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Hear poet Andy Breckenridge read poems for wave 15 of literary poetry journal iamb. Andy Breckenridge wave 15 autumn 2023 back next the poet Andy Breckenridge is originally from Oban, Scotland, but now lives and works in Brighton, England, as a secondary school English teacher. He writes about self-imposed exile, place, relationships, cultural identity and memory, and his poems have been published widely in print and online journals. He's been a featured poet with Flight of the Dragonfly Spoken Word, and with the Northern Poet’s Society. His first poetry pamphlet The Liquid Air appeared in 2021, followed by an illustrated version in 2022. Andy's debut full collection, published in 2023, is titled The Fish Inside . the poems Tartanalia 00:00 / 01:55 I stand outside your window at night waiting for you to open the blinds and see my tartan face the whites of my eyes shot with blood lines – green irises popping see how the plain silver kilt pins jawbone my skin together in the wind see how symmetrical and intricately blocked I am – each sawtooth of green dovetails with dark blue in a precise matrix see how the straps and buckles fit so neatly through the slits in my waist – hold fast I was that night bus that snagged on departure from Glasgow Buchanan Street and unravelled en route to London Victoria to help you find your way back – now I frown at your lack of fealty and the accents of your kids and yours – while you sleep, I’ll slip sliver after sliver of tablet onto your tongue until your teeth pop like lightbulbs see my gridlines keep everything in check stretch to infinity like a spreadsheet weighing up the debits and credits (you are in the red) that’s me peering in right now, an arrow slit of borrowed moonlight that’s my breath – that’s me hanging lifeless in your wardrobe – following you in the car lurking on shortbread tins and tea towels as you scurry past gift shops at airports avoiding eye contact – weigh me Is my cloth too rich and heavy? Morning light slides past the blinds again and the first trains shake me out of the air. You Can Take The Boy Out Of Nature … 00:00 / 00:45 Dizzy astride the rope clump on the swing in the Hazel Woods, you pendulum above the roots exposed on the earthy floor. Cool air wrings your eyes, adrenaline runs its fingers through your gut; the branch creaks out a rhythm like rust. You are still unable to identify a hazel or the bare bushes at the head of the loch whose silver fingers tug at your jersey where ticks hitch rides on your blood. You pluck away their bodies and legs, leave the buried mouthparts to grow out or dissolve in the flesh. Photograph: Ganavan Beach In Winter 00:00 / 01:21 You both always knew exactly what to do and set about your play in earnest knowing your time there was finite. Fine sand and cold February air pinched your small fingers, as you crouched, burrowed and shaped a friable cityscape of roads, tunnels, bridges, stairs and squat buildings. You never saw the low winter sun pool shadows in every dip. Or the tyre tracks beside you twist like prehistoric spines that stretched down towards the footprints and pawprints, the hieroglyphs left by birds, the careless signatures of lugworms or the blackened lines of dry seaweed marking tide lines like shed skin. Or the snow retreating to the peaks on Mull. Later, by your feet in the back of the car there are peeled off parking permits empty hula hoop packets discarded and dated. Rain flecks the shop front windows of the real town empty and holding its breath for the season. Publishing credits Tartanalia: Flights (Flight of the Dragonfly Press) You Can Take The Boy Out Of Nature ...: exclusive first publication by iamb Photograph: Ganavan Beach In Winter: The Fish Inside (Flight of the Dragonfly Press)

Hear poet Kevin Grauke read poems for wave 20 of literary poetry journal iamb. Kevin Grauke wave 20 winter 2024 back next the poet With work in The Threepenny Review , The Southern Review , StoryQuarterly , Fiction , and Quarterly West , Kevin Grauke is the author of short story collection Shadows of Men . He's also the winner of the Steven Turner Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Kevin teaches at La Salle University, and lives in Philadelphia. His next collection, Bullies & Cowards , arrives in 2026 from Cornerstone Press. the poems The Secret of Tornadoes 00:00 / 01:07 Tornadoes, I knew at age four, were dragons spun to furious life from sickly spring skies. Watch meant be careful. Warning meant hide. Born in the Alley’s south, I learned this quick. Let’s make a fort in the tub! Mommy once shouted much too loudly, wrestling a mattress past the toilet. Houses could become like weeds pulled up and flung. Cradles landed in trees, sometimes still with babies. But then an older girl, already in school, told me the secret: Touch the sidewalk, honey. If it’s warm, one’s coming. A whisper—wisdom meant only for me. Honored, I stayed quiet. Pretending to tie a shoe I couldn’t yet knot, I pressed my palms to the sun-shot sidewalk, dirtying them in the unicorn dust of her hopscotch chalk. Frightened but grateful, I flew home fast to warn Mommy, my pink hands aflame with a May day’s false prophecy. Ant 00:00 / 01:00 I hope to capture this moment exactly, how the late afternoon sun on this sixth day of May is shining now on this journal page so perfectly, casting a shadow of my pen that looks like nothing if not a hummingbird darting its bill into and out of the flower of yet another attempt at something good. Soon, the sun’s gold will sink below the trees, but for now it holds steady, content to give me a little more time to try to capture its likeness. Onto the glare of this still empty page an ant wanders. Nothing more than a dark speck, it meanders about, a mobile period in search of a true sentence to end. I watch it move from here to there and there to there until it finally disappears over the edge, headed elsewhere, but not before leaving me a path to follow with the words of this very poem, now finished and named in its honor. First Lesson 00:00 / 02:06 Two houses down, a young man, a little girl, and a bicycle. Behind them, in the grass, training wheels tossed aside. Way down and far back, I feel both dad’s stooped patience and the mettle of his daughter’s courage. But what I feel most: the unspoken swirl of their fears—of spills and scrapes, of tears and pain. And it’s almost a more aching beauty, even as clumsy and raw as it is, than I, remembering my own once-tiny girl now grown, can bear on my own. I watch him, the father, so proud, how he claps and shouts while jogging alongside as close as he can manage without jostling an arm or handlebar. He sends out so much encouragement: Go! You’re doing it! Keep pedalling! When the inevitable comes, it’s no surprise. It is, after all, inevitable. The front wheel wobbles, turns too much to the left, to the right, to the left again. The end then happens so slowly—the flailing, the toppling, the falling over— almost if it were taking place in a series of stages (Duchamp’s bicycle descending the stairs) as she moves from upright to tilted to tilted still more to crashed to now splayed on the sidewalk like the insides of a dropped egg. Not unlike a hand-cranked siren from days even before my own, the two wheels spin two cries into the neighborhood silence: one the girl’s, one the father’s. Together, they braid a thin rope that each hopes the other will snatch to save the day’s grace. It swings between them, back and forth, then stops. Each is so certain they’ve let the other down. Except for the crickets, it’s silent now. She’ll learn, of course, and he will have taught her. Of this I’m sure. For now, though, failure. But in memory this will glow like treasure. Publishing credits The Secret of Tornadoes: The Minnesota Review (Issue 101) Ant: Alabama Literary Review (Vol. 32) First Lesson: Poet Lore (Vol. 118)

