Hear poet Isra Hassan read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Isra Hassan back next the poet Holly Peters is a Creative Writing PhD student at the University of Plymouth. She held the position of Plymouth’s Young City Laureate from 2019-2022, and had her poem Artificial Moons featured in the Moths to a Flame: Art and Energy Collective installation at the Glasgow Botanical Gardens during COP26. You’ll typically find Holly hiding somewhere between the covers of a book, or out walking her crazy spaniels, Dotty and Booby. the poems Sigh For Hoyo 00:00 / 00:42 a river skitters in the dark wriggling like a lullaby’s shh I take the first rock; it weighs the same as the peach pit in my stomach. Clay rolls in the canyon of my palm, squishing between fingers, then shuddering back to shape. An audience of stones, I deliberate, the choice all mine. nothing falls fast in the waves, settling down for its final rest The second breathes dust, hot to touch, singed syllables filling my throat. You don’t have to ignore the craters: use your nails and crack them open. The river shapes beds from burdens: kneel down, whisper them gently. water ages slow, sighs as it swallows my offering Crumbling. I’d avoided the river for years – it no longer able to relieve me – yet I still gather the third rock that slices through the sand timer’s neck. The bank cuts into the hard white behind my shins and I cry as I litter what’s left like ashes. soft drops melt like they were never there at all Of Thee, the Solemn Fluid Sings 00:00 / 00:21 Her teeth grind in time with the knife that slathers butter over his slice of bread. His dinner steams, fragrant with turmeric and all the time she has spent stewing over it. Not that he takes any notice. Whatever plate she presents him with – matsutake mushrooms, moose cheese, wagyu beef – his mouth waters only for the ample half-wheat bread. Her arrangement of lip-pink tulips has already been extracted from the table’s heart, so his bulging loaf can fill its centre. He takes his time massaging butter into the bread’s porcelain cheek. He cups his hand, its back arching, then spoons his dinner inside, letting the slice envelope it like skin. He chews it, mouth opening wide, tongue slopping. The crumbs cascade, shredded like the last slivers of her patience. Archetype The Ingénue 00:00 / 00:23 You won’t know which part of me you hold in your hands: my lower lip, a worn-down heel or knobbly elbow – because it’ll look no different to dirt. You’ll be given a watch-sized box filled with two palmfuls of what’s left of me, and even though I’m only saying it, those flakes, like tree bark, are my heart. All the rest, enough to fill a wheelbarrow, will be mingled with the remains of others. What was once kneecaps, earlobes, eyeballs will become part of the damp woodland floor. But in that forest, it will always be a part of me you hold in your hands. It will be earth, and worm food, a home for tentative tree roots, a world unravelling in the planet of your palm. Publishing credits Sigh: The Wake (Vol. 21, Issue 3) Of Thee, the Solemn Fluid Sings / Archetype: exclusive first publication by iamb

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

Hear poet Tracey Rhys read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Tracey Rhys back next the poet With a New Writer’s bursary from Literature Wales, Tracey Rhys finished her first pamphlet, Teaching a Bird to Sing . Its theme of parenting a child with autism, told through poetry, would later feature in two touring theatre productions, and as part of an exhibition at The Senedd. Tracey’s work can be found in journals from Poetry Wales and New Welsh Review to The Lonely Crowd and Ink, Sweat & Tears , and she's no stranger to being long and shortlisted for poetry competitions – the Cinnamon Press Pamphlet Competition, Poetry Wales Pamphlet Competition and Cardiff International Poetry Competition among them. Tracey was also among the 20 winners of The Poetry Archive’s WordView Now! competition in 2020. Her first full collection, 21st-Century Bathsheba , will be published by Parthian in 2025. the poems Flood 00:00 / 02:07 Flood woke up on the wrong side of her bed, flowed over the bank with displeasure. There was power in her upsurge, the great swell of her being. Birds who waded in, the egrets and cormorants, recalled that once Flood was happy, but now was better. By better, they meant Ocean. Flood was broad and tidal estuary. She left a salty ring around their beaks and gave them shells. Flood was beautiful, they said. She