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Hear poet Ruth Wiggins read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Ruth Wiggins back next the poet Birmingham-based writer, poet and educator Louise McStravick says her writing is concerned mostly with extracting the extraordinary from the ordinary. Her recent work can be found in Popshot , Ink Sweat & Tears , Dear Damsels , Aphelion, Porridge Magazine and several other respected publications. Louise's debut poetry collection, How to Make Curry Goat , was published in 2020. the poems Daughters 00:00 / 01:34 When children come out healthy, they are pink. Or the bit when pink meets red like that point in the sky when the sun reminds of its power to make us forget everything that came before it. Even if only a minute. This blood spilled sky an ending. Children are not yellow like a fully baked sun. They said she must have jaundice. My mother tells them her father’s skin holds the burnt ochres of a Caribbean sunset. They do not say sorry when they hand her over. Kallisto From Playing the Bear 00:00 / 01:12 Make the water rearrange its insides, shift shape as it is told, steam rise drip drip vinegar, sour the water to not let things stick. Watch it fight its way to the surface. It is not an easy process, such transformation, if not careful it can erupt, break onto skin that has already learned this is too hot, but does it again anyway. Turn the heat down. Don’t hold the egg too high or it will spread itself open, reveal itself, some things should be left to the imagination. Wand a whirlpool and crack it in watch it bring itself together, composed, despite itself. Let the bubbles teach it how to mature, push it to the surface, fully fledged yolk whole, unbroken, ready for charred bread. In one move, let the knife cut it open watch it pour itself out, ready for hungry tongues. K is for Keats 00:00 / 01:17 Start your day with a cheese board; wear lycra to work; decorate your eyelids with glitter made from reclaimed rainbow tears; slay your greetings—wink with both eyes—say goodbye instead of hello; only consume things that are the yellow of the midday sun; defy winter, wear a bikini, manifest warmth; yoga yourself to a luxury holiday at least 8 times a day—the more you do it the more the universe receives; eat squirty cream for lunch straight from the can and inhale the gas after; go on a 24-hour lunch break—if your boss asks why tell her to read your daily horoscope; stop your thoughts at the click of a notification; order yourself a slice of knowledge; you’re owning it babes you’re shitting out that deposit with every reusable cup. You can do this! Start a petition to ban white bread; teach the bacteria in your stomach to recycle plastic; don’t eat anything that could look sound or feel like it could have been crawled on by anything that can be named. Keep going! You know you’re winning when you wake up and it isn’t raining. Publishing credits Daughters: The Poetry Review (Vol. 108, No. 4) Kallisto / K is for Keats: exclusive first publication by iamb

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

Hear poet Nóra Blascsók read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Nóra Blascsók back next the poet Nóra Blascsók is a Hungarian poet based in Manchester. Her most recent poems can be found in bath magg , Acumen and Atrium . Her debut pamphlet, of work , will be published by Broken Sleep Books in June 2022. the poems Draw Myself 00:00 / 01:17 from behind body of a baby owl sleeping arms limp the small of my back yes turn over childbearing hips like grandmother said we bled for the original sin brackets around sentence drenched it’s fake run pen over thigh line wider and wider leave a gap for the imagination the pause before you go under can’t look roast potatoes would be nice later draw big areolae remind myself my breasts have an underside a lump in my throat as I check for hated them touched now I don’t watch my skin fade colour my teeth into lips draw curtain for hiding off the page amorphous Play-Doh make me in the image of Goddess of Woman or something that passes The Truth About Swans A found poem using text from a website with facts about swans, as well as questions suggested by Google's autofill. 