Hear poet Rennie Parker read poems for wave 4 of literary poetry journal iamb. Rennie Parker wave 4 autumn 2020 back next the poet Born in West Yorkshire, Rennie Parker now lives and works in the East Midlands. Her first collection Secret Villages was published by Flambard Press in 2001 and featured in the 2002 Forward Prizes anthology. Since then, Rennie has published two collections with Shoestring Press: Candleshoe (2014) and The Complete Electric Artisan (2017). She's also published reviews and literary history, including The Georgian Poets (Northcote House/British Council, 1999). the poems The Original Captain Boomerang’s Death-Defying Stunts 00:00 / 02:16 Ladies and gentlemen: it's not the escape which sets me free but the entire surrender. As always there is no body double and no apparatus, the lumber and chock which keep you rooted there will vanish, in a trice. Released into that forgetfulness holding my breath for another count of ten I work my strategy out. You see, in practice when engaged with any airtight fiendish device it's no different to the Nailed-In- Packing-Crate Mystery or the Upside Down Barrel Plunge. It's a hard one this time. Sir, you are amazed I should survive these incredible feats. Let me tell you it takes a special kind of person to become a genuine fake. The simple fact is I cannot be killed – the crowd believes it's impossible but I know everything is true. We are always conjuring on the edge of death, ladies and gentlemen. I have studied my subject and I know its ways. There's no exit from that sealed casket. I do not enter this compact lightly and you have every reason to be afraid, not on my account but for yourselves, for wanting to see such blood. You await the wrong turn, the failure of my dextrous digits, the mistaken breath that loses me. Perhaps it will happen tonight and you were there when the great illusionist never returned and you yourselves became history. Well, we'll see. Ladies and gentlemen, I stand before you as clean as a shelled egg. There's nothing up my sleeves. Let me show you how it's done: one two three ... dreaming about the plenitude 00:00 / 01:38 a lifetime of holidays is killing them perfect with the beautiful children, their artless arrangement: their mothers, honed down like bone flutes, that strain – or there, poised quite like rare ikebana in the classical style with five types of olives or delicate at the piano perhaps or stuffing pimientos with hand-reared lemongrass straight from a double-page spread about interiors or careless with artisan bread, the rich delivery promised: a husband ironic with stubble and rough linen cool at his infinite desk, the blond wood and the textiles. You know they're only pretending but it's so good at the grandstand window in a trendy cafe or crunching across wet pebbles as if in the moment windswept thinking of lighthouses yanking their dogs back and striding, the world mastered, a flint-stuck cottage where everything happens each startled blue summer, those indigo nightfalls of laughter-echoing parties the trug encrusted with warm earth a descending line of wellingtons in their honey-dappled hallway, matted with sea-grass and on-point architectural salvage. ‘we will all sing hallelujah in the river of time’ 00:00 / 01:57 and we race past collections of backyard hens the unadopted roads and spilled walls those awkward bridges of blue-toned brick each one with its engineer's number: and how we smack underneath them one after another as down the carriages heads are moving in rhythm and polystyrene cups jog slightly on the bolted-down granite-look tables – oh unison and perfect synchronicity I am riding with you on the train of all our hopes the passion behind your newspapers and your sweet contained heads – you do not know where this pleasure is aimed or what sent it flying, only that the calm people are waiting flipping their cards back and pages or scrolling down to the next track placing their new chestnut boots on the stained utility carpet, turning over their books like heroes safe in the knowledge that someone is waiting for them and their clean shopping bags are being touched, slid, with goods they've been looking for all year and this was their afternoon even here in the middle of November in the rain as our train jinks leftright like an animal with an itch on its shoulder as we swat into midlands cities and out the other side with loose fields running away from us, charred hedges scribbling into the distance and the pinpoint lights coming on. Publishing credits The Original Captain Boomerang’s Death-Defying Stunts: The Complete Electric Artisan (Shoestring Press) dreaming about the plenitude / ‘we will all sing hallelujah in the river of time’: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Nicholas McGaughey read poems for wave 19 of literary poetry journal iamb. Nicholas McGaughey wave 19 autumn 2024 back next the poet Nicholas McGaughey lives in Wales. He has new work in Lighthouse , Poetry Wales , And Other Poems , Bad Lilies , Stand and The London Magazine , as well as in Like Flyering for the Revolution: The VERVE Anthology of Protest Poems . the poems The Ring 00:00 / 01:14 The old ring was lost or stolen, bought on the never-never on the eve of our empty chapel. This new band has been forged out of many declarations, spilling from a box of old commitments to be smelted in a crucible of clasp and chain: one eternity, a keepsake that lost its charm and the uncoupled links of a gold wristwatch. Tokens given at font and altar, that glowed on clutched pillow and sheet, chucked or soaped-off by morticians … All the muck of life is veined there in the circle of surname and children. A century of unions, paper, silver, ruby or gold. I twist its weight from my finger, another ring is left: a transparent tattoo, which heals, then disappears too. der Stollen 00:00 / 01:02 A town has slept in a hillside for a century. Men who left their livings for the Kaiser: butchers, teachers, a clerk of works; some two and a half hundred stooped in feldgrau , where blue firs have canopied the craters and spoil that tombed them. There have been looters here bent on old coins and trench-art, on watches that looped on a week after the air expired. Deep in the dug-outs, pictures of kinder , they never saw marry, watch over tables set with benches, tin steins and chargers for a meal. A strop hangs under the mirror in the latrine, where a bone razor brush set and a nub of soap anticipate a morning. Anthem 00:00 / 01:00 They stand for Wales in wind and rain, impervious to elements that might conspire to quell them. He, strumming his lyre, she, sturdy, plaited, our Lady of Verse. In a town renowned for its bridge and song, these monuments are springtime flocked with daffodil and druid. In black bronze, they wait for The Prophesied Son, on the green acre of Ynysangharad, churned now like a battlefield, limbed with trees, where something dear was almost drowned. After the flood, a nation stirs in a park. Publishing credits The Ring: Scintilla Magazine (No. 23) der Stollen: And Other Poems (Issue One) Anthem: The London Magazine (March 1st 2023)

