Hear poet Clarissa Aykroyd read poems for wave 1 of literary poetry journal iamb. Clarissa Aykroyd wave 1 winter 2020 back next the poet Clarissa Aykroyd grew up in Victoria, Canada and now lives in London, where she works as a publisher. Her poetry has appeared in UK and international journals such as Black Bough Poetry, The Interpreter's House, The Island Review, Lighthouse, The Missing Slate, The Ofi Press Magazine and Shot Glass Journal. Her pamphlet, Island of Towers , was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2019. the poems I dream the perfect ride 00:00 / 00:36 It was raining and the cheap black gloves chafed my hands. The reins and curved neck’s crest, a wave. I blinked the rain, I was horse and river – we flowed the jump but my clumsy mouth-jag scared the horse and I had to dream sunlight to calm him. He listened with his mind, breathed, so black and sleek and slicker than a seal in the patience of the rain, the white noise of the rain, his cantering a mountain beneath me, breaking the earth, living-deep. Amrum 00:00 / 00:22 Cloud spiral. Here – pale bone of the light. Sand riddles hissing – at my feet, my neck. Rising now the rosehip moon. The sky, bitten. All flags torn. Watson on Dartmoor 00:00 / 00:53 I first saw it in sun, edged with yellow like the dragged note of a violin: and yet, and yet something just out of tune like the faintest rot beneath the sweetness. It’s not of the earth, the moor. You drive as though ascending – to hell; mist rolled in, the wet air choked me. The light walked backwards and vanished. The grey tors grinned down on us. Holmes would love this, I thought. The touch of drama. And then came the gates of Baskerville Hall. Well, you know the rest. But the moor, that space, that’s what I can’t explain. How it was not of this world. How its clouds were close enough to touch, and yet its skies were high enough to elude my faltering translation. Publishing credits I dream the perfect ride: exclusive first publication by iamb Amrum: Island of Towers (Broken Sleep Books) Watson on Dartmoor: Ink, Sweat & Tears (July 1st 2017)

Hear poet Susie Campbell read poems for wave 12 of literary poetry journal iamb. Susie Campbell wave 12 winter 2022 back next the poet Susie Campbell's poems have appeared in many UK and international journals, visual poetry anthologies and exhibitions. Currently studying for a practice-based poetry PhD at Oxford Brookes University, Susie is the author of six poetry pamphlets – I return to you , Tenter and Enclosures being her three most recent. Her newest work, The Sleeping Place , will be published by Guillemot Press in 2023. the poems A Deictic Miracle, This Boxwood Prayer Nut Exhibit: Waddesdon Bequest, British Museum 00:00 / 01:41 To hold and be held, an uncracked walnut, a little earth. There is something strange about this richness, growing into its own boundaries, rank and subtle as a hunted creature. Time has become a strongbox of interlocking branches. Global complexities, plumbed with pipelines of gold, are reduced to wafer-thin discs, slotted one into the other, light bevelled into a compound syntax of mortise and tenon. An articulation of honest wood, it holds the shape and hard veins of the forest by fitting it to the palm: an armillary sphere circling an internal sun, opened by flicking up a tiny hinge secured on its pin. Ahead, glimmering through a tiny screen, carved and fretted to this terrestrial cage, a thimble saint with his trembling hound bows before the stag. Kneeling here, prayer beads in hand, an intricate system of shadow blows from antler and slender branch to form the cross, thorn-sized and lifted to the wooden sky, as outside bends to imitate this reconciliation. if magic 00:00 / 01:24 if such ordinary box jar tin or burlap and if tested unbought night finds an opening past neighbours fought for squeaking and scratched open by tiny razor- sharp and left beyond and further how the night is done with moss and damp and squelch and how quickly attaching themselves to dark are wet marbles if tied up in a pouch and with mercy new-opened and sticky and still smelling of sleep as sap is and here a soft clink of word against word could be taken for protection a charm new-minted from darkness against theirs ours some dispensable such brittle claims across this globe of glass could be soothed or silenced if won by this as talisman Hush 00:00 / 01:43 A hill beneath and a filled-in door. This bench, its damp wooden flowers. A dead tree stripped clean and time fucking stops. You reach a corner of you are there. You are there. An edge of grief you can park in an empty tongue. The fields are empty. That’s near enough. You expect you have come here to honour the dead. An open field looks like battlefield words: gone, absent, missing. You come to hold it in memory but it becomes spongy underfoot. You do not mean to remember her, the time you brought her here. A list in a notebook of useful words: Blank Nil Null Hush-hush Ssh Shush Sodden ground but your body remembers so you try to follow even as it is hardening and solidifying, becomes a whole, no longer possible to enter nor be held by it. Nil. Null. Hush. Ssh. Shush. You cannot enter nor explore its spaces nor the dead in their apophatic silence that gap in words. Listen. Hush. Publishing credits A Deictic Miracle, This Boxwood Prayer Nut: Shearsman Magazine (125/126 – Autumn/Winter) if magic: Stride Magazine (December 2021) Hush: Tenter (Guillemot Press)

