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Hear poet J A Lenton read poems for wave 22 of literary poetry journal iamb. J A Lenton wave 22 summer 2025 back next the poet J A Lenton lives in Dorset, writes for a scientific publisher, and is the author of poetry pamphlet Kingdom of Mud . After studying English and Philosophy in Nottingham he received an MA in Creative Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London. Jack's poetry has appeared in Vice , The Cardiff Review , Amsterdam Quarterly , and on The Poetry Society's website. He was commended in the Bridport Prize for Poetry in 2023 and Magma Poetry Prize in 2024, numbered among the winners of The Poetry Society's Members' Poems competition in 2024, and shortlisted for the Society's Free Verse Prize in 2025. the poems Reproductions ‘When the caterpillar is fully grown, it makes a button of silk which it uses to fasten its body to a leaf or a twig. Then the caterpillar’s skin comes off for the final time. Under this old skin is a hard skin called a chrysalis.’ Gene Darby, What is a Butterfly? (1958) 00:00 / 01:19 We were pupaed in our parkas chilling outside the red factory where your da once hefted whole chunks of cow and pig, where the dead certainty of animal emerged in complex blends – soups, sausages and ready meals – the sort an eight-year-old could make. Did. A man isn’t his work you said, stink-eyeing me like a deserter. In that waist-deep grass, the perfect height for hiding in, fat-necked dandelions scaled the chain fences. We kicked off their heads, waiting around for nothing. I had a job offer, you had a hangover. You were all nerves, I was a ball of them – was this how escape felt? All my insides minced through this rusting fence’s mesh? I said, But they’ll crush me like a bug . We looked at the nursery of clouds, the two unthreading contrails. We looked at our feet, nettle, cleavers, bindweed. We looked at the peeling factory walls. They’ll crush you anyway , you shrugged. It’s how things get made . Family Value 00:00 / 01:28 Each time she came home, there was less of her. The doctor warned our family, Slow down . You ’ re taking too much . Watching the way he fingered her weakening pulse, you could tell he had eyes on her heart. It started simple. An ear went missing here (mounted on my uncle’s living room wall), A pinkie vanished there (joint-locked and tensed, a perfect coat-hook) What began at extremities broke into extremes: At Christmas dinner, she sat bewildered; she was just a torso propped up with pillows. I had to wine and dine her, holding her knife saying, It’s quite all right, do you remember the relic of this jaw, how it moves and bites? Others got the best of her. The neighbours rolled up her tongue like a Turkish rug. Her arse appeared at my mother's door gift-wrapped so lovingly with an unsigned note stating, You should keep this in the family . Truth be told, I snuck out an eye. She was past noticing. In my workshop, I cleared the cloud and realigned the sights. I still look through it, reviewing that world just beyond my grasp. The trail on my cheek, her garden’s path. Belongings 00:00 / 01:09 On my tenth trip around the sun, I was gifted a broken copper watch, given by Grandpa, a man I hardly knew, would never know – we were beyond repair. Fixing the workings was a waste of time, the battery was ancient, three vital cogs had fused into a knuckle. I hear his son, tongue clicking, What’s even a watch if it no longer works around the clock? Still, it’s on my wrist. I love its silence. The way the lean, long hand reaches out for the green-furred six. In a hundred years, it will still be arriving. I catch myself staring, willing it on, caught between the minutes. That this worn-out thing, so far beyond fixing, can still fix me, hold me still for a moment as the world spins indefinitely on, displays an older face still ticking inside this one. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Kate Jenkinson read poems for wave 22 of literary poetry journal iamb. Kate Jenkinson wave 22 summer 2025 back next the poet Dr Kate Jenkinson is scientist and poet reconciled – and one of a handful of LinkedIn Business Poets . Her work has appeared in publications such as Flights , Feral and Steel Jackdaw . In 2022, she performed her TEDx talk Poetry Never Abandons Us . Two years later, her debut collection Un/Broken was born. Kate is the founder of the groundbreaking Poetry in Business Conference, launched in 2024, with its mission of creating more paid jobs for poets. Her neurodivergence and aphantasia are both features of her recent work. She also likes hats, writing about the many she wears. the poems Curated Chaos 00:00 / 02:11 INCOMING TEXT: ‘It’s been a right faff. But I’ve got it sorted.’ Love is: changing a tyre at 10.30pm so I can go to my poetry workshop, and he can play golf Love is: asking if you want to eat tea together Love is: eating tea together ADHD is: forgetting you said you would eat tea together, getting distracted and forgiveness. Zuihitsu legitimises distraction allowing me to follow the flow of a busy brain. Lyrics that are my life’s soundtrack I’ll tell you what What I have found That I’m no fool I’m just upside down. Kairos time is my favourite. It’s not chronology. It’s being ready to seize the moment! Is a neurodivergent brain synonymous with creativity? I think it could be. Would you be interested in attending more live events in Hebden Bridge or the local area? I don’t know what the local area means, so how do I answer that question? I definitely want to attend more live events in the North as opposed to virtual, but I really miss the chat function – which is ironic (it should be called the random thoughts function). Random thoughts I have often that infiltrate and illuminate my dreams: • losing my teeth • resitting my ‘A’ Levels • getting to school late and then waking to remember I’m 55 and I can never be late for school again. Ducks sound like they are laughing – well they would – they outlasted the dinosaurs. Corporal Punishment 00:00 / 01:42 I pushed you hard: in sport, in study, in life, at work. I burnt you out three times at least. I neglected, ignored, dehydrated and undernourished you. Dear Body , I am sorry I didn’t learn to love you more when we were young. I only noticed you in pain or pleasure, never in-between. I rebelliously loved the features others called out in playground names: rubber lips, hairy legs, melancholy eyes. I had to cover up for shame of exposing thighs, ‘above the knee’, that others should not see. Now I wish I had been there for you, as you have always been there for me. Had I understood your needs I may not have fallen so low. Menopause feels like your revenge as you demand attention through every wayward regulation. P.S. I will do my best to listen, to understand the transformation we are going through. I must accept this for what it is: a time to be wise, womanly, mature. Where sleep, thoughts, thermoregulation, nutrition, heart beats, beauty are in transition. Body , I will learn to love you more. Forgotten 00:00 / 01:11 I forget. Then remember I’ve forgotten to forget, again. A repeating pattern. Every time the shame, the stinking shame of it screws my face, makes me gag. Those reeking memories plague me. Remind me of all I wish I’d done for me, instead of giving that promise of a better life to someone else. I could have asked for help. But a strong woman has no voice. She shoulders the burden mute; stubborn as a beaten mule. She digs in deeper. Calloused hands dig so deep, she is buried in remembering. And only when she’s six foot under, coffin-deep, bone-cold, where no-one can hear her, forgotten: she screams. Publishing credits Curated Chaos / Forgotten: exclusive first publication by iamb Corporal Punishment: Un/Broken (Poetic Edge Publishers)

