Hear poet Suyin Du Bois read poems for wave 19 of literary poetry journal iamb. Suyin Du Bois wave 19 autumn 2024 back next the poet Suyin Du Bois (she/her) is a poet of mixed Chinese-Malaysian and Belgian heritage. She lives in London, and studied for her BA in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Warwick. In her most recent writing, Suyin has explored her multi-cultural heritage and life through food. Her poems have appeared in Propel Magazine , Freeze Ray Poetry , Zindabad and Stanzas , and she was anthologised in Fourteen Publishing's Bi+ Lines: An Anthology of Contemporary Bi+ Poets . When not obsessing over word choices, Suyin spends her time building an early-stage start-up that aims to give NHS hospital staff 24/7 access to nutritious, affordable food. the poems Ode to Kaya 00:00 / 01:45 Egg jam first on my young tongue, palm sugar sweet, coconut milk rich. Thick layers on charred toast, salted butter cubes between, melting in Penang sweat. My Goh Ee Poh stood for hours stirring you in that double-boiled heat. Exports to be swaddled, twisted into pink and green plastic bags, nestled amongst swimming costumes and sundresses, rituals to ward off mid-air leaks in the 14 hours from one home to the other. Back in England your layers thinned, our knives more sparing after each spread. After Goh Ee Poh grew too frail, aunties and uncles gifted us store-bought surrogates. You were labelled Kaya . Our cupboards filled with your empties, aides-mémoire of indulgence repurposed to house fragrant rice, Chinese mushrooms, our longing for Nonya flavours. By the time pandan leaves arrive in Chinatown, I am grown up, have my own kitchen where I can stand for hours. But Goh Ee Poh has long since condensed into photographs, so I sweeten my never-asked regret, trace down someone else’s heirloom recipe. You are needy, threaten lumps, failure, but I stir and stir like her, until my spoon draws the right depths of lineage. I lift a heap of you into my mouth, tongue your clotted grainy sweetness. The First Mouthful 00:00 / 01:41 In the back corner of Pulau Tikus market, tucked in behind uncles pressing fresh santan, trays of kueh steamed overnight, gutted fish, beside batik dresses and the energetic ladling of hawker sellers, I sit still– watch tiny bubbles on the surface of my koay teow th’ng. I’m not sure what’s woken me so early: jet lag or my stomach aching for hot soup in the heat, for kopi strong and Carnation-swirled, for the kinship of their steam. I pull fine white noodles from the broth’s well-oiled clarity, wind them into the flat base of my spoon, chopstick up: a slither of duck, crunchy pork lard, one wide-blinked iris of chilli padi to top the pile. Nudging the spoon back into the liquid so it wells up around this first mouthful, I catch the curious eye of the uncle at the next table. Where are you from? Wah eh mama si Penang lang. The words mis-intoned, or too unexpected from this face, he frowns. The rooster on the side of my bowl hasn’t yet crowed me fully awake, so I say London and we both smile. I turn back, slurp my spoonful down – feel the quick slip of the koay teow, the stock radiating through me, the chilli biting at my throat. On The First Cold Day of Winter, You Ask for Rusks 00:00 / 01:30 Tannie Noeline’s recipe calls for true boeremeisie quantities, so I adapt each measure by awkward fractions— still the batter laps the lip of my bowl as I wed flour to crushed bran to buttermilk. The last step says dry . I had to google it the first time, and even on the thirteenth I worry when to take them out of the oven, leave them in overnight. In the morning, our house smells of a hunger that’s spread wide since our last trip back to your childhood home, my windfall one. We don’t wait. We dunk rough chopped rusks into our coffee, and you tell me once more about your Ouma’s aniseed beskuit, so tall and arid, they’d absorb half a mug in one dip, hang sodden only long enough for your mouth to get under its fall. We reminisce about road trips between Hermanus and Bothaville, how I make us pause at every padstal, seek out the most tempting treats – banana and bran, pumpkin seed and apricot – how every homemade rusk tempts us. You remind me that mine are your favourite, and I reply Jy is my gunsteling . And we keep going until the bottom of our mugs is a beach of sunflower seeds and crumbs with the tide sucked out. Publishing credits Ode to Kaya: Propel Magazine (Issue One) The First Mouthful: Bi+ Lines: An Anthology of Contemporary Bi+ Poets (Fourteen Publishing) On The First Cold Day of Winter, You Ask for Rusks: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Wren