Hear poet Kim Harvey read poems for wave 1 of literary poetry journal iamb. Kim Harvey wave 1 winter 2020 back next the poet Kim Harvey is a San Francisco Bay Area poet and Associate Editor at Palette Poetry. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. You can find her work in Poets Reading the News, Rattle, Radar, Barren Magazine, 3Elements Review, Wraparound South, Black Bough Poetry, Kissing Dynamite and elsewhere. She won The Comstock Review’s Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award 2019, and placed third in the Barren Press Poetry Contest in the same year. the poems Standard Credibility Inquiry for Displaced Plant Life 00:00 / 02:23 Are you now or have you ever been considered an invasive species? How long can you survive in the desert without water? Have you ever lied to the U.S. government? Are you lying now? You let me know if you need something to drink. To what fungi have you been exposed? Are you infectious? Do you carry contagions? Are you viable? How much attention do you require? Are you wild? Tell me why you are afraid of fire. What is your country of origin? Do you seek the shade of others? Do you plan to uproot established trees? How far back can you trace your seed? Are you a clone? Are you barren? Are you a weed? Will you reproduce incessantly and choke the perennials? Why were you harmed? When were you harmed? So you were witness to a violence. Are you damaged at the cellular level? Under what conditions will you wilt or wither? How did you escape? And where have you been since? On whom or what do you depend? Are you a hallucinogen? Are you medicinal? Are you lethal to domestic animals or people? Can you be bought and sold? Are you illegal? And the Plant Answers Back [Redacted]: (muffled, inaudible) …my sister was burned part of me died too I don’t know how I got out I will tell you I flew I was a samara on the wind I can still feel her like a phantom limb [ ] I could [ ] smell her [ ] singed skin [ ] raining down around me [ -------- ] Even now I hear her howling Light & Shadow ‘The best way to know God is to love many things.’ ~ Vincent Van Gogh ~ 00:00 / 02:17 A hawk takes a snake in its talons, flies to the top of the trees, aspens I think, above the canyon. Can we agree the snake is dead now? Your words, shards from a broken vase I turn over in my hands, crush fine like millet into the fallen leaves. Stop brooding on the form of things. Think of Van Gogh. Modest blue room. Towel hung on a nail by the door, bowl and pitcher, water if you’re thirsty – absinthe green spilling in through paned glass like a sickness. Loss, a lamp lit long ago. Wasn’t it you who told me blue was the last color to be named in every language? Show me again in moonlight the hollows of you – the places where your body starts and stops. I remember you told me about Van Gogh, how he ate yellow paint to try to get the light inside him. How when he died his body was laid out alongside easels and brushes in a room full of yellow dahlias and sunflowers. How, in the end, it wasn’t just the light he was after. What he wanted was to drink turpentine, to choke on black cadmium and lead. What he really wanted was to die eating his paints, breathing them in, every color, all of them – orange, sienna, crimson, ochre, gypsum, lapis, gold, cobalt blue. Winter Solstice Incantation 00:00 / 01:00 Snapdragon petals, pink and yellow, rose hips, gold paint chips tossed over my shoulder. Hellebore and phlox, candles to burn through the long pitch-black. This spell’s being cast at last light and you’ll come back through the mirror’s crack like Lazarus from the dead tonight if I can just find the right words. Close and closed, what you were to me and a door slammed shut between this world and the next. Outside, a wild wind whips through the trees, whispering its warning—what’s done cannot be undone. Slippery as winter ice, you’re gone. Publishing credits Standard Credibility Inquiry for Displaced Plant Life: Poets Reading the News (September 14th 2019) Light & Shadow: The Comstock Review (Fall/Winter 2019) – winner of the Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Contest 2019 Winter Solstice Incantation: Black Bough Poetry Christmas / Winter Edition 2019 (Black Bough Poetry)

