answer. Publishing credits Five Ways of Looking at a Period: Banshee (No. 12) Even Birds: The Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Anthology Vol. VI (Jacana Media) Ngiyakuthanda: uHlanga Issue 1 (uHlanga Press)

Hear poet Lysz Flo read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Lysz Flo back next the poet AfroCaribbean Latine polyglot Lysz Flo is an indie author, podcast host and member of The Estuary Collective. She won the Ignyte Award for Creative Non-Fiction in 2024 , was a Voodoonauts Summer Fellow in 2020 , a Grubstreet Instructor from 2020 to 2024, and an Obsidian Black Listening Fellow in 2022. A creative educator since 2020 – with a writing workshop series in MOCA NOMI – Lysz is the author of poetry novel Soliloquy of an Ice Queen . Her poems can be found in FIYAH , The Hellebore , Lolwe and Strange Horizons , amongst other places, and she's done various multimedia projects with O, Miami . the poems a sestina of the grief that lives in yearning 00:00 / 03:11 how do I greet the grief in yearning the hoping for something to happen dreams of hands held in a sea of stars are we a constellation of impossibilities to be poet & ocean—sleeping in a desert a lover lost in a chase of majestic echoes a majestic chase | a lover lost in echoes I am greeted by the grief in yearning to be an ocean—a poet asleep | a desert absorbed in hoping for something to happen is my desire a constellation of impossibilities dreams of hands held | a sea of stars hands dream to be held in a sea of stars love lost in a chasm of magic echoes my grief constellation of impossibilities greet how I remain in yearning the grief of hoping for a constellation to happen to be poet & ocean—forced to be desert to be poet & ocean—yearning in a desert dreams of hands deserted in a sea of stars hoping for something to happen lost | a lover | a chase | met magnanimous echoes how do I agree there is grief in yearning are we a constellation & impossibilities we are a constellation of impossibilities to be a sleeping poet & ocean dried to a desert how does the morning greet grief ‘s yearning a sea | of dreams of hands held in stars a lover majestically lost in the echoes & hoping for something to happen hoping for some one to happen are we a constellation of impossibilities already lost loving majestic echoes cursed to be poet & ocean—emptying in a desert dimming dreams of hands held in dying stars how do we greet grief in all this yearning in how I greet grief in my yearning haunted by dreams holding hands in a sea of stars as a poet & voracious ocean—slumbering in a desert Over the rice 00:00 / 01:07 there has been laughter there is love there is a rice going cold right now watching an argument rice been here wild a few feet tall watching the world go by the sound of births the people fight the feeling of being seasoned in tears the observer of many histories Rice been & as we become there is rice right now holding the mold of a child’s fist & shaking in a plate with an adult’s rice been feeding us through sorrows through deserts food & heat alike rice has stood with us in the rain now replace rice with a name & see how much love rice has given Glimmers 00:00 / 03:22 I woke up and the sky was the bluest of bluest of blues. No cloud—just sun and blue | on shuffle—black like you starts playing and I already know that love is in the suns beams coming through the window. My bestie calls me early and I worry—but they say—have a good day friend. Thank you for loving me. & maybe the world isn’t healing but I am. I am. I am. I woke up and the sky was the bluest of bluest of blues. And I get a random cash app for this meal I was craving—just when I was down to my last few dollars and cents. The sun follows me down the road. Soledad and I drive down to my favorite spot. & they already know my order. I woke up and the sky was the bluest of bluest of blues. My crush mentions to me mangoes. Looking for a way to fill the space between time and perhaps mutual possibility. Or maybe its two Haitians talking about Mangoes. Mangoes were gifted to me after pining for weeks. Big melon sized—golden currency mangoes. And I know ‘I am loved by somebody.’ I woke up and the sky was the bluest of bluest of blues. I have been enclosed from these glimmers. Trapped within my own silence. Calling myself away from home. Frequency waning. But today the sky is the bluest of bluest of blues. And love came with me in a bag with mangoes. This is the closest I get to a kiss and embrace—my hands balancing this overflowing bag. Of golden offerings of joy. A gift. An unknowing answered prayer. I woke up and the sky was the bluest of bluest of blues. My crush compliments me and I am glowing could be the mangoes or could be the compliment. I have forgotten to embody the sun, but apparently everyone can see my beams through the virtual windows. I have been the bluest of bluest of blues. But today I am golden, and sun, and love. I am glimmering in hope. Black like you starts to play and I. Look forward to the possibilities. Of crushes or moreso blooms. No clouds but precise vision & windows—the love. The joy, glimmers Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Róisín Ní Neachtain read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Róisín Ní Neachtain back next the poet Róisín Ní Neachtain is an autistic Irish-Scottish poet and artist now based in County Kildare, Ireland. Though mainly self-taught, she was briefly educated at NCAD and Trinity College Dublin, before studying for two years under Irish artist Gill Berry. Róisín is creator and editor of