should stop and feel it. But how could Flood pause when she was all reflection? Moon-driven, surging to sea. * Flood recalled her first taste of tarmac. Compared it to fennel. Preferred it to liquorice. She drawled, No need for glass when you have fibreglass. Or slate stacks, when you have those aching aluminium greys: the skeletons of automobiles. Ever since she’d drunk her first bollard, Flood had regretted concrete. The way it sunk into her pit and stayed there, trolley-bound for years. * Stories began circulating that Flood had been a stream, had thought big and got lucky. She was fast becoming folklore. It was true that she’d tried all the tricks; consuming lakes, spouting dams. I am braver than I know, Flood told the starlings. Bigger than is necessary. Beaks rippled in. The sun gave her prisms. Soon, she was run through with flowing, even as she was imbibed. I am always inside other bodies, she confided to the water rats on the underside of her skin. Interview with a Flood 00:00 / 01:41 I appreciate you must be busy … Well, I’m nothing without my fans. And your fans love you. Why, thank you. They want me to ask what your favourite colour is? My favourite colour is calcite. Pearly, like the inside of a tooth, all pulp and tusk. It reminds me of better days; snow quartz skies, rain on the way, white horses rising to pummel the hard brick houses. Where do you go on holiday? The fat berg. Everyone will be surprised by that! I think we imagined the Maldives … The fat berg is an island destination, a busman’s holiday if you like. Not everyone’s choice but I confess to enjoy oozing up through a drain grille, along waste pipes to vanity units, coating myself slick on the gunge loaded with hair in the trap. The limescale on the U-bend is a good day out. What keeps you going? It has to be the Blob Fish. Have you seen how ugly they look, dead on land? That nose! Almost human. 4,000 feet under the sea they don’t look half bad. I live by that. What are you afraid of? Jugs. What advice have you got for our youngsters, starting out? Get yourself a spot, it doesn’t have to be nice. Grow into it. To be small is no small thing. I always felt as big as I could be. As if the air was with me, walls parting at the dam. Shame 00:00 / 00:43 Though she’s old enough to have forgotten all the embarrassing beginnings, Flood lets them in at night, which is when the wind rushes at her edges and the riverbank is audible in its silver spoons. Flood remembers her great shames, burns with them. Her vast stupidities. Didn’t she once boast to the moon that she had the bigger tides? She pours herself into the earth, spreads herself thinner than vapour. Nothing will find her until morning, when the tinny glug of her belly will answer the flushing loos. Publishing credits Flood: Poetry Wales (Vol. 56, No. 3) Interview with a Flood / Shame: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Ken Cockburn read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Ken Cockburn back next the poet Poet and translator Ken Cockburn spent several years at the Scottish Poetry Library before going freelance to work in education, care and community settings – often in collaboration with visual artists. His most recent collection is Floating the Woods . Ken's also the man behind the pamphlet Edinburgh: poems and translations , which features work written for the guided walks he leads in the city’s Old Town. He also translated from the German Christine Marendon's Heroines from Abroad . the poems Hands 00:00 / 01:37 These hands have buckled belts and fastened buttons These hands have howked the tatties from the ground These hands have handled cutlery and weapons These hands have picked the apples from the bough Hands to hold a pen or blade Hands to strike and cup a match Hands to give the eyes some shade Hands to take another catch These hands have spooned out medicines and teas These hands have painted watercolour scenes These hands have tinkled old piano keys These hands have worked industrial machines Hands to turn another page Hands to hoist and set the sails Hands applaud those on the stage Hands with dirty fingernails These hands in tearooms picked up cakes and fancies These hands have sharpened pencils with a knife These hands held partners at the weekend dances These hands have mapped the progress of a life Hands to scrub and peel potatoes Hands to cup a baby’s head Hands to knit a balaclava Hands to smooth the unmade bed Hands to give a proper measure Hands to stitch the binding thread Hands up when you know the answer