00:00 / 00:48 Can swans fly? The only sound is the wings beating. Do swans mate for life? The male is known as cob and the female as pen. Are swans protected? It has been known for swans to die of a broken heart. Are swans aggressive? Cygnets are grey with black beaks when they hatch. Do swans kill? A cygnet weighs a block of butter. Are swans territorial? A gosling floating. Salvation 00:00 / 00:37 Standing still Misplaced reed Calm summer day Strange new God on spindly legs The congregation In state of trance Thrash around Speaking in tongues Prostrate with beaks Bowed in submission Silent sermon The flock in awe Twitch The heron’s wings Envelop the pond The gulls Briefly silent Resurface Cleansed Publishing credits Draw Myself: Dust Magazine (Issue 5) The Truth About Swans: Dreich Magazine (Season 2, Issue 2) Salvation: Exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Graham Clifford read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Graham Clifford © Martin Juhasz back next the poet CEO of a large Multi Academy Trust and author of five poetry collections – published, variously, by Seren Books, Against the Grain and The Black Light Engine Room – Graham Clifford is the author of The Hitting Game . He's seen his work chiselled into paving slabs in Walthamstow, translated into Romanian and German, and featured in the UK's Poetry Archive . He's had poems in Poetry Wales , The Rialto , Magma , Ink, Sweat & Tears and The London Magazine , been anthologised by Faber & Faber and Broken Sleep Books, and rejected by The New Yorker. the poems No Alternative Now 00:00 / 01:06 Let’s grow a forest and hide in it. We will stay there for years, our clothes dropping from us in leaf shapes in the dim crunchiness where we copulate quickly like foxes, and crap standing, ready to run. After a while, reporters will arrive but we will be up a tree, bearded and matted. Puffballs come up in the areas where we urinate: they are delicately luminescent, buzz in the dark like candle-lit, drizzly planets. Shivering, curled together, one night I smell death about to bloom in you – next thing, you don’t want your hazelnuts, can’t pull yourself up onto our branch. From then on, until it happens, every night I dream we drive sharp cars and eat from tins. We will never get this life out of our system. Why He was Chosen 00:00 / 00:50 The man whose body accepted the pig’s heart had a violent past and worked with a machine that de-beaked chicks. The heart lasted three years partly because of immunosuppressant drugs. The night before the transplant he watched a YouTube video of a black and white Russian experiment where a dog’s head was severed, reattached and had its nose tickled and it reacted. It is reported the man mostly stayed alive because he studied calm and practised identifying and eradicating stress with the fidelity of a bear goring salmon full of semen and roe from a terrifyingly cold river in the dark. The Best Poem Ever Written 00:00 / 01:45 I write a poem that is the best. Massive. Not just long, but huge intellectually and although it is book length reading is like freefalling, each line greased with two genius thoughts. The poem makes me famous. I wander oxygen-depleted nights down city streets and hear lines of my poem bartered between sticky lovers. On the train, I peek over the top of a hardback book about me at a man in a suit nodding off and recognise the words he’s mouthing in his swoon. All front pages, every day, showcase stanzas of my poem – bombings and murders get tucked inside. The new novelist pays well to get my poem printed as an introduction: she knows her work makes no sense without it. Everyone I have ever known rings me to ask how I did it. I say I don’t know and that’s the truth. After a year the fuss hasn’t died away. I sit at my computer and hear downstairs turn the TV on. I put my ear to a gap in the floorboards. It’s an actor, and he’s reading my poem. It’s a good version: I’ve heard it before. He has a Shakespearean voice doing justice to what the introducer called The Best Poem Ever Written. I listen to it all, I travel where the poem takes me, then get back in my chair and write a better one. Publishing credits No Alternative Now: The Hitting Game (Seren Books) Why He was Chosen: The Rialto (No. 100) The Best Poem Ever Written: Obsessed with Pipework (No. 24)

Hear poet Patricia M Osborne read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Patricia M Osborne back next the poet Patricia M Osborne graduated with an MA in Creative Writing in 2019. A novelist, poet and short fiction writer, she's published eight poetry pamphlets and had numerous poems and short stories appear in various literary magazines and anthologies. Her debut poetry pamphlet, Taxus Baccata , was nominated for the 2020 Michael Marks Pamphlet Award, while her poem ‘Sandcastles Fall’ was nominated for The Pushcart Prize in 2025. When not working on her own writing, Patricia enjoys mentoring other writers. the poems Galanthus 00:00 / 00:59 I shelter at the base of trees, abbeys, churchyards or amongst woodland. My neighbours, mistletoe, petasites, wild aconitum, hang close to my side. I’m harvest for Norman Monks who decorate churches at Feast of Candlemas, nature’s medicine, rub on temples to treat mal de tête . I spring into action, push up through arctic-white and cheer through winter gloom. Standing with grace, I nod as you pass by silver birch. Milk-tone drooping petals, viridescent stem, ... symbol of purity. Journey