Wood read poems for wave 22 of literary poetry journal iamb. Wren Wood wave 22 summer 2025 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 Jude Marr read poems for wave 13 of literary poetry journal iamb. Jude Marr wave 13 spring 2023 back next the poet The Pushcart Prize-nominated non-binary poet Jude Marr (they/them) is the author of the poetry collection We Know Each Other By Our Wounds . Their work has appeared in many magazines in the US, the UK and worldwide. After ten years of living, learning and teaching in the US, Jude is now back in Britain working as a freelance editor and writing coach. They're looking forward to expanding their horizons on the UK poetry scene. the poems Live from the Billionaire Philanthropists’ Banquet 00:00 / 02:06 at this false table appetite is not loss: love cocoons blame while self- proclaimed good servants shave bottom lines and spin kaleidoscopes before the famished (slivered glass as thought salad) as well-tended hands offer bread to shrinking, wrinkled bodies the would-be unhinge their hearts, still filthy from a dream of delights meanwhile children, graveyard wraiths, stuff restructured bread into unlined mouths: their hands hang angular: their eye-skeletons are sockets of birds who sing, featherless in the graveyard of power-hungry minds, dark famine eats air: rainfall’s undelivered: a mess of struts rises around barred gold— three meals feed expectations: a bountiful garden, bread without errors, heart-table dreams and we say, let’s eat expensive: grind night like we grind coffee: remind the pot that we are appetite: but what terror of the rambling heart, rock-fraught and filthy, empties a child’s hand without touching? graveyard children make our sold-out hearts raw: we draw our hands from their hunger: we make coffee without touching the world. Solitary 00:00 / 01:07 spider on a cold expanse of glass: your padded claws, tiny to the human eye, never misstep: your leg-hairs hear the beat of winter’s wings— find my window’s crack and crawl in: my home’s dark corners do not hide a broom: make my room your own: spin filaments as sanctuary, silk strong enough to catch the light— cold-blooded spider: I know you do not fear winter’s beak: nature has made you predator and prey: stay of execution is my offering: all I seek is fractal consolation from the corner of my eye. Silence Will Not Save Us 00:00 / 01:14 word-heat rises, carbon-oxidised, as oily lies combust: on city streets we are still breathing, just: our children trusted us— masks act as word-catchers, trapping holy lies as halitosis, drowning saviour fantasies in spit: still, the unmasked spew their shit— jugglers, jousters, clowns conjure witty lies to please a crowd: word games to distract: even mimes may misdirect— in my silent room, I pass my cup from one hand to the other: I am the loner I declaim, my wasted words already ash— in my room, silent, I smell smoke. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Jamie Woods read poems for wave 14 of literary poetry journal iamb. Jamie Woods wave 14 summer 2023 back next the poet Jamie Woods, a writer from Swansea, has poetry in Poetry Wales , Ink Sweat & Tears , Lucent Dreaming and elsewhere. With his work centring on experiences of disabilities and cancer, Jamie has been commended in the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine 2021, and is now poet-in-residence at the charity Leukaemia Care. His debut pamphlet, Rebel Blood Cells , is available from Punk Dust Poetry . the poems The Silence of the Hospital Ward 00:00 / 01:49 Silence is elusive, is illusive. When your head is on the pillow and you think that it’s close you complacently relax and it scurries. Clocks ticking. The mundane drip of the tap, the one with handles for elbows that you’re too far away from to give a nudge off. The low-level buzz of electric light. The slow wheeze heart and lung churn of the IV pump and the siren when it’s nearly run out or you just bump the tube. Other people’s ringtones, message chimes, other people’s phone calls. Other people’s conversations. The excitement of family, the desperate anger. The admin of auxiliaries and nurses and doctors, the gossip of auxiliaries and nurses and doctors. The driving mechanics, the alarms, the beeps; blood pressure, oxygen count, your still-beating heart. Painkillers wearing off. The screams fly as wraiths through walls and curtains biting and snatching away dying hope. At night, at day – no time here, just numbers – the ward whispers sting with invasiveness, the rumbles of breathlessness and nasal congestion, the snores, the moans, hurt like needles. The shock, the