online literary and art journal Crow of Minerva , and has had her poetry featured in a number of digital publications. She's currently at work on her first collection. the poems Memory 00:00 / 01:12 I held my dreams in my palms Though they were bleeding A soft tremor against my skin Some were shallow Some like a cave Some pricked my conscience Their threads tethered to my flesh And I chewed their weights to set them free My teeth wore down I fell in a haze through our memories When a hollow sound echoed in my mouth And fell past my lips You bit my tongue and hummed The ebb of nameless laughter A cadence of sorrows Spinning a steep melody Now I am unfearful of pain A slow praise of closeness Breathing blue In midnight songs Tightening my pulse Fingers twisting in a frenzied dance To unworded lyrics My last need stilled Remembering Without Believing 00:00 / 01:21 Remembering without believing The stars appeasing Against their obsidian abyss Heat and light unseamed from dust Remembering without believing Questions pressed in psychosis And promises which feel no shame Illegible hypergraphic promises Of love and empty rooms and symbiotic existence And undivided sounds and realities And reproached pain and laughter And dissonant dreams Which lead to my repossession A petty heresy of Silence Look at this earth embedded beneath our nails Our language measured by prayers And lumen a measure of their glare Look at this skin scored by hate Their unfamiliar eye Rooted in fear All truths unchanged in time The Edge of Reason 00:00 / 01:22 A room Like a trite cage Between these four walls Where prodigal sons and daughters return And are rejoiced and bound once more A spiel read like a dead poet A bastard pain The object of such a conclusion Perhaps an accidental gale? Swept and tendering our bones Archaic songs of sorrow That lull us in their readiness Black on white Black on black White on white Letters made barely visible And nonsensical A few steps closer to the edge of reason A past and future arrested in a photograph What will happen if we awake again To see these passings going beyond that edge? To the beginnings of someplace? Someplace more of a sedentary mind A hollowed space in each Man’s chest Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Gillian Craig read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Gillian Craig back next the poet Gillian Craig is a Scottish poet and author who spent 20 years in the Middle East, South East Asia and East Asia. Her poems have appeared in a wide range of publications, including New Writing Scotland , Orbis , Abridged and Black Bough Poetry . Gillian is also a children’s author and poet , with four books published by Marshall Cavendish as Gillian Spiller. She currently lives in Scotland with her daughter, and is writing her first novel. the poems Helen, by accident 00:00 / 00:38 On a windscourged Scottish shore, Hogmanay, three lists brightly wrapped in leftovers. A fire in a biscuit tin, beacon in the storm sparked, smouldered, caught the wishes, snatched them away: a little hope visible as smoke. I intended the catharsis of fireballs; the forgiveness of krathongs. Instead, it seems I stood on the beach in this now foreign land where I’d screamed despair to the howling dark two nights before, and unwittingly vowed to burn it all down. Return to Saigon 00:00 / 01:29 On the long island I too am stranded on, he scans the gaudy propaganda, with its flat figures, stirring sentiments. The traffic laps the kerb. Later a book and a drink and I sit across the street, thinking of the old white castaway, and see him still on the same island, gazing at the traffic. He gives two bright young travellers friendly directions and a story; they laugh and thank and leave him. He resumes his post, staring into hypnotic wheels. ('I've been waiting since early morning to transfer power to you,' said Duong Van Minh, surrendering the South in 1976.) I know, although I do not know, he is no stranger here, and yet seems lost, waiting, watching the road now, not the traffic, for some sign he is remembered too. Eyes trained on the ground, he could be looking with young eyes again, when life was fierce, and any evening wheels could carry a friend, a foe, a flame, himself. As long, it seems, as he is peaceful, makes no sudden movements, things may rearrange themselves with their former brutal clarity. He bows a final look at what was lost. ('Your power has crumbled. You cannot give up what you no longer have,' said Colonel Bui Tin, cutting the strings, tying loose ends.) Stupit fucken wurds 00:00 / 01:01 A man sprawled on the station bench indistinctly opining, gleefully goading you as only a 3pm drunk in hi-vis can or does. When your vape shattered, punctuated the platform, I thought it was a semicolon; I expected something more. The Glasgow train was approaching platform 1. See stupit fucken wurds. That was it. No explosion. A slumped smoulder of despair. The carriage gulped, shunted you on to Kilwinning or beyond. Words can wound, tear, set light winds of fury, we cleave, hew, bark, we resent the toll the sewers we cross exact. We are so often misunderstood. But I wish you knew thae stupit fucken wurds were a poem. That’s all it is: the right words delivered perfectly at the right time. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Emily Cotterill read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Emily Cotterill back next the poet Emily Cotterill is a Cardiff-based poet originally from Alfreton in Derbyshire. Her pamphlet The Day of the Flying Ants was part of Carol Ann Duffy’s Laurate’s Choice selection. Emily has been published in a variety of print and online publications, including Poetry Wales, The North and The Waxed Lemon. She's currently working on a first full collection about celebrity, storytelling and pop culture. the poems Slag 00:00 / 01:12 I have loved coal, like a teenage girl loves an older guitarist with a rough black smudge of eyeliner. I have built my life on it, screamed down decades for it, COAL NOT DOLE – bared my soul for it, but old women gossip about the pit. I know the world has had enough of it. Coal – with its head full of history, strong arms, filthy engines, heavy, the small town sex of it. Broken bodies, white knuckle wives, the silence of canaries – has risen from slag heaps and pit heads to thick air spluttering into anyone born late with an old miner's lungs. I have loved coal but recently, when I sit in the fresh place built on the scar of my grandfather’s pit, I have loved birdsong, greenspace, the safety and hope of it – wind turbines, rising white beacons, sharp armed, slicing clean paths to a future. The Greatest Punk Album In The World Ever (Disc 2) 00:00 / 00:44 I am consciously, consciously picking up women: to carry in my pockets, to throw at rough walls in moments when something might make them stick. I have lined my back teeth with Viv Albertine, replaced my extremities with Patti Smith. I have built a soft curve around a sad razor, there’s blood in my mouth that’s familiar. I do the things men do, just better. I have swapped my memories for the future, but when I whimper, hear Debbie Harry scream. The Cheeseburger Love Song 00:00 / 01:26 At the window is a woman you have loved despite your diet, gorged on the look of her with the guiltiest parts of hunger. Her deft hands dance on the wax wrap paper, forearms flecked with a hundred spitting oil scars. The fast food tattoo. She is always here, and you suppose that she remembers you, from her un-kissed acne years and all the warm paper bags between. You, who would surrender your torso to the drive-thru window, to take her by the faded polo-shirt collar and to have her. Her lips would have the cherry pink taste of market stall gloss, her mouth drenched in free fills of fountain cola and the thing is, she has seen you, all your faces in those repeated flash cars. She could make you in a minute. Plunge your heart and her hand into the deep fat, feel nothing. You are ruined, crisp and bubbling. She scrunches your wrapping, she throws you away. Publishing credits Slag: A Change of Climate (Illingworth) The Greatest Punk Album In The World Ever (Disc 2): exclusive first publication by iamb The Cheeseburger Love Song: The Day of the Flying Ants (Smith|Doorstop)

Hear poet Jerm Curtin read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jerm Curtin back next the poet Originally from County Cork in Ireland but still living in Spain after many years, Jerm Curtin received the 2021 Patrick Kavanagh Award , as well as the 2020 Cúirt International Festival of Literature's New Writing Prize for Poetry . He's also won the Listowel Writers' Week Single Poem Competition on two occasions – first in 2015, then again in 2018. the poems Strangers 00:00 / 02:44 Remember how a traveller, who was unwelcome, would pass through our village in doctrinal black. We were untutored, barely literate. We'd say a low-flying swallow harboured rain, and he'd tut-tut at our weak embodiment of knowledge. We feared his presence; we'd seen strong men drown on dry land after his passing. Now it is no longer the past, nor yet the future, with its tracking devices and sanitary masks. It is the middle of the night. You cannot tell what is life and what is death. Like a newcomer in town, death enlivens even a dull Sunday, which is why, perhaps, we sheltered and adopted an outlaw blacksmith. He could forge the sharpest pike in Munster, a weapon which struck fear among our foes; but he preferred to hide with his descendants in our remote townland and fold them in our midst. Death can ordain like a patriarch, or come for the patriarch, now as human as anyone. It can flourish in the cold, night air like snow before it falls, when a man out of step with himself pulls up in an articulated truck at a service station far from his home and his destination, where he has trouble with the local tongue. A pump attendant, who'd represent Hope in a morality play, comes out to serve him and sees the damaged door mirror, blood smeared on the window, the dent. The attendant can deal with all of this across the barrier of language. There's been a death, no doubt – he catches as much, as the foreign driver proclaims both innocence and guilt and offers him a cardboard box with such beseeching and mumbled grief that the tawny owl inside, open-eyed, stretched on its back, could be either an injunction or a gift. Lola Wakes 00:00 / 02:54 Coffee grumbles on the stove, and Lola wakes. – I had my dream again, she says. At night, she reads in bed, books that lift the streets like bedclothes so that the corpses in the subsoil turn their faces to the light. – Look, she says, and points me to the shock of nakedness in war. My eyes are drawn to a beautiful bush of pubic hair, burning all the more fiercely because the woman's face has an open wound and she's sprawled dead on the street. – There were girls at school with those same names. She reads them out, smarting at the roll call. This is her town. I am a stranger here. I can ignore the grate of rough unwieldy boots on cobbled streets, can take the sandals from beneath the bed as if we lived already in the Arcady