Hear poet Jamie Woods read poems for wave 14 of literary poetry journal iamb. Jamie Woods wave 14 summer 2023 back next the poet Jamie Woods, a writer from Swansea, has poetry in Poetry Wales , Ink Sweat & Tears , Lucent Dreaming and elsewhere. With his work centring on experiences of disabilities and cancer, Jamie has been commended in the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine 2021, and is now poet-in-residence at the charity Leukaemia Care. His debut pamphlet, Rebel Blood Cells , is available from Punk Dust Poetry . the poems The Silence of the Hospital Ward 00:00 / 01:49 Silence is elusive, is illusive. When your head is on the pillow and you think that it’s close you complacently relax and it scurries. Clocks ticking. The mundane drip of the tap, the one with handles for elbows that you’re too far away from to give a nudge off. The low-level buzz of electric light. The slow wheeze heart and lung churn of the IV pump and the siren when it’s nearly run out or you just bump the tube. Other people’s ringtones, message chimes, other people’s phone calls. Other people’s conversations. The excitement of family, the desperate anger. The admin of auxiliaries and nurses and doctors, the gossip of auxiliaries and nurses and doctors. The driving mechanics, the alarms, the beeps; blood pressure, oxygen count, your still-beating heart. Painkillers wearing off. The screams fly as wraiths through walls and curtains biting and snatching away dying hope. At night, at day – no time here, just numbers – the ward whispers sting with invasiveness, the rumbles of breathlessness and nasal congestion, the snores, the moans, hurt like needles. The shock, the pain, the begging. The trundle of the drug trolley, and the screams at night, my God, the screams at night terrify, terrorise. Clarion calls for carrion attacks. Not me, not this time. Clocks ticking. Headphones on, I sleep with the spoken word, smooth voices, TED talks and shipping forecasts, waking throughout, until Thought for the Day: unrested, unblessed, undead. Johnson’s Baby Shampoo 00:00 / 00:46 I get flashbacks now months later when I step out of the shower and bury my face in the towel I’m back in the showers at Singleton the water blasting furiously, too hot, with a precious locked door refuge from the dormitories let myself go, unheard, unashamed, the raging water and baby shampoo blanch away the fatigue from my dying broken skin cry into the towel until I’m ready to go back to a freshly made bed hospital corners, military precision, fake smiles distracting from coal-blackened eyes and I know I’m not there anymore, but it’s scalded into my brain and I can’t find the right type of soap I need to wash it all away. Wolf Alice & Camper Van Beethoven Live at the Adam Smith Institute 00:00 / 01:08 Had a dream last night and everyone was coughing In therapy today she forgets why we’re here Tell me about a recent social situation that made you anxious? I’ve not been in a social situation for the last two years Everybody’s going out for lunch these days So jealous of your new-found laissez-faire I buy tickets for a concert that I’m aching for But in my scared heart, I know I won’t go. Resell them at face value in a free-market economy The Adam Smith Institute must think that I’m ill. DOORS AT SEVEN. MASKS OPTIONAL. ADMISSION RIGHTS RESERVED. OVER 18s, WITH WORKING IMMUNE SYSTEMS ONLY. Last night there were two hundred people in the room. Walls sweat-shimmered, shoulders condensed, screaming tears, You’re a Germ , kinetic hormones released. Words now airborne, choruses viral. I stay at home in my germ-free convalescence Playing scratched old records for the left-behind. Publishing credits The Silence of the Hospital Ward / Johnson’s Baby Shampoo: Rebel Blood Cells (Punk Dust Poetry) Wolf Alice & Camper Van Beethoven Live at the Adam Smith Institute: Poetry Wales (Vol. 58, Issue 1)

Hear poet Pam Thompson read poems for wave 20 of literary poetry journal iamb. Pam Thompson wave 20 winter 2024 back next the poet A Hawthornden Fellow in 2019, Pam Thompson is a writer, educator and reviewer. She's been widely published in magazines including Atrium , Butcher’s Dog , Finished Creatures , The Alchemy Spoon , The High Window , Ink, Sweat & Tears , The North , The Rialto , Magma and Mslexia . Pam is the author of three poetry pamphlets – Spin , Parting the Ghosts of Salt and Show Date and Time – as well as full collections The Japan Quiz and Strange Fashion . Her fourth pamphlet, Sub/urban Legends , won the Paper Swans Press Poetry Pamphlet Prize in 2023. the poems Shoes for Departure After Marina Abramović 00:00 / 01:21 You are about to set off on your journey. What will you need? Map and compass? Or if you’re at sea – telescope, sextant – to track angles between you and the stars. Tonight Polaris is brighter. You are no stranger to True North. No one is awake to wave you off. Suitable clothing is taken for granted – the hood of your parka, fur-lined, detachable or your blue raincoat, as light as the song of itself, is groundsheet and sail, folds into the size of your hand, the hand which feels under the bed for the shoes for departure, hands which find shoes of pale carved amethyst. Putting them on is like stepping inside the Earth, and as you do, the room, your city, the galaxies, spin away and you are the fixed point, each foot, re-making gravity, hardly moving at all, travelling far away. Reading my mother’s diaries 00:00 / 00:59 admiring again her sloping handwriting. I have been trying to fill in the gaps in my memory. No that’s a lie. I have been trying to bring her back, to unspool her words and sentences until they loop themselves into her own true form. Mum, where have you been? All evening I've watched for the blur of your shape in the stained-glass panel of our front door. I have been a watcher at the gate. What kind of mother would stay out for so long, stay out this late? I have been reading my mother backwards, standing on the slope of my own life, looking down to that squiggly, tangled path. She is so far ahead, the sun’s bright, I’m shielding my eyes. In Whitby 00:00 / 00:53 on a January morning my heart climbs the 199 steps turns, takes a breath, and for seconds is terraces, the swelling North Sea, Inside St. Mary’s Church, my heart reads a notice, Do not ask the staff where the grave of Dracula is because there isn’t one and my heart smiles, moving very slowly between pews looking for, but not finding, a carved effigy of itself. Instead, is an offering and a candle that stays lit even in the day’s sudden gusts which blow inside and outside my heart in the abbey where it settles at last, in front of a statue of St Hild. Publishing credits Shoes for Departure: The High Window (Autumn 2023) Reading my mother's diaries: Sub/Urban Legends (Paper Swans Press) / winner in the Paper Swans Pamphlet Prize 2023 In Whitby: Mary Evans Picture Library

Hear poet Catherine Graham read poems for wave 9 of literary poetry journal iamb. Catherine Graham wave 9 spring 2022 back next the poet Catherine Graham’s most recent book, Æther: An Out-of-Body Lyric , was a finalist for the Toronto Book Award; while her sixth collection of poems The Celery Forest was named a CBC Best Book of the Year – as well as being a finalist for the Fred Cogswell Award. A previous winner of the Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Poetry NOW , Catherine leads its monthly Book Club, and teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto. Her second novel, The Most Cunning Heart, is due out in spring 2022. the poems Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We’re Dead 00:00 / 02:55 The moon arcs—in and out, playing form. Stars wrap our fate while intruder dreams signal: come back. They hold our stability with quickened steps. Stand where grass weaves basket strands, make the centre heave, the pinched earth speak, before thoughts erase and we have no names. Fixed on the busy you miss the owl-winter, the who-cold crizzling lake. Raindrops inside snowdrops. When our shoes sprout hello-flowers, cold lips pucker, speak— What to do but follow this thread? Wind circular words to chain our necks. A necklace without clasps means another light’s not listening. To think story is to construct from that other realm where jade water cools fire’s friction. Pockets where pleasure finds memory. Take this nosegay, touch intuition, before we float off the page. Now go past sentence. Air-sheets shatter—absorbed by grasses and creatures scurrying there. Viral green points down, we watch the swarm. Swan’s neck quickens to question—her wings, snow-blinding flaps. Nest birds have it—twiggy cup to sink into after cracking. The rub that brought forth twine and twig weaves the cradle. Head naked like a freshly hatched bird, moist with dew from the wormfield. What moves in tawny spurts, jolts. Silence rearranges. It does not mend. Seed. But know bloom. Unravelling defies gravity. False to think otherwise. Fools. We have a future to hatch. When roots shoot out— the sun-calling art of escape: leaf, sepal, petal—the sun plays hide-and-seek. Silence is a kind of flight. Scratch light to a rain-flecked level. Twitch strategic to inhabit submission. Repetition renews. Upland by the railroad tracks—eggs disguised as stones. Slip past daylight to a time held by skein of old stars— past evening, past waiting— Enough! Never enough, until pulled to flight or sleep. And a dog bounds helplessly wet for a tossed stick he cannot find. MRI 00:00 / 01:04 No metal implants or fragments. A long, fibrous stalk. You signed consent, removed jewellery. Face down through the doughnut hole. Tapering into leaves. Contrast material running through your veins. Magnets. Pinnate to bipinnate with rhombic leaflets. Still – lie still. You’ve been given earphones, a padded table. Seeds are broad ovoids. Cushioned openings for breasts to hang. Grown in an open garden. Thumping. Clicking. Knocks and taps. The celery’s a cleansing tonic. Whirs with car-accident screeches – a father’s skull, mother’s mouth. Wide range of cultivars. The technician stands in a nearby room. Inside, a seed; inside, a small fruit. Sleep Patterns for Seamus Heaney 00:00 / 00:33 We hold sleep patterns for him. Clip flowers from seeds; mist hours from worries into a line’s heartbeat. Tears are rinsers, not energy takers. Never waterfalls. We don’t envy his gift, we coax something out— Take me, for instance, my dead mother’s voice— You’re a game changer, a post-autumn woman. Publishing credits Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We're Dead: Finalist for the Montreal International Poetry Prize MRI: The Celery Forest (Wolsak & Wynn / Buckrider Books) Sleep Patterns for Seamus Heaney: The Belfield Literary Review