Hear poet Loic Ekinga read poems for wave 22 of literary poetry journal iamb. Loic Ekinga wave 22 summer 2025 back next the poet Loic Ekinga is a writer from the Democratic Republic of Congo. He's the author of poetry collection How To Wake A Butterfly , and has had his works of fiction and poetry appear in Agbowò , Tint Journal , Type/Cast , Salamander Ink , Ja. Magazine , Poetry Potion , A Long House , New Contrast , Brittle Paper and elsewhere. Loic's experimental mini chapbook, Twelve Things You Failed at As A Man Today , earned him an honourable mention by J K Anowe for Praxis Magazine . A finalist of Poetry Africa’s Slam Jam competition, Loic is also a Kasala writer and teacher, and Best of the Net nominee. the poems For Black Boy 00:00 / 01:29 The black boy—still unfurling, puts his hand over his mouth and weeps. Be a man, we were just joking! Years later, a black boy he knew is said to stand at the entrance of the city—on a motorcycle, looking to feed his black children. Another black boy, the pointy-eared black boy, digs black holes with his black bare hands for anyone willing to pay for water. Another makes music and blames his infidelity on black pain. What happens after you climb a mountain and find no ram caught in a thicket? Years before, around the time the black boy—unfurling, wept into his hands -- they kicked balls on the golden sands of his grandparents’ street until Black God stroked the sky purple. They laughed into each other’s day and rubbed leaves against their black skins until they could taste the trees. There was a time, the night/black was the only thing worth fearing. There was a time when to live too long meant to die. The boys, now, stand on their blood every morning trying to be men, crying into their hands behind walls, away from their fathers' eyes. Nausea (ii) 00:00 / 01:42 This must be what it’s like to chase someone's love to the edge of the self: The groaning, the longing, the dancing At the precipice. The men who taught me love, taught me injury What happens in the body should stay in the body I open my chest, the pulp– the despair Someone, somewhere talks to a friend about me And says he was never a bad person, He was just never in love with me The first rainbow appeared out of regret. I apologise. I multiply. In my apartment, the ants are everywhere. So is the moss. I fall in love and everything aches. How do I say the tragedy meant to end me is growing teeth, without sounding like a poet in reverie? Because there are conversations too uncomfortable For even God, I wonder whether we will ever talk about this body and His plans What is the name of our disease? The men who taught me care, almost starved my mother to death. You tell me, How do I open my mouth into a woman’s without my grandfather marching down her throat? Do you see what ails me? What do our people call it? And for God’s sake, what is it with the longing? No One Is Writing Love Poems About Me 00:00 / 00:36 I say to her— out of nowhere, in a crowded bar, before she brings her mouth so close we eat the night Then I remembered that she had on my favourite T-shirt —black, polyester … two sprays of my cologne behind each ear. She glitters—gold rings within rings within rings In the hallway of my apartment building, she pushes me against the wall & proceeds to swallow the night whole Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Katrina Naomi read poems for wave 22 of literary poetry journal iamb. Katrina Naomi wave 22 summer 2025 back next the poet Katrina Naomi’s poetry has featured on Poems on the Underground, as well as on Radio 4’s Front Row and Open Country. She tutors with Arvon and the Poetry School , and has a PhD in creative writing from Goldsmiths, University of London. Katrina’s fourth collection, Battery Rocks , won her the Arthur Welton Award from the Society of Authors, and was Daljit Nagra ’s Collection of the Month on Radio 4 Extra’s Poetry Extra. She's also received the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry, and with fellow poet Helen Mort, a Saboteur Award. the poems Fickle Lover 00:00 / 01:33 Ours is not a relationship of equals. You’re passionate, rough, violent. So much is an act – you’re always on display – I want you all to myself. Of course, you’re unfaithful, you swim with anyone, moshing their thighs, their breasts, knocking them out with your rush. At one time, I could choose whether to be in love with you. I do my best to ignore your conquests. Instead, I think of when you’re away, how you leave me gifts – razor shells, man o war, jags of glass – fragile reminders of your own tough love. I need your chill; can’t help myself. You swoosh round my brain, frolicking with neurones, make my skin fit me, tighter, tighter, after I’ve plunged right in. I’m going deeper. I can’t consider what you want – pinning me, scraping my limbs along rocks. I’ve learnt to say no. Despite your allure, I won’t go to you at night. But sunrise, I’ll be waiting for you, having shifted my day around your tides; my primitivism seduced – loving how you run, spuming, towards me. And if there were no sea? 00:00 / 00:55 no shushing of the pull / no shimmer of summer / no knowledge of splash / no repetition of clouds / no clouds / no splendour of kelp / no fish / no study of scales / no silhouette of oystercatcher / the moon on repeat / no islands / no need for ships / storms would laze in their beds / no Speedos / no coastal erosion / all of us living inland / no salt / no shells / no need to row / no Jaws / no glamour of rock pools / nowhere for the sun to swim / no rivers / rain unknown / no place to drown in the kelp forest 00:00 / 01:40 the first time she finds herself among brown strands between fear and wonder floating in this other world of upside down a place a person could wed herself to so much dank silence beyond her breath the gentle murmur of limbs in suspension their arc and splay there’s no peace like this in the dry country she’s like a body in a jar at the lab but keeps her Dutch colours sliding her mind through slender lengths of weed fabric-like plastic-like part translucent part shine like nothing else but kelp her restless hair goes on its own pulsing journey she forgets for blissed moments she can’t breathe here this isn’t air waves nudge overhead it’s like any place almost visited say a city say Seville and she talks half-seriously half what-if of how she might live here the kelp wafts in welcome displays its tentacles as she refuses neoprene longs for kelp’s beckon and touch longs to pass as a local a strange fish for sure but one who could belong Publishing credits Fickle Lover: Same But Different (Hazel Press) And if there were no sea?: berlin lit in the kelp forest: winner of the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry 2021 All poems: Battery Rocks (Seren Books, 2024)

Hear poet Charlotte Gann read poems for wave 22 of literary poetry journal iamb. Charlotte Gann wave 22 summer 2025 back next the poet Charlotte Gann is a writer and editor from Sussex who enjoys walking the South Downs in her spare time. Her first pamphlet was The Long Woman , which saw her shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award in 2012. Two full collections followed: Noir and The Girl Who Cried , as well as another pamphlet, Cargo . Charlotte also founded and runs online hub The Understory Conversation : a space for fellow writers to meet, talk and share in small groups and one to one. the poems The house with no door 00:00 / 00:38 The house with no door looks welcoming, with its wisteria and robins. I can see, through the kitchen window, a bowl of cherries. They’re the brightest, darkest, shiniest cherries. But that window’s shut and bolted. I move on round. I know I shouldn’t walk on flowerbeds. I keep thinking the door must be around the next corner. I’ve lost count now how many times I’ve circumnavigated. In the Classroom of Touch 00:00 / 01:36 This is how you hold a person , Mr Farnham says demonstrating. Your touch needs to be light but firm. Felt in the skin like a weight, a squeeze. No sudden movements, please. Still is best. The pupil he’s performing on closes her eyes, head slightly folded like a bird’s. She’s collapsed into his woollen front. See how my arms arc? the teacher asks his class. Hold each other like precious cargo. Never be rough. Don’t shove into the person you love. Don’t steal touch. Be clear about this: we give a hug. Thanks Lydia, back to your seat now. Giles–? The boy stares down at his feet, face pink. His worst subject. Mr Farnham waits quietly, bends his head, smiles. C’mon Giles , he says gently. The boy staggers down the ragged aisle between assorted classmates. Waits while this man opens his arms. Falls forward, hiding his face, his sobs. The teacher enfolds him carefully, whispers, You’re doing well, Giles . Calling Time 00:00 / 02:09 So I’d sit at my desk waiting and hoping and trembling before someone would say it – maybe me – A quick drink after work – and we’d go night after night, pint after pint after pint. We’d smoke sixty cigarettes, drink drink after drink starting at six when seven thirty seemed another, safe country but suddenly was upon us, then long gone and it’s more like half nine and our table a landscape of pint glasses and overflowing ashtrays after trip upon trip to the cigarette machine in the hallway and turn after turn to the bar for another round, another tray of toppling filled glasses and laughter and it still only Tuesday, say, and then the bar staff flashing the lights on and off and it must be after eleven and they’re calling a warning and stacking chairs at the other end of the narrow room and we’re the only table left and still we stay drinking and shouting until they call ‘Time’ and yank the noisy chain grille down over the bar and padlock it and turn the lights off and we grope our way blindly foghorning back up the stairs and even then not out into the night, contrite, rushing for last Tubes but into the hotel bar for residents only where the drinks are even more expensive and it’s just us two now usually and we order ‘A night cap’ then ‘One for the road’ lighting cold fags and slumping on that black-leather slidey sofa in this pot-planted environment with piano muzac playing softly and it’s hard now to keep my spirits up with you falling silent beside me so near and far away. Publishing credits The house with no door: The Lyrical Aye: Richie McCaffery Calling Time: London Grip (Summer 2022) In The Classroom of Touch: The Rialto (No. 81)