we wish to create, where our flowers and potted plants, geraniums on their stalks, might stand in place of severed heads on pikes and so redeem the past. – My sleep was soured, Lola concludes. * * * * * * All our dark childhoods, our backs to the border, only an outlaw's footfall away. I was the child who shrank from the nuns and kept my skirt clean and my mind a blank. I was chaste and silent, and desired above all else to be lifted up into the sanctity of Christ Our Lord. Instead, we were taken over the border for contraband coffee. The bus had wooden seats and smelled of bleach and black tobacco. We visited churches while the nuns went about their purchases. Then we stuffed the bags of coffee grains under our skirts, under our overcoats, under our blouses. On the way back, the nuns smiled their obsequious smiles and the border guards waved us on. We filed out at the convent gates, handing over the smuggled wares. Now the taste of bitter roast grains each morning brings me back to who I am. Cacti / A Poetry Lesson ‘Tan toste que acabada / ouv’ o mong’ a oraçon. oyu hûa passarinna / cantar log’ en tan bon son. que sse escaecéu seendo / e catando sempr’ alá.’ ~ Alfonso X, el sabio ~ 00:00 / 07:16 A time will come when every poem I write will be as ingrained as checking a watch, kneeling or making the sign of the cross. Faith will not matter, nor authenticity. I will come to my page like a blackbird to its branch, repeating the lessons I've learned: something to do with age, and with routine, and a grandmother opening her arms to a child. Years hence, standing above the sinkhole or the stairwell where a child’s look was lost, miles from the delicate arms at rest on a banister or a low windlass wall, I remember the silence on the sunny porch like a poetry lesson as she nurtured life from the dew in the shadow of the cacti. It was a feeling as old as the soft blue hills; the lichened orchard, past its prime, ripened with marvels and moss, like a backdrop to Paradise. Now, as I cross a thoroughfare, hand in hand with a lover, or run my fingers down an arm in the dark as if it were the railing on a deck, and other fingers return the caress, or as I hear the nightingales among the reeds, it is that first heaven I'm reminded of. How she lingered out on the porch, tending to cacti and potted flowers. How I knew I mustn't disturb her. Later she'll bring out her currant bread and Lucozade, a caraway-seed loaf. Meanwhile, I try to keep occupied. I find the mood has penetrated everywhere. In a dusty outhouse loft, I come across damaged and dated toys, school jotters, rusty tools and gadgets, fabulous tarnished fishing flies, American letters stashed in a box, red, white and blue around the borders, solemn statesmen on the stamps. I follow my grandmother, tall and thin, her hair like ermine, back through O. Henry to New York. Her face flashes out above the crowd. The Depression brought her home, in ways I am too young to know. When I am older, I'll remember; another bauble to occupy my time, but nothing on which to rely; I catch a sense of intangible doom – as in a fairytale, where no disguise will free a victim from a lure, or return a wanderer to their course, as if old age had built a wall about its house and time itself had stalled and drawn to it a child who knows they must not enter. But once I turned the key on that outhouse door, a century might well have passed before my grandmother called me from the parlour, her tête-à-tête with the cacti over. And almost as long before I'd read a poem about a hapless monk in an orchard. A worthless monk, beaten round the ears, whose beard cannot hide his sores, one the others can't abide, so he is sent to dig and till the soil, and while he works and weeds, he asks the Blessed Virgin for a glimpse of what's in store for those who enter Paradise. He prays among the seedlings in his care, under trees whose nuts will be their staple through the winter, and fruit trees, whose flowers he loves and worries through frost. He works and hears a blackbird sing. Or is it a thrush? His ear is poor, but the song is beautiful; he spends the afternoon in its thrall until the time to gather tools and join the other monks for Vespers. Wistfully, he hoists the hems of his tunic up. In evening light that bathes the path, some shrubs are now as large as trees, there are others he can't recognise; but it meanders as it always does, and takes him as far as the chapel. Bells ring. He steps inside, and genuflects. He makes the sign of the cross before the Eucharist. And finds himself beside a brother who he does not know, and whispers: 'Who are you? And which monks are these?' After the first outbreaks of plague had passed, the last monk of the old school came in from the garden, in aspect rough, speaking a dialect we barely comprehended. He asked for brethren we knew nothing of, so we first beat him with a stick and bade him talk sense. Then, contrite at our behaviour, we washed and fed him like a stray, showed him to a cell and allowed him rest. Next day we garnered from his nonsense, hobbled in that old tongue, that he referred to monks now long deceased, and a prayer to the Virgin Mother in which he'd asked to savour Paradise, whereupon a bird had sung. We calculate its trill went on three hundred years. Such is the miracle of prayer: a simple monk in a garden granted a glimpse of Paradise, while we hung on his words, and mourned its loss. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Adam Cairns read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Adam Cairns back next the poet Based in South Wales, Adam Cairns is a poet and a photographer whose poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies including Green Ink Poetry , Poetry Wales and The Ekphrastic Review . He's currently studying for an MA in Poetry Writing with the Poetry School and Newcastle University, and runs poetry workshops for the RSPB at the Newport Wetlands Centre. the poems Archaic 00:00 / 01:31 My sister calls, says there's something she's found I need to see— can a wound be buried in the blood could a faint trace of the trench he died in linger, ramped into an impression— a patch of green barley the farmer leaves— she shows me the album, the whole brown and white of him— dark eyes boring through the century between us, that ridge above his nose, familiar—I take the photo to a mirror, hold it up looking back at myself. I tuck the photo in my pocket, climb up Gray Hill to find where the forest crouches, my home hidden in the play of hills and there, beyond the frown lines of spruce, the moraine of stumps, a first go at bracken, I see they have planted trees, row after row of plastic-wrapped saplings shining in cold air, white as graves at Neuve-Chapelle each casting a small shadow—and looking back, the path ducks inside the shelter of archaic trees, the last of the sky going out my visible breath, the ghost of everyone there. Last year the apple tree smouldered 00:00 / 00:52 hidden wires from its roots charging limbs with sparks of blossom. All summer bees droned in sheaths of nectar and we leant together in deckchairs dozing. But this year came a cold spring and though frail blossoms opened a promise of coupling and sap within the flex of boughs surged in traceries of twigs the flowering failed. After you left ice sugared every petal with a touch of death so there are few fruit this autumn the tree alone with its leaves stalling. Only last summer there was still time for everything Balloon 00:00 / 00:46 sadness sweeps the boundary clear— lines of impeccable spruce a touch of sharpness in beech and ash— an old man I saw fifteen years ahead all this loneliness shadowing me the clatter of family I gave away easily a balloon wind-snatched from my five-year-old hand floating off and unable to trace a route back to my hand letting go the crumpled gaudy tin-foil of what we had collapses all the air inside long since voided Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Kittie Belltree read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Kittie Belltree back next the poet Kittie Belltree is a Specialist Tutor for neurodivergent students at Aberystwyth University. She received a Literature Wales bursary for her debut collection, Sliced Tongue and Pearl Cufflinks . Her short stories and poems have appeared in Cut on the Bias , Heartland , The Brown Envelope Book and Cast a Long Shadow . Kittie was recently selected for the Representing Wales Writer Development Programme, supporting writers from low income backgrounds. She's hard at work on a novel, and writing her second poetry collection. the poems The Magician’s Daughter In the fairy stories, the daughters love their fathers because they are mighty princes, great rulers, and because such absolute power seduces. ~ Carolyn Steedman ~ Landscape for a Good Woman 00:00 / 02:36 He draws a silk scarf from a secret pocket in his trousers – snakes it around wrists, splits in two, twists it taut, like her vocal cords, places it over her eggshell eyelids, then offers his hand – white-gloved bowing low, he lets loose the stolen jewels lining his jacket. She accepts – blindly – curtseying into the citrine shaft of spotlight that slices the stage in half, then footsteps into the dead-flat chest, arranges herself – doll-like – inside before he lays the wooden lid to rest. Until now he has kept her for himself, fed on a diet of sliced tongue and pearl cufflinks. The ritual begins before the stage door, before the audience, the dressing room – where he inserts the knife into her velvet and feathers, plucks her hair into tucks and tresses, places a glass slipper on her pillow. Thus, he enters without breaking and she slips seamlessly into the space conjured by his third wife who broke all his spells while he snored by the stove after Saturday matinée , stole the key to his best hat box for her whale-bone combs and peacock frocks and vanished with a ventriloquist from Vladivostok. He feels the thickness of the blade like honey inside her and the strength of his heaving old magic. Why, his wand can cut her in two – separate her bones from her meat like halving a peach. She is ripe, now, for his next trick – Now he has her undone, he will make her disappear. Now – Austerity 00:00 / 01:16 Dirty rat. You’re a fat duck in the House of Lords, fiddling expenses, pinching, farting. You insinuate intemperance, an excess of back-bedrooms, a debauched dissipation in disability benefits, washed down by a superfluity of free school dinners and social care. You point parsimonious fingers into porky pies. You lie with the fishes, the figures. You’re a tight-fisted wrecking ball, punch drunk on stuffing filthy wads into greasy palms and off-shore pension pots. You’re out to lunch, insatiable, voraciously force-feeding families into food banks, mincemeat, rent arrears, debt. You’re a champagne Charlie Chancellor of The Exchequer who neglects to check. You’re specks of white powder smirching naughty nostrils. You’re a glut of gluttony gutting kitchen cupboards, a rip-roaring rusty tin opener doing dentistry on the NHS; an overweight authority on obsessive abscission-making; on cutting things cuttingly; thinking yeah, what the fuck . Bond In 1945, August DeMont drove to the Golden Gate Bridge with his five-year-old daughter, Marilyn; told her to climb over the rail and jump. She did so without hesitation. Seconds later, he dived 'gracefully' after her. A note left in the car stated: 'I and my daughter have committed suicide.' 