Hear poet Katie Stockton read poems for wave 5 of literary poetry journal iamb. Katie Stockton wave 5 spring 2021 back next the poet Katie Stockton is a welsh poet, playwright, crossword lover and recent graduate of the UEA Masters Writing programme. She's the 2020 Snoo Wilson Writing Prize winner, and was recently longlisted for the Poetry Society's Collaboration Award. Her work has appeared in Hellebore Press, Forward Poetry, Ink, Sweat & Tears and others. Her writing commissions include those by The Sunday Times , Norwich Arts Centre, the Maddermarket Theatre, RADA, Drama Studio London, WalesOnline and Young Norfolk Arts Festival. the poems Basilisk 00:00 / 00:55 Faces have seen older, stranger faces than this, train windows too, which’ve learned a new habit of smudging me out. My face squished between the hardlines of a hat and a collar. Can you will a face into a second state of life? Let me tell you: the universe is a snake – I saw this in a true dream – it sheds and it sheds, leaves behind its echo-brothers on the porches of its next-door neighbours. A face cannot live like this. I’m no universe of cold-blood, I am an egg cracked, slipping. You can shadow-reckon my wrinkles, hear the shadow-people that live in these folds. When my face was a stone, a marble. cold and membraned, when I liked things the shape of a full stop, I used to stare long at the basilisk in the mirror, every morning. Askew Road 00:00 / 00:51 Heat. Around the fruit bowl like flies, dripping from the fridge handle, the upturned door numbers, dropping from the hallway creak. The single periwinkle house beckoned heat down to us. Summer’s fingers run tracks through window droplets. We measure out our stay in Askew Road, London, in the hexagons of limescale, its ones or twos at the bottom of the mug, or the tip of the tongue, if unlucky. The heat of it. The sun a pea pod ready to be split. The neighbours rattling their keys. The people have stopped parking their cars. The buses are carving a new route away. We’ve become our mothers’ daughters, fathers’ sons. We could leave for home, or obey the heat. Genus 00:00 / 01:14 this garden is plotted into the lines of my hands I put an earthworm to my upper lip and whisper for access to my own skin when it comes to butterflies I am a royalist a weatherman craving a wallflower a template of root an earthworm chewing pieces of the dark school happens again in blades stems are paper spines no schoolyard tyrants this time, just those things I’ll never attain the symmetry of and the teacher is the entire memory of winter blinking over the hill’s shoulder making me into flowers unfurling without fear that their twins will be there again this year the earth forgives the worm that needs it the world forgives the wound the hyacinths and I have reached an accord when they’ve gone I’ll construct solariums out of a new genus slink down the garden path to sleep in roses through winter no lullabying flowerbeds the magic birds gone quiet but I won’t be afraid of giving into soil of inhaling the heady pollen that sleepwalks the slopes of mountains into my skin Publishing credits Basilisk: Re-Side (Issue 1) Askew Road: Hellebore Press (Issue 4) Genus: exclusive first publication by iamb / Runner-up in the Hestercombe Gardens Poetry Competition 2019

Hear poet Eilín de Paor read poems for wave 17 of literary poetry journal iamb. Eilín de Paor wave 17 spring 2024 back next the poet Eilín de Paor lives in Dublin, where she works in services for people with disabilities – a field in which she's studying for a PhD. Her poems have appeared in numerous places, including The Stony Thursday Book , Banshee , Howl , The Waxed Lemon , Abridged , Ink, Sweat & Tears , Flights and New Ohio Review . Eilín collaborated with Damien B Donnelly on their pamphlet, In the Jitterfritz of Neon , and sub-edited Issue 2 of The Storms: a journal of poetry, prose and visual art . the poems Anchor Stitch 00:00 / 01:13 Once he had asked and I said yes, we flew to London, Mum and I, budget, red-eye, trawled the costumeries of Soho, the Liberty remnant troughs, returning that night with six metres of duck-egg satin, two of lace chiffon. We borrowed a form from her friend Joann and for six months, I shared a bedroom with that silent twin, draped in muslin mock-ups, pinned with panels of interfacing, lining. I worked with ceremony in cotton gloves like a magician— shaping cap sleeves, scoop neck, empire line, added thirty covered buttons along the spine, three hidden tapes to bustle up the train. Afterwards, the dress became a headless Havisham stuffed pert with acid-free tissue paper in a vacuum-sealed box with viewing