through a Mythical Forest An encounter with my muse 00:00 / 02:00 He wraps strong branches around me. I inhale his sweet scented needles with the promise of a story in a dream as the yew’s magic heals my mind from darkness into light. Twigs brush my bare arms, I caress their fruit, a cluster of nuts drop to my feet with the promise of inspiration as the hazel’s magic heals my mind from darkness to light. She rustles her leaves, I finger her silver bark, peel back a small patch with the promise of fertility as the birch’s magic heals my mind from darkness to light. Sturdy boulders stroke my shoulders I glance up at his crown with the promise of protection, strength and wisdom as the oak’s magic heals my mind from darkness to light. I kneel under his huge canopy, hug his wide trunk, close my eyes. My muse arrives. I write on the page– I am rich, I am strong, I am wise, I am gifted. I am thankful to the mystic forest for its magic in healing my mind from darkness to light. I am 00:00 / 00:53 Serenity captured by blue cloudless sky over sun-kissed ripples where Canada geese play and Egyptian goslings nuzzle up to their mother. I am Love and Harmony together with family, friends, yet miles apart. I am Hope as daffodils wave their yellow heads, and perfect pink blossom sways from the nearby cherry tree. I am Memory as forget-me-nots in their blue and white glory push up from the ground. I am Peace and pray this world will let me in. Publishing credits Galanthus: Taxus Baccata (The Hedgehog Poetry Press) Journey through a Mythical Forest: exclusive first publication by iamb I am: Nature’s Bookends (The Hedgehog Poetry Press)

Hear poet Julie Stevens read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Julie Stevens back next the poet Frances Boyle (she/her) is a prairie-raised Canadian writer, long settled in Ottawa, Ontario, whose third collection is Openwork and Limestone . Her debut, Light-carved Passages , was republished after ten years in 2024 as a free, open-access eBook. With her poetry published everywhere from The Fiddlehead and The New Quarterly to The Ekphrastic Review and The Honest Ulsterman , Frances has received a number of prizes – among these, This Magazine ’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt, and Arc Poetry Magazine ’s Diana Brebner Prize . She was a long-time member of the editorial board of Arc Poetry Magazine , and is now on the boards of The League of Canadian Poets, and VERSe Ottawa, which runs the VERSeFest international poetry festival. the poems Piano Practice 00:00 / 01:31 A column of light, not steady but scintillating. I listen for its faint scratchiness, its syncopated silences, its airy breathing. Exhalation of pores, the inhalation of mountains and the sea’s unceasing bellow-lungs. Surf, like horses that rear and mane- shake, rush in, retreat. And spume a spiraling cylinder. A rising, a lifting, finest droplets hovering on the air. What tuning will bring me past static to clarity, to that thrum of silence, voices chiming, twining, a braid of sound within that space between breathing, behind the exhale, pulling the inhale into animate energy, that silent moment that might be death but for the animal compulsion willing our squeezebox lungs to echo ocean, and breathe. Why I Don’t Like Kippers 00:00 / 01:17 Inside your house, the radiator ticks, floors shift and mutter. The skeleton of struts and beams is clad with plaster and paint. You’ve adorned the walls with more paint —on canvas, on paper. A visiting friend admires the art, the book-crammed shelves. Talk turns to what she’s read, what you haven’t. Excuses for uncracked spines. Your dog’s steps are halting now, nail- clack on hardwood more syncopated than staccato. You hear him sigh. In the driveway, a crunch as tires compress the snow. A squirrel traverses wire and bare branches. The tremble at leafless ends. You feel the slow flow of tidal rock how the current supports you, carries you. Them 00:00 / 00:54 An amble of half a mile down to the beach, green on both sides as I carry my pack. I emerge to wave- rush that washes out speech, and set borrowed tent on the sand near sea-wrack. I came on my own to wrench from the mire of my shame over deeds which should have stayed hidden. The campers next site watch me struggle with fire. That woman craves quiet they shush their children. I beachcomb for hours, sand under my feet. Pared down to sorrow, guilt grows slowly leaner. My feeble campfire still gives me some heat while grit, whipped by wind, works to scour me cleaner. Lone nights under canvas deliver release; slow rot, woody moss-scent their own kind of peace. Publishing credits Piano Practice / Why I Don't Like Kippers: Journey Through the Fire (The Hedgehog Poetry Press) Them: Flights (Issue Nine)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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