Hear poet Kerry Trautman read poems for wave 22 of literary poetry journal iamb. Kerry Trautman wave 22 summer 2025 back next the poet Ohio born and raised, Kerry Trautman has served as a Northwest regional judge for Ohio’s Poetry Out Loud competition since 2016. In 2024, her one-act play Mass was a winner of The Toledo Repertoire Theater’s Toledo Voices competition. Her poetry collections include Things That Come in Boxes, Artifacts , T o be Nonchalantly Alive , Unknowable Things and Irregulars . the poems To the NYC Fire Escape Mannequin 00:00 / 01:16 Whoever placed you there must not love their own Mama, knowing how yours would have a heart attack—you perched so high, hard ass teetering on rusted iron railing. Your nude sisters inside—posed bare to windows like bodega hoagies— must envy your demure drape of arm across left breast, your waist-cape granting some dignity, some hint at flight, your sunlight unfiltered by high window glass grimed with breath of streetsidedness, the purity of your unmuffled noise. I hope they let you in from rain, or when October chills through to your metal armature, your smooth scalp. I hope no pigeons nest in your wig or if they do—because they probably will— that they shit elsewhere, that their fledglings alight off your shoulder, soar down through the alleyway in the rose-gold wash of post-drizzle June, that they flap harder than they thought their sparse new wings could, that your sisters envy them, too. Commandments For we walk by faith, not by sight. ~ 2 Corinthians, 5:7 ~ 00:00 / 01:48 My eye doctor’s office blasts Christian rock louder than I play music I like. Today will be 90° like each this week and next, sweat by 9am. On walls are crucifixes, Ohio State football ephemerae, American Flags, Bible verses scorched into wood planks. It’s the only office that takes my insurance. Louisiana voted requiring the ‘Ten Commandments’ be posted in classrooms. I dread my hot car when I’m done here. The doc scopes my eyes, says look straight ahead . New Orleans could be underwater by 2050. The radio sings give me your eyes . Air conditioning rumbles, ruffles his white beard. He covers my eye, says read the chart across the room. Hands me a card, says read tiny print. Commandments posters must be in a ‘large readable font’. Did I crack my car windows? He opens my eyelids with a thumb and finger. I have no way to not see. Look up —ceiling panels blocking godless sky. Look down —green carpet, basement, earth with only today’s inferno. The radio sings you are my vision . The doctor says look straight at me . We see so little the same. Singeing a pyrography quote on a wood block takes a steady hand, patience, the desire to burn to be certain everyone sees what you believe. Reservoir 00:00 / 01:34 This is drinking water, right? my son asks, watching wave-lets swish the boulders’ seaweed tutus. Yes , I say, not knowing how it works. Not knowing how much of anything works. A mower cuts the high grassy incline holding all this water in, its blade apparatus angled along the steep slope, its cab with head-phoned driver inside remaining plumb. So many machines and systems engineered for real purpose. Then there’s me, sitting on a rock trucked-in to create a fake lake’s berm. I wouldn’t know how to fish here if we were starved. Could I save us both if we fell in? I can only write about cloud cover obscuring sun that aches to glint off water. I can sit here and conjure worthless words while my son wonders how long his phone might last if tossed in. He answers his own questions better than I could. If an earthquake split this miles-around wall that never should have been here, how far into town would waters keep swallowing? How much of this could we drink? Sometimes what looks like a lake is just a construction, not ancient at all. Sometimes a woman is incapable of being anything more than a scratcher-down of words, symbols, glyphs. It would be too easy to tumble off this cliff. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb Author photo: © Alexis Mitchell Photography

Hear poet Rishika Williams read poems for wave 22 of literary poetry journal iamb. Rishika Williams wave 22 summer 2025 back next the poet Rishika Williams started writing poetry after COVID-19 lockdowns eased in London in 2021. She writes trauma-based, long-form narrative poetry centred on gender-based violence, Partition, and activism in Sindh – both her families having left Hyderabad around Partition. She was shortlisted for the 2022/23 Malorie Blackman Scholarship, and longlisted for the UK's National Poetry Competition in 2023. Her work appears in Third Space , Between the Lines , Form Lab and Hyderabad & Beyond . Rishika performs regularly at open mics, online, and at events, including at the World Sindhi Congress’ 36th Annual Conference in 2024. the poems on the bald hill 00:00 / 02:46 I press my palm to brick touch a familial laugh with the metre of forgive I press my ear to stone listen to the river walk I recall the game thurra with small flecks of flint with the rhythm of return I recall that havaa, that wind a tourist on the bald hill I tell the windcatchers my got~ra is Kashyap with the Haridwar scrolls I tell the land grabbers nukhs D~umba and T~evek I find your initials in my mehendi Khudāwadī script on my hands with the search for sat~a suhagan~ I find my hair is wet with oil a red thread wraps my wrist I count seven fruits on my lap nine planets, a swastik, a betel nut with the invite to the departed I count two pieces of misree conjoined a red line in my parting I throw the clothes from my old life ghari pots laden with water with the many shapes of fire I throw ghee and spice in the flames the mandap is one umbrella  I walk in front for moksha mangal sutra chains my neck with the priest facing north I walk east for liberty dancing girl is there to protect me I let you step on my foot a dholee brought me here with the camels and the horses I let you step on my land my parents wash your feet I give salt for loyalty exchange datar with the slope with the tilak from the incline I give salt for peace and unity the grains sigh in my blood I fast for your long-life in search for the T~eejr^ee moon with the light I catch in my thali I fast to remain your wife there are seven widows’ shrines I look straight in the eyes of a crow the kawa know my face with the directions of the caw I look straight at my front door you take a knife to water Indus, 00:00 / 00:48 there is already bhukha amongst the hari in Bukhari droughts in my home in Mehrghar and so many whistle blows in Manjidak the farmers need your emeralds from the ruby red of Lal Qalander and Guru Nanak must ride the Phuleli on a fish send the white horse to warn of floods so families do not sell their daughters and in the brackish waters of the triangle at your mouth if the salinity increases you will need to swallow it as the yogis’ cleanse of Vamana Kriya but the lobsters netted off the costal stretch of Clifton Beach might get too salty for the chi-chi my parents come from a place that no longer exists 00:00 / 03:50 and in the ‘o’ of exodus I hear my father as a boy, ‘just take your hands’ I hear him say and I had not heard that he had said that before but I know him so well he does still tell me things things that had no language before, as his memories get younger, the further Dad goes, he ages closer my Dad is always closer than ever before and my families