Hands to shush what’s best unsaid Ward 00:00 / 00:48 I keep my diaries in a large bookcase my mother told me crossly, years ago, she was now giving to my sister. Fine, fine. I left with what did belong to me, returning sooner than expected when, days before the move, my father collapsed. I went to visit him in hospital as he convalesced and took my daughter who, at eighteen months, was still innocent of past and future, caveats, grudges, grip and slow release. Let property wait. The ward dispenses all we need for now. Rodney 00:00 / 00:58 At that school at that time there was no choice: rugby. Skinny, tall and slow I was put in the second row, scrummed and pushed on cue. Asthmatic, on cold days I wheezed until my lungs gave in. I was keen. I wanted to be good enough for the first fifteen unlike Rodney, disinclined to bother. Played at full-back to avoid set pieces, on the whole, he was left untroubled. Once we were on the same team; a breakaway left only Rodney between the runner and our line. 'Tackle him!' I shouted, but he stood his ground and the ball was touched down. At that moment I could only admire his simple refusal to play the game. Publishing credits Hands: part of Lapidus Scotland's Working with ‘Hands’ and Living Voices Ward: exclusive first publication by iamb Rodney: Poetry Scotland (No. 101)

Hear poet Frances Boyle read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Frances Boyle © Curtis Perry back next the poet Frances Boyle (she/her) is a prairie-raised Canadian writer, long settled in Ottawa, Ontario, whose third collection is Openwork and Limestone . Her debut, Light-carved Passages , was republished after ten years in 2024 as a free, open-access eBook. With her poetry published everywhere from The Fiddlehead and The New Quarterly to The Ekphrastic Review and The Honest Ulsterman , Frances has received a number of prizes – among these, This Magazine ’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt, and Arc Poetry Magazine ’s Diana Brebner Prize . She was a long-time member of the editorial board of Arc Poetry Magazine , and is now on the boards of The League of Canadian Poets, and VERSe Ottawa, which runs the VERSeFest international poetry festival. the poems The Whole Tall World 00:00 / 01:07 A column of light, not steady but scintillating. I listen for its faint scratchiness, its syncopated silences, its airy breathing. Exhalation of pores, the inhalation of mountains and the sea’s unceasing bellow-lungs. Surf, like horses that rear and mane- shake, rush in, retreat. And spume a spiraling cylinder. A rising, a lifting, finest droplets hovering on the air. What tuning will bring me past static to clarity, to that thrum of silence, voices chiming, twining, a braid of sound within that space between breathing, behind the exhale, pulling the inhale into animate energy, that silent moment that might be death but for the animal compulsion willing our squeezebox lungs to echo ocean, and breathe. Water and Stone ‘When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert ... Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless Earth.’ ~ Robert Macfarlane, Underlands ~ 00:00 / 01:23 Inside your house, the radiator ticks, floors shift and mutter. The skeleton of struts and beams is clad with plaster and paint. You’ve adorned the walls with more paint —on canvas, on paper. A visiting friend admires the art, the book-crammed shelves. Talk turns to what she’s read, what you haven’t. Excuses for uncracked spines. Your dog’s steps are halting now, nail- clack on hardwood more syncopated than staccato. You hear him sigh. In the driveway, a crunch as tires compress the snow. A squirrel traverses wire and bare branches. The tremble at leafless ends. You feel the slow flow of tidal rock how the current supports you, carries you. Pacific Rim Park, 1984 00:00 / 01:04 An amble of half a mile down to the beach, green on both sides as I carry my pack. I emerge to wave- rush that washes out speech, and set borrowed tent on the sand near sea-wrack. I came on my own to wrench from the mire of my shame over deeds which should have stayed hidden. The campers next site watch me struggle with fire. That woman craves quiet they shush their children. I beachcomb for hours, sand under my feet. Pared down to sorrow, guilt grows slowly leaner. My feeble campfire still gives me some heat while grit, whipped by wind, works to scour me cleaner. Lone nights under canvas deliver release; slow rot, woody moss-scent their own kind of peace. Publishing credits The Whole Tall World: Prairie Fire (Vol. 41, No. 4) Water and Stone: Rust & Moth (Autumn 2022) Pacific Rim Park, 1984: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Mary Mulholland read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Mary Mulholland © Xavier Bonfire 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)