panel, waiting in the attic for a daughter to claim her and now, failing that, staying on as ballast. Why Poets All Wear Sturdy Boots 00:00 / 00:58 Forget mists and honeydew, poems aren't drawn in subtle hues, words are born of mud and blood, wrenched panting from the sludge and scrub. Pull on your toughest pair of boots. Tie the laces skin-blanche tight. Hitch a pack onto your back. Anchor nets around your waist. Scour the earth for worthy clods, fingers stained by foraged weed, forearms bared to better feel the sting and flay of briary twigs. When night and hunger leave you weak, gnaw wild roots, suck bird-scorned fruits, or blistered, bruised and labour-torn, scavenge on through muck and thorn, in thrall of ever brighter gems, hidden just beyond the dawn. Back at the End of the World For Barbara 00:00 / 01:00 This is how you came to an unnamed spit of dunes and winter-flooded fields: the caravan park was too crowded that summer, your mother couldn’t stand it, so your father drove out, turned off, picked a field, made an offer. Clay puddles up in copper pools where we trudge now through marram trails carved by long-scrapped dune buggies, kept up by horses, dogs, the children of the children. At the sedge-break to the waves, sea pea and holly catch the pebbled sky, cast back blues to the wheeling terns, who dive for fish to bring back to their island mates. We dive our feet into the coarse-grain sand, choose old songs on our phones— sing along to the terns, to our mothers. Publishing credits Anchor Stitch: Howl – New Irish Writing (Issue 23), and shortlisted for the 2022 Red Line Festival Poetry Competition Why Poets All Wear Sturdy Boots: exclusive first publication by iamb Back at the End of the World: Local Wonders Anthology (Dedalus Press)

Hear poet Ivor Daniel read poems for wave 7 of literary poetry journal iamb. Ivor Daniel wave 7 autumn 2021 back next the poet Ivor Daniel’s work has appeared in the Cheltenham Poetry Festival's wildfire words , Steel Jackdaw Magazine and Writeresque . He lives in Gloucestershire, where he works as an English tutor. the poems Perfect Bed 00:00 / 00:56 I dream I am at Bembom Brothers Dreamland funfair park with Tracey Emin. Hard by Margate sands. I know I shouldn’t drink that Vodka on the Helter Skelter. Apart from that, a Day as Perfect as the Lou Reed song. We Kiss with Fish and Chips Lips, Join Hips. A Turner Sunset Going Down. I guess it is the Golden Hour. Blair’s Babes and even some of his men MPs are busy Changing a whole heap of things for the Better. Back in your room we remember that we even Changed the Bed this morning. The linen soft and cool next to our Optimistic skin. Questions & Starlings 00:00 / 03:01 Wow! Can the sun set blue azure and flame at the same time? How do starlings twist and turn as one? Who decided this is called a murmuration ? And who was that, going behind that awesome tree? No...It couldn’t be.. sweeping turning swooping......soon arriving from all directions. swelling then melting then swelling. streamlining safe in such numbers. pirouetting protection from predators. twist turn swoop swirl your genie is out of the bottle. shape-shifting unsolid sculpture of starling. you spinning top you sundown twister. a magic carpet has slipped its cave. . ...a cloud of iron filings .. ... dancing from... ..and to .. . . ..an ecstatic magnet. if we could cast the ashes........ of our loved ones as elegantly as your silken swirl then that would be the perfect way to go. intuiting when to turn in complex shifting patterns through a liminal space between remarkable and miracle. flying like no one is watching or maybe like God could be watching. oblivious of compass points and rocket science yet also knowing more than this. murmuration motion poetry in motion your swarm is the truth. black mustard seed beauty. then in the last of daylight at the secret signal a final funneling collective swoop down an unseen chimney to land on your roosting grounds. I labour with my leaden words, and muse on whether starlings know how spellbinding they are. And God. Is that you behind that awesome tree? Is this the last, the only, evidence that you exist? Was this your hobby all along: the choreography of sunset starlings? And is that just the slightest hint of disappointment on your face at how the human cohort of Creation has performed? Tread Lightly 00:00 / 01:31 I navigate the micro fathom ocean charts of flat portal ice puddles on a January farm track With their trapped air bubbles whorling patterns coils gyres spirals curls Trapped otherworldly whirls Secret as fingerprints coiled like intestines mysterious as a foetal scan marbled as the white fat in Spanish ham Iced lava lamps but underfoot Liquid light shows behind psychedelic bands but monochrome The frozen surface flat as frosted