pain, the begging. The trundle of the drug trolley, and the screams at night, my God, the screams at night terrify, terrorise. Clarion calls for carrion attacks. Not me, not this time. Clocks ticking. Headphones on, I sleep with the spoken word, smooth voices, TED talks and shipping forecasts, waking throughout, until Thought for the Day: unrested, unblessed, undead. Johnson’s Baby Shampoo 00:00 / 00:46 I get flashbacks now months later when I step out of the shower and bury my face in the towel I’m back in the showers at Singleton the water blasting furiously, too hot, with a precious locked door refuge from the dormitories let myself go, unheard, unashamed, the raging water and baby shampoo blanch away the fatigue from my dying broken skin cry into the towel until I’m ready to go back to a freshly made bed hospital corners, military precision, fake smiles distracting from coal-blackened eyes and I know I’m not there anymore, but it’s scalded into my brain and I can’t find the right type of soap I need to wash it all away. Wolf Alice & Camper Van Beethoven Live at the Adam Smith Institute 00:00 / 01:08 Had a dream last night and everyone was coughing In therapy today she forgets why we’re here Tell me about a recent social situation that made you anxious? I’ve not been in a social situation for the last two years Everybody’s going out for lunch these days So jealous of your new-found laissez-faire I buy tickets for a concert that I’m aching for But in my scared heart, I know I won’t go. Resell them at face value in a free-market economy The Adam Smith Institute must think that I’m ill. DOORS AT SEVEN. MASKS OPTIONAL. ADMISSION RIGHTS RESERVED. OVER 18s, WITH WORKING IMMUNE SYSTEMS ONLY. Last night there were two hundred people in the room. Walls sweat-shimmered, shoulders condensed, screaming tears, You’re a Germ , kinetic hormones released. Words now airborne, choruses viral. I stay at home in my germ-free convalescence Playing scratched old records for the left-behind. Publishing credits The Silence of the Hospital Ward / Johnson’s Baby Shampoo: Rebel Blood Cells (Punk Dust Poetry) Wolf Alice & Camper Van Beethoven Live at the Adam Smith Institute: Poetry Wales (Vol. 58, Issue 1)

Hear poet Hilary Menos read poems for wave 18 of literary poetry journal iamb. Hilary Menos wave 18 summer 2024 back next the poet Hilary Menos won The 2010 Forward Prize for Best First Collection with Berg , and was a winner in The Poetry Business International Book & Pamphlet Competition 2019/20 with her pamphlet Human Tissue . Her second collection is Red Devon , while her most recent pamphlet is Fear of Forks . After reading Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford, Hilary took an MA in poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. She's worked as a student organiser, journalist, food reviewer, organic farmer, dramaturge and builder’s mate, is married with four sons, and now lives in France. Hilary is the editor of weekly online poetry journal, The Friday Poem . the poems Ivory Viking Queen The Lewis chessmen are a group of medieval chess pieces carved from walrus ivory and whale teeth, discovered in 1831 in the Outer Hebrides. There is some debate over their origin. 00:00 / 01:11 What has she seen, what has she seen, this sombre little Viking queen, hunched and brooding on her ivory throne, one hand to her cheek, one clutching a drinking horn. Is she mourning the battle-dead, the lost pawns, the cost of revenge, the endless cycle of harm? Beside her, the king is implacable, bearded. Her berserker is biting his shield. There is mystery, too, in her making — was she carved in the workshops of Trondheim or Jelling, or by Margret the Adroit, the best in Iceland with tusk and tooth and bone? From the cast resin face of this British Museum fridge magnet her maker winks at me. My money’s on Margret. Queen Esther’s Makeover ' ... Esther was brought also unto the king’s house, to the custody of Hegai, keeper of the women.' ~ Esther, 2:8 ~ 00:00 / 01:14 The verb form used is passive: they were gathered, they were prepared, they were made ready, and after a twelve-month beauty treatment — six months with oil of myrrh, six months with sweet perfumes (of all the Biblical oils, myrrh is top of the list) — each one was taken in to the bachelor king and would not be taken in again, unless he delighted in her and summoned her again by name. The words for ‘beauty treatment’ translate as ‘scour, polish’ (read more here about skin care in the Bible, Psalms, 104:15. Oil makes a person’s face shine. Vigorous scrubbing with ash imparts a natural glow.) But no mention of what