Hear poet Elizabeth M Castillo read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Elizabeth M Castillo back next the poet British-Mauritian poet Elizabeth M Castillo is a writer, indie press promoter, and two-time nominee for The Pushcart Prize. Her writing reflects the various countries and cultures she grew up in and with – exploring themes of race, ethnicity, woman/motherhood, language, love, loss and grief (often with a dash of magical realism). Published widely in the UK, USA, Australia, Mexico and the Middle East, Elizabeth has bilingual debut collection Cajoncito: Poems on Love, Loss, y Otras Locuras to her name. She'll add debut chapbook Not Quite an Ocean in December 2022. the poems Ghosts 00:00 / 00:45 I tell my children there are no ghosts in this house. I press a kiss into their cheeks and foreheads and leave them to the peaceable mercy of sleep. No ghosts, I say. Except the one that lives in the stain on the bathroom floor. The lady that swirls around the bottom of your mother’s teacup, in amongst the sediment. The ones you plastered into the walls. No ghosts, except the one that lies in bed between us. The one hidden beneath the flowers in the garden. The two I folded between the pages of my passport. The one that stares back at me from the bathroom mirror when I brush my teeth at night. Zot dir, or a short history of Mauritius 00:00 / 01:47 Ou koné ki zot dir? So many things mon tann zot dir they say / they say the dutchman came / he ate the dodo / curious bird / stupid bird / zot dir independence will be won by the wits of the indian / papi inn dir / nu bizin alé / nu bizin get out / zot dir Le Père de la Nation has the ear of the queen / they say / things are better in Australia / In UK / In SA they don’t say créole zot dir coloured / Mo matante inn allé last year / 65 / before the riots start / labas tou prop / she said / labas seulman ena bon dimoun / nice people / they say / zot inn met bann lekor / under the mountain / enba la ter / they say / Mauritius is still the star of the indian ocean / they say parti socialis pu sauv nu zile / zot dir / ten thousand rupees / c’est rien / they say / sorti la! / sorti la! / kifer Kaya pann res trankil ? / they say / the hungry tourist / come down / devoured our coastline / the south / the east / is all we have left / Ramgoolam / they say / has lined his own pockets / they say it once / they say / look to the horizon / thick and black / we blame Japan / zot dir / the island is retracting / inwards / they say / nu zil pé vinn bien gran / no more beaches / no fish / ban pecheur / zot disan / has pooled down by the river’s mouth / Jugnauth / zot dir / his hands live under the table / so bann kamrad / their coffers are full / faratha from six / to 25 rupees / they say / we have no language / they say if bis don’t kill you / hopital will / they say / pa kozé / stop saying all the things we saying / res trankil / dernié fwa kiken in kozé / so disan / his blood / it runs beneath the mountains / out beyond the reef / into the sea / that you left behind / The Other Woman 00:00 / 02:16 The sun has set, and at this hour, shadows hang between the daylight and the trees. There, the sudden scent of blood, scent of man , carries to me on the breeze, the wind howling through, falls silent at my feet: 'good hunting, milady,' it whispers, then retreats. There is a darkness in this forest, an end that rivals death itself, in the mist about my ankles. Even lizards know they would do well to hide inside their hovels, and underground. Dirt crunches beneath. Treacherous soil! Leaves plunge downwards, to be eaten by the earth. The naked trees testify: this forest is deadly, and will swallow you whole. I hear footsteps racing, running, in thundering lockstep. Flash of black. Flash of teeth. There are dangerous games afoot! Surely it’s time to turn back. Surely it’s time to go home. I am well beyond my borders now. She can’t catch me, she can’t catch me, here, where I lurk and linger on the periphery just out of sight, just beyond her mind’s eye. She knows I am here, her veins course with rage, and vengeance. But she does not know where. She is death. She is danger. But the line has been crossed, the threat prowls within her marked territory. She