left Sindh as the British penned a long line of a couplet their lawyer came to strip off our linens to unmake our beds to make us leave without a pot or a pen, to turn our backs on Lalibai’s garden, leave the walks we had taken, our books and our businesses, as they gave away our river, the very one that named our land: aj raat the navy separates, the fabric rips, I spill some of my indigo as that part of India went am I supposed to feel better Cyril that you said ‘I nearly gave you Lahore’ the largest mass migration of human beings as animals scrambling to cross a line for survival, over the amputated shoulder of Mother India, her pallu cross-stitched wet red as her border embroidered millions in massacres of threads un-woven warp of the Indus with the stench of departure lingering as Yardley’s English Lavender in torn cashmere is rape not enough: bullets still land in cargo trains my five-year old mother sleeps clutching a biscuit tin gold coins are inedible the new scars indelible invisible ink of my genes smudged in the parting sindoor in a hair line is to consecrate a wedding, to live in sin is to live together as if married, yet Sindh has been ashed in vermillion, dakoon at Marwar Junction bang on the carriages my Uma starts bleeding; she must change trains to a hospital fugitive paints run in ajrak, must they or must they not be rescinded, my twelve-year-old father has been left to fend for himself; he cuts logs for a torn piece of bread, to break with his siblings, an unbroken promise to his mother right up to no end Dad, I don’t understand what I’m writing: how can I hear the sitar's lyrics caterwauling, the tabla beats reverberating as history migrates our tanpura I hear now as violins, as I tiptoe amongst the neem, golden shower, peepul and moringa trees what is this strange tense that we find ourselves in I sit with you to listen to the ghazals of Anup Jalota I watch you in the garden, I see you talking with Dada I deal us a hand of rummy, time to play cards with Uma I reach for a mango near the rose bush, I choose you a flower I will feed you your breakfast, yes I know you’d like some seyun patata I do hold your hands Dad and rewhisper ‘we are all safe as we re-member’ Publishing credits on the bald hill / Indus,: exclusive first publication by iamb my parents come from a place that no longer exists: Third Space (Renard Press)

Hear poet Samantha Terrell read poems for wave 22 of literary poetry journal iamb. Samantha Terrell wave 22 summer 2025 back next the poet Nominated for The Forward Prizes and The Pushcart Prize, Samantha Terrell is the curator of international poetry series SHINE . She lives with her family in Upstate New York, and has had her poetry anthologised in Door=Jar , Eunoia Review , Green Ink Poetry , In Parentheses , The Orchards Poetry Journal and elsewhere. Samantha's many collections – most recently, Delta Function – have consistently garnered five-star reviews. the poems AI and the Animal Kingdom 00:00 / 00:59 Fabricatus intellĭgos , a man-made being with the capacity for intelligent processing and output It’s been said what separates Homo sapiens from the rest of the Animal Kingdom is intelligence – Reasoning Skills, Speech, Forethought. Turns out we’re not very good at Forethought, since we’ve created a being that renders the use of Reason and Speech as obsolete. All those crunching numbers, tabulating potential outcomes, answering queries, researching options – who needs ‘em? But what about relationships made around the water cooler? The client who becomes a family friend? Apparently creating Fabricatus intellĭgos has proven something else, too: Homo sapiens aren’t unique because of a boundless capacity for intelligence, but our boundless capacity for love. Fluidity 00:00 / 00:32 It’s not always easy to know what’s been taken from us, or what we have taken from others. Dignity is a fluid thing – one in the moment, and another in hindsight. We put words in each others’ mouths, then take them out again to suit us. We are wet clothes hanging on the line, in the rain, beginning to sag with the weight of double-saturation – not knowing how long we must hold on. Social Psychology 00:00 / 00:34 Another ink-blot test, this time for society, is sure to reveal our perception of reality. Forget the shapes for a moment. We can’t even agree on the parameters. The blur of lines one would only characterize as grey, another sees as black and white. Should the paper be held up, or laid down? Never mind, time to look. What do we see? To one, a ballot box; to another, a crown. Publishing credits AI and the Animal Kingdom / Social Psychology: exclusive first publication by iamb Fluidity: Fulcrum Review (Issue 2)

Hear poet Wren Wood read poems for wave 22 of literary poetry journal iamb. Wren Wood wave 22 summer 2025 back next the poet Wren Wood, a mother, poet and nature educator/connection specialist from London, writes imagistic and constrained poetry to document life’s small, often overlooked moments. She also loves reworking old myths in contemporary settings. Having studied for her BA in Creative Writing at Roehampton University, Wren is now undertaking Bardic training. She's had work published by the Land Workers Alliance, as well as in several titles from Black Bough Poetry. After years of scribbling poems in snatched moments, Wren is now going through her piles of poetry to pick out the best for her debut pamphlet and collection. the poems Couplet 00:00 / 00:31 Held by spider-silk to the thin-twigged edges of the redbark cherry, a couplet of nests sit snow-cloaked and silent, on this, our shortest day – awaiting the return of the lengthening light, of pink blossom riots, the renewal of leaves, and with it all, their goldfinch charm. Lutein 00:00 / 00:17 My son’s tousled hair echoes the lutein gold strands of pollen-heavy catkins in the hazel copse, gleaming in winter sunlight. A Summation of Wonder 00:00 / 04:35 If it is claimed by those around – or within – you, that you are too much or at times, not yet enough; in your retreat to smallness Dear Heart, please re-call that the iron in your blood, in nettles that burn, the core of this blessed Earth, forged in a collapsing star. As you unravel, re-know how your skin was once carbon held in the sprawling roots of ancient pines that flourished after the ice. As panic threatens to swell and wash away all, your sweat works to cool and calm, and retreats to the streams of vapour stored as clouds. While you perspire droplets born of the oceans, they rise to join the transpired outbreaths of pink hawthorns, and violet heartsease, blown across the skies to mountains to fall as snow. And there, your worry – and mine – is tended until the weight of itself shakes free. I note your nails are worn short through teeth and wrought-thoughts. One day, when we are long done, this keratin you gift with spit – puh! – back to the land, will form a rhino’s horn, the fur of wolves, feathers of iridescence, turtle-shells, and the scales of adders that bask in the sun. Friend, the calcium and phosphorus in your bones were once bound in chalk: cliffs of creatures of the seas. Who before they sank into the pale sediment, kept company with the small exhalations of algae, and reptile giants, who became the birds you now marvel at as we shelter from the rain and watch in awe-fear as they twist across the sky, teasing the storm clouds to charge and s t r i k e ! Streaks of lightning split the atmosphere on repeat; the protons beneath your feet calling to the ground vivid electricity. Clouds we gazed into forms that fine day in July, do you remember? Now invoking air’s atoms to white-heat incandescence. And calls nitrogen into blue luminescence. That then falls, torn from within, clutched by a current of rain forcing you to flinch as it thuds against the soil merging with the work of microbes smaller than we can perceive so plants may feast, then die to nourish you and so tend to your thriving. Delivering that nitrogen, once of the stars then sky then soil to scaffold your DNA. And in the quiet of this night, we look for her, – dear Grandmother Moon – who herself cannot be full without her retreat into the deep dark. And in her new-born weeks, she gazes upon the tide of distant starlight that made her. We too. And speak of being loved in imperfect manners by those hearts who have forgotten their own magnitude, while we search out past-stars; exploded into fractions of themselves. Yet their light still edges near; longing to wise-look upon their young descendants: drifting, lingering in an illuminated brilliance