glass The patterns captive Zany This is the cat ice So named because it can only bear the weight of a cat Cold-pawed agile Although I am yet to meet the cat who would leave the warmth of the hearth to test ice puddles with its paws or fret on other scientific laws as hydrostatic pressure capillary action et cetera I make a resolution to tread lightly Publishing credits All poems: Exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Christina Thatcher read poems for wave 4 of literary poetry journal iamb. Christina Thatcher wave 4 autumn 2020 back next the poet Christina Thatcher is a Creative Writing Lecturer at Cardiff Metropolitan University. She keeps busy off campus as Poetry Editor for The Cardiff Review , a tutor for the Poetry School , and a member of the Literature Wales Management Board . Her creative work has featured in over 50 literary magazines, and she's published two poetry collections with Parthian Books: More than you were and How to Carry Fire . the poems Becoming an Astronaut 00:00 / 01:25 Brother, if you want to become an astronaut you must first earn a degree in engineering, science, or mathematics. This will take four years or more. After this you can choose: become a pilot, join the military, complete a PhD or recognize you exceed the height requirement (147 centimetres) and decide this is enough to try. Astronauts must then complete technical courses in meteorology and geology. You must learn to scuba dive, to survive in the open ocean, tread water for hours. You must fly a T-38 Talon Jet, learn Russian. You must receive medical training. You must accept the principles of microgravity. You must simulate space walks at the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. You must repair and operate space vehicles. You must relearn how to move objects in a frictionless world. You must trust your mentors and rehearse your chosen mission. You must embrace fear but understand, too, that you are ready: you have been training for this since the first day you picked up a needle and took yourself to the moon. Detox Passage After William Brewer 00:00 / 01:21 You find spoons everywhere: under kitchen cabinets, inside comforters, poking through boxer briefs. Yesterday, you sat on the sofa and discovered spoons had replaced stuffing. You cut open cushions, heaved out hundreds. This is a clearing process. You dream only of metal. The pastor tells you: This is normal. You must simply let go of the spoons. You accept this but the sink still fills up with silver. The shower spits sterling. Rid yourself of temptation, my son. The pastor has our father’s blue-green eyes. You listen and nod: throw out every spoon in the house. You tell the pastor you can do it. You believe you can do it. God is with you, my son. The jerks in your arms and teeth begin to go. All you had to do was rid yourself of temptation. You thank God for new strength, bow your head to pray for more good, more clean, but every time you close your eyes you see that silver curve and linger. Hail 00:00 / 00:48 If stones were being thrown it would be better, at least then there’d be mystery and motive. Who did this— leapt into our high-walled garden at 4am with an arsenal of rocks? Instead I think it is a sign: thunder, high winds, rain and then a battering on the conservatory roof, our puffy-tailed cat running from the room, up-ending sleep. Like last year’s oak which rotted and fell, claimed a car in the office parking lot just as your body was carried like a grain sack to the barn— I fear this hail is exclaiming it happened: you finally let go of your life. Publishing credits Becoming an Astronaut: North American Review Detox Passage: commended in the 2019 Battered Moons Poetry Competition Hail: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Richard Jeffrey Newman read poems for wave 10 of literary poetry journal iamb. Richard Jeffrey Newman wave 10 summer 2022 back next the poet Richard Jeffrey Newman is the author of Words for What Those Men Have Done and The Silence of Men , as well as the translation, The Teller of Tales: Stories from Ferdowsi's Shahameh . Richard curates the First Tuesdays reading series in Jackson Heights, New York, and is on the Board of Newtown Literary . He's also Professor of English at Nassau Community College, where he recently stepped down to focus on his writing after a decade of service to his faculty union. the poems Just Beyond Your Reach 00:00 / 00:54 The prayer you say is neither seed nor plow, nor is it rain to quench your soul’s old thirst. The parched and blistered field your tongue is now bespeaks the long neglect about to burst, like rotten fruit thrown to chase from the stage a comic leaving dead words at your feet; and she, or maybe he, responds with rage, shrinking the room until the single seat that’s left is where you’re planted. Confront your god, shimmering and luscious, there, his skin— or is it hers?