may think I have lost, but this no longer bears any resemblance to a fair fight. No, now two legs, not enough. I drop down onto four, draw strength from the thousand invisible heartbeats, the lifeblood, the microbiome of the forest floor. There is fear, and some fury, encrusted under each hungry claw. The hunt smells of my father, champion long before I had ever heard of this sport, and I wonder: would he be proud? There is sweat at my temples, and my wrists are bound to stop them from trembling. I step, crabways, low and feral, without shadow or sound. Your ears twitch and you shudder, your neck craning to see what you and I must learn the hard way: the deadliest thing in here is me. Publishing credits Ghosts / Zot dir, or a short history of Mauritius: exclusive first publication by iamb The Other Woman: Glean & Graft / Descent (Fresher Publishing) Shortlisted for the 2021 Bournemouth Writing Poetry Prize

Hear poet Kathryn Bevis read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Kathryn Bevis back next the poet Hampshire Poet 2020-21 and founder of The Writing School , Kathryn Bevis won several awards, including first prizes in poetry competitions run by Poets & Players and Against the Grain Press. Shortlisted for the Nine Arches Press Primers scheme, Kathryn was longlisted for the National Poetry Competition. Her poems appeared in print and online, and were broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Kathryn also designed and delivered ACE and county council-funded Poetry for Wellbeing projects for adults in mental health and substance misuse recovery settings, as well as in prisons. Her debut collection was The Butterfly House . the poems starlings 00:00 / 01:50 in the beginning is the skydeep and the skydeep is shapeless and hollow and blankness dwells there and the bodyus broods over the belly of the horizon clinging to skeletons of trees and we say let there be wavetrail and there is wavetrail and we divide the wavetrail from the skydeep and the outpour from the inshrink and we call the wavetrail WE ARE and we call the skydeep IT IS and we say let there be curlsmoke in the midst of the skyswim and let it divide the WE ARE from the IT IS and we fashion the curlsmoke from the skyswim and it is so and we call the curlsmoke ONE and the skyswim we call MANY and we say let the breakwave be heard among the MANY and the pebblerush also and we call the breakwave FLESH and the pebblerush we call SPIRIT and thus it is then we say let the SPIRIT be divided into the skybright we will call LIGHT and the outsnuff we will call DARKNESS and let DARKNESS bring about a great shitting upon the earth and we say let DARKNESS herald the downpull and the stenchsweet, the dirtroost and the clutchheart and so it goes glory be to the skydeep and the bodyus the curlsmoke and the skyswim glory be to the breakwave and the pebblerush the dirtroost and the outsnuff for we are the MANY we are the ONE Tidal Race For Ollie 00:00 / 01:29 This morning found you capsized and sinking in the campsite kitchen, bloodless, clammy, haunted by the world and all its doubles. They hauled you off in their blue-light bus and I rode beside, squeezed your shoulder tight, willed you back to yesterday. Drowning here, the reflected twin of everything swims in your eyes, pulls you far from reach. They wheel you out and in, from scan to scan, pump dye around your veins and brain to find the chink that let the shadows seep inside. Hours slide behind this green curtain and still you get your sums wrong, still believe in clones of fingers, faces, clocks that press at the corners of your eyes, maintaining they exist, insisting on their right to be here. Come back. We’ll grip the cliff edge while the seal’s sleek head lifts above the water’s surface, melts to gloss again. Gannets will plunge, gold-hooded, into the tidal race and splash to scoop out cloud-marked mackerel, flaring silver in the sun. Matryoshka 00:00 / 01:20 We’re all in the family way. Full of ourselves. In the pudding club, my dear. On our shelf, we gather dust like dandruff and listen to the sound of human children growing. Their girls – once born – are great squishy, smelly things that pule and puke and shit the sodding bed. Not ours. We are a nest with all our pretty chicks inside. We are the hatchling and the egg. Each of us is mother to a daughter who is pregnant with the next in line. Our bodies rhyme, like the faces of the moon. All except our smallest. We don’t talk about it but let me say it softly: she was born with no space inside. That’s right. She’s wood all the way through. It’s not that we judge her, understand, but we know (as only mothers can) she’ll never get to split herself in two, she’ll never have to bear the others as we do. Publishing credits starlings: winner of the 2019 Against the Grain Press Poem Competition / Fenland Poetry Journal (Issue 4) Tidal Race: shortlisted in the 2020 Live Canon Single Poem Competition / Live Canon Anthology 2020 (Live Canon) Matryoshka: commended in the 2021 International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine / 2021 Hippocrates Prize Anthology (Hippocrates Initiative)