happened to the other queen, the one who refused, who spoke back, using the active voice. Ruby Woo 00:00 / 01:43 All I ever needed to know about lipstick I learned from Emily Fox. Influencer, queen of the haul and swatch, she has fifty shades of MAC and she’s applying them, now, on her YouTube channel, working her way through the nudes, the pinks, the corals like a pedagogue, like a pro, as if she’d been gifted a Girl’s World Styling Head at birth. She slicks on Daddy’s Girl, then Sin, then Ruby Woo and I can’t stop watching, transfixed by her technique (two notches on her top lip, then four elegant strokes) and by the way she turns to camera when she’s done and smiles, and pauses. Smiles wider. Main beam! Emily taught me the power of a wet, red mouth. Now crowds of men in pubs part like the Red Sea and a dozen barmen fall over each other to serve me. O Emily, what goes on when the camera goes off? Do your cheek muscles ache? Does your fridge magnet say: ‘Lipstick is the red badge of courage’ — Man Ray? I’m more of a John Keats fan. Beauty is truth, truth, beauty. That’s all you know on earth, all you need to know. Don’t ask me what I know. I’m coming to a bar near you, coming for you. Me and Daddy’s Girl and Sin and Ruby Woo. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Ben Blench read poems for wave 13 of literary poetry journal iamb. Ben Blench wave 13 spring 2023 back next the poet Amsterdam-based freelance copywriter Ben Blench writes poems and songs to escape his day job. He's translated two books – Why I Love Tattoos and Why I Love Sex – and has had a poem published by Broken Sleep Books. the poems Alt text for a photo of an out-of-phase moon 00:00 / 01:02 Frost on the treetops in the foreground A baby-blue sky, clear except For one small scrape of cloud In the top right corner Which isn’t a cloud at all But a midday moon Eight trillion tons of rock Disguised as a thin foam disc All awkward in the cold like I’m not sure I belong here Perhaps I should get my things And quietly slope off Half gone, half forgotten But at the same time half not Listen I think maybe This isn’t making much sense Let me try to spell it out: It’s easy to miss a thing As big as love first time But you must keep looking, don’t stop. Anthem for a resurrected planet 00:00 / 01:33 Our pockets are stuffed with cash And we are wandering along a beach At the end of the day, a wonderful day No sickness, no sweat, You and me on the up Striking out into life like the first day, And you say kiss me, you hideous brute . Through clean air we can see for miles And it is a picture of togetherness The landscape triumphant, unmolested Filled with contented mothers Babies cradled in their arms Everything well built And I just know that this time it’s going to last Every nation’s flag is flying with a supreme lack of arrogance That drowns out the advertisers’ claims The sun swells with slow pride As if all the systems that conspired to bind us Have seized up and dissolved, as if We have turned off the TV and thrown open the curtains And for the first time in years we don’t feel like getting drunk Finally, an upstanding woman is in charge of things And there is change on the wind Safe streets and clean rivers, everywhere bursting with life And we’re all on our bikes, riding Towards some beautiful unbordered country. In the park 00:00 / 01:11 I want to tell you how weird it is to become a father. Like suddenly finding yourself sunk on a long, stone bench, the evening sun falling bronze on your shoulders, the church bell calling: time to go. Part of you leaps up and jogs away, over the bridge towards a bowl of noodles, maybe, or a toastie. Part of you coughs last night's cigarettes into the grass and mutters, I don’t feel much like food . And the other part just sits there, tying and retying the laces in your two-hundred euro shoes. Up on the disused chimney the stork clatters her bill and all you can think is, I’ll set off in a minute. I just need a minute. Just give me one more minute . This kind of thing can go on for quite some time. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Phoebe Gilmore read poems for wave 24 of literary poetry journal iamb. Phoebe Gilmore wave 24 winter 2025 back next the poet Originally from Devon but based now in London, Phoebe Gilmore has work in And Other Poems , Propel Magazine , Seaford Review , The Shore and eggplusfrog . She was shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize in 2024, and is currently working towards her debut collection. the poems Gynaecology Ranch 00:00 / 01:00 Giddy up leather filly there’s no use in lying down like a dead book our appointment opens me to the hills the secret once found is grainy and black buried under gut and a disposable mini- skirt of blue paper doctor in the field give me an answer clear and thick as cold lubrication so I may slip prescription into my filly’s mouth a brilliant metal knocking against teeth when I squeeze left and right dig my spurs into her bloated belly knickerless animal on animal when home I’ll sleep off the long ride like shrugging out of a winter coat Turning King 00:00 / 00:47 When I attempt to atomise, when I’m a ball of spine and flinging small dogs from my throat across bathroom tile, figure womb before as a light membrane of a forgotten sock, transformed to a pale fist of mud night beginning and with it a fire engine in my underwear, in my blood pills spinning their wheels, I open to the toilet bowl, turn king, it’s my castle. Here comes the big one After Hase 00:00 / 00:55 Godspeed big pink bunny you appeared brief and accidental but five years of hands made you and assembled your gangles like you fell from the sky cartoonish slide whistle a dropped clown apple covered in hiker ants on Colletto Fava the weather ate you in the end and in the end the weather ate you into a greying gym sock I’m trying to find your ghost on Google Maps I too will deteriorate before my predicted time of deterioration lying on the floor of my hallway assembled like I’ve fallen from the ceiling Publishing credits Gynecology Ranch: And Other Poems Turning King: Goldfish Anthology (Goldsmiths University) Here comes the big one: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Nigel Kent read poems for wave 1 of literary poetry journal iamb. Nigel Kent wave 1 winter 2020 back next the poet The poems of Pushcart Prize-nominated poet Nigel Kent have appeared in a wide range of publications and been shortlisted in national poetry competitions. His collection, Saudade , was published in 2019 by The Hedgehog Poetry Press, following the success of his poetry conversations, Thinking you Home and A Hostile Environment, written in collaboration with Sarah Thomson. the poems Breakfast Scene 00:00 / 01:34 We watch her fill the glass up to its brim with juice and carry it like the sacrament, across the busy breakfast room, tongue pressed between her lips, to where her mum will sit. Her father shovels sugar into a cup of cooling tea to sweeten the bitterness that has spiked their holiday; the image of her with their friend stirring, stirring, stirring. The mother doesn’t notice what her child’s prepared; she’s looking for her partner, who, seeing her arrive, walks off, wading through a churning sea, chin deep, the sand sinking beneath his leaden feet. ‘DADDY’S GOING, MUMMY!’ her daughter screams and makes us silent extras in this breakfast scene; wishing we had lines to shape a new direction to this plot. His partner grabs the siren child fighting sandaled feet that kick out vainly at her fears, and smash the love-filled glass instead, which haemorrhages unchecked across the pristine linen, and though in seconds a waitress removes the sodden cloth and mops up the sticky dregs dripping from the table top, she cannot rid the room of the stain the family has left behind. Miscarried 00:00 / 00:49 When she lost the little girl she’d longed for, they did not try again; ‘Too old!’ he’d said. She did not lie silently in a closed-curtain room; she did not stare mutely into the unused cot. Her grief was a howling, bared-teeth grief; a sinew-ripping grief; a snapping, snarling grief that locked its jaws around her throat and swiped at both his outstretched hands. He learned in time to tip-toe round her, flattening himself against the nursery walls, but he never could ignore the quiet sound of gnawing, as it devoured her hour by hour. Man of words 00:00 / 00:58 You were so different from your older brother. I’d toss words to you, cajoling you to catch them and throw them back. But unlike him, you would not play; you’d let them fall and watch them bounce across the floor. Silence was your mouthpiece; but you were simply biding time, storing the words you'd let drop, and snapping them together with muffled clicks, to make a labyrinth of plastic streets and towering houses, where you would hide, count to ten and challenge me to find you, though I never could, not even when I cheated. You made me wait, testing patience till it failed. Then you’d emerge wearing expressions, borrowed from friends, concealing the face I’ve never learned to read. Publishing credits All poems: Saudade (The Hedgehog Poetry Press)