—a proffered gift, a prod to every hunger you have called a sin. Welcome each new taste; spread wide; bow low. Lose yourself till loss is all you know. This Sentence Is A Metaphor For Bridge #20 00:00 / 00:55 Imagine hell unfenced, yourself the unburned center of all that burning, every prayer you’ve ever said undone line by line, until the empty page is all you have. Enter there the path in you that is only a path, gather its shadows into a dance, a movement that ends with love, that keeps on moving till love becomes the rhythm, and you the fire, and the dance, the life you’ve chosen to make your loving possible. You thought you had to be the clench you’ve held where none but you could feel it. Give yourself instead to all that rises. Fill that cloudless sky with laughter. After Drought 00:00 / 00:58 Knees rooted in the bed on either side of your belly, my body’s a stalk of wheat bent in summer wind, a bamboo shoot rising, an orchid, and then all at once a cloud swelling, a swallow sculpting air, a freed white dove. You pull me down, but you are hot beneath me, and the gust that is my own heat lifts me away: I’m not ready. Outside, footsteps, voices. Two men. Giggling, we pull the sheet around us till they pass, but if someone does see, what will they have seen? A couple making love. No. More than that: they will have seen the coming of the rain; they will have seen us bathe in it, and they will say Amen. Publishing credits Just Beyond Your Reach / This Sentence Is A Metaphor for Bridge #20: exclusive first publication by iamb After Drought: The Silence of Men (CavanKerry Press)

Hear poet Sascha Akhtar read poems for wave 3 of literary poetry journal iamb. Sascha Akhtar wave 3 summer 2020 back next the poet Sascha Aurora Akhtar is a poet of the liminal – someone for whom all is magic. She considers herself a 'Pakistani-British-American: something reflected in the linguistic registers in her work. Her six poetry collections have been published by Salt, Shearsman, Contraband, The Emma Press, Knives, Forks & Spoons Press and ZimZalla. Her first short story collection, Of Necessity And Wanting, is due out from The 87 Press in October 2020, while Oxford University Press (India) will publish her first book of translations in 2021. Sascha's Poems For Eliot , from the book #LoveLikeBlood , was named number one poem of the past five years by Poetry Wales in the summer of 2019. the poems Space dies for it 00:00 / 01:43 I am pure possibility drinking with both heads out of wishing wells geegaws to dust off, Dionysius That remind me of me picking manes are you catching water I give you wands imagine I need to get out there with a vengeance where is it I sit on a doll's platform you do not marvel at the wonder of things. Semi-state hands smell like chicken more words to give the mouth chosen worlds Send messages sometimes I seek sometimes, not beaded colors remind of another turn some reality if I don't write them down, will they disappear. I might close you off I am losing sunshine there is plenty for you to get stars twisted & still, blessed be you are edgewise, edgewise I would like to wrap my head in the salt of you who knows how many near misses you've had. The sky is majestic otherwise oven gloves people worried about library fines being on their record nothing impending words spoken go off I met someone undeniable how is one supposed to keep track of days I stepped on your pile of nails. Aethyrs Restoration of temperature 00:00 / 02:03 Magnets collide, poles pushing each other apart, each half of the brain doing the same, crashing the front of a car, red, burning into a wall rhythmic & repeated Ramming into the bricks bleeding at the joints, the car is redder now, my medulla love oblongata tending the sails aloft & blossoming outwards in a kiss-filled driving wind; Will, shining phallus of a female reading portents in the moonscape of a cloudy night Rising like death in a gas chamber ambles with six legs of an arachnid, the carver of slumber into nightmarish waltzes with familials Jaws yawning & you reflected in the epi-glottis hanging in the cavern of the throat where words ring pealing like awakenings. Under this heat-maddened sky of language & commerce, donkeys rot next to pye-dogs that rule the streets of days & night howling into forms that manifest suspended over above our beds like rain frozen in a pause a blink, each moment flows in a circuitous emblem designed to signify this immersion of senses, a vice grip keeping the head down, breath is all you can take, the mercury falling, your abdomen a lilting cadence the beginning song rustling through imaginary leaves on trees festooned with glowing cups ripe