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

Hear poet Sam J Grudgings read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Sam J Grudgings back next the poet Paranormal investigator and erotic Doomsday prophet Sam J Grudgings is a queer poet from Bristol whose work was shortlisted for the Outspoken Poetry Prize in 2020. His writing explores rehabilitation, addiction and loss through the lenses of body horror, the 1920s burlesque scene and the New Weird movement. Sam can typically be found yelling poems at punk shows. His debut collection is The Bible II . the poems Phatic CW: Grieving, mild body horror 00:00 / 04:15 People with tiny blown-out hearts, private jokes, dates, or other things tattooed on otherwise virgin skin. Reminders hidden under collars & other disguises. We weren’t to know. The distant roar of motorways that will never judge you for how you were when you were young. Borrowing from tomorrow to pay today the money you said you were setting aside to stop this feeling of constantly travelling unwanted in time. Not waking up till the month is done. I get it. Hold on, the pain is almost receding. Minute keeper of the meetings where nothing gets changed or accepted but for the agreement that Carol, from accounting, who is retiring this year, who is generous with her praise, never makes a fuss & will be forgotten in weeks of leaving, would really love another cat calendar. The anniversaries we neglect for our well-being. The smog of escaping. Staycations & expired memberships to the museum of left-behinds – all the artefacts of our past lives that never really worked out as we remember. It almost feels bearable. The parasitic burden of your diary eating your deposit & promising by the time the page turns on a new month you'll be out of the noose of your savings. I get it. It shouldn't have to be this way, but it is. You used to stand for something. Now you're browsing near-death experiences – saving up vacation days to really focus on your new-found passion for playing doctor the hard way – self-medication & the intricacies of your own autopsy. I think we had it pretty good, considering. Remember how you used to not mind being overlooked till everyone started to doubt your existence & now you can't convince people that you are alive. Passing familiarity with sleeplessness. Nodding acquaintance with loss. Fewer contacts in your phonebook & less inclination to trouble them. The dress shirts our families bought us at Christmases long past that we save for missed laundry days & refusing to let go of the touch of those who can't keep promises. You don't blame them. You can't. There's this aneurysm going around means they keep repeating the same skin song. This year they're gonna get it together. You haven't got it in you to argue. You have hobbies now that require the kind patience you pay off in instalments. The minutiae of catching a break, of catching up with school friends better left forgot, of fumbling the last moments of a relationship turned sour from disuse because you just have so much on right now & maybe it's better off this way. You haven't even been yourself for very long & now everything is ending anyways. The most you can do with what you were given. Decades of anchor wire blooming from your glassblower stomach trying to disprove your wounds. You let them. The specificity of activities that consume us. Regressing to childhood from having to call dentists about the cavities in your teratomas. Niche interests. Rewilding your past from the fleshy mechanics of distance. Pretending it was better or worse than it was, so you don’t flinch at finishing the bottle off after a long day. Gas station housewarming gifts & a future of debt. Misspelt well wishes on office whip-rounds. You forgo the right to being named complainant if only they'll just let you keep the sweet fucking sense of relief you deserve from switching off your brain after a decade of weeks. Favourite