Hear poet Hannah Linden read poems for wave 14 of literary poetry journal iamb. Hannah Linden wave 14 summer 2023 back next the poet Hailing from a northern working-class background but living now in ramshackle social housing in Devon, Hannah Linden has had her poetry published in Acumen , Lighthouse , Magma , New Welsh Review , Tears in the Fence , Under the Radar and elsewhere. She won the Cafe Writers Poetry Competition in 2021, and was highly commended in the Wales Poetry Award 2021. Hannah's debut pamphlet is The Beautiful Open Sky , and she's currently working towards her first full poetry collection. the poems What the Wind Said 00:00 / 01:48 There’s no doubt I was already buried. I was prone and silent so it’s no surprise people talked about me in the third person. I was the family problem—the musty smell from a corner, the already gone but lingering. I did everything underground. Even my thinking was hidden from me. Up would come an idea— a fruit that was perhaps poisonous. I didn’t know how to trust anything. I felt the rooms of me become caves half full of water, somewhere, somewhere. My body was a disconnect. I was blind and deaf. Threads of me stretched thin, deep below the family carpet. I wanted to be gone, threw spores to the wind— tiny pieces of conversation seeking release, some lichen-yearn escape from a spent flower burst. There was no romance in it, no fairytale quest. I was turning myself into nothing, drifting on thin air. I don’t know who whispered onto a breeze the direction to a crack in the pavement. It was a small thing, small kindness, like I was alive—like I should be alive. The Fight 00:00 / 01:33 She said HE had packed my things, boxes stacked under the stairs, ready for the off. I tasted nothing of the reconciliation supper, the too- light chatter of my brothers, my sister's over-long hug as we whispered goodbye. But I felt Mum's silence in the car, the negative pull until I was a black hole sucking everything into my void, except her. She sat on the edge of Nan's spare bed. You will never come home again. I am a half-circle. I am an apple falling from the tree. When she left, I slit open the boxes to search for my overall: my dead dad's shirt, the hold of his undying smell. My step-father had thrown away this rag of him—the remnant Dad gave me for when there’s dirty work to do. How he'd kept me clean. I roll up my sleeves, remember bare arms, tattoos he'd regretted— it's my skin being bloodied now. Light 00:00 / 01:35 When I first climbed out it was simply the absence of him. Then the absence of pain in the shoulders that I hadn’t known was connected to him, like shadows are. Then a ladder started to form, simple steps like noticing I enjoyed the sound of a ticking clock. Or being able to turn over in bed, turn on a lamp to read, or open the curtains to the moon. Ladders of light are not a form of magic. Sometimes they are silence in a room that is not always aware of the sounds in another. I wasn’t used to climbing, the muscles in my legs weary from lack of use. Resting on a ladder of light takes practice. I made some of the rungs into ledges. Rested with my children. Sometimes it’s best not to look back or try to calculate how far there is left to climb. In the hollows at the back of the rock face, pressed hard into the surface, the imprint of women’s fingers, more felt than visible, waiting to be found. Publishing credits What the Wind Said / Light: exclusive first publication by iamb The Fight: The Beautiful Open Sky (V. Press) Author photo: © Jeanette Mullins

Hear poet Jill Abram read poems for wave 5 of literary poetry journal iamb. Jill Abram wave 5 spring 2021 back next the poet Director of Malika's Poetry Kitchen, a collective encouraging craft, community and development, Jill Abram grew up in Manchester, travelled the world and now lives in Brixton. She's performed her poems everywhere from London to the Ledbury Poetry Festival, as well as in Paris, the USA and online. Jill's poetry has appeared in The Rialto , Magma , Finished Creatures , Ink Sweat &Tears , And Other Poems and Harana . When not writing poetry, Jill produces and presents a variety of events, including the Stablemates series of poetry and conversation. the poems Stepping Out 00:00 / 01:01 His tight hold and strong lead send the calendar backwards. I shed half my lifetime, my weight as we quick quick slow across the grass. This stranger saw my winces at every kick of the drum, tish of the hi-hat, chose to rescue me for a foxtrot around the garden. Evening sun stretches shadows – our heads bob among apple trees. I move at his command – can hear the melody playing in his head. We flow over the lawn: chasse, turn, promenade. A burst of laughter could be at our expense. His step never falters, he does not loosen his grip. Dive 00:00 / 01:38 Tanks checked, mask on, I topple in backwards, descend. I approach your feet, count ten little toes, as there should be. I want to check fingers too but only have enough air for one full scan. They’ll have to wait until I’m halfway. Your legs are plump, a dimple on each side of chubby knees, as yet no sign of patella bones. There are folds at the top of each thigh to be checked carefully at every nappy change. And now I can see you are a boy. You should be my boy. A fat little belly, umbilicus trailing, wafting in the swell. Two functionless nipples but you’d look wrong without them. Now I can fin along an arm from your shoulder to the relief of thumb, four fingers, and across to the same on the other side. I swim away to see your whole face then back for the detail; teeny round chin, lips surprisingly full and a perfect bow. The cliché button nose, your eyelids fringed by blond lashes, closed. I want to see the colour of your eyes, for you to see me. Marriage Vow 00:00 / 01:11 Mum says Dad was brought as a date for her sister by his friend who said, This is my friend Leo. Mum says Dad would have asked out whoever answered the phone, but he only rang at dinnertime when she was nearest. Mum says Dad took her to dinner and concerts, If I wanted to have fun, I’d go out with one of the others. Mum says Dad said, I’d like to marry you, but I only earn £4 a week. Mum says Dad went away, so when he came back she said, I suppose we’d better get married. Other people said she could give up work once she was a wife, but Dad said, Not bloody likely! After more than fifty years and two more generations, Dad says, Turn the radiator up, I can’t hear a word! Dad says, Have I had my dinner? when he’s just had his lunch. Mum says We’ve had the better, now’s the worse. Publishing credits Stepping Out: exclusive first publication by iamb Dive: The Fenland Reed Marriage Vow: Cake Magazine Author photo: © Naomi Woddis