of limerence at the thought of All: human, and more-than-we in multiple, ongoing forms. My friend, please re-call in your retreat to smallness: you’re Light’s memory – a fingerprint of the stars. A summation of wonder. * * * * * Publishing credits Couplet: Christmas & Winter Edition Vol. 3 (Black Bough Poetry) Lutein: Christmas & Winter Edition Vol. 2 (Black Bough Poetry) A Summation of Wonder: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Patricia M Osborne read poems for wave 22 of literary poetry journal iamb. Patricia M Osborne wave 22 summer 2025 back next the poet Patricia M Osborne graduated with an MA in Creative Writing in 2019. A novelist, poet and short fiction writer, she's published eight poetry pamphlets and had numerous poems and short stories appear in various literary magazines and anthologies. Her debut poetry pamphlet, Taxus Baccata , was nominated for the 2020 Michael Marks Pamphlet Award, while her poem ‘Sandcastles Fall’ was nominated for The Pushcart Prize in 2025. When not working on her own writing, Patricia enjoys mentoring other writers. the poems Galanthus 00:00 / 00:59 I shelter at the base of trees, abbeys, churchyards or amongst woodland. My neighbours, mistletoe, petasites, wild aconitum, hang close to my side. I’m harvest for Norman Monks who decorate churches at Feast of Candlemas, nature’s medicine, rub on temples to treat mal de tête . I spring into action, push up through arctic-white and cheer through winter gloom. Standing with grace, I nod as you pass by silver birch. Milk-tone drooping petals, viridescent stem, ... symbol of purity. Journey through a Mythical Forest An encounter with my muse 00:00 / 02:00 He wraps strong branches around me. I inhale his sweet scented needles with the promise of a story in a dream as the yew’s magic heals my mind from darkness into light. Twigs brush my bare arms, I caress their fruit, a cluster of nuts drop to my feet with the promise of inspiration as the hazel’s magic heals my mind from darkness to light. She rustles her leaves, I finger her silver bark, peel back a small patch with the promise of fertility as the birch’s magic heals my mind from darkness to light. Sturdy boulders stroke my shoulders I glance up at his crown with the promise of protection, strength and wisdom as the oak’s magic heals my mind from darkness to light. I kneel under his huge canopy, hug his wide trunk, close my eyes. My muse arrives. I write on the page– I am rich, I am strong, I am wise, I am gifted. I am thankful to the mystic forest for its magic in healing my mind from darkness to light. I am 00:00 / 00:53 Serenity captured by blue cloudless sky over sun-kissed ripples where Canada geese play and Egyptian goslings nuzzle up to their mother. I am Love and Harmony together with family, friends, yet miles apart. I am Hope as daffodils wave their yellow heads, and perfect pink blossom sways from the nearby cherry tree. I am Memory as forget-me-nots in their blue and white glory push up from the ground. I am Peace and pray this world will let me in. Publishing credits Galanthus: Taxus Baccata (The Hedgehog Poetry Press) Journey through a Mythical Forest: exclusive first publication by iamb I am: Nature’s Bookends (The Hedgehog Poetry Press)

Hear poet 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 Mary Mulholland read poems for wave 22 of literary poetry journal iamb. Mary Mulholland wave 22 summer 2025 back next the poet Mary Mulholland's poetry has been published in Mslexia , Magma , The Interpreter's House , The Rialto and Under the Radar . Highly commended in the Bridport Prize for Poetry and The Rialto's Nature and Place Poetry Competition, she was also longlisted in the UK's National Poetry competition. Mary founded and co-runs Red Door Poets , and is co-founder and editor of The Alchemy Spoon . Formerly a transpersonal psychotherapist, Mary holds a Newcastle University/Poetry School MA in Poetry. Her published works include What the sheep taught me , two collaborations with Vasiliki Albedo and Simon Maddrell ( All About Our Mothers / All About Our Fathers ), plus a new pamphlet is on its way from Broken Sleep Books. the poems Heading to the swamps 00:00 / 02:00 The fruit bats flew off at dusk. I went to the harbour, bought a prawn salad, but a gull snatched my first forkful mid-air. Now, heading back, empty, to the Airbnb, seagulls yeowing, chuckling over my head my phone rings: you’re in a coma. I stop midway across the bridge, the sea far below dark and cold, so many stars, and all I can think is where do the bats go by night? At first I’d thought they were a cloud of crows. I force you back to mind, wonder if you’ll survive, but we all die sometime, and this’d save divorce. I’m having an adrenaline rush. It’s as well we have a half-world between us. I’m no good with invalids. And hearts need to be looked after. Mine can’t be broken. You say love’s a basic need. I don’t need needs like that. Yet once we had dreams. On a beach you read me Jonathan Livingston. We were so young. After that, seagulls divebombed me, followed me home, waited on my sill. Seagulls have this wide range of sound and elegant social behaviour. I don’t like seagulls. When I broke with you, the first time, you argued your way back. It was autumn. Even fruit bats get amorous in autumn, making love, feasting in the swamps until dawn, then off. Like us. Always coming and going. And you now drip-fed. The cold rips through me. Does it take this for me to learn I love you? What the sheep taught me 00:00 / 00:41 All day I have watched the ewes, Trying to see as they do, everything at once. I think best sequentially: it’s getting towards evening. The sheep know this too, they’re starting their sunset corral of the field perimeter, practising for the national, leaping like antelope, even the large one bearing triplets, she soars over the electric fence, she’s made of spring. All those fences I could have jumped. I take a run. The shock sends me flying. Flypast 00:00 / 01:46 He hands me a canister decorated with sunflowers. It is November. I peer into a hole, the size of a fifty-pence piece. Inside is just over half full, its weight approximate to a bag of flour. Pale grey, the cremulator has produced a texture more silt than sand, and I am lost in staring: that speck is her laughter, that’s her at the proms, dressed for a ball, with a fractured skull on her way to the point-to-point she’d invited me to but I was busy revising the middle ages. That dark fleck is her holding babies, never her own, and that, ‘if you’re cold put on another jumper’, their chilly lakeside house. My brother-in-law clears his throat. Last night he said he gives wood-ash to a neighbouring potter for the kiln; it creates a fine sheen in the glaze. Has anyone used ash of a loved one? Three fighter jets burst overhead, fast and low. We look up. Cloudless blue, after a wraith-like early mist. He circles the cherry, scatters her lightly, and each of us does a round of the leafless tree whose base flickers with tea lights. She’s a circular skirt of powder. A breeze lifts her briefly, almost a flamenco, then drops to silence. Overnight drizzle will vanish her to earth. Publishing credits Heading to the Swamps: Fourteen Poems to say I Love You (Candlestick Press) What the sheep taught me: What the sheep taught me (Live Canon) Flypast: Mslexia (Issue 105) Author photo: © Xavier Bonfire