Hear poet Sarah Connor read poems for wave 16 of literary poetry journal iamb. Sarah Connor wave 16 winter 2023 back next the poet Poet Sarah Connor lives in Devon, England, and is a past nominee for both The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Her work has appeared in numerous anthologies and magazines, and she's published two full collections of poetry: The Crow Gods and The Poet Spells Her Name . the poems Stumbling on Beauty 00:00 / 00:50 That summer, I became adept at finding beauty. I reached out for it – the clean-scrubbed nails on the nurse's fingers. They were beautiful. The green flesh of an avocado; a spider's web, caught in a hedge – all beauty. I held it like a trophy. I was so greedy for the loveliness of a child swinging in a playground, of a light caught in water of a bird turning on emptiness – I collected it, collated it, I held it tightly, threw it high, up into the air, like cherry blossom or confetti, like the light that shatters through the branches of a tree. The Red-haired Girl 00:00 / 02:20 Bobby Sands died. That's how old I am. Bobby Sands died, and the red-haired girl died too, two days apart – so now, when I discuss the hunger strikers, I still feel that gush of anger, that someone could just die. We'd been in a school play together, her and I, the Redhead. As if her hair defined her. Perhaps it did. I think now, that hair might have been her mother's first loss, the first thing she mourned. Somebody dropped out, so we both moved up a notch, theatrically. I became the mother, and she became the governess. A comic part. I wanted to play tragedy back then. The father was a guy called Tim. He wore white jeans. Went off and joined the Met. The Metropolitan Police – so that maybe when I was down in London, doing all that student stuff, making my way in party clothes at daybreak through the empty city streets, and knowing this was how my life would always be, if I'd been picked up for some minor crime, or been the victim of an unprovoked attack, so guileless in my tawdry party clothes – it could have been him that I dealt with. And maybe he was at Orgreave. So while I was layering on my eyeliner and putting change into the miner's tin, he was up there, sticking in his boot. So far apart we drift, just spiders, really, riding threads. When my hairdresser shaved my head, she cried, and an old lady sitting next to me reached over – ‘You look just like that Irish girl’, she said, and we all laughed, smiling and sobbing. That was my first loss, but nothing like her mother's – that great cloud of Titian red, those curls, she must have sighed and cursed that hair so many times, and then wept at the losing of it. The Generosity of Birds 00:00 / 00:42 By which I mean The way the robin throws his song out to the world The way the herring gull carves the sky The way the starlings create dreams The way the wren calls from the hedge The way the pigeons swagger across the city square The way the goldfinch embroiders a line between tree and sky The way the blackbird melts the world into music The way the cormorant opens its wings its arms its heart to the wind The way the lark sings only of summer The way the buzzard reminds us to trust the sky Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Louise Machen read poems for wave 25 of literary poetry journal iamb. Louise Machen wave 25 spring 2026 back next the poet Manchester-based Louise Machen has an MA in Creative Writing from The University of Manchester. Nominated for The Forward Prize (Best Single Poem –Written), she's had work in The Poetry Bus , Acropolis Journal , The Morning Star and Cape Magazine . Louise has been a featured poet at East Ridge Review , and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and twice for Best of the Net. Her work has featured on BBC Radio Manchester, and she was commissioned to write a poem for FC United of Manchester , celebrating their twentieth anniversary. Louise wrote a collaborative pamphlet, The Words of Others Are All We Have , and has published her debut collection, I Am Not Light . She's also a member of the poetry collective behind the audiobook, Which Way the Words Grow . the poems In Need of a Closer Shore After the MV Princess Victoria Memorial, Portpatrick 00:00 / 01:12 Granite-bolted above my wind-torn head, her greenish hands hang from iron history above a sharp and steely sea – fingers splayed and clinging like a mother’s desperation to recover the awe of infancy. Flogged by the air, I edge broadside and the picture becomes whole where pasts erode like sea stacks falling in on themselves – a short crossing, a solitary shift from which returning will always mark disaster. Gusts form abrasions like a scolding from her