00:00 / 01:59 i For that was the fact of the matter. The fact of the matter in a sentence. A punishment. The blunt force of its grammar. Pragmatic punctuation precise enough to slice through time like a seam. That night, the rain fell in short, pattering clusters. Your clothes moaned in the closet. A dog slipped out into the dark. The quiet fact of the matter. Seven words for sadness. Words like stones. ii She never spoke. Someone said the car seat was still warm when they found the note. The matter-of-fact fumbling at the rubble of my heart. A cigarette butt tossed into space. iii How to smother a black hole revoke the last wordless slam of doors annul the unspoken bond deeper than any drop leaving me done with life. A sentence followed by a full stop. Publishing credits The Magician’s Daughter: The Lampeter Review (No. 11) Austerity: The Morning Star (May 21st 2020) Bond: Poetry Wales (Vol. 54, No. 1)

Hear poet Shiksha S Dheda read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Shiksha S Dheda back next the poet South African of Indian descent, Shiksha Dheda uses writing to express her rollercoaster ride of OCD and depression – but mostly, to avoid working on her Master's. Sometimes dabbling in photography, painting or the baking of lopsided layered cakes, Shiksha has had her writing featured in Brittle Paper , The Daily Drunk , Door is a Jar and Epoch Press . She's also The Pushcart Prize nominated author of Washed Away . the poems When I think about writing about flowers 00:00 / 01:32 The world is falling apart. Tearing itself into pieces. Then breaking those pieces into tinier pieces. It’s chewing itself up. Crunchingly. Crunch. Chew. Crunch. Chew. Spitting itself out. Vomiting. Convulsing. Should I be writing about flowers at this time? Should I be getting lost in a garden? In a beautiful world of growth and beauty when war rages around me? Should I write about flowers when the weeds of negativity, of malice, of suspicion, of anger, of desolation are fed by the never-faltering winds of my pessimism? Carried on the backs of minute ants – too small to comprehend that the salty sugar pieces that they carry will create a sculpture of paranoia – of nervous frustration – in some abandoned corner of my mind. Should I be writing about flowers when the anxious caterpillars of my obsessions burrow into my hands – eating them from the inside out, leaving behind beautiful wretched blood butterflies – bared, naked for all to see – to marvel, to mock: my insanity; a kaleidoscope of my helpless, vulnerable, aggressive, disappointing scars. Should I really be writing about flowers? Come, eat. Come, drink. 00:00 / 01:18 Come, eat. Come, drink. It’s my party – everyone’s invited. Eat this bread. Made daily – from the labours of my love – from the frustrations of my bored hours. Drink this punch. Perfected now – after months of trying different concoctions – after days of crying on the floor in defeat. Sit at my table. Worn out now – from days spent trying to be productive – from nights struggling to sleep, laughing at endless memes. Lay your hands next to mine. Cracked and raw now – from washing and washing, and washing – from waiting and waiting, and waiting. Speak. Let me hear your voice. I yearn for it now – after months of sobriety – after months of starvation, let your champagne voice flood my home, let your streamer hair flow across my table, let your confetti gaze lock eyes with my parched stare. Come, eat. Come, drink. It's my party – everyone’s invited. You’re invited. Martyr 00:00 / 01:21 I remember the war – intense, bloody – I fought for what I thought was right. Fought for what I thought would make a better country; a better home. For me. For all of us. For you. Wanting to be courageous, reluctantly so at points, wanting to carry you; even if I had to bear you upon my own weary back. I thought we had won the war. I thought it would be worth it at the end. Stumbling back home, I see the native flag. Torn. Battered. I see my home. Torn (apart). Divided. I see you. Embarrassed – by my wounds – – my scars – I cannot bear your silence – your reluctance – – your evading line of vision. Your disdain. Your shame. I yearn now for the sound of bullets, long for the uncertainty of spontaneous explosions, thirst for the imminent possibility of mangled death, – the opportunity to die a martyr. A celebrated hero. Not live as a burden. Fighting – daily – – embattled – – at war – within me. Against this civil society. Against you. Against myself. Publishing credits Come, eat. Come, drink.: Stanchion (Issue Seven) When I think about writing about flowers: Paranoid Tree (Vol. 8) Martyr: Washed Away (Alien Buddha Press)

