Hear poet Holly Bars read poems for wave 24 of literary poetry journal iamb. Holly Bars wave 24 winter 2025 back next the poet Known for her work on surviving CSA, Leeds poet Holly Bars has been published in The Moth , Stand , The London Magazine , Ink, Sweat & Tears and elsewhere. She was one of six New Northern Poets in 2024, as chosen by the Ilkley Literature Festival , and published her debut, Dirty , with Yaffle Press. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Leeds. the poems Rewriting my Mother’s Death 00:00 / 00:59 The Moon kissed my mother, came in through the front door, to her room, to her bed, and it fitted perfectly; the Moon was all cream and sugar that night, and my mother was coffee. Moon kissed my mother like mercy: the awaited home after a journey; smoke in the chimney; the warm teacup. Kissed my mother, and I can see how the Moon filled the room with the opposite of alone. Moon kissed my mother when my mother could barely hold herself up; the longest night. The Moon kissed my mother, Alicia, and she kissed back. Breathing in stardom 00:00 / 01:32 with all the glamour of a maisonette in Bramley. Our coke is cut with crystals of Persil, paracetamol, gunpowder. Someone’s mum’s kitchen is our dressing room whilst she’s sectioned. Someone else fetches a mirror, CD cases, rolls up five pound notes which probe our nostrils, fills them fat till our amethyst veins crack. We stream onto the red carpet of the living room, clamour in 60-watt light, and not even beetling mould can dampen this. Everyone wants us. Someone plays bassline and it beats down our arms, pulses in our nipples and clits and cocks. And we hang off fire, white and obvious, lips releasing, talking the rabbit off the moon. Even our blood is noisy, itching with wishes and achievement because we’re seventeen, bright and brilliant in this beautiful snow blanket we dress ourselves in for a night; kiss and talk, fuck forever. Before morning dusts us, sun steals our starlight and blood becomes black. The Magic Circle 00:00 / 01:11 Magicians keep their methods in a ring, wear ordinary clothes, ordinary faces, have ordinary jobs. Some people tell you that magicians are old men with a pension and no hobbies: this is a trick. Magicians love tricks, especially that one; it helps them, makes them mythic. Magicians love getting away with it. They love their stage and apparatus, their wands, pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Magicians pick their assistants carefully. But most of all, they love the hoodwink. Magicians love showmanship, to flaunt. They love the awe of the audience, the round of applause. Magicians love the climax; the white dove disappearing; a body sawn in half. They live for the wonder in a child’s eyes. A good magician never tells their secrets. Publishing credits Rewriting my Mother ’s Death : Black Nore Review (Nov 28th 2024) Breathing in Stardom / The Magic Circle: Dirty (Yaffle Press)

Hear poet Erik Kennedy read poems for wave 3 of literary poetry journal iamb. Erik Kennedy wave 3 summer 2020 back next the poet Erik Kennedy is the author of There's No Place Like the Internet in Springtime . He's co-editing a book of climate change poetry from New Zealand and the Pacific which will be published by Auckland University Press in 2021. His poems and criticism have recently appeared in The Moth, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, the TLS and Western Humanities Review. Originally from New Jersey, Erik now lives in Christchurch, New Zealand. the poems The Night Before the Barn-raising 00:00 / 02:04 It was the night before the barn-raising and our son told us that he wasn’t going to be participating. He no longer believed, he told us. I asked him if he meant that he didn’t believe in barns, and I pointed impatiently to the wall and a print of a lovely old barn in DeKalb County. It wasn’t like that, he said. He no longer believed in community, in cooperation. And I said oh, wasn’t that convenient for him to give up on community just when the Flowerdews needed his help with their barn. And I asked if he didn’t remember when Mrs Flowerdew bought a subscription to Pigeon Fancy Magazine when he was fundraising for his school choir trip to Paraguay. And I asked if he thought that Mrs Flowerdew gave an everloving faff about pigeons. The woman is allergic to birds. Allergic. She did it to help him, and I said that I shouldn’t wonder that she’d do it again even if he’d become a thankless heartbreak to his dear mother and a disappointment to the town and a threat to a cohesive society. He said he was sorry but that’s just how it was, and we needed to respect his beliefs, and he was going outside to get some air and he hoped we’d understand some day. So I told his little sister to wait ten minutes then go upstairs and cut all his shoelaces with the kitchen scissors. Georgics 00:00 / 02:45 A lambent light it is that fills the pasture, but it’s too dark to read. The wise farmer rises early to get the best broadband speed. As shepherds watch their fleecy care, they see claggy-arsed, beady-eyed billows of wool. A full house is a pair of Cheviots and three of a kind of Karakuls. ‘Pneumatic nipple suck-fest’ is a quaint term for the morning milking! Gervase Markham writes of a cow that filled sixty buckets. You can ride a tractor from, as the Italians say, the stable to the stars. The tractor’s GPS is more powerful than the computer on the ship that, some day, will take men to Mars. Fifty miles south of here it’s green-yellow. Fifty miles north it’s green. Here, brown trout are scooped from the drying river in nets and trucked to the sea. They wrap hay in plastic now, another processed food. ‘They’ are the farmers. Making hay is a pleasant interlude. The last lightning-strike fire was put out by passing farmer Alan MacHugh. The superstitious among us say that he threw the lightning himself. I’ve asked, and my duty is not to protect the weak. It is to make the weak strong. May they use that strength to make their own peace. At night, from a car, sheep’s eyes look like the ghosts of snooker balls. The dew falls in orbs and rises in a vaporous pyramid. That’s the water cycle, kid. The half-sun on the evening hill is a great aunt’s hairy kiss. Around the manger the animals sing ‘What Version of Pastoral Is This?’ Where the glow-worm creepeth in the night, no adder will go in the day. The ways things are going now, it’s cheaper to throw the crops out than to give them away. Annual Self-evaluation 00:00 / 02:40 I misunderstood what the gig economy is. It is not, in fact, driving people around in a gig, a light, two-wheeled sprung cart pulled by a single horse. My mistake! And now I suspect that I don’t know what ride-sharing is, either— not if it means something other than budging up in the carriage so another lady or gentleman in muslin and starch can share the seat with you. It makes so much sense now that no one ever mentions horses in relation to the gig economy or ride-sharing. They’re big animals—can’t miss the neighing— and if they were involved you’d think they’d come up. But I do know that cars are part of the conversation, and I think to myself, Now we’re getting somewhere. Like the golden car of Helios drawing the sun across the sky, these are the vehicles of our lives, bringing light and wisdom and clarity to both the meek and the proud so we may realise mutually our destiny to be one people, bound together imperfectly but happily in struggle and earthly love! But no, I’ve got that wrong, too, that is not what a car is, and I suddenly grasp that I am three hundred years old, my ideas are as fashionable as falling down the stairs, as relevant as the social contract or nostrums for scurvy, and I apologise humbly for not bettering myself in the last year, or in other years, and for taking a place in the economy that might be better used by an eager unit, an operative of the now who would privatise the past and mortgage the future for the right to say ‘I am here today’ and who wouldn’t waste your time with self-accusations like mine. Publishing credits The Night Before the Barn-Raising: Minarets (Issue 10) Georgics: Landfall (No. 230) Annual Self-Evaluation: exclusive first publication by iamb

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