Hear poet Carl Alexandersson read poems for wave 22 of literary poetry journal iamb. Carl Alexandersson wave 22 summer 2025 back next the poet Carl Alexandersson (he/him), a queer spoken word poet based in London, hails from Småland, Sweden. He was Highly Commended for the Edwin Morgan Poetry Award 2022, a runner-up for the Grierson Verse Prize 2022, and selected for the BBC Words First programme in 2021. Carl's work has been published in Atrium , Ink Sweat & Tears , Dust Poetry and elsewhere. His debut poetry pamphlet Förgätmigej // Forget-me-not appeared in 2023. the poems The cows on the ice 00:00 / 02:07 on clear winter days we'd ice skate on Sjöatorpssjön our breaths were condensed precise fast-paced as we'd circle the patch of ice we were told was safe safety is a decision others make * on this frozen-over lake decades ago Dad's childhood friend poured hot cocoa into his ice skates to warm his feet which worked briefly before backfiring nothing is as cold as heat fading * once, I fell through slipped from the pier and had to get draped in a tablecloth the colour of snödroppar in Swedish we have this saying det är ingen ko på isen there is no cow on the ice it means no danger everything's fine * once I poured hot cocoa onto the ice thinking it'd melt but it just stained * Dad always told me if I ever go further out on the ice I'd need to bring ice picks in case I fell in on Sjöatorpssjön I learned how to listen for cracks under skates for spring to break for danger * last summer, in the dark Dad and I heard our neighbours shout there were cows in the lake having escaped their farm for the cooling bliss of a summer night swim we stood and listened as they brought them ashore like we'd listen for the ice to crack * I'd like to not stain this ice this lake this life if I can * in the end the cows on the ice were saved safety is a decision others make. Wind-bent trees still grow 00:00 / 01:46 in a city centre park in Bilbao, my best friend reaches out and touches the trees we pass says man-made things are too smooth, too flat; unnatural. I think of things I have lost: laying down on grass, jumping from one rock to the next, picking wildflowers bringing them home which brings me back to summer days with farmor and farfar by Sjöatorpssjön reading Kalle Anka comics in the shade of an oak tree, holding the ground with my body; breathing it in. when did I stop going for forest runs, stop walking into the kitchen with grass-stained feet, carrying wild strawberries from the edge of the greenery? such sweetness in such small bodies. I read somewhere that twigs don’t always break at their weakest point; that it is more of a chain reaction of small breakages – and that rings out like my first phone. later on, my best friend leans back onto a patch of grass on a hill overlooking the city, closes her eyes, exhales deeply, feels ground against skin, and still, I don’t. instead, I look out at what’s been built below. but also further at the hills in the distance, overlapping each other, wild waves of green – And I do breathe it in. Skummeslövsstrand’s shoreline 00:00 / 02:29 At 5 / at the shores of Skummeslövsstrand / we would collect the washed-up jellyfish / and place them in piles / I don't remember / why. Generally / I think the why-nots are more important / why not build a tower of jellyfish / reaching all the way to the candy floss clouds? See / at 5 / that made perfect sense /... / I want nonsense to make sense again / pick up shiny things from the ground and keep them / draw badly with crayons / so as to grace the fridge / with this representative testament of my nonsensical existence! And then / I want to munch on snow / and feel the water melt / into me / hold your hand and not question it / ask you what your favourite colour is / and your top 5 animals / and if you remember / how quickly we could exit a building / for recess? It was a question of seconds / holding each other / so close /... / Once / we went there in winter / holding plastic shovels close to our chests / stomping through the snow / in order to reach the shoreline / finding that oceans don't freeze the way lakes do / the waves stay warm by moving Mom says / and we run / all the way home / empty handed / convinced / the holes we dug in the snow / will still be there tomorrow /... / In Cornwall, I am told / collecting trinkets from the shore / is common practice. The belief / that whatever the sea washes up is yours / to keep / washed clean / of any claims / belonging to the sea and the shore and the clouds and you all / at /... / Once, my brother got stung by a lion's mane jellyfish / so badly / we had to scrape his entire back / with Dad's credit card. During the car ride / home / Dad explained why / that works / and his words made sense /... / We had asked the sea to play / with us / and it had said no / there is nothing left / to collect. Don’t ask me / again . Publishing credits The cows on the ice: Dust Poetry Magazine (Issue 10) Wind-bent trees still grow: exclusive first publication by iamb Skummeslövsstrand’s shoreline: The Hyacinth Review (December 11th 2023)

Hear poet Mari Ellis Dunning read poems for wave 1 of literary poetry journal iamb. Mari Ellis Dunning wave 1 winter 2020 back next the poet Mari Ellis Dunning is an award-winning poet living and writing on the coast of West Wales. Mari’s debut poetry collection, Salacia , was published by Parthian Books in 2018, and was shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year award in 2019. Mari is a Hay Festival Writer at Work and PhD candidate at Aberystwyth University, where she's studying the relationship between witch-hunts and reproduction/fertility. Her work has featured on The Crunch Poetry Podcast and the BBC. the poems Lingering for Catherine 00:00 / 00:57 I couldn’t stand the cedarwood stench that grew in your absence, so I migrated to the smaller back bedroom. Each night, I hear your shallow breath seeping through the thin wall, picture you, one leg cocked, reaching for me through darkness. I found your keyring under the sofa, gathering dust, forgotten, and on it – that photo of us, of you, a bearded stranger, and me, girlish and unsure, cloaked in a vintage dress awaiting assurance of my beauty. With oversized marigolds and an old tea towel, I bleached your skin cells from the skirting, swabbed your residue from the foundations. You clung like smoke to the wallpaper. The Bees Part i. The Queen 00:00 / 00:46 When I couldn’t recover the self that flaked like dust from paper-thin wings, my children turned against me, they pummelled my body like ash, suffocated by song. Face first, my daughter waxed from her peanut-hollow cell, crawling through its open hinges, a ghost, a crook, I saw her coming, that tiresome usurper; the virgin Queen, swift as an intruder at my mantel, honey-sweet and baby-eyed, her allure so strong, they let me wilt, let me starve – matricide on the edge of a comb. relapse 00:00 / 00:55 i wake to your emaciated form, your smile smug and self-sure even as you pale and weep, your serpent’s hair maps the pillow, body quivering, rocked by sticky tentacles. i could have sworn i’d shaken you off years before, dislodged you with a hard gulp and a strapped wrist, nevertheless – here you are again, the same dead form, the same shirking shoulders, damp with river-water, lemur eyed, splintering bone, your features a mirror of mine even as your ragged breath sucks air into rotting lungs. You roll smoke around your tongue, lean back – the mattress hollows for you, an old lover welcomes you home. Publishing credits All poems: Salacia (Parthian Books) – winner of the Terry Hetherington Young Writers’ Award, and shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2019

Hear poet Harula Ladd read poems for wave 7 of literary poetry journal iamb. Harula Ladd wave 7 autumn 2021 back next the poet Poet, performer and facilitator Harula Ladd is based in the South West and is the current Exeter Slam Champion. She's also the founder of the Postal Poetry Library , and loves writing on-the-spot poems for the public. Fascinated by the power of the imagination, Harula is passionate about the way creativity connects us. She gathers ideas for her writing while out walking. the poems Skin 00:00 / 01:40 is hard to put back on at a moment’s notice, when someone knocks on your door to offer a piece of their mother’s Christmas cake. You wipe wetness from your cheeks, demand your skin quickly swallow you in again and keep the hand where the skin is cracked behind your back. Reach out with the other to receive perfect Christmas cake, complete with miniature marzipan holly. You make eye contact with this new mother, pushed to the edge of her own skin until she’s shining. She’s beautiful. *** The skin you live in is tight, thin, bulging with broken that just wants to breathe. At night you pin your skin to the edges of your room, to the curtains, hook it over the door handle, trap a corner under the weight of a table leg so at least you can be free while you sleep. When you wake, skin won’t shrink to fit. You wonder if you should give up your free feeling dreams where skin is so big you can swim in it, inside it, exploring it from underneath like swimming underwater looking up at the surface not wanting to break it yet. It’s quiet and fascinating down here. People can’t knock on the surface of the sea. They’d have to wade in and get wet to reach you, so swim swim swim The girl who brought the world home 00:00 / 01:38 She brought the world home like an injured bird found by the road, shrunk to one metre across to hang safely from her ceiling like a breathing glitter ball behind closed curtains. She lay on the field of her carpet to watch the living world above twirl cobwebs in miniaturised hurricanes. That first night, she couldn’t sleep. Got up to warm some milk and heard the oceans burst. 