matriarchal tongue, whipping this child who is too close to the abyss – a daughter distracted, peeling feet from algae, unwilling to let go of her fractured vessel, as water floods the deck of attrition sluicing legs of broken timber. Do not drown me now in their loneliness. A Burnt Child Dreads the Fire 00:00 / 01:21 I dare to get out of bed each day, wash my face in troubled waters, rough flannel, tender cheeks – skin aflame from the fingertips of yesterday’s reluctant ownership. I keep my breathing shallow, beneath a square of sodden cotton, as though this room is smoke-filled – made safe by makeshift blindfolds and a thin but bolted door. I souse the canvas of my flesh, hot water pooled in porcelain, the slop and slough echoes – a rhythmic meditation made orange in the dawning light. I recite the rules by rote by heart, by practise, practise, practise by trial and by error, so quietly the hum of my voice is a vaporous elegy to rebellion: a softly spoken slander. I have been taught the right way and my way are not always the same. I pat the notes of my learning dry – water drains away. There is breakfast to be made with clean hands for glass smiles. Remains 00:00 / 01:06 Pulling up floorboards in the back room, we saw a green checked tea towel tightly wound – years hoarded in folds of bruised yellow, incongruous with copper pipes in cavities and the tedium of Sunday morning DIY. Fatherly hands unfolded the cloth – we watched as he brought to light the fragile skeleton of a tiny bird, phalanges curled and consenting to this almost-ceremony of the dining table – a not-quite final rites for our cotton-bound hand-me-down. My eyes widened like the orbital rings of that small skull, emptying their disbelief across its featherless frame. A hollowed relic of care wrapped as though old bones could fly away. Turning to my mother, he said, People are strange, aren’t they? In the room where, now, he keeps her ashes. Publishing credits In Need of a Closer Shore / A Burnt Child Dreads the Fire: I Am Not light , (Black Bough Poetry) Remains: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Ben Ray read poems for wave 6 of literary poetry journal iamb. Ben Ray wave 6 summer 2021 back next the poet Poet, reviewer and workshopper Ben Ray is a patron of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival, and a winner of the 2019 New Poets Prize. His most recent collection is The Kindness of the Eel , and his writing has appeared in a wide range of publications including Poetry Wales and The Oxford Review of Books . the poems Epska pjesma for a new millennium 00:00 / 01:19 You wanted to be an epic poem in the drafting to sit with Marko, Branković, Crnojević but our palimpsest homeland had forgotten poetry gifting us only hoarse voices, bloody footprints. We stayed at your house, frustrated we could not make history: but you had inherited from a vanished world distant stories, new borders that tightened round the neck and a rusted can of tear gas from some atrocity. Like good citizens we shut the doors, pierced the cap and inflicted our country upon ourselves pushing / staring / turning / running / choking / children vaulting over chintz sofas in desperation then outside, gasping laughing – you tore your chest open found three hearts: around the third, the snake was still sleeping In October 2000 huge protests broke out in Serbia's capital, Belgrade, against the perceived authoritarianism of the Serbian government, resulting in the overthrow of President Slobodan Milošević. The protests saw a high level of youth engagement. Sinning with Captain Birdseye 00:00 / 01:04 It really wasn’t necessary. They were just two fish fingers left sulking in soggy packaging. But that was the point. An act of Antoinette extravagance, a hubristic vote of confidence in modern society. Was there ever a better expression of disaster capitalism than turning on a whole fridge freezer just for them? No shame: only God can judge their private fishy palace for two, heated with North Sea oil to help them feel at home (Even Anthropocene bad boys have a heart). Then, of course, the breathless question on the crowd’s lips: to eat one and leave the other alone in that icy void? The act of a maniac the act of a daredevil. But look at them now. So settled. So happy. Do you not believe in redemption? Joke’s on you I have a tiramisu in my chest freezer I am a market square after everyone has left 00:00 / 01:16 I am a market square after everyone has left all made of loose veg and plastic wrapping, that pervasive pioneer of untouched spaces. My breath invigorates paper bags across slabs rustles drain-locked receipts