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Hear poet Charles G Lauder Jr read poems for wave 11 of literary poetry journal iamb. Charles G Lauder Jr wave 11 autumn 2022 back next the poet Charles G Lauder Jr was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. Having lived on both coasts of America and graduated from Boston University, he moved to Leicestershire in the UK where he lives with his wife and two children. His poems have been published widely – in print, and online. From 2014 to 2018, he was Assistant Editor for The Interpreter’s House; and for over twenty years, he's copyedited academic books on literature, history, medicine and science. Charles' two pamphlets are Bleeds and Camouflaged Beasts . His debut collection is The Aesthetics of Breath . the poems The Color of Mourning 00:00 / 01:21 The colour of morning in a San Diego autumn: you displaced here twelve years note sunlight’s silent taint and fade trees stained not with the blood of a slain midsummer god but with the knick of his finger. Dressed in the hues of fallen leaves you fill kitchen corners with apples and acorns corn husks and pine cones brew cauldrons of thick chowder and beer dropping hints that August has outstayed its welcome. This is the time of spiders gossamer-veiled doorways thresholds scorched by the shadow of scarred tattooed pumpkins eyes spooned out in grief over summer’s supposed passing. From here you scry distant clouds of smoke: seasonal wildfires fuelled by desert sage and dried brush that will touch many hands before put out like the sparklers once waved around a bonfire as if casting a spell lights danced off your fingers before extinguishing. The Pissing Contest 00:00 / 02:24 Little boys with their penises in hand gathered about a porcelain trough, the drain a silver dome, when all they know of politics is what they overhear their parents declare, so though they know nothing of Watergate and eighteen minutes of missing tape, nor of Ehrlichman and Hunt, Mitchell and Dean, they know ‘Nixon’, with its hard ‘ks’ lump, and Congressional hearings, the long, droning table of men in a dark wooden-panelled room and the high smack of a gavel, broadcast on all three TV channels, stealing away afternoon cartoons and Mother’s soaps for weeks on end, they stand there, penises grasped in little hands, following the biggest boy’s lead and aim their streams at the silver dome drain: Look at me! I’m peeing on the Capitol! Only a few of the arched golden flows have the strength to splatter against the dome, burst through its holes like a water cannon against windows, offices and corridors flood with desks and sofas floating away in the foam, interns and PAs swim to get clear. It doesn’t matter if they really meant the White House, or Congress, or Washington in general, this is for Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, and, if their mothers were here, The Guiding Light and As the World Turns , little boys peeing until penises run dry and the pee drains away, leaving a stink and a stain, the little boys are proud of their new game, as penises are waved and shook, then tucked away. This before the days of separate urinals, like older brothers and fathers already use, where they’ll stand, distracted by size, and brag to one another that the water is cold , and the biggest boy will reply, And deep too . The Guest 00:00 / 01:25 Bellying up to the night in neighborhoods as dark as the street corners of my mind I meet him fully for the first time, lucid, bug-eyed manic but not ugly, his frightened grasp handcuffed to my wrist as he circles, circles about me like wagons on the open, empty plains. What folk birthed and nurtured him, caged him, then set him free with few words in the ear as guidance? Like a cousin, or brother, last seen as a child —he’s not a stranger, but he is. Back home, thieves have broken in and he breathes their air, the money they stole, the television they broke, the window they crawled through, the colorful oxygen of their skin. Like a dead grandfather or drunk uncle at Christmas he collapses on the sofa mumbling like a ventriloquist, lending me his tremulous voice, his pinched nose and clouded sight. Rubbish spilling from his pockets is quickly brushed under the carpet. Publishing credits The Color of Mourning: The Aesthetics of Breath (V. Press) The Pissing Contest: Atrium The Guest: Dreich (Season 4, No. 2) Author photo: © Julian Lauder-Mander

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 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 Carol J Forrester read poems for wave 17 of literary poetry journal iamb. Carol J Forrester wave 17 spring 2024 back next the poet Raised in rural North Shropshire, Carol J Forrester balances words and numbers by writing poems for pleasure when not working in finance. Interwoven throughout Carol's work is her passion for history – especially that of women and folklore. She's seen her poetry published in Ink, Sweat & Tears , Hencroft , The Daily Drunk , The Drabble and Eyes+Words , and her debut collection, It’s All In The Blood , appeared in 2019. Her second, Stone Tongued , was published in March 2024. the poems Dandelions Have Roots In Necromancy 00:00 / 00:53 and if you carry the soil-clotted plant between your palms it might bring you luck. As may the air-spun halos, when preserved in small pouches hidden around doorways, along hallways. Petals pressed by water against a patterned teacup, might dream you forward. The white latex leaking from a broken stem supposedly treats warts. A coven of tiny priestesses are little psychopomps, buzzing on their glorious golden knees, Artemis in their prayers. Day turns to night, and every dusk the moon rises full followed by the sun’s lion face at dawn, birth, death, renewal. All sunshine, and toothy leaves. The Birth Plan Is Abandoned 00:00 / 03:17 You will not react to the pain meds like your father, and sister do. It will be fine. They’ll let you sleep, for all of six hours, across three days, during a labour that refuses to comply with any actions taken. You will hear the words two centimetres from every midwife in the hospital. When they increase the oxytocin, it will drop your daughter’s heart rate, and you’ll be told not to worry. They will attempt to break your waters. Twice. Neither time will they need to change the sheets, except for when you throw up so hard you wet yourself. Speaking of which, a nurse will tell you only a few cases of labour result in the mother retaining urine. Lucky you, you get to be special. The nurse will doubt it until you have spent the last twenty-four hours weeing into bowls every twenty minutes, only for the catheter to drain a litre and half from your bladder. For the first time in your life, you actually feel every muscle loosen in your body. For a moment, you are utterly relaxed. They will bring your supper while your feet are still in stirrups. The third, or fourth time the heartbeat on the monitor falters, you will meet the consultant, who seems to think you’ll fight her on a C-section. By that time you won’t even know what she looks like, because your eyelids will not open. The anaesthetist comments when you doze on the surgical table. Your daughter shits herself on the way out. You can’t move your arms for an hour. The epidural goes higher than expected, and it makes you shiver until you rattle the bed. When you can’t lift them to cradle her, they have your husband feed the baby your colostrum with a syringe. Spend another three days fighting with your breasts to find a hold that fits her latch, and end up soaking in your own milk, her skin the colour of a tangerine. No one mentions how much blood you lost until seven days later when a panic attack drags you back to the hospital because you cannot administer the blood thinners yourself. Indigestion dogs you until your mother gives you bicarb dissolved in water, and you burp fizzy. Pain is a firework that keeps relighting