Hear poet John McCullough read poems for wave 1 of literary poetry journal iamb. John McCullough wave 1 winter 2020 back next the poet John McCullough lives in Hove on the south coast of England. His first collection, The Frost Fairs , won the Polari First Book Prize in 2012 and was a Book of the Year in The Independent as well as a summer read in The Observer. His latest collection, Reckless Paper Birds , published by Penned in the Margins and shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award 2019, focuses on vulnerability and the human body. It won John the coveted Hawthornden Prize in 2020. the poems Queer-Cole 00:00 / 02:15 You tumbled into my palm in a trickle of sterling bad coin foul queen though I didn’t notice. I pocketed you conveyed you like your Sedan chair respectfully slotted you into vending machines that coughed you out. You winked at me from a change tray and abruptly I spotted everything about you was wrong your weight your ill-defined milled edge your obverse skewed. Not copper zinc nickel but lead sprayed with gold paint. Too shiny. Queer-cole they used to say meaning counterfeit or base money what ends up improperly beside your person tilting the system forcing each wall mutilating the weather. Fucking queer a voice in the Watford crowd snarled as my lips brushed Ryan’s cheek. There I was my mouth mimicking legit my hoodie cap trackies like a man’s but on close inspection awry my voice too light edges blurred. Flickery. I carry this awareness in my blood how simply I’m revealed as undermining the currency warping the ceiling. Now coin I keep you squirrelled in my wallet’s secret section. You are my talisman return me to what I am no pink pound but queer-cole rebel head wonky origin dangerous minting. Stationery 00:00 / 02:14 September is going all out to ease us in. The clouded sky is a whiteboard for helpful diagrams, the first cool air as welcome as your hand inside my jeans. Autumn zips round with its orange highlighter and you provide nifty shocks and marshmallows, leaving pornographic Post-its that ask me to rendezvous, please, for hot chocolate. I am the type of man who likes unnecessary displays of manners, who appreciates thank you cards, warning signs, a forest of regretful notices for building works. I admire rows of ginkgos that lose all their foliage in one drop to form a Yellow Brick Road. I am a desperate Lion today, stalking Scarecrow. I chew biros, glimpse at my watch too often. I was so afraid of being late to see you once, I arrived six days early. Love is horrific like that. First it’s a rabbit, then a duck, then it’s a ravenous, one-eyed sock puppet; but the rest is yoghurt adverts. And you fasten my thoughts with the most beautiful paperclips, even the filthy ones, like the time I saw a grove of ripening chilli plants become a rainbow of penis trees. Do you wish to continue, says the voice of a self-service checkout. Yes, yes I do. Between the shops, the sea snuggles under its blue leaves. The clock tower waits patiently for Christmas, a familiar figure below waggling his arms to lure me over. Succeeding. Your skilful face punches a giant hole in the day and I jump through it. Tender Vessels 00:00 / 02:23 I keep trying to slip away through the crowd but history won’t take its mouth off my body. What was exacted on someone else’s softness, his cuttable flesh, is always about to happen here. The vague kinship which exists between tender men glowing with thirst starts in awareness of this, how we’re unstitched by tongue prints, resurrections. Standing in a street party one Pride, I saw a figure stomp through, fists raised, and strike three boys. They dropped to the ground, clutching their heads. I witnessed everything, squeezed a stranger’s shoulder then fifteen minutes on, my body was distracted utterly by the smell of oranges. The unspeakable scrapes a fingernail across my neck, but I can only concentrate so long before I wind up decanting myself into the nearest fizzing light: Instagram, house music. It’s like those inventors who tried to devise a spray-on cast for broken bones, created Silly String. But there are remedies worse than squirting metres of sticky mayhem across a jubilant face, outcomes bleaker than attempting despite the scissors to inhabit this twenty-first-century skin. I live in a dream of plummeting from the earth’s tallest building without ever having felt more beautiful because I’m not the only one falling. I’m in a crowd, a loose democracy of descent, velocity with its hands all over our bodies, but not enough to stop us gossiping and blowing kisses as we speed through the air together, reckless paper birds. They will find us with our beaks wide open. Publishing credits All poems: Reckless Paper Birds (Penned in the Margins) – shortlisted for the Costa Poetry Award 2019

Hear poet Maxine Rose Munro read poems for wave 5 of literary poetry journal iamb. Maxine Rose Munro wave 5 spring 2021 back next the poet Maxine Rose Munro is a Shetlander adrift on the outskirts of Glasgow. Her poetry has been published widely, exhibited at the Stanza Poetry Festival, shortlisted for the SMHAFF Awards, and nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Maxine runs the First Steps in Poetry feedback programme, which offers beginner poets free feedback and support. the poems Finnman 00:00 / 01:12 My land is a constant, stripped by inconstant seas and I should know better: allure soon abandons all promise and beauty lies like an oily film on your surface. I have no use for fortune-tellers spinning gaudy futures – tall, dark strangers on narrow, isolated islands can't be true, but are surely puzzle and paradox. False, false man there is as much plastic in your offer as silver fishes in the sea. Now you tell me of your sunken treasures and hidden depths, but never your shifting, treacherous nature. I dream of your sea rising to enfold me, cover my mouth and stop my breath. I am lost and will go with you. But first come close, closer, let me see if, like waves meeting land, you break against me. The Finnman is a legend of the Northern Isles. Sometimes he can be benevolent, others he seeks to entice women down to his undersea world, only to turn them into his slaves. Let me sing a song of love 00:00 / 01:11 though we both know I'm not romantic. Though it could end in embarrassed mumbling and staring at our feet. I know I take time to get going, and often head off in a confusing direction , but just sit, and I'll do my best. Let my voice crack, wander between dialects like it does when I'm worried I'm an idiot putting myself forward for a kicking, a puppy wanting to pee all over the floor, shivery with terror, anticipating horror. I've written the words and rehearsed them a dozen different ways but none of them were as right as I wanted. It's funny how so very hard it is to do this, but let me try. Let me stand up before you, not quite look at you, let me sing the words I wrote you, edited over and over and over again. Let me sing this song – I love you. I'm glad I found you and no one else. Let's live all our lives together. There. I have sung my song. I hope you don't think I got it wrong. I hope you feel the same. Mother Tongue 00:00 / 01:04 If I were to speak with my mother's tongue my words would reach up out of the land, rooted deep in the language she learned sat at the knees of Viking descendants – the soil pressed against her bare skin: möld , a word that grew in her fertile mouth. To be dirty rich was möld -rich. To be nearly buried by the drink, möld -drocht. Her word for the Earth: Aert . Spoken with an ai , a rolling r , and a tih . Compact. Solid. And if she were to say 'from all the earths', well, this was her way of saying 'everywhere'. Stuck and grounded, both aert -fast. And that was how she looked to me, a woman who couldn't work with abstracts, their gush, their drift from the source. But my father, ah now, my father, he was one who was soothed by this. His words were dreams of the sea. Publishing credits Finnman / Let me sing a song of love: exclusive first publication by iamb Mother Tongue: Acumen