into chorus: I am the one who pulls up the cobbles to trip the cyclists. The heart of a lettuce has never looked so lonely nor the leaves of an artichoke so fragile than when I wear them, dressing down in casual wear that would melt your heart. If carrots had eyes, they would be Disney-round and doleful as they roll down the orphanages of roadsides fulfilling tragic character arcs as they’re pulped underfoot. I am a market square after everyone has left grand words like desolation and loss are too big for my ordinary leftover onion-skin self, this paper-bag floor-level life – where dashed organic-grown hopes are swept up by street cleaners and next Sunday always seems so far away Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Angela Dye read poems for wave 4 of literary poetry journal iamb. Angela Dye wave 4 autumn 2020 back next the poet Angela Dye is a writer, editor, podcaster, teacher, reviewer, interviewer and radio broadcaster. She runs many literary events and projects in Kent, England, and has worked for various magazines and businesses creating audio content. Angela's work has appeared in several print and digital magazines. She's currently writing a novel, as well as her second poetry book. the poems The Ruby and the Con 00:00 / 00:50 Oh you patriarchs who regulate the calyx vase, who decree the mix of wine, milk and honey, who place me on the shelf to admire, to tame, to spill. Know this: I possess myself. I hug my curves tight, I vibrate myself within my jar. I unsteady the shelf. I smash the walls. My mother’s chambers no longer constrain me. I escape as viscous perfume, filling all the cracks. I, woman, am so wonderful and vast, I will fill boots, books, beds, babies, benches and brains. We shall run the Rubicon. We shall fill the Earth. And that shall not constrain us. The calyx is the female reproductive part of a flower. A calyx vase holds the mythical wine, honey and milk – different combinations of which denote women’s purity and immortality. Soup 00:00 / 01:33 Before the baby sun had been hurled hot into an unmade bed of sky, before earth was made, compliant and lush, we were dreaming the world, cooking up ideas, where nothing matters – he coerced me. Just once. Asked for soup. Just soup. Soup? Yes! I want it without humans in! Just a refreshing bowl of soup for the soul. Little things matter. Soup matters. Matter's in the soup: illusion and dreams, hopes and art, his dark materials to stir the soul. Season with love. So much love. Love to be made. There are many ways to kill a man. One could harm with charm, cut, drown, crown, disown, dismember, diss, hiss, piss take, mistake, disarm, cut, drown, burn, spurn, tickle, taunt, tar and feather, strap with leather, hail, nail. But remember this … the easiest way, by far the surest method to kill a good man, once and for all, is to slowly, ever so slowly, keep ... him … alive. The Borderline 00:00 / 02:11 We live in another world now, where forgiveness is no longer a magic spell, where potions are stolen, cannot be wolfed down, and Lupin cries to the moon. He wants to be good but he has this suit ... They say six foot is the best depth. This is so the stench doesn’t arise and the body is not taken so easy – for cannibalism, or even necrophilia. But five inches in, and we have hit hard strata. At first we thought we knew what we were looking at – two bodies at most, possibly, lying atop, a third. But after a while we needed the experts, the archaeologists, the social diarists and the film crews. The first cut was the hardest: that slice through still warm sinew and the gleam of bone. And now ... I cannot go any further than this. The spade has hit the denying rock that yields no more. Please say no more. I would have met you half way – I even wanted to hide the murderer in the cupboard, feed him warm milk from these old breasts. I thought that knowing we were monsters would keep us safe, our brushes with death keeping us alive. You didn’t tell us where the bodies lay. Keen senses of smell led us, dogs baying, that spotting of the perfect lawn perturbed, the fountain in the patio off kilter and the water killing the birds, the keepsakes shining in a window display. But she is a forensic expert – she will find them all. Although destroyed and with their souls sucked out, we have set them free roaming in a street near you. There can be no forgiveness now. It isn’t even needed. A monster can’t help but devour, doing what it is made to do. All one can do is run and hide. Publishing credits The Ruby and the Con / The Borderline: exclusive first publication by iamb Soup: The Echo Chamber (Whisky and Beards)