'What’s wrong?' she asked. The world replied, 'To shrink is no protection. I cannot give life like this. 'You deny my power, hanging me here behind closed curtains. I need to be!' 'But I only … ' 'You don’t even know you haven’t met freedom yet.' Forests inhaled. Exhaled. 'To live is to be willing to die. 'Look. You are taller than me now. Is that what you wanted? To make me small and you big? 'In order to control something beyond your understanding you have to shrink it for it to make sense. 'For it to be safe. You shrink what is vast only to grow more of what has no importance.' What’s inside 00:00 / 01:15 I roll myself out flat, squeeze all you don’t need to know from me and fold over seven times, until I’m the size of an envelope. I slide in to send myself to you. Once sealed it’s too late to take back bits added to me since we last met. It’s fine. I can deny them or cross them out before you open me. At the weigh in the lady working the Post Office counter raises an eyebrow. 'May I ask what’s inside?' 'Skin. No guts.' I ask for second class. Gives me more time. I land on your doormat stiff and sore. You soak me in a bath like those teas that bloom in a mug, and the little I’d been prepared to say dissolves, and goes the way of the bathwater. Once dry, I dress, all fresh and empty. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Maria Taylor read poems for wave 3 of literary poetry journal iamb. Maria Taylor wave 3 summer 2020 back next the poet Maria Taylor is a British Cypriot poet. Her debut collection, Melanchrini , was shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. More recently, she published her pamphlet Instructions for Making Me with HappenStance. Maria's writing has featured in a range of magazines, and she's Reviews Editor for Under the Radar. Her new collection, Dressing for the Afterlife , is due out from Nine Arches Press in September 2020. the poems What It Was Like 00:00 / 01:03 When the stranger’s baby cries, my body remembers the shrill, tuneless song of need. It remembers endless nights of cat and dog rain. It remembers our road falling asleep, as we forgot to remember us. That summer, clothes stopped remembering to fit. We’d look through thin curtains and remember the sun, mimicked by sodium light. I remember the feel of warm, sleep-suited limbs, still breathe in their powdery smell. The stranger I used to be lives in the present tense now. The baby fidgets on her chest like a rabbit. Then he’s calm. His blue eyes gnaw on me for a moment till his head’s at rest, the frail, dreaming head of infancy that only knows a need for love and milk, that won’t remember any of this. Ghosting 00:00 / 00:46 Think of Will, the ghost of Covent Garden, the murdered thesp who’s walking alongside you down and down a staircase that never ends. Dapper gent. Eventually you’ll see daylight. The actor won’t. Spare a thought for the ghosts we pass at stations: their secret meetings, flings, kisses. People vanish into thin air every single day, even ghosts fade in time. Where do they go all those see-through Elizabethans, Plantagenet kings in car parks, crying boys reaching out for our faces, those we can’t see, can’t feel. You’re no different. Look, here’s your own reflection. Woman Running Alone 00:00 / 01:05 A woman who follows her own trail and pounds pavements of unending cities, past statues of forgotten men, fountains, sticky sunshine pouring over tower blocks, past gentrified basement windows where wives hear the washing-up howl between their hands, past suits on phones and panda-eyed women in doorways with faces that say I know, I know – tell me about it; these streets where open hands beg for more than is ever offered, where someone’s kid is a sleeping bag, where the wolf-whistle becomes the wolf and love’s worn like musk aftershave, where she forgets who she is: Ms. Keep On, Ms. Never-going-home, neither running away nor running toward anyone, wind-sifted, letting the weather sing through her, she who is different to her brothers. The rhythm fills her with flight – and her wings, what wings she has – Publishing credits What It Was like: The North Ghosting: Atrium (March 12th 2019) Woman Running Alone: The Result is What You See Today: Poems About Running (Smith/Doorstop)

Hear poet Róisín Ní Neachtain read poems for wave 6 of literary poetry journal iamb. Róisín Ní Neachtain wave 6 summer 2021 back next the poet Róisín Ní Neachtain is an autistic Irish-Scottish poet and artist now based in County Kildare, Ireland. Though mainly self-taught, she was briefly educated at NCAD and Trinity College Dublin, before studying for two years under Irish artist Gill Berry. Róisín is creator and editor of online literary and art journal Crow of Minerva , and has had her poetry featured in a number of digital publications. She's currently at work on her first collection. the poems Memory 00:00 / 01:12 I held my dreams in my palms Though they were bleeding A soft tremor against my skin Some were shallow Some like a cave Some pricked my conscience Their threads tethered to my flesh And I chewed their weights to set them free My teeth wore down I fell in a haze through our memories When a hollow sound echoed in my mouth And fell past my lips You bit my tongue and hummed The ebb of nameless laughter A cadence of sorrows Spinning a steep melody Now I am unfearful of pain A slow praise of closeness Breathing blue In midnight songs Tightening my pulse Fingers twisting in a frenzied dance To unworded lyrics My last need stilled Remembering Without Believing 00:00 / 01:21 Remembering without believing The stars appeasing Against their obsidian abyss Heat and light unseamed from dust Remembering without believing Questions pressed in psychosis And promises which feel no shame Illegible hypergraphic promises Of love and empty rooms and symbiotic existence And undivided sounds and realities And reproached pain and laughter And dissonant dreams Which lead to my repossession A petty heresy of Silence Look at this earth embedded beneath our nails Our language measured by prayers And lumen a measure of their glare Look at this skin scored by hate Their unfamiliar eye Rooted in fear All truths unchanged in time The Edge of Reason 00:00 / 01:22 A room Like a trite cage Between these four walls Where prodigal sons and daughters return And are rejoiced and bound once more A spiel read like a dead poet A bastard pain The object of such a conclusion Perhaps an accidental gale? Swept and tendering our bones Archaic songs of sorrow That lull us in their readiness Black on white Black on black White on white Letters made barely visible And nonsensical A few steps closer to the edge of reason A past and future arrested in a photograph What will happen if we awake again To see these passings going beyond that edge? To the beginnings of someplace? Someplace more of a sedentary mind A hollowed space in each Man’s chest Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Carrie Etter read poems for wave 3 of literary poetry journal iamb. Carrie Etter wave 3 summer 2020 back next the poet Carrie Etter is an American poet resident in England since 2001, and Reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. She has published four collections – most recently, The Weather in Normal – and numerous chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, The Guardian, The Iowa Review, The New Republic, The New Statesman, Poetry Review and The Times Literary Supplement, as well as in anthologies such as The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem and Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK . Carrie also publishes short fiction, essays and reviews. the poems A Birthmother’s Catechism 00:00 / 00:56 How did you let him go? With black ink and legalese How did you let him go? It’d be another year before I could vote How did you let him go? With altruism, tears, and self-loathing How did you let him go? A nurse brought pills for drying up breast milk How did you let him go? Who hangs a birdhouse from a sapling? Eldest 00:00 / 01:28 Lean forward in shadow. The room is corridor opening into square, passage and purpose. On the distant bed, a spill of mottled flesh, the white cotton gown fallen to little use. You gape in the doorway. His body is positioned away, toward the window. You stare until he calls, calls you into mutual shame. Now you must gentle. The mind, relieved, packs away its unfinished question. The bowl of green gelatin has no scent. You hold it to your