month, after month, at all sorts of inconvenient hours. Then somewhere down the road, you pick up a book that tells you there was a study on bicarb being administered to pregnant persons an hour before inductions around 2016. That the number of vaginal births was higher by 17% but researchers were denied further funding because weak contractions were not a high enough priority. Funny that. Maybe I could have kept that litre of blood. Maybe there was more I could have done. Maybe the answer was sitting in my kitchen cupboard, in the garden, or in another space too domestic to be considered. How much power is overlooked among the thorns? Newborn 00:00 / 01:04 It all takes too long. Sheep too narrow, lamb too big, rain hammering on a tin roof scattering the quiet. Sunrise still sulks out of sight, out of mind. The farmyard a black mirror, midden cloaked in shadows until the security light catches on a fox scurrying for shelter. Knelt in the straw, concrete cold on her knees, her breath is mist. Knuckles tucked between the new-born’s ankles as she pulls it free. She lays it straight, rubs a fistful of bedding to its ribcage. Tries to scrub breath back into its body. Twenty miles away, her own child will be sleeping. Her husband’s mother holding her place until spring runs its course. She lays the lamb by the door, notes to call Bradshaw’s in the morning and tries not to carry it home to the empty room where the cot is waiting. Publishing credits Dandelions Have Roots In Necromancy / The Birth Plan Is Abandoned: Stone Tongued (Self-published) Newborn: Ink, Sweat & Tears

Hear poet Dominic Leonard read poems for wave 6 of literary poetry journal iamb. Dominic Leonard wave 6 summer 2021 back next the poet Dominic Leonard’s writing can be found in PN Review , Poetry London , the TLS , Pain and elsewhere, with two of his poems featuring in the spring edition of The Poetry Review . In 2019, he received an Eric Gregory Award. His pamphlet, Antimasque , will be published by Broken Sleep Books in 2021. He lives and teaches in London. the poems Seven Birds Passed Through a Great Building 00:00 / 01:00 Seven birds passed through A great building—I cannot Remember you always but I have been finding ways to Remember you enough. I have Loved only from a safe distance, Staring into sinks long enough To know the sense of spillage That comes with every act of Honesty. Seven birds passed Through a house of spectacle Through the light that lounged Around each of the great stupid Bells and I thought about how Profound it felt, hands thick And heavy on my stupid knees. When I say that once I dreamt You were a taxi on fire plunging Down every country road in England I am not being facetious I am testing my immensity. I am trying to manage my fear, Which is to say I cannot risk Heaven, or any attempt at heaven I Have made so far, not when each Line I find is a room gone dark just As I leave it and always the birds are Flown and I’ve missed it just, just. What is the wind, what is it After Gertrude Stein 00:00 / 00:53 An egg – lithe beast that could crack with any pressure, That gets yellower towards its centre, that hangs between The fingers. A ghost-vision, serenely bovine. Incubated, Stratified. A correct language of where it was, where it Went, how are we anchored by it. But, to wander with it – How the wind knocks my ham-fisted breath from me, Makes a pelt of it. And wedged is the wind, trickling Into and out of all my little compartments and rooms, A fawn in a field seen blurred through the rain at nearly Seven in the evening after stumbling from the house. Something to consider when deciding on materials to Rebuild the world from after testing its capacity for grief, Which is all this was. On forgetting the anniversary of a death 00:00 / 00:13 If that’s you hearing – out on the roof, astride your miscreant echo – you made this of me, didn’t you. Publishing credits Seven Birds Passed Through a Great Building / On forgetting the anniversary of a death: exclusive first publication by iamb What is the wind, what is it: Stand (Issue 223, Volume 17 No. 3)

Hear poet JC Niala read poems for wave 8 of literary poetry journal iamb. JC Niala wave 8 winter 2021 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 Elisabeth Sennitt Clough read poems for wave 15 of literary poetry journal iamb. Elisabeth Sennitt Clough wave 15 autumn 2023 back next the poet Elisabeth Sennitt Clough is the author of the 2017 Saboteur Awards Best Pamphlet winner Glass , and the editor of the Fenland Poetry Journal . Her debut collection Sightings won her the Michael Schmidt Award, while At or Below Sea Level was a 2019 Poetry Book Society Spring Recommendation . Elisabeth has also written The Cold Store and My Name is Abilene , which is shortlisted for The Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023. Elisabeth's poems have appeared in Poem , The Rialto , Mslexia , Wasafiri , Magma , The Cannon’s Mouth , Ambit and Stand among others. the poems There was a door & then a door Poem beginning with a line by Ocean Vuong 00:00 / 00:54 The second door was oak, brawny with a heavy-duty handle & latch, the sort that could mutilate a child’s hand if pushed too much. This is how thresholds are reinforced in farming country. Give your prayers to the sky. The neighbours are out of earshot. What could a flappy city girl know about the ebb of backwaters? People here read shotgun holes like exegesis. Old mail piles up. All letterboxes are sealed shut. Some days even the windows shudder. Everyone’s forgotten the first door. Histerid 00:00 / 01:22 In a hardbacked book with charcoal-grey covers in an attic, above a small bedroom, next to an illustration, the error of a typeface places a hole in a word, His terid , so that it becomes owned. You are mine says the pronoun to the beetle. But the neglectful parent had let his terid go, its skinny legs toddling beneath its round belly in-between legs in crowded market places, through garden fences to the edge-of-town industrial estate and beyond – the place where all lost things end up – the Gymnasium of the Forgotten. There his terid crouches on a varnished floor at the end of a long wooden bench, next to Arthur, who’s sat next to Tom, willing someone to sight him, make a call from the black telephone: Hello, Mr England, we have located your terid, reported missing and suspected extinct in 1936. Please come and collect. The Arse-end of Summer 00:00 / 01:01 Like warlords, the neighbour’s firs cast darkness across my lawn. So much in my garden promised to blossom but never did. A section of wasp nest dangles from a tree like a slice of dried meat. The splatter of an heirloom tomato still decorates next door’s patio beneath a sign: trespassers will be composted . A wood pigeon repeats itself four times. I mimic it twice. Sunday afternoon alone in a rose-less garden, still in my nightie – maybe I’m no longer alive, but don’t realise? A motorbike engine growls out the miles over cracked asphalt, past wheelie bins stinking of yesterday’s burnt ends. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Sarah Wallis read poems for wave 23 of literary poetry journal iamb. Sarah Wallis wave 23 autumn 2025 back next the poet Sarah Wallis lives by the sea on the east coast of Scotland. Her most recent chapbook is Poet Seabird Island . She's also the author of Precious Mettle , which unfolds like a treasure hunt, and Medusa Retold , a long-form feminist retelling of the Medusa myth, set in a run-down modern seaside town. With a nomination for The Pushcart Prize and work forthcoming in Stand , Sarah is proud to have been published in The Scottish Poetry Library's Best Scottish Poems , Eat the Storms , The Interpreter’s House , Black Bough Poetry and Propel Magazine . the poems Amber Bears in the Danish Tuck Shop 00:00 / 01:06 An ancient civilisation’s glowing ruins, the spoils of prehistory are washing up on Danish beaches, translucent treasure looks like cola bottles from the sweet shop but are priceless gems and unlike gummy rings give sign and symbol of a society brokered long ago, who knows who else along the way may have lost such relics, toyed with the fragile forms of bear, elk and bird, cast them like runes or simply flung them into the sea refined pattern and handsome geometric designs lost for a time, the anonymous artist had patience and knowledge and an obsession with bears, catching a glint of amber fire, whatever your party, your pick and mix, let the resin shine again, let it spark, the amber bears are marching home through the dark. The Artefact 00:00 / 02:45 We walked miles, searching out a definitive signpost, like Land’s End, John o’ Groats, or Dover; the end of the line. Superstition kept us walking, staring down magpies as we looked for omens on the grassy path, twisting, turning between the neat lines of dreamers, reading their dramatic lines of poetry and strong Bible verses standing guard, the winged angels and Gothic letters steadfast, meant to last, to always point the way, Here Lies Mary Beloved of George ... and everyone would know, there was Mary, there she was, and – lucky her – she had been beloved. But where were you? Your blessed stone had been set, you were beloved too – but who could know that, since the words were spirited away ... We saw no one that first time, felt we were dreaming too, as you didn’t seem to be there – somehow lost, amongst the lonely headstones of the long since dead. The second time we saw disturbed earth, new graves appearing, fresh flowers laid. The third time the vicar showed up, sacred gardener, muddy and penitent, amen. We decided on a new stone. But once they were digging to set it, like archaeologists amongst the angels and the flowers, they hit upon something hard – the artefact – sunken down in its flowerbed and entered into a pact of hiding the past, as you always did, and the terrible warstruck things in it, a shadow reluctant to bring too much reality into the light. After much discussion, the man with two gravestones, thirty years apart, would share his signpost and the shiny, proud, Portland stone took precedence, standing for the two of you; husband and wife, reunited in death. The older of the two stones rides around in the car with us now, a grumbling presence, commentating on the driving, and crashing around in the foot well, side to side as we sit out the corners – until someone with the strength to do it can move the artefact again, perhaps to sit quietly in the garden by the birdbath or under the twisting grapevines waiting to ripen. Sent Tiny Stars from the Sea Echinocardium cordatum (sea potato / heart urchin) 00:00 / 24:05:16 A kick of spines like baby hedgehog once graced this brittle shell a heart shaped porcelain see-light-through star-marked path, a shape I mistook for crabwise, I thought it was a myth, strange albino no-coloured pincer mover decorated by a master etcher who dealt out constellations by the dozen, someone who wandered in starfish shaped dreams and drifted through the sand dunes left half-buried at the whim of breezes and joined the blue and flowers jellies of by-the-wind sailors. I exhumed the fragile white star-marked shell and recognised the constellation, sea-potato. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Sarah James read poems for wave 22 of literary poetry journal iamb. Sarah James wave 22 summer 2025 back next the poet Nine out of ten solo poetry titles by prize-winning poet, fiction writer, journalist and photographer Sarah James have either won or been shortlisted/highly commended for various awards. Her latest collection, Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic scooped the CP Aware Award Prize for Poetry in 2021, and was highly commended in The Forward Prizes. Her newest collection, Darling Blue , due out in 2025, combines ekphrastic poems with a book-length fictional poetry narrative – winning Sarah the Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize 2024. Author of a poetry-play, an ACE-funded multi-media hypertext poetry narrative > Room , and two novellas, Sarah also runs V. Press publishing . the poems An Atlas of Tears Inspired by Rose-Lynn Fisher’s work ( The Topography of Tears) 00:00 / 01:35 Under the microscope, entire landscapes contained in every dried human tear. In these photos, grief’s saline secretions are aerial shots of flooded cities. Tears of change are a slum, overpopulated with flimsy dwellings. Basal drops are quake-lines from the cracked mud of a parched riverbed. Each one is mapped as art, but doesn’t chart what happens when ducts block. Nothing explains the tears that won’t flow, or how a body of skin and bones can carry years of non-stop rain inside, yet still remain whole. It wasn’t always like this. A few decades ago, we had cradles of ice for our polar cubs, summer skies counterbalanced by the days of snow. Who’s to say which tears would shine brighter – mine or the mother bear’s, trekking for miles across our thinning seasons? My son’s room 00:00 / 00:51 I can only hear birds, from his open window but their song rises and falls on his sleeping breath. Like this, love is peaceful. Sure in its presence – listened to and witnessed. A hymn that silence turns to prayer once he’s not there. Birds sing on through the opened glass. Air moves within. The empty-bellied note that settles on my outstretched finger has a mother’s hunger. It feeds on the crumbs of my heart. The River Girl After The Lady of Shalott by John William Waterhouse 00:00 / 02:19 Maybe her real curse is Lancelot himself, glimpsed unwillingly. The glass in her mirror shatters like a Cinderella slipper forced onto the wrong foot. Or so, the myth goes … She steps into her boat in a dress of innocence that’s bridal white. Sitting upright, her gaze is alive, but eyes fixed on something out of sight. She has no oars or means of steering, only her arms outstretched slightly at her sides like swan-wings half-prepared to fly or glide. Except, she doesn’t move; she’s as still as a dead Viking on a funeral pyre about to be lit and set adrift. As yet, the only flames are a lantern at the golden prow and one taper candle, another two having blown to smoke. But her hair is ready to set fire to the autumn trees in a slow blaze across this whole landscape. Her tapestried quilt drapes in the water. Already, a layer of colour from the tales patterned by that fabric has slipped onto the river’s surface, like a dream which has lost both shape and meaning but not its fluidity. If she were to dive in now to swim for shore, she’d arrive with a new life dyed into the white of her clinging dress – dripping weed, yes, but also the taste of fresh flowing rain and how brightly sunlight shines through when freed from a cracked mirror. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Michael McGill read poems for wave 10 of literary poetry journal iamb. Michael McGill wave 10 summer 2022 back next the poet Michael McGill is a writer from Edinburgh whose work has recently appeared in The Interpreter’s House , Lunate , The Haiku Quarterly and elsewhere. Michael also has work in the Scottish Poetry Library’s Poems by and for Social Workers anthology. As well as performing for Big Word Performance Poetry in Edinburgh, Glasgow and London, Michael has appeared in several episodes of BBC Radio 3’s The Verb. His work has also been featured on the Micro podcast . the poems Puppy Dog Man 00:00 / 02:01 I thought I saw a puppy dog. I did! I did! I saw the Puppy Dog Man! Baroompta-doo-da. Walk tall, Puppy Dog, Puppy Dog, walk tall – Hey there, Puppy Dog Man – Puppy Dog Man never understand; never understand, little Puppy Dog Man, never understand – Let's talk man to man, acrobat to magician, Devil to Christian, honest man to politician on the street, drowning in a sea of integrity, of humanity; 'Such things as these don't please His Majesty!' Baroompta – do do do. Hello? Oliver Speaking speaking. I was talking to the dog, Maury. Please, you're annoying me. Baroompta-doo-da. Lie low, Puppy Dog, Puppy Dog, lie low – Hey there, Puppy Dog Man – Puppy Dog Man take me underground; take me underground, little Puppy Dog Man, take me underground – New street! New street! I wanna live in a new street. I wanna live in your face. I wanna live in the warm puppy dog folds of your skin. Yeah, I wanna live there, man. Woof! Woof! Baroompta-doo-da – walkin' hand in hand with Puppy Dog Man … Pyjamas in the Snow 00:00 / 02:07 Free postcards were scattered all over New York then, filed in metal displays on the walls of clubs and coffee shops, and I’d collect them and tuck them away in my journal, stumbling around like a 1996 Hansel and Gretel reject, and it was January and everywhere was lit like a still from a Blondie video, and sometimes I’d order a Hazelnut Latte and a Sour Cream Mini Bundt Cake, and I’d write home using one of these postcards, back when home-whilst-travelling was a strange place, an exotic village elsewhere, a solipsist’s mirage, a narcissist’s daydream, and then I’d go to the Post Office on East 34th Street and watch these postcards take flight, because I was living life in Technicolor then, but, oh, that boy back at the hostel was a strange one, and he slept in the bed opposite mine in the dorm, and he’d talk about how much he missed ‘The Bay’ and I’d look puzzled, and he asked me why I’d never been to Ireland, and he laughed when I replied, 'Because it’s so far away,' and he seemed homesick and lost, and very sad, so I showed him my postcards, and one was RuPaul’s face in close-up, and he said, 'She’s gorgeous!' – but he’d turn shifty most evenings when a note was stuck to the door because he was late paying for his bed, and the word REMINDER would sit at the top of the page in cold black font, and then he’d disappear for a time and come back later looking dishevelled and used, and then the note on the door would disappear, and one day it was time to pack and head to JFK, and he wasn’t there so I left the RuPaul postcard on his pillow, and I never said goodbye – and back then Jackie 60 nightclub had a hotline you’d call, yeah, it was listed in Time Out , and one night I stood in a phone booth in the lobby of the hostel, and a recorded voice said the theme that week was Scotland and the dress code was ‘tartan tartan tartan’ and, oh, how I wish I’d gone to Jackie 60 in my tartan pyjamas, walking through Manhattan in the snow, but I never did. Celluloid Clown 00:00 / 01:11 'Your poem isn’t a fit for us,' the email read. I recall him emerging; black biro, yellow Post-it. I recall the usual questions: 'To and or to ampersand ?' etc., etc. What is to become of him, I wonder? He doesn’t fit anywhere, it seems. Still, he remains my three-line darling; long-lost relative of that scrawled first draft. 'Your poem isn’t a fit for us,' the email read. Yes, I know he ended up like a circus clown from some campy old film. You know the type of character: always a criminal in hiding (for what are celluloid clowns really, but painted criminals?). 'Your poem isn’t a fit for us,' the email read. In his final scene, he is led to the jailhouse. He hands over his dog (a Boston Terrier) to a young girl and says, 'Take care of him, Cheryl, he’s a good ‘un.' Then he walks away – fade to black. Publishing credits Puppy Dog Man / Celluloid Clown: exclusive first publication by iamb Pyjamas in the Snow: Anser Journal

Hear poet C Daventry read poems for wave 15 of literary poetry journal iamb. C Daventry wave 15 autumn 2023 back next the poet A linguist, writer and poet living in Scotland, C Daventry has won several awards for her work. These include first place in the Bridport Prize for Poetry (her work appearing in its annual anthologies several times), winner of the 2019 Hippocrates Open Awards for Poetry and Medicine , and The John Ruskin Prize in its inaugural year. A finalist in the 2019 Moth Poetry Prize , she's also chalked up multiple shortlistings and nominations elsewhere. Her work has been published throughout the UK and beyond, and her solo poetry chapbook is titled, The Oligarch Loses His Patience . the poems Mother’s Ruin 00:00 / 01:38 She comes home and takes gin gin deadbeat, gin strayed-from-the-fold takes its own back again, robs families of fathers, rips the roof off terraces, shows off mould and wallpaper in flapping strips gets inside the cistern, the milk bottle, the baby’s bottle, filled up with gripe and mither to the neck with Dutch courage, gin-Jenever; make baby silver make her gold liquid witch, my juice of the juniper take with you my lumbago my gallstones my gout take with you his droop and ague gin swills in our gutters, our runnels, swirls down the drains and out through the grilles, up to the gunwales mammy’s boots go out slap-slap on slimy cobbles. Gin is the colour of her moon-clout her eyes her rouged knees her grey lips gin with lemon gin with lime gin will be damned gin laced with turpentine will take oranges to Scotland and pish on England gin will fackin rhyme if and when it likes gin and whey out of the teats of her into the mouths of babes stiff after three days in winding sheets gin from the ankles up, bad as brown apples in the bottom of the barrel soft ribs teeth like cheese maggots in the brain in every port be mine in the estuarine brine croons the seaman biting her tongue I’ll give you gin up your skirt for your pains dump the bairn come away to Mandalay to the East Indies to the straits so she gave him a dose of gin to take away for my Valentine in an fMRI scanner 00:00 / 00:57 Beloved, it’s because of the way your parahippocampal gyrus glows green under pressure. The way your parietal lobe (which, try as I might, I can’t see as inferior) shows hyperactivity when I whisper sweet nothings. For this alone I want to sail away to your bilateral insula in a precuneus coracle, drag it high on white sand, dance the cingulate cortex breathless and wild, then pull you close and do the fusiform gyrus as the fiery plate of the sun drops below the horizon. You are my frontal and limbic regions of interest. You alone are my dorsal hypoactive cluster. You have declared cerebellum on my own amygdala, o, stroll with me under the globus pallidus of the moon. I do not appear in photos 00:00 / 00:53 anymore. There was a time my face was green hills covered in buttercups, I walked with bees hovering above the clover of my hair which was perpetually ruffled by the light breeze of your breath, of anyone’s breath, of the breath of a man standing over me on the bus, his feet planted too near the saplings of my legs, the hive in my belly, the bird of heart in my feathery breast, us swaying a little; everything I owned slung over the waterfall of my shoulders. My bangles had the clink of pebbles in a burn, and me, averting my eyes – changing direction quick as a shoal of silver fish – from my own aristocracy, my neck a stalk of willow under the heavy crown none of us ever knew we wore. Publishing credits Mother's Ruin: MAGMA (No. 67) for my Valentine in an fMRI scanner: 2019 Hippocrates Prize Anthology (The Hippocrates Press) I do not appear in photos: shortlisted for the Moth Poetry Prize 2019