Hear poet Kerry Darbishire read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Kerry Darbishire back next the poet Living in the English Lake District and writing most days, Kerry Darbishire is inspired by her wild surroundings. Her poems have won – and been placed in – many competitions, and her work has appeared widely in anthologies and magazines. Kerry's three poetry collections are A Lift of Wings , Distance Sweet on my Tongue and Jardiniѐre . There are also her pamphlets A Window of Passing Light , Glory Days (in collaboration with Kelly Davis) and River Talk . the poems River Talk After Raymond Carver 00:00 / 01:21 I’d slip across mossy rocks to catch your intonations clear as glass splintering morning air, accents you taught me before the scent of pine lifted from your tongue, before blackbirds and traffic spilled over the bridge. Come autumn you’d growl open-mouthed through the woods towards me louder than a stream, faster than a beck, bold as a heron, I’d wait on the brim. Sometimes a rush of hungry dippers murmured through marigold edges like angels, but I didn’t need saving. I learned to measure the highs and lows of your voice even in winter when your lips barely moved, and you held me like a mother in a perfume of breathy lullabies sinking deep into my pillow and I clung as if I was your child to every word you whispered, like fog shifting from your skin. All night I’d lie awake listening to the sound the water made until I was fluent. Jardinière 00:00 / 01:43 When I lift the lid, I let go the ghosts of kings and queens tombed in their paper-dry beds – buds and petals still clothed in the palest dawn, bonfire-grey, evening-sky-pink, thunder-cloud-yellow, honesty’s sheen like rainstorms that often sent us back inside with the smell of drenched earth in our hair. When I lift the lid, I could turn a field into a garden, work all day, become Vita Sackville-West or Gertrude Jekyll using her painterly approach to colour. Season after planted season I grew, cut and gathered aquiligea, rosa rugosa, alchemilla, poppies, larkspur; honoured their brief blooms in vases until they threw themselves down like confetti. When I lift the lid, forty summers rise and wake from slumber: lapsang souchong and cake, birdsong, afternoons fading in deck chairs, slow-scented evenings folded in the wings of moths; my daughter’s tenth birthday, the spring she broke her arm, the autumn she left home and my mother fell ill. It is a thing to leave your soil. When I go I’ll take my garden with me. Song of the Fell 00:00 / 01:40 When you say fellside a woodpecker drums spring into the ghyll, curlews turn their tune inland on salt clouds scudding west to east fast as a fox crossing high slopes where runnels of earth slip from lairs and whins begin to yellow the air. When you say fellside an evening in summer swims out of my children’s eyes as they race to the beck where lizards soak up warmth from boulders, foxgloves guard sheep trods, firm as stone, where reeds lean in like old friends and distance spreads a blue cloth. When you say fellside owls haunt low light, the first frost snaps at hedges of hazel and thorn, snow steals boundaries without a second thought from high intakes at rest, hollow nests, berries shrivel and all evidence of life before is squirrelled under white. When you say fellside celandines must be opening, a half-moon floating in a lake-blue sky lifting sun, swallows and flights of geese over Whinfell; our bright steps climbing a new path to find water-mint, frog spawn, primroses waiting for rain. Publishing credits River Talk: Flights (Issue Five) Jardiniere: Jardiniere (The Hedgehog Poetry Press) Song of the Fell: Finished Creatures (Issue 5, 'Surface')

Hear poet Wren Wood read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Wren Wood back next the poet Wren Wood, a mother, poet and nature educator/connection specialist from London, writes imagistic and constrained poetry to document life’s small, often overlooked moments. She also loves reworking old myths in contemporary settings. Having studied for her BA in Creative Writing at Roehampton University, Wren is now undertaking Bardic training. She's had work published by the Land Workers Alliance, as well as in several titles from Black Bough Poetry. After years of scribbling poems in snatched moments, Wren is now going through her piles of poetry to pick out the best for her debut pamphlet and collection. the poems Couplet 00:00 / 00:31 Held by spider-silk to the thin-twigged edges of the redbark cherry, a couplet of nests sit snow-cloaked and silent, on this, our shortest day – awaiting the return of the lengthening light, of pink blossom riots, the renewal of leaves, and with it all, their goldfinch charm. Lutein 00:00 / 00:17 My son’s tousled hair echoes the lutein gold strands of pollen-heavy catkins in the hazel copse, gleaming in winter sunlight. A Summation of Wonder 00:00 / 04:35 If it is claimed by those around – or within – you, that you are too much or at times, not yet enough; in your retreat to smallness Dear Heart, please re-call that the iron in your blood, in nettles that burn, the core of this blessed Earth, forged in a collapsing star. As you unravel, re-know how your skin was once carbon held in the sprawling roots of ancient pines that flourished after the ice. As panic threatens to swell and wash away all, your sweat works to cool and calm, and retreats to the streams of vapour stored as clouds. While you perspire droplets born of the oceans, they rise to join the transpired outbreaths of pink hawthorns, and violet heartsease, blown across the skies to mountains to fall as snow. And there, your worry – and mine – is tended until the weight of itself shakes free. I note your nails are worn short through teeth and wrought-thoughts. One day, when we are long done, this keratin you gift with spit – puh! – back to the land, will form a rhino’s horn, the fur of wolves, feathers of iridescence, turtle-shells, and the scales of adders that bask in the sun. Friend, the calcium and phosphorus in your bones were once bound in chalk: cliffs of creatures of the seas. Who before they sank into the pale