Hear poet Valerie Bence read poems for wave 14 of literary poetry journal iamb. Valerie Bence wave 14 summer 2023 back next the poet After completing an MA in Poetry with Manchester Metropolitan University (plus a year’s mentoring), Valerie published her first pamphlet: Falling in love with a dead man – poems which take as their source the art of Rembrandt. Her second pamphlet, Overlap , followed in 2022. Valerie has been shortlisted for The Poetry School/Nine Arches Press Primer series, the Fish Publishing Poetry prize, and longlisted for the Ginkgo Prize. Her poems have appeared in several anthologies, and she was delighted to contribute to the inaugural issue of The Storms journal. A mum and nonna, Valerie lives and works in Buckinghamshire. the poems Caitlin After Dylan Thomas’ death in New York, aged 39 00:00 / 02:13 So, it's happened, you shit of a man I love the bones of you. I can’t think for the howl in my head of our unborn babies I’ll never forgive you. I’m finished. No rules for us from that first day in the Wheatsheaf you lay your beer-swimming head in my lap proposed then and there stole me body and soul from Augustus. You always took what you thought was yours you had me in the raw, as far as you ever had me killed my soul, then killed your own. I love the bones of you. I used to think all men are swine. Now I know it. You bastard, you’ve left me squalid, what will become of us? I considered throwing myself out the bedroom window but decided it wasn’t a big enough drop I won’t make that mistake again. I hope you had your black socks on, darned with red wool so people would tut-tut over how you keep your wife impoverished you bad bastard of a wonderful man, you penniless slob I love the bones of you – and your voice, going on and on whispered endearments slurring in my ear – oh God! I always lose whatever I have, now I’ve lost you booming your poems at me when we weren’t in drink. At least it wasn’t me that killed you, although I’ve beaten and kicked you many times and you, the man that let me. Worse, I’ve torn your precious work in tiny pieces, flung them out the window like dark bats into the estuary. But even though I tramped out to the dawn mudbank to get them back before the tide did I’ll never know if you forgave me now. Well, you always knew you wouldn’t make forty I hope you’re happy now, you shit of a man. I love the bones of you. romancing the etch Rembrandt self-portrait with Saskia, 1636 (etching) 00:00 / 01:29 I remember the only time you let me share this intimate process I am behind you, not quite touching, watching fingertips I know so well work the surface of copper plate; take care with our hair, let the shadow of your own hand fall across my breast. I imagine these hands sharpening a quill, cupping my toes, drawing our baby. In mirror work, looking straight ahead, your hand moves ‘blind’, must draw in reverse – you see us backwards, as if we could turn back time before sadness made lines on our faces. The back of your head is rigid with concentration, you are rarely still this long and your reflected gaze watches me watching you work. With no change of expression you make myriad decisions – on pressure, what to leave, what to wipe away, which paper when pressed to plate will take up ink exactly as you want – then peel away revealing the reverse of the reverse. All this, your eyes in the mirror still hold mine. Red 00:00 / 01:27 There’s a red kite whose patch encompasses my house. I watch him most days, sweeping in slow circles, letting updrafts do the work for him, using his forked tail to steer the skies. On the first day of lockdown, as I drew back the curtains to let the grey in, he was the first moving thing I saw. So surprisingly low I could almost count splayed feathers on wingtips, eye on predatory eye as – just for a second – he seemed to peer into the bedroom. I think we’re quite close now; at least more than nodding acquaintances. When it snowed I considered wearing red, curling-up in the front garden to be as small as I felt. He might think me carrion – perhaps swoop upon me, take me to his eyrie. His little ones could be surrogate for mine. He could bring me small mammals I would learn to eat raw, my mouth and their little beaks bloodied red with the effort. I could teach his nestlings songs from Moana , number rhymes, how to play Jacks with leftover vertebrae, then at sunset we’d screech their names to a bleeding sky and I would tell them how the world used to be. Publishing credits Caitlin / romancing the etch: exclusive first publication by iamb Red: Overlap (The Emma Press)

Hear poet J L M Morton read poems for wave 14 of literary poetry journal iamb. J L M Morton wave 14 summer 2023 back next the poet Winner of the inaugural Laurie Lee Prize for Writing in 2022, J L M Morton is a writer and poet whose work has been published internationally in journals including The Poetry Review , The Rialto and most recently in the multidisciplinary ethnography Living With Water: Everyday encounters and liquid connections . Her latest book is Glos Mythos – a collaboration with satirist Emma Kernahan and illustrator Bill Jones. Her first full collection, Red Handed , will be published by Broken Sleep Books in 2024. the poems An Inheritance of Water 00:00 / 01:15 When I die the chemical signature in my bones will tell of Thames and Severn, Churn and Frome, marrow of upland pastures, mill race and outflow. An ancestral line of dockers loading and unloading cargo. A spring-fed apple tree that transpires deep in a valley sheds fruits that only wasps will feed on. And I want to close my ears to the endless sound of buckets emptying and refilling on the wheel. Is this what we call beauty? Is this a place my hand can hold, still reaching for the world? None of this is clean but it connects. Big enough and continuous to contain all of our lives, our deaths are carried in my blood and breath is carried by water. Rain is another name for love. Life Cycle of the Cochineal Beetle (c.1788) ‘ … it is worthwhile recalling that from the medieval era, one of the colours most prized by the crown, church and nobility in Europe for their finest fabrics was that of carmine or deep crimson.’ ~ Carlos Marichal Salinas ~ 00:00 / 01:51 An egg breaks on the pad of a prickly pear somewhere in Oaxaca where the scale insects’ livid bodies mass and crackle in the sun. Emerging, a crawler nymph clusters with the softness of her siblings to feed in the downy blanket – explorers edging to the brink of the known world. Nymph throws out a long wisp of wax, a thread to catch a ride on the wind, lifting and landing on the terra incognita of a new cactus pad. Her claim is staked with a stab of her beak. Cochineal sups the juices, sees off predators – lacewings, ladybirds, ants – with the bright surprise of her body. Fat, fierce and full of poison. She has detached her wings. Has no need of legs. Holding her colour quietly in trust – she waits for the male to eat his fill, to mate and die. Scraped away at ninety days, her body is laid out and dried, then pulverised. Destined for dominion. On Doubt / A Pair of Blue Eyes After Thomas Hardy and Emma Gifford 00:00 / 01:16 Meeting changed our strata, the way only a storm at the edge of an ocean can do. The way a slump of salt water in a black cliff hole is a wet metronome for desire and regret. Blue milk sea and yellow gorse – it is possible to be ambivalent and beautiful at the same time. Everything becomes an image of our disharmonic foldings. You hanging from the clifftop in search of my jewels. I should have guessed the houses were crappy behind the waterfront where the old lanes run deep, away from the wind, under the pines. Stacked tyres, fly-tipped white goods. We are here for this moment and we fuck it up. Instead of making like gregarious worms in a world of Sabelleria reefs, honeycombed in our detritus. Publishing credits An Inheritance of Water: Raceme (Issue 13) Life Cycle of the Cochineal Beetle (c.1788): Poetry Review (Vol. 112, Issue 4) On Doubt / A Pair of Blue Eyes: Dust Poetry Magazine (Issue 9)