swords, sun-kissed winds & lush pentacles. Chaos Totem 00:00 / 01:45 If it is, condors in the night sky a gilded wooing eruption in the empress way of stars, I hear each bar of the xylophone beaten by their wings battling the atmosphere. A wish to pass behind the firewall, you. If it is, fire-starters in the dim in the cavernous, in the ruins of the day a pacing, piercing undulation rippling under the skin, I feel each dig of the claws of the panther puncturing my lungs to a paler, slivered shadow of breath. Your smile glowing in the tint of a nuclear sun; the dream of red letters every night, new. If it is, angels of mercy unfurling ragged wings on runny skies I see Sophia’s paintings dripping on my head & each prayer wheel spins in the temples of Kathmandu furiously, yellow-bellied pigeons fall over from lack of oxygen, eggs are fried on the bonnets of cars & I hear the Noctiluca roaring of its hunger. If it is, I draw the line. I choke the hold on time & supply runs short. Shoals of unborns playing tantras with wooden legs on tankers carrying oil explode & melt the very tarsoul of the road & you you must run for your very, very life. Publishing credits Space dies for it: Astra Inclinant (Contraband Books) Aethyrs: The Whimsy Of Dank Ju-Ju (The Emma Press) Chaos Totem: Poetry International (2012) Author photo: © Christa Holka

Hear poet Briony Collins read poems for wave 1 of literary poetry journal iamb. Briony Collins wave 1 winter 2020 back next the poet Briony Collins is a writer, artist, and performer based in North Wales. Her career began when she won the 2016 Exeter Novel Prize. Since then, she has published numerous poems and stories, produced plays, and received the 2018 Under-25s Literature Wales Bursary. Briony enjoys illustrating her own work and performing on stage. She is represented by DHH Literary Agency. the poems taid taught me 00:00 / 00:41 how to open corked wine bottles: twisting a fusilli knife deep and prying the bone from a long, green spine until the tetric body pops. whenever i drink i remember this, meaning we will always be merry past when he’s gone and we can pretend that the darkness won’t come for us even though it is coming all the time. Newborn 00:00 / 00:11 Petals of your fingers around mine; Hibiscus closing around moonlight. Liberty Based on William Sidney Mount’s painting The Power of Music (1847) 00:00 / 00:41 Violin strings mark mayflower fingers while mine blister. We smile together and smoke our pipes down to embers. Toes tap the same southern rhythm: them, in the stables, me, outside with the horses, whistling intimations of liberty. Publishing credits taid taught me: exclusive first publication by iamb Newborn: Black Bough Poetry Broadsides: ‘gold lit hour’ (Issue 1) Liberty: Agenda Magazine (Vol. 52, Nos. 3-4)

Hear poet Estelle Price read poems for wave 23 of literary poetry journal iamb. Estelle Price wave 23 autumn 2025 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 Anthony Etherin read poems for wave 25 of literary poetry journal iamb. Anthony Etherin wave 25 spring 2026 back next the poet Experimental formalist poet and musician Anthony Etherin specialises in working under strict constraints. His three poems for iamb are written in the ottava rima form and in iambic metres. Colourscape is intersected by a Shakespearean sonnet in iambic dimeter – each of the third feet of the ottava rima’s lines belonging also to the sonnet – while Famine Moon is a palindrome by letter. An omnibus edition of Anthony's work can be found in Knit Ink (and Other Poems) . the poems July 00:00 / 00:36 I walked a starlit field that cold July. I found a star and named it after you, the way the ancients mapped the gods to sky. I named another for myself and drew a line between us. Then, I said goodbye ... I wonder if the stars have named us too, with names that last far longer than our own – and echo, gently, mid that great unknown? Colourscape 00:00 / 00:51 The night was green. It might A day that might have been was painted black. A brush erased the moss and amber leaves. Then, any light that came was given back – consumed and flung across aborted eves – as time and space, the frame, began to crack ... Beneath the new, the old dimension grieves: That day became stained glass – an onyx mass Soon, every truth I’m told will likewise pass. the grass and dew were blue. Famine Moon 00:00 / 00:38 No omen, I’m a foetal stone. I die, null, at a fate lit far – die raw, one loss, Selene resewn on woe. We lord a memo, star afar, at some mad role we own. On, we, serene, less sole now are. I draft. I let a fatal lune – I die, not slate. O, famine moon! Publishing credits July / Colourscape: Slate Petals (and Other Wordscapes) (Penteract Press) Famine Moon: Stray Arts (and Other Inventions) (Penteract Press)