Hear poet Anila Arshad-Mehmood read poems for wave 13 of literary poetry journal iamb. Anila Arshad-Mehmood wave 13 spring 2023 back next the poet Anila Arshad-Mehmood (she/her) volunteers as a governor at a school and a trustee at a mental health charity. She has a professional background in mental health and wellbeing working with young people, and currently delivers safeguarding and mental health training to colleagues. Her writing focuses on her experiences of immigrant family life in an anti-cohesive lifestyle. Anila's interests range from reading, drinking coffee and petting cats to travelling as widely as possible to learn about other cultures and cuisines. An enthusiastic member of several book clubs, Anila considers poetry an abiding personal passion. the poems The World is Made This Way 00:00 / 01:09 When I scrunch my nose up Tight into my brain I feel something It's like a bad smell crawled into my mind to hold on to Why do we do the things we do To make others feel bad for their good You can be good Own your best Your strength is power And if you are better than the rest why is it Bad to feel good to feel bad to feel Something about me is triggered by you Not something is bad about you I'm letting you know I'm feeling something because of how you Present to me but it's me who feels the feeling Not you who is bad to be good in me forcing feelings on Owning my feeling My strength My best Better, smart, assured Because not everything is me and the world is different and we all have our Better and best self and skill and behaviour And this one can be mine It isn't yours But it's not bad to say Because the world is made this way Labyrinth 00:00 / 02:31 There's a ball of twine glowing at my feet I could pick it up, See if it leads me to the centre of the labyrinth. Or I could stay here, Try my way back to the door which I closed behind me. I didn't lock it but I didn't leave breadcrumbs, I was certain the way back wasn't needed, interesting or useful anymore. Going back or forwards, Forward or backwards. When you communicate differently what do you see A different reaction or an explanation that emotions exist Hide Exist inside your mind, nose, mind. I'm a woman with emotions, More than hate, rage, fear, rage, anger, rage, sadness, rage Curious, open, sadness, happiness, excitement, engaged, hopeful Open the door and check with the key Which key opens the door This behaviour means Empath: noun noun: empath; plural noun: empaths 1. (chiefly in science fiction) a person with the paranormal ability to perceive the mental or emotional state of another individual. Emotional perception, try on the jacket of his dear friend and coat yourself in their sadness, happiness, sadness, step away so it leaves you behind. Emotional perception so your eyes glaze with the tinted glasses on his dear friend see sadness, happiness, sadness. Emotional perception, try on a medicated maze of bars blocking the feelings of every dear friend so only you can feel numb and nothing – not their dear saddappiness. Empathic Guide. Twine in a maze of bloody chains and no need for breadcrumbs, step into the light and wander around without the twine. No map, no guide, no rooms, doors, windows, what comes next, explore, who says twine is the way to explore anymore? Still 00:00 / 00:49 the women who came before me Rose but how can I wonder how can I access my sass draw on words and steal back breath to rise above this smog engulfing me I am drowning in black squares zoom sequences and distant W A L K S dreaming of the time when I step back from the bitter twisted lies written in hashtags I’ll remember I didn’t run from discomfort even when it ran from me like women who came before me I want to fill with air and rise Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb Author photo: © Johanna Elizabeth Photography

Hear poet Thomas Zimmerman read poems for wave 18 of literary poetry journal iamb. Thomas Zimmerman wave 18 summer 2024 back next the poet At Washtenaw Community College, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Thomas Zimmerman teaches English, directs the Writing Center , and edits The Big Windows Review . He's been active in small press publishing since the 1980s, and his latest poetry book is Dead Man's Quintet . Thomas' poetry can be found in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal , Pulp Poets Press , Green Ink Poetry , A Thin Slice of Anxiety , Grand Little Things and elsewhere. the poems Few Good Things 00:00 / 01:00 A sluggish walk in dewy woods with Ann and Trey, who nearly snagged a fresh-dead bird. The sun burned off some brain fog, thoughts began to breach, and then submerged without a word. Unshowered, stubble-chinned, I had a bad night’s sleep: Trey licking, barking in his dreams. Or maybe it was me, poor poet sad enough to nurse his ironies and memes. And now black coffee’s coursing through my wan and tepid blood, spring-gleam in glacial shade. Yet ennui clings like moss, chill hanging on. Not hard to see how few good things get made. How long this search for beauty, truth, gods’ signs? Ad infinitum? No, just fourteen lines. How Slowly 00:00 / 00:54 Some days, how slowly flows the river: that of consciousness, and I a crumbling cork in it. Oh rudderless. I think of all the swimmers in my streams, some surfers too. All hunted down: white sharks. My screen glows whiter than potential, clean blank canvas stretched, which I, most days, mistake for nothingness. Last night, twice, thunder shook the house. An inch of rain. So muggier than hell today. But after work, I saw a fawn, curled cool in backyard spruce shade, looking at me with intent, or so it seemed. But I admit I often think that you are looking at me that way too. You like to say you’re not. Dispatch 00:00 / 01:10 My dad would have been 94 today, and I’ll be 63 next Saturday. Regardless of which Zimmerman’s alive or dead, years fall like rain to swell the river, same mad god still counting drops. Now, drowned gold sun, dry champagne in your glass, strong ale in mine. I slept in late this morning, haven’t showered. Mind’s a dark pavilion, fairness in the shadow turning blue, and temples gray. I write because I want to feel alive: the poet in the book I’m reading says the same. New moon: late birdsong, whine of tires on the interstate, the bedroom window cracked to let the night air in, death floating lonely and austere. I feel it pass but know that it and I will cycle back. This dispatch from the planet, time, my molecules: so slightly all coheres. Publishing credits Few Good Things: Beakful (November 28th 2023) How Slowly: Disturb the Universe (February 13th 2024) Dispatch: Litmora (No. 0, August 2023)

Hear poet Rae Howells read poems for wave 1 of literary poetry journal iamb. Rae Howells wave 1 winter 2020 back next the poet Rae Howells is a poet and journalist from Swansea, UK. She's won both the Welsh International and The Rialto poetry competitions, and her work has featured in a wide range of journals including Magma , The Rialto and Poetry Wales . Rae's poetry has recently appeared in anthologies including The Result is What You See Today and A470: Poems for the Road , in which she also translated her poem into Welsh. She was one of ten poets selected for a digital residency and exchange between Wales and Vietnam, resulting in the collaborative trilingual multi-media showcase, U O | suo . Rae co-authored the pamphlet Bloom and Bones with Jean James, and her collection, The language of bees , is out in 2022. the poems Merchant Vessel Defoe, 1941 00:00 / 01:51 Moon nights were the worst like being on a ruddy stage with the spotlight shining in your eyes the audience somewhere down there in the oily stalls beneath your feet you couldn’t look them in the eye but they saw you all right unblinking periscopes with the waves clapping. we’d clank across the water a band a moving factory waves riddling on the rivets and the machine of the ocean grinding they knew exactly where we were of course they did we were the great flywheel rattling over and they, iron whales, waiting in the tide’s deep belt. So we kept our backs to Brazil and breathed our hope to Swansea. We were bananas tucked in our skins sweating in boxes in the tin stomach of the hull our hands worrying black spiders in our sleep I couldn’t swim a stroke y’know kept my steel helmet on so I could drown the quicker I hated the watch all that starless black stretching out like a long ear listening our convoy was the world we could have been the only people alive the others wavering candles alongside lamps and smoke the cigarette ends flaring and then – BANG! you always saw the white flash of death before you heard the whump