Hear poet Helen Ivory read poems for wave 4 of literary poetry journal iamb. Helen Ivory wave 4 autumn 2020 back next the poet Helen Ivory is a poet and visual artist whose fifth collection, published by Bloodaxe Books, is The Anatomical Venus . She edits webzine Ink Sweat and Tears , and teaches creative writing online for the UEA/WCN. Her book of mixed media poems – Hear What the Moon Told Me – was published by Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, while her chapbook Maps of the Abandoned City appeared with SurVision. As part of Versopolis Poetry , Helen's work has been translated into Polish and Ukrainian. the poems All the Suckling Imps 00:00 / 01:32 Summon your children by their given names be wet nurse; harbour; slatternly distaff – let them suck of your virulent blood. Now issue them Elemanzer, Pyewacket, Peck in the Crown to derange the neighbours rabbits, kittlings, polecats and rats have them spill from your skirts; from your crimson teats. * A hare on the threshold tame like a dog bright crooked cast in its lemony eye. * Basket of apples placed on the floor of a virtuous larder. A peppery grimalkin curled on the roof. A Goodwife takes to her bed body a roost of convulsions an apple a day an apple a day * A palaver of mice big as squirrels ravage the hayloft winter rises early a smother of crows draws its cloak across the pale vault of heaven. * A scabrous dog kiss cold as clay springs from the lap of its fostering bedlam to dance and dance the black dance of itself atishoo atishoo, we all fall down * Old woman old woman who lives in a shoe oh monstrous mother now what will you do? The watchers have come to unclothe your imps the prickers are here sing witchery, sing jinx Cunning ‘If a woman dare cure without having studied, she is a witch and must die.’ Revv. Kramer and Sprenger Malleus Maleficarum (1486) 00:00 / 00:53 She comes when summoned with birth blood and earth caked to the hem of her skirts and dark little half-moons packed under broken nails. The hedgerows are her pantry: to quicken labour, there is cock-spur, balm of poppies to assuage your pain. Her senses are sharp as hoarfrost – she will bid you when to squat like a brute. And when the physician invents himself he will call at your door in the empirical light of day with his bagful of leeches and headful of planets. He will scribe the words of the Lord into your waxing belly. And when your daughter happens her crowning, he will rip off her head with forceps. Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Sorceress to Live Exodus 7:11 00:00 / 00:42 For her neighbour’s sickness was more than merely unnatural; for he sang perfectly without moving his lips. For she is intemperate in her desires and pilfers apples from the orchard; for she hitches her skirts to clamber the fence. For her womb is a wandering beast; for she is husbandless, and at candle time brazenly trades with the Devil. For she spoke razors to her brother; who has looked upon her witches’ pap and the odious suckling imp. For the corn is foul teeth. For the horse is bedlam in its stable. For the black cow and the white cow are dead. Publishing credits All poems: The Anatomical Venus (Bloodaxe Books) Author photo: © Dave Guttridge

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

Hear poet Scarlett Ward Bennett read poems for wave 2 of literary poetry journal iamb. Scarlett Ward Bennett wave 2 spring 2020 back next the poet Scarlett Ward Bennett is a West Midlands poet whose debut collection ache – published by Verve Poetry Press in 2019 – has been nominated for a 2020 Forward Poetry Prize. She was nominated for Best Spoken Word Performer in the 2019 Saboteur Awards, and came third in the Wolverhampton Literature Festival Prize judged by Roy McFarlane. Scarlett runs several poetry workshops, and hosts the 'Versification' poetry evening in Cannock. A self-confessed hedgehog lady, she volunteers for West Midlands Hedgehog Rescue. the poems Culling Season 00:00 / 00:44 Somewhere in a town that is best known for how deep it has dug underneath itself, where the addresses are earthy like “May Dene” and “Old Fallow”, and roads fling themselves lethargically around woodland bends, a pot hole rips the gut out of an exhaust on an accelerating Ford with all the viciousness of antlers on bark. After all, it is rutting season, and it’s all I can think of lately; feuding stags butting skulls, concrete tearing out metal piping, and the way my neighbour boasted to me this morning of the fawn he shot through the eye socket. We’re going to have to talk about it at some point 00:00 / 00:46 aren’t we? Except, I don’t want to. Can’t instead we talk of dandelion manes; the way they nose their way through cracks in the pavement, only to be scattered in infinite directions when kicked violently enough, scorned spores spiraling; frantic heads of fine-spun lace dizzying themselves away, as though away is the only place far enough from that damned kicking boot. Can we focus on the flowers and not think of anything else – not of how I ran home to my mum’s house, shame dampening the crotch of my underwear, and not of the beads from my snapped bracelet that I clutched tightly in my fist. What Is True Of Spring 00:00 / 00:54 is true also of ourselves. Learn from her; how she unfurls her flowered fists, waits for buds to burst from the end of branches, like beading blood on kneecaps, or lacquer slicked at the end of knuckled hands. Heal from your wounds womb first; blood is no omen of death, but of the pact we make with life. Even fossils dream of dawn, brittle from singing themselves hoarse clinking away under all that soil like forgotten coins in a deep pocket waiting to be unearthed. What if none of us ever stopped singing, the same way an oak remembers its notes of green once April comes back around no matter how much white winter had buried it in? Publishing credits All poems: ache (Verve Poetry Press)

Hear poet Dorian Nightingale read poems for wave 16 of literary poetry journal iamb. Dorian Nightingale wave 16 winter 2023 back next the poet Dorian Nightingale has always been fascinated by the musicality and textural sounds of words. He draws inspiration from an eclectic range of artistic influences: everything from Caravaggio to Radiohead. A graduate of New Writing South (Creative Writing), the Open University (Psychology) and the London School of Economics (Comparative Politics), Dorian was nominated in 2022 for Best of the Net for his poem you. He's also had a number of his poems published in print and online. Dorian lives with his family in Sussex, England. the poems spellbound 00:00 / 01:03 forgive me. for if you were to ask what were my dreams and my goals, they’d remain undisclosed, all holed up, left untold. for i fear the fact that when they are spoken, if they should dare pass my lips and be there in the open, the merest hint of their uttering would prevent them from happening (or at least puncture ambition to the point of abandonment). the attainment of aims, it seems, spellbound by admittance. so i’ll tell you almost wants and nearly desires. the fire in my belly coming across not so hot. careful not to craft too particular replies – answering imperfectly, all seemingly unwise. and therefore don’t be surprised if my style seems apathetic, that i’m somewhat distracted, slightly compromised. i’m just protecting myself from some predictable fall. keeping in thrall to make the endgame, my prize. you 00:00 / 00:28 and i lock you in a box that i occasionally open, with that key i still pick up by the tip not the bow. a place where i stow your hair clips and your tutus, pairs of polka dotted socks and shiny buckled shoes. your name on tags, a name i’ve known since i was six. patterns saved of dresses that i was going to sew and stitch. day at the beach 00:00 / 00:55 dilly-dallying, shilly-shallying. my mind confined on this shoreline of mine. i’ve been here before, many times, many more. the brine in the air assaulting my senses, lining my gut with that same salted feeling. the same sort of feeling revealing my shy endeavour. a spoiling reminder that whatever the weather i’ll always foil the very first step, the very first dip in the saltwater wet. Fearful i’ll slip on the undersea flint and slit the tip of my toe or cut the side of my foot. i know, i know … biding my time, still afraid of that slice, never holding my nerve, never turning the tide. Publishing credits spellbound: Flights (Issue 10) you / day at the beach: Flights (Issue 5)