nose as he draws the cloth up with a tug, his grasp like a bird’s. No, not shame. Not now. Though he doesn’t know it, he will be glad when you sit down at last. This is your father. The room is white and inescapable. Paternal 00:00 / 02:24 A parent a plinth. The first week he regarded hospital as hotel. So the variables include the kind of stone, its consistency, the velocity of prevailing winds. What’s purer than an infidel’s prayer? How strangely, in the second week, the swollen limbs stiffened. And the effects of climate change: milder winters, more precipitation, two, three heat waves each summer. All American, non-Jewish whites are Christian by default. Incredulous, I realise his bicycle may rust and walk it to the shed. Such an ordinary act of reverence. The pulmonologist, the neurologist, the family physician. A bed is a bed is the smallest of bedsores. Blood doesn’t come into it. Ritual, of course, is another matter. A Midwestern town of that size exhibits limited types of architecture. I’ve yet to mention the distance. Come now, to the pivot, the abscess, another end of innocence. In every shop, the woman at the till sings, 'Merry Christmas,' a red turtleneck under her green jumper. I thought jumper rather than sweater, a basic equation of space and time. Midnight shuffles the cards. Translated thus, the matter became surgical, a place on the spine. Each night the bicycle breaks out to complete its usual course. A loyalty of ritual or habit. 'ICU' means I see you connected to life by wire and tube. A geologist can explain the complexities of erosion. The third week comes with liner notes already becoming apocryphal. Look at this old map, where my fingers once stretched across the sea. Publishing credits A Birthmother’s Catechism: Imagined Sons (Seren) Eldest: The Weather in Normal (Seren / Station Hill) Paternal: Divining for Starters (Shearsman)

Hear poet James Giddings read poems for wave 9 of literary poetry journal iamb. James Giddings wave 9 spring 2022 back next the poet Born in Johannesburg and now living in Sheffield in the north of England, James Giddings is the author of Everything is Scripted , published in 2016 by Templar Poetry. the poems Look inside 00:00 / 01:00 At the base of the back of my neck is the button you press to get a look inside. One firm push with your thumb and FWIP! my head pops back like the top of a kettle and a noise strikes the same tone as a microwave casserole when it’s cooked, a mushroom cloud of steam ballooning from the neck hole of my thin cigarette body. Once you’ve released all that hot air, take a peek, you’ll see there’s not much there: no gold elements, no dial tone of great intellect, just a feeling, as if staring down a deep ravine. There seems as if there’s no end to it, until you throw something down and a sound calls back from the bottom. There are versions of us in alternate universes 00:00 / 01:37 One where we’re partners on a buddy cop show who stand back-to-back with our guns raised as our theme tune swells to a crescendo and the screen detonates, our names exploding out of picture. Another where we bloom on trees like bright fruit and our lives are spent waiting for the great fall. Then there’s the one where I am your father and you are my son, and you are crying because you’re hungry and I am crying because I can’t get the car seat to bloody fit, but we stop, for a few seconds, each of us near silent when we catch the eyes of the other. One where we are giant glass shards reflecting. Another where we are bank robbers, our ears pressed against a safe door like expectant fathers listening for a heartbeat. Another where we wait in a long line for the entrance to Hell and both complain about how long it’s taking. And even though I know there are worse universes than ours, I can’t shake the one in which each night you tell me all the unextraordinary words you know like spam , hardcopy and telemarketer, then right before you leave, say a couple of extraordinary ones, which are only so because of how rarely I’ve heard you utter them in this world. No requests 00:00 / 01:55 I’m working on my vanishing act, an homage to my father. To learn more I attend a show where the magician starts by sawing a ladle in half. To further subvert the genre he pulls a hat out of a rabbit, places the rabbit on his head like a toupee and shaves it into oblivion with a set of clippers, leaving the cue ball of his bald head shining. Do the one where the father disappears and you bring him back on stage! I heckle, but he doesn’t do requests. Next he does a card trick entirely with birthday cards, which, in a feat of anti-gravity, levitates the heart in my chest. With love , one reads, then his signature, a single kiss. Impressed, I shout, do the one where you bring back the father! But he still doesn’t do requests. Next he stretches a ten pence piece leaving the Queen’s face visibly frustrated. Then he solves a Rubik’s cube by throwing it behind his back; it is so convincing and easy, I hope a policeman might hand him a murder case. I rise from my seat, plead, please do the one where you bring back the father! He gestures off-stage theatrically, magics up security and I’m escorted out through a plain grey door. No traps. No secret panels. I never got to see the big finish, whether he did the trick, but I waited anyway, checking every face that left the auditorium, hopeful he had pulled it off. Publishing credits Look Inside: exclusive first publication by iamb There Are versions of Us in Alternate Universes: Poetry Wales (Vol. 56, No. 2) No Requests: Poetry London (Issue 97)

Hear poet Ruth Taaffe read poems for wave 10 of literary poetry journal iamb. Ruth Taaffe wave 10 summer 2022 back next the poet Hailing from Manchester and having lived variously in Sheffield, Thailand, Australia and Singapore, Ruth Taaffe is now settled in the south of England. She writes about her experiences of living overseas, the idea of home, and how the natural environment finds its way into our identity. Ruth has taught English internationally for more than 20 years, and has a Masters degree in Creative Writing from Lancaster University. Her poems have appeared in such literary journals as The Poetry Village , Acumen and One Hand Clapping , and her debut collection is Unearthed . the poems Driving Over the Snake Pass Under a Shed with a Goldfish on my Lap 00:00 / 01:04 These were the final items to repatriate taken over the hills to my first home – the cats had gone ahead two weeks before. Young enough to still depend on parents, we knew the baggage that we did not take could be left at their door and kept for us. Tied to the roof rack like a tortoise shell, the shed, unconstructed, was just boards of wood. I peered skyward as you drove, for any shift in light foreshadowing some avalanche of splinters. We kept the radio off, tuned in to creaking and the steady slosh of fish water that I was powerless to stop. We had no idea how our life would be rebuilt a thousand miles away, or why fish, when moved into some larger water, grow. Acrobat 00:00 / 01:23 He toes the wire which sways like a hammock, outstretches his knotted arms of rope. Ears ringed gold as a sailor of air. His back and chest inked by compass, star. Fixing his eye low on the horizon where he’ll land in time with our ovation, he climbs the unicycle, inches backwards, slowly unwalking the plank. We buoy him up with our applause, become his crew, his wave and tide, life vest of his triumph. And he ours. Four clubs fly like seagulls mobbing a fish, or words trying to land on a line. Each catch sharpens our awe. Then, he’s passed a fifth on fire! We stow the clapping, trade in calm. For this moment we anchor him with our belief, as the solo drumbeats start. He catches in time, leaps to land, and signs a charter of hope on our hearts. Nightjar 00:00 / 00:58 Squat like a knot of dark upon dark at the edge of dusk. Folded blades of downed chopper, landed mound of bark and leaves. Your snake eye opens up like a moon glassing the night. Bug-eater lacking fangs to pierce the nocturne skin, only your baleen beak sifting plankton from the sky, flat as an unsent valentine. You shoot soft tuts of fireworks cluck up Morse code. Heart monitor for the forest, it was told that you stole milk from goats, but you preserve such sweetness, Chupacabra. Open wide, let the world pour its song back into your throat. Publishing credits Driving Over the Snake Pass Under a Shed with a Goldfish on my Lap: 192 Magazine Acrobat: exclusive first publication by iamb Nightjar: Finished Creatures (The Poetry Village)