bookshops & the chain restaurants that inherit them. The groan of sidewalks between your jaw. A taste you have no desire to relish. Only ever making missed calls & the acrobatics of expressions we practise in the mirror to avoid moments like this & nothing much keeping on going, same as always & how are you? I saw you got married & had kids & that was what you always wanted wasn't it? & I’m sorry we didn't know each other as well as we deserved & no, I'm sorry I can't stop now, I have nowhere that I need to be but it's an appointment I cannot possibly, possibly be late for ... Zuiyo-Maru Carcass Remembering 00:00 / 01:50 CW: Grieving Two mothers let their girls play in roads. I get it. The cars are family to traffic & the edging of human sacrifice is a coping mechanism so this makes sense in a brother kind of way. Grieving is the opposite of touching & we are simple engines of brute force & moving on. Hooked on this kind of Cotard delusion where instead of being dead everyone you love is a Rube-Goldberg machine. Madame, your children are throwing roses yet yesterday they unveiled a great whale carcass colossal with pig grief. I’m not angry but I want to ask how they got it here when it was exactly what I needed. And you stormed the party as an unexpected contender at the dead-body Oscars. The red carpet loves you sticky with blood as it is. The children who studied at the church of the scientific method have asked you not abandon them in their time of need – to be a guarantor for their impartiality. I am here in theory only, drowning litre after litre of medical-grade kerosene. The thin edge of a wedge looking at the world like I know there's a crux but don't know what. Madame! These roses, do you need them returned? I need a bouquet for stopping journeys bloated with complex ecosystems as I am. Glass shard brittle worms, sleeper sharks & the empty of a life sunk. My friend was alive once, you have helped me understand how now he is not. Mothmen, Jackalopes, Rooksong, Yesterday And Other Cryptids 00:00 / 02:14 You are telling me the story of your parents forgiving you for the mistake of setting your nerve endings on fire. Removing all obscene in the telling. Tides of skin ripple your body. Sesamoid bones fall into your orbit as you weigh up this narrative. Your justifications have heavy. Your mouth is a purple bridge of history, a monument to spit off of into the river. I am weighing up my options in an escape kind of way, all I have ever been taught is narrative & not living up to the possibilities of absence demonstrated by those who disappeared from me. Both of us have a history of planting bridges in the chests of those who left us. Rewilding the bodies prone to burials, making something of our leaving. You are inheriting that which you least covet; architecture-sour mouths; promises of change & coral reefs. You are not sure if you are the ship sinking on them or if your ribcage is bleached from grounding too many sailors. You are reassuring me I am still here even after everything is gone. You are a giant sign that says TURN OFF NEXT LEFT. I dream of not leaving. I am sitting on my grandfather's lap. He has stopped playing to pull coins lost in my ear & instead finds a prophecy. I am loath to become heir to it. I never learned the rules of the game. My mouth, an argument of inherited language. You cover my body in road sign. Note that flight or freedom is a matter of perspective. Whisper to me to yield priority to oncoming gambits. My hands abandon their scaphoid & lunate, becoming shadows with purple mouths. At the river, two armies stop. They are telling the story of war. They take it in turns. They say they don't think it is a bad thing that they have to die. You go first , they say. This is half yours after all. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Ian McMillan read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Ian McMillan © Adrian Mealing back next the poet Presenter of BBC Radio 3's The Verb, compère of the annual T S Eliot Prize Readings, writer, broadcaster and recent recipient of The Freedom of Barnsley, Ian McMillan is a renowned British poet who's been everywhere and done more. He's already written a verse autobiography ( Talking Myself Home: My Life in Verses ), and now a memoir of childhood and the sea – My Sand Life, My Pebble Life . Ian’s been a castaway on Desert Island Discs , resident poet for English National Opera, and a contestant on BBC 1's Pointless Celebrities. His most recent collection is To Fold The Evening Star: New and