Hear poet Elizabeth McGeown read poems for wave 4 of literary poetry journal iamb. Elizabeth McGeown wave 4 autumn 2020 back next the poet Elizabeth McGeown is from Belfast, Northern Ireland, and is the current All-Ulster Slam Champion. Winner of the 2019 Cúirt International Festival of Literature Spoken Word Platform, Elizabeth has been a finalist in the All-Ireland Poetry Slam and represented Northern Ireland at the Hammer & Tongue UK Slam Finals 2019 in the Royal Albert Hall. She has received funding from Arts Council of NI and The National Lottery to work on her first full-length spoken word show. Her poetry has featured most recently in Banshee, Abridged and Riggwelter. the poems SUFTUM 00:00 / 03:06 Ulster Rugby have a slogan: Stand. Up. For. The. Ulster. Men. Stand up in court. Stand up for 8 days detailing, and detailing, and detailing their triumphs while they get half a day each, in their delicacy, for their delicacy. You are a delicacy, not-so-gently roasted over an open fire. Liar! Stand up as underwear is passed around – yours – while they hmm and haah and examine: 'These are a bit showy, aren't they, Jennifer? Almost as if you wanted someone to see them, Sadie.' Stand up and explain VPL spoiling an outfit and dressing for yourself from the inside out. Sarah/Lynn/Sue cries. Classic victim! Stand up while they debate the merits of certain bloodstains, the consistency of menstrual blood versus trauma blood and stand up while they tell you you don't know the difference. Don't know the difference between a lot of things. All fingers and thumbs. Just fingers and thumbs. No harm done. Stand up. Stand up explaining why you wanted to go to a party, why anybody wants to go to a party, why parties exist and the evolution of humans gathering for friendship and celebration. It seems they have never heard of parties before, not met a woman who seeks out company for conversation. Stand up when they accept the party, grudgingly, other middle-class girls were at the party but aren't sure why you went as you're not middle class, aren't sure why you went into the room. The room! Theroomth eroomt herooooooooom thero ooooo oooooooooo m Stand up while there's a giggling babble from the gallery, faint sounds of popcorn munching. Stand up check your phone *new messages* because word gets around. This is why you don't go to court. Lie low, hide, be proud, be honest, just the facts, you're lying This is why you don't report. STAND UP. Stand up and explain that a room can just mean a kiss, a room can often mean a kiss, in the past a room was a kiss on its own merits. A room is not a promise and a kiss is just a kiss. Stand up and explain you didn't know you were going into a room with a top shagger, with suemepaddy. You didn't know it wasn't a room but a merry-go-round. You just thought you were going into a normal room with a normal person. Singular, not plural. It's hard to stand up when the whole room is spinning and you are a carousel horse. But stand up. Stand up for the Ulster ... women? Everything You Could Ever Need i.m. Comfort, Praise-Emmanuel and Gabriel Diya (d. December 24th 2019) 00:00 / 03:17 We have everything you could ever need. Welcome to your home away from home! We provide you with luxury, we are full board, we are an undisputed hotspot, we are whatever you want us to be. A romantic getaway? Our beds are the best beds, the finest, you will sleep on feathers and dream away. You will watch beach sunsets with panoramic views, you will dine by candlelight. Explore, please, our lush tropical gardens. A family break? We have daytrips: visit Malaga – the home of Pablo Picasso. We have golf! Your children can come with us SCUBA diving, or painting, or to the fun fair. Our complex boasts twenty-one swimming pools and of all the pools in all the world, she had to d i v e i n t o ours. I know an old woman who swallowed a fly, who swallowed a spider to swallow the fly, who swallowed a rat to swallow the spider, who swallowed a cat to swallow the rat all the way up to a horse. She's dead, of course. A girl is drowning. There are no lifeguards but we offer such luxury here! Such candlelight, such silk sheets, such a wondrous buffet, no lifeguards. Children struggle in water all the time. An older brother sighs. In the absence of a lifeguard, he will fix this. Pauses his game, puts down his tablet and gets wet. A boy is drowning, trying to swallow-save his sister-fly but it is just a coincidence. We have tested the water and examined the drainage system. We boast twenty-one pools in our complex! We know how to pool safely. An increasingly concerned father tries and tries his best as he has done his whole life; to protect his children, to open large embracing arms, to be the horse, to swallow the cat to catch the rat to catch the spider to catch the daughter-fly. His wife and other child, dry child, still breathing child pray loudly, pray screaming as defibrillators are employed to no avail on girl, brother, father. We have everything you could ever need! We have retrieved her swimming hat from the filtration unit. After the investigation was declared complete, we reopened the twenty-first pool. We need no lifeguards, we have twenty-one pools, we know how to pool. We are so delighted you chose to spend your Christmas Eve with us. Flesh 00:00 / 01:47 These sacks, these bags of flesh we live in; they expand, beyond what one could ever comprehend. Would you sit and eat chocolate naked watching your nudity grow? Thinking about what you used to be: whip-thin. A boy laughs and tells you you are both sticks; rub together would create fire, would burn out. You find this romantic. Hip bones crash flintily, sheets appear, on next day examination, to be scorched. But what is this compared with whale? Glorious whale. So many curves of you that you have lost track of which island your hands rest on. Is this breast or stomach one or stomach two (lesser stomach) or a buttock or a back roll? It all forms a melange and you know you could create more of it and yet more (no intellect needed for this creation; to simply eat with gluttonous abandon). Skate fingers across the pink-coloured more of you, twisting and turning to admire the new excesses. Thigh dimples smile and wink at you. Tiny purple cracked lines of lightning express your power. Raise hips and thighs and thunder them in time to the music. You are all weather conditions. Droplets of moisture gather between mounds as you consider your next move. It will be colossal. Publishing credits SUFTUM / Everything You Could Ever Need: exclusive first publication by iamb Flesh: Abridged (0–58 Kassandra)

Hear poet Wendy Allen read poems for wave 15 of literary poetry journal iamb. Wendy Allen wave 15 autumn 2023 back next the poet Wendy Allen’s poems have appeared in The London Magazine , The North , Propel Magazine , Poetry Ireland Review , Ambit , Poetry Wales and The Moth among others. Her debut poetry pamphlet, Plastic Tubed Little Bird , was published in 2023 by Broken Sleep Books. the poems Plastic Tubed Little Bird 00:00 / 01:40 I hide the tampon within my fingers like I’m holding a tiny, fragile bird. Someone once told me this is how my hands should be when I run. On the side of an unstained trainer’s edge is a star. In red. On the edge. I think of the tiny celestial mark I draw in ink on my calendar, always inconspicuous. I pretend to look for my phone, pen, a date two weeks later. Inside my bag, a yellow wrapper the colour of cruel. A creased spring dress worn only to celebrate bloodshed. I whisper period to you