sediment, kept company with the small exhalations of algae, and reptile giants, who became the birds you now marvel at as we shelter from the rain and watch in awe-fear as they twist across the sky, teasing the storm clouds to charge and s t r i k e ! Streaks of lightning split the atmosphere on repeat; the protons beneath your feet calling to the ground vivid electricity. Clouds we gazed into forms that fine day in July, do you remember? Now invoking air’s atoms to white-heat incandescence. And calls nitrogen into blue luminescence. That then falls, torn from within, clutched by a current of rain forcing you to flinch as it thuds against the soil merging with the work of microbes smaller than we can perceive so plants may feast, then die to nourish you and so tend to your thriving. Delivering that nitrogen, once of the stars then sky then soil to scaffold your DNA. And in the quiet of this night, we look for her, – dear Grandmother Moon – who herself cannot be full without her retreat into the deep dark. And in her new-born weeks, she gazes upon the tide of distant starlight that made her. We too. And speak of being loved in imperfect manners by those hearts who have forgotten their own magnitude, while we search out past-stars; exploded into fractions of themselves. Yet their light still edges near; longing to wise-look upon their young descendants: drifting, lingering in an illuminated brilliance of limerence at the thought of All: human, and more-than-we in multiple, ongoing forms. My friend, please re-call in your retreat to smallness: you’re Light’s memory – a fingerprint of the stars. A summation of wonder. * * * * * Publishing credits Couplet: Christmas & Winter Edition Vol. 3 (Black Bough Poetry) Lutein: Christmas & Winter Edition Vol. 2 (Black Bough Poetry) A Summation of Wonder: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Andy Breckenridge read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Andy Breckenridge back next the poet Andy Breckenridge is originally from Oban, Scotland, but now lives and works in Brighton, England, as a secondary school English teacher. He writes about self-imposed exile, place, relationships, cultural identity and memory, and his poems have been published widely in print and online journals. He's been a featured poet with Flight of the Dragonfly Spoken Word, and with the Northern Poet’s Society. His first poetry pamphlet The Liquid Air appeared in 2021, followed by an illustrated version in 2022. Andy's debut full collection, published in 2023, is titled The Fish Inside . the poems Tartanalia 00:00 / 01:55 I stand outside your window at night waiting for you to open the blinds and see my tartan face the whites of my eyes shot with blood lines – green irises popping see how the plain silver kilt pins jawbone my skin together in the wind see how symmetrical and intricately blocked I am – each sawtooth of green dovetails with dark blue in a precise matrix see how the straps and buckles fit so neatly through the slits in my waist – hold fast I was that night bus that snagged on departure from Glasgow Buchanan Street and unravelled en route to London Victoria to help you find your way back – now I frown at your lack of fealty and the accents of your kids and yours – while you sleep, I’ll slip sliver after sliver of tablet onto your tongue until your teeth pop like lightbulbs see my gridlines keep everything in check stretch to infinity like a spreadsheet weighing up the debits and credits (you are in the red) that’s me peering in right now, an arrow slit of borrowed moonlight that’s my breath – that’s me hanging lifeless in your wardrobe – following you in the car lurking on shortbread tins and tea towels as you scurry past gift shops at airports avoiding eye contact – weigh me Is my cloth too rich and heavy? Morning light slides past the blinds again and the first trains shake me out of the air. You Can Take The Boy Out Of Nature … 00:00 / 00:45 Dizzy astride the rope clump on the swing in the Hazel Woods, you pendulum above the roots exposed on the earthy floor. Cool air wrings your eyes, adrenaline runs its fingers through your gut; the branch creaks out a rhythm like rust. You are still unable to identify a hazel or the bare bushes at the head of the loch whose silver fingers tug at your jersey where ticks hitch rides on your blood. You pluck away their bodies and legs, leave the buried mouthparts to grow out or dissolve in the flesh. Photograph: Ganavan Beach In Winter 00:00 / 01:21 You both always knew exactly what to do and set about your play in earnest knowing your time there was finite. Fine sand and cold February air pinched your small fingers, as you crouched, burrowed and shaped a friable cityscape of roads, tunnels, bridges, stairs and squat buildings. You never saw the low winter sun pool shadows in every dip. Or the tyre tracks beside you twist like prehistoric spines that stretched down towards the footprints and pawprints, the hieroglyphs left by birds, the careless signatures of lugworms or the blackened lines of dry seaweed marking tide lines like shed skin. Or the snow retreating to the peaks on Mull. Later, by your feet in the back of the car there are peeled off parking permits empty hula hoop packets discarded and dated. Rain flecks the shop front windows of the real town empty and holding its breath for the season. Publishing credits Tartanalia: Flights (Flight of the Dragonfly Press) You Can Take The Boy Out Of Nature ...: exclusive first publication by iamb Photograph: Ganavan Beach In Winter: The Fish Inside (Flight of the Dragonfly Press)