Selected Poems . the poems Half a Minute Before the Start of the World 00:00 / 01:00 There was an idea. Well, more of the ghost Of an idea. And the idea/ghost idea was The idea of a tree. Somewhere (remember, There was no somewhere yet) The ghost of an idea of a tree waited To become an idea of a tree and then A tree. On the day before your first day At school you are full of possibilities In your little socks. Maybe you hold A crayon close to a blank sheet That almost collapses under metaphor’s Incalculable weight. It is, look, look, Half a minute before the start of the world And that (insert blankness here) of a tree Has no idea what the world has in store for it But it dreams its leaves are burning. Try Knocking on Your Own Door and Opening it 00:00 / 00:40 Your shadow Either side. Lit by possibility. This is like Walking and sitting down At the same time. This is like Being the past and the future At the same time. Knock now. Knock. Both sides of the door at once. Hearing the knock And being the one who knocks. Gaze through The letterbox At yourself, Knocking and listening. Listen. This is like Writing and reading At the same time. The Last Speaker of the Language 00:00 / 00:59 The last speaker of the language said this: ‘My words fall unnoticed; snow in a wood. No one to talk to’s like no one to kiss.’ Nobody answered. No one understood. The last speaker of the language lay down On the grass only he had the words for And felt his dry mind beginning to drown In the sound of old sounds closed like a door. The last speaker of the language looked up At what he called something I call the sun I passed him a drink. I call it a cup: His word for that thing is over and done. The untitled moon set fire to the night. When languages die, who says the last rites? Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Jan Harris read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jan Harris back next the poet Jan Harris lives in Nottinghamshire, and was awarded a place on Writing East Midlands’ mentoring scheme in 2018. Her first collection, Mute Swans on the Cam , was published in 2020. Jan has had poems in various print and online journals, including Acumen , Atrium and Poetry Wales , as well as in many poetry anthologies. In 2019, Jan scooped third place in the Wales Poetry Award. the poems Summerlands 00:00 / 00:55 Willow man farms the summerlands, tends black maul in its bed of clay. At leaf fall he harvests young stems by machine. His father’s billhook rusts away. At home his wife dusts the crib great-grandmother wove from withies, stripped white as tight sinews, proud on her hand when she twined the pliant wands to shape. Their willow lines Old Yeo’s banks where whimbrel-song springs and water voles burrow deep in osier-cradled earth. And there they sleep, close to the river’s lap and lull. The glove her mother left unfinished 00:00 / 01:04 It would mean so much to me , my friend says, if you could finish it . She hands me the needles: two neat rows of knitting in soft black yarn, a single strand of silver shimmering through. The finished one hugs her wrist, fits each finger with comfort. The pattern is fragile with age, held together with yellowed tape, adjusted many times to fit her growing hand, the workings written in pencil on the back. I follow it with care, fall into the rhythm of her mother’s making. To finish the glove takes little from the skein, enough left over for a hat and scarf to keep a daughter warm on the coldest winter day. Urban sheepdog 00:00 / 01:28 He’s your uber-cool streetwise sidekick, hyper- connected through the wavelength of his lead, but unleash him and he flows like a brook through the park, gathers you in the oxbows of his meanders. No city nine-to-five for him – he keeps a farmer’s time. Wet nose in your face at dawn and instant-coffee eyes that perk you up for work – no time to play. The sticks you throw are sheep to stalk in stealth mode, belly low to dew-damp grass, his gaze unflinching before the fetch! He’s partial to the urban life. A taste of pilau rice from late-night takeaways goes down a doggy treat. He works out weekly at the canine gym, and though he’ll sleep on a rug, he always prefers to snore amid the snowdrift of your crisp and clean Egyptian cotton sheets. But see, his muzzle’s flecked with moorland brown. He dreams, and his paws shake like a new-born lamb. Publishing credits Summerlands: Ink Sweat & Tears The glove her mother left unfinished: Acumen (Issue 101) Urban sheepdog: winner of The Writer Highway Dog Poetry Competition 2020