of it before you retched at the cordite stink chlorine fire and oil burning on saltwater and the shouts of tiny men flung into the moonroad you couldn’t help but wonder when your turn would come I’ve still got my medals somewhere, y’know, tucked up in a tin box round as faces. The swing 00:00 / 02:02 Six years on but still, sometimes, I wake and find you in the dawn, the woman from the mother-and-baby group, pushing the swing, still there, in that playground – do you remember? both of us in the park: your older daughter is straddled into the safety swing, her legs flying up towards the sun as she leaves you and comes back, leaves you, and comes back and I am with you, the wind insisting itself into everything, the row of boats along the foreshore with their metalwork ringing, crying out, my own baby snug in the hull of her pram, and her small, reliable, heart working, winging in its chest so that when I gull myself next to you – squawking too noisily about motherhood – I almost miss your daughter’s eyes, locked onto you, airborne tight, as she reluctantly leaves you, and leaves you, a series of small griefs, her swoop, her snag of delight, each time caught uncertainly in that belly-drop moment between soaring joy and parting. I was too slow to notice you were a cracked egg, albumen leaking out of you, the way you forced yourself to push the swing away, willed your muscles to obey, each push a wrench of the heart. I presumed you had simply left your baby boy with your mother. But of course, there are your daughter’s eyes, fixed on you as you slowly implode – you, with your heart strung up on a pendulum – transfixed, watching you caught in that terrible moment between: oscillating, flying away, hands outstretched for the miraculous return. The winter-king 00:00 / 00:52 little-word bird little wren feathered lung only built for singing purifying freezing air through a feather ball chitter chatter piper little wren little brownleaf keeneye built for singing round like a minim little wren pink wire feet gripping winter’s branches holding on to cold little bird only built to pipe built to whistle keeneye watching snow fall crowning the holly little thornbeak feathered bauble hanging on the pine only built to sing turning cold air into arias too quick for the ice to catch little keeneye raised eyebrow jingling the dead leaf bells surely too small to be – but they say you’re the winter-king only you can sing us into light Publishing credits Merchant Vessel Defoe, 1941: Magma (Issue 74) The Swing: Please Give Me Your Heart to Hold – longlisted for the Winchester Poetry Prize 2019 The winter-king: The Rialto – winner of The Rialto Nature Poetry Competition 2018

Hear poet Charlotte Ansell read poems for wave 6 of literary poetry journal iamb. Charlotte Ansell wave 6 summer 2021 back next the poet Charlotte Ansell left Yorkshire via the North Sea to moor up on the Medway. Her third collection Deluge was a 2019 Poetry Book Society Winter Recommendation, and she’s had poetry in Poetry Review, Mslexia, Now Then, Butcher’s Dog, Prole, Algebra of Owls and various anthologies – most recently These Are The Hands: Poems from the Heart of the NHS . Charlotte received a Royal Society of Literature Literature Matters Award in 2020, and is a member of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen . the poems My child buys a They/Them badge After Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland 00:00 / 01:52 Because you made an announcement, does it make it so? Forgive me, I don’t see boy not yet, just the you you’ve always been, somewhere in between, yes, halfway through a door I have no key to, a warren I cannot tumble down. I am far too old to shape-shift now, despite your insistence it can be done. Please allow me time to grieve, the you that shrunk and slipped away. The only place your given name exists is in passwords on my phone, all other traces scrunched up, crossed out, erased, sunk or burnt. Your new pronouns cram my mouth, get lodged behind my tongue. I don’t expect the binders to always hold off the surgeon’s knife but forever is a long stretch when you’re fifteen; this is not like a decision to tattoo the word regret on your arm. I watch your carpet get worn with your white rabbit circles, it feels like your absolute conviction is the hook you needed to hang your pain on, with only me wondering why this one. They are already painting the roses, a whole court clamouring for my head but they don’t know you, my love, you can be anything you want and I will always be your mum. I want you to keep one more Drink me just in case, I want you to leave yourself an if . Published with the consent and blessing of my child Mockingbird Based on the traditional song, and after Terence Hayes’ A Golden Shovel 00:00 / 01:08 Your gasp prompts a finger to her lips – Hush. Ever the mimic, kingfisher shade this time, no longer little all grown as blue dye blush seeps her shoulders, your baby gone. Hugs are tolerated but far more nopes and don’t Mum , with rolled eyes, more words less say in her life; no beak grasping yet still a claw outstretched, please a familiar word, she only says Mama’ s - oftly when she wants something, all you cradled gonna fly, no more fluffed wings piled in your lap, you can’t buy back those years, mouth tight to a thumb. You love her still as fierce as a swan but she is restless, gobby, mockingbird. Credo for the clinic at the girls’ school 00:00 / 02:16 Don’t take this home even if this heaviness is not a shoulder bag of textbooks you can shrug off, it will settle in your bones, behind your eyes when your 9am cries for the mum who was either drunk or not there, says she isn’t bothered that she has a room now with an actual bed, where no one shouts she misses hugs, the unpredictability. Keep your tone neutral, if tears threaten, hold them back your empathy must be muted. Don’t bring home here, In these corridors, this tiny room you cannot be mum. When your 10am says she doesn’t know Why she feels so sad, after a year in which her half-brother saw his dad murdered, a stubbed cigarette life caring for her disabled mum before she reached fifteen do not say you understand. Do not make suggestions that are plainly stupid, there are those who recommend pinging a rubber band instead of taking a razor to a wrist but this is akin to gritted teeth in an avalanche. Resist. Never say it will be OK, you are here to sit with them in the tremors and not flinch. Hold still, no one feels listened to by a fidget. Never check your watch. Try to focus through your 10.55’s elaborate lies It’s not your job to believe her, nor judge or call her out. Your 12.15 doesn’t come, which considering, is no surprise. Don’t for one minute think you can rescue any of them – you are not God. At lunch, escape to the park for a proper latte from the mobile van. Head back. When your 2pm says she doesn’t feel seen, one of ten kids, beneath the hijab she has no faith in and tells you life is pointless, do not contradict. When the bell goes, do not take this home. Do not try this at home. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Marcelle Newbold read poems for wave 8 of literary poetry journal iamb. Marcelle Newbold wave 8 winter 2021 back next the poet Winner of Cardiff's Poetry in the Arcades Competition 2020, Marcelle Newbold has had her poetry, with its themes and explorations of place and inheritance, published in various online and print magazines – most recently, anthologies from Black Bough Poetry and Indigo Dreams Publishing. Managing editor of Rare Swan Press, Marcelle is also poetry editor for Nightingale & Sparrow. the poems Weeping Willow 00:00 / 00:58 The boy wanted to know so they embraced. Her bark softened to his apples and knobbles, less agitated now her tendril jewels dripped. She did not answer. Although her roots sang again, again and a leaf, perfect in its death, kissed frigid ripples to life. They whispered soundless love: conceived sinew; osmosis; their thirst. Dreamt indigo sweet blooms, beds of white, held solace in their skins. He knew: the full moon flooded her, bled potential. Death score times score, now a feast for the roses, evidence of a scheme. She knew: memory as a trick, there’s only now. So they bathe, drink, exert, worship – keep not to themselves, and believe in divine cultivation. Wassailing Spirits 00:00 / 00:31 I idle under the apple tree – warped limbs, damp smell of green, dormant blooms. Eventually they come: spoon and saucepan clanks; grins and ciders, bright toes cajole, blunt fingers creak, sweet hearts enjoy the blush of dusk. And they greet me. They sing & dance & racket around, voices conjure bounty, enchant praise, nurture the new. Moving On 00:00 / 01:09 And that’s when I knew those seagulls had lied – my then-smooth face turned to the sea, breeze pulling wetness from the sky and our eyes, my summer frocked legs goose-pimpled — hand in family hand we sat on my father’s favourite gorse-cling bench, saying goodbye, as his urn carefully capsized. Those seagulls enjoyed the bleak lifting. Beaks yellow, blood spot. Bellies chip full. Sky blackened wing tips gleaming. They mocked: no return . For here, now, my daughter sits, serenely wrapped in orange lifejacket, cinnamon bun in willing chubby hand — licking icing streaks, selecting raisins, one by one, occasionally releasing a blown blond strand from sticky lips. The sea churns white crests, we heave and jolt, the boat cradled through mud-heavy waves, our sails sheeted tight. Publishing credits Wassailing Spirits: Black Bough Poetry (Christmas Edition 2021) Weeping willow: Dear Dylan: An anthology after Dylan Thomas (Indigo Dreams Publishing) Moving on: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Sam Henley Smith read poems for wave 11 of literary poetry journal iamb. Sam Henley Smith wave 11 autumn 2022 back next the poet A Person Centred Therapist with a special interest in bibliotherapy, Sam Henley Smith found writing poetry helped her process the death of her parents from COVID-19. Sam’s had work published in a variety of journals, including Anthropocene , Green Ink Poetry and One Hand Clapping . She was longlisted in 2021 for the Plough Poetry Prize, and commended by Jacqueline Saphra in the Winchester Poetry Prize. the poems Requiem Delphinus Delphis For Dad 00:00 / 01:02 I find you again, in the body washed in. You sailed out of this city single and sailed back betrothed, exchanged the brine in your bloodstream for love, found land legs and made family your amphibian home. Now, boat-teeth line the mouth of the muddy creek where the sea spat the creature out. Face up, fixed grin, unable to swim with or agin the tide. Time swallowed the whole whale of it and retching, the sea returns you to me in case I hadn't understood that you were gone. I have come to the wall to pray 00:00 / 00:55 to be with you. The stone is peppered with scars, an executioner’s wall – rows of hearts obliterated. You wouldn’t approve, I can hear you dismissing such display of affection as sentimental memorialisation. Hand-painted in pretty pink FUCK COVID on a heart is not your style. Yet in the insistent overwriting of a name, scribed again and again, I see your pain – determined to be etched forever as if you had held that husband’s hand and together had shouted your loves. A familiar route 00:00 / 01:31 I’ve researched it on the internet, how to brace my back between wall and chair right leg slightly forward, knees pinioned fondly around your together-knees. It’s my turn to raise you now Dad. British Red Cross has lent us the commode but Covid-style, we are alone. I struggle, ease you to sitting, gently ease, gently please , then a pause for breath. Another breath. And if the Tamar Bridge could swing it would look just like your legs as its long carefully engineered limbs manoeuvre in parallel, perfectly paced, another journey across a Devon river bed. The crooks of my arms are hooks now, nestled in your pits. And lift. And pivot. And lower. Gently ease. Gently please. And breathe. And breathe. Publishing credits Requiem Delphinus Delphis: Green Ink Poetry I have come to the wall to pray: exclusive first publication by iamb A familiar route: So we go about our days: Winchester Poetry Prize Anthology 2021 (Winchester Poetry Prize)

Hear poet Tom Weir read poems for wave 24 of literary poetry journal iamb. Tom Weir wave 24 winter 2025 back next the poet Highly commended in The Forward Prizes and commended by The Poetry Society's National Poetry Competition , Tom Weir won the Magma Editor’s Choice Prize with his poem A Man Blames the Dent in the Bonnet of his Car on Two Deer. He was also one of the inaugural winners of Templar Poetry's iOTA Shot Pamphlet Awards for The Outsider . As well as publishing the collections All That Falling and Ruin thanks to a grant from Arts Council England, Tom's had poems in Stand , The Scores , iOTA Poetry and elsewhere. After many years spent living in the north of England, he now calls Bristol home. It's here that he's working on his third collection. the poems Trampoline After Gerard Woodward 00:00 / 00:58 I should probably mention the dark, the distance, how we sank a little deeper into the waves the further we got from land, and how tired we were after ten days camping in that heat. And then there was the brandy and the brandy after the brandy the waiter poured from the bottle hidden beneath the bar that he didn’t charge us for, that the kitchen staff came out to watch us drink, that he told us they used to clean the windows and an hour later, when these children started springing from the earth, I was no longer sure he was joking – all these faces appearing on the air, held at the tipping point where the dim light strung them up like photographs above a ground that continued to refuse them – faces stretched from all that falling, all that trying not to fall. Show Me The Way to Bahrain 00:00 / 01:16 At half time, while the stewards tried to keep the steel fence that separated the two sets of fans from collapsing, you told me your favourite part was the chant about Bahrain. But it was loud and there wasn't enough time to explain that what they were actually singing was show me the way to Plough Lane. So you must've spent the second half thinking these 300 fans who’d made the long trip from London, arms outstretched and shouting at the sky as if discovering rain for the first time, these men and women drinking vodka hidden in bottles of coke and falling over plastic seats and laughing, these men and women treating this stadium by an airfield up north somewhere like the house their parents left one weekend when they were sixteen, were all paying homage to some place in the Middle East they’d never been – its heat, its deserts, its duty free. So when I read that the plans to build a stadium back in Plough Lane have finally been approved, I think of you, of Darlington away, that cold, damp, beautiful day. Walking with Annie 00:00 / 00:39 What else is it for, this night – but the compromise it makes with the city to call off its threat the way you might draw a pack of dogs from the scent. Just you and me, little fox – sack of skin and bone I carry close to my chest as we head further into the dark than I’ve ever been – so dark the river below has become an imagined place. We’ve been here each night since the week you were born but never this late. Look how vulnerable you’ve made the dawn. Publishing credits Trampoline / Show Me The Way to Bahrain: All that Falling (Templar Poetry) Walking with Annie: After Sylvia (Nine Arches Press)

Hear poet Kittie Belltree read poems for wave 11 of literary poetry journal iamb. Kittie Belltree wave 11 autumn 2022 back next the poet Kittie Belltree is a Specialist Tutor for neurodivergent students at Aberystwyth University. She received a Literature Wales bursary for her debut collection, Sliced Tongue and Pearl Cufflinks . Her short stories and poems have appeared in Cut on the Bias , Heartland , The Brown Envelope Book and Cast a Long Shadow . Kittie was recently selected for the Representing Wales Writer Development Programme, supporting writers from low income backgrounds. She's hard at work on a novel, and writing her second poetry collection. the poems The Magician’s Daughter In the fairy stories, the daughters love their fathers because they are mighty princes, great rulers, and because such absolute power seduces. ~ Carolyn Steedman ~ Landscape for a Good Woman 00:00 / 02:36 He draws a silk scarf from a secret pocket in his trousers – snakes it around wrists, splits in two, twists it taut, like her vocal cords, places it over her eggshell eyelids, then offers his hand – white-gloved bowing low, he lets loose the stolen jewels lining his jacket. She accepts – blindly – curtseying into the citrine shaft of spotlight that slices the stage in half, then footsteps into the dead-flat chest, arranges herself – doll-like – inside before he lays the wooden lid to rest. Until now he has kept her for himself, fed on a diet of sliced tongue and pearl cufflinks. The ritual begins before the stage door, before the audience, the dressing room – where he inserts the knife into her velvet and feathers, plucks her hair into tucks and tresses, places a glass slipper on her pillow. Thus, he enters without breaking and she slips seamlessly into the space conjured by his third wife who broke all his spells while he snored by the stove after Saturday matinée , stole the key to his best hat box for her whale-bone combs and peacock frocks and vanished with a ventriloquist from Vladivostok. He feels the thickness of the blade like honey inside her and the strength of his heaving old magic. Why, his wand can cut her in two – separate her bones from her meat like halving a peach. She is ripe, now, for his next trick – Now he has her undone, he will make her disappear. Now – Austerity 00:00 / 01:16 Dirty rat. You’re a fat duck in the House of Lords, fiddling expenses, pinching, farting. You insinuate intemperance, an excess of back-bedrooms, a debauched dissipation in disability benefits, washed down by a superfluity of free school dinners and social care. You point parsimonious fingers into porky pies. You lie with the fishes, the figures. You’re a tight-fisted wrecking ball, punch drunk on stuffing filthy wads into greasy palms and off-shore pension pots. You’re out to lunch, insatiable, voraciously force-feeding families into food banks, mincemeat, rent arrears, debt. You’re a champagne Charlie Chancellor of The Exchequer who neglects to check. You’re specks of white powder smirching naughty nostrils. You’re a glut of gluttony gutting kitchen cupboards, a rip-roaring rusty tin opener doing dentistry on the NHS; an overweight authority on obsessive abscission-making; on cutting things cuttingly; thinking yeah, what the fuck . Bond In 1945, August DeMont drove to the Golden Gate Bridge with his five-year-old daughter, Marilyn; told her to climb over the rail and jump. She did so without hesitation. Seconds later, he dived 'gracefully' after her. A note left in the car stated: 'I and my daughter have committed suicide.' 00:00 / 01:59 i For that was the fact of the matter. The fact of the matter in a sentence. A punishment. The blunt force of its grammar. Pragmatic punctuation precise enough to slice through time like a seam. That night, the rain fell in short, pattering clusters. Your clothes moaned in the closet. A dog slipped out into the dark. The quiet fact of the matter. Seven words for sadness. Words like stones. ii She never spoke. Someone said the car seat was still warm when they found the note. The matter-of-fact fumbling at the rubble of my heart. A cigarette butt tossed into space. iii How to smother a black hole revoke the last wordless slam of doors annul the unspoken bond deeper than any drop leaving me done with life. A sentence followed by a full stop. Publishing credits The Magician’s Daughter: The Lampeter Review (No. 11) Austerity: The Morning Star (May 21st 2020) Bond: Poetry Wales (Vol. 54, No. 1)

Hear poet Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig read poems for wave 23 of literary poetry journal iamb. Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig wave 23 autumn 2025 back next the poet Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig (MIMS) is a freelance translator, editor and author. Her poetry publications include her pamphlet kinscapes and the anthology The Joy of Living , which she edited to support the Maggie’s Centres . MIMS' work has been published by Dust Poetry Magazine , Dreich , Nine Pens Press and Visual Verse . She lives in Dunfermline, Scotland. the poems Breathe through my roots 00:00 / 01:20 nights of waking amid coal-smoked absence of air gasping dark horror mother’s voice guiding me back to surface where corals of plastic lungs grow on the desks of pulmonologists afternoons spent before metal dragons that spit healing vapours or in a body plethysmography diving bell connected by mic to the outside of effortless intake of nitrogen oxygen carbon dioxide a thing of course unless dad tears up when he leaves me in the Alps for expert strangers to reset my faulty pulmonary system close to the Eagle’s Nest where Hitler owned the mountain skies while Special Children’s Wards dealt those considered weak sedatives depressing respiration or let them starve a slow deliberate death meant to appear natural while German physicians in the 1960s still opposed ventilating neonates & the GDR let wee preemies suffocate or drown – at which point in this poem the girl in my womb kicks hard & hesitates to no madeleine 00:00 / 00:33 walking the dog down a window-lit street the wind delivers a familiar heady fragrance it draws my gaze to the back of a woman grey bob, dark jacket wide skirt swishing red brown white she unlocks a door and the thought this could be my mother now cuts right through my middle Tobi’s tales 00:00 / 02:26 Each morning we uncurl, you from your safe corner, I from bed, into this, our togetherness. Garden patrol, maybe a morsel of toast, buttered. Then we put on armours: harness, shoes, a coat. The lead, two-ended cord umbilical between us, we stroll: always expectant, in any weather. You rarely aim for straights but zigzags, backs and forths. The hour strays along. Each patch of grass, each leaf and stem hold so much information. They’re endless message boards, smells stacked on smells, scattered by strangers, not quite randomly. We walk, discovering: you stop, I stop, and vice versa. We dance, wait for each other. Sometimes you put your paws up on a wall and raise your nose, take note. Then you plop down onto all fours, stride on. You seldom share what secrets you’ve uncovered. Though we have some fixed routes – around the golf course, into the deep sea of the woods, down the old country lane filled with with feathered life and the occasional deer, each time we step out, it remakes us, we never walk the same path twice. The world is wondrous, frightful sometimes: feet, disembodied, stick out under hedges, canines off-lead bounce towards us fast, humans are nervous, or calm, open-hearted. You’ll be outside some more during the day with A., and then at sunset, we three go around the pond together, feed ducks and swans, play hide and seek before the great Forth amphitheatre, the bridges red, grey, white, the harbour’s crane, blue, Pentland wonders. At nightfall then, we tuck you in, cuddle, maybe hum a lullaby, until you’re quite relaxed. And soon, with twitching legs, huffing and puffing, a growl, a little whine, you tell us stories of your old home back in Bosnia, and with a deep intake of breath, just like a sigh, you bind yourself to us and us to you. Publishing credits Breathe through my roots: Visual Verse (Vol. 10, Ch. 4) no madeleine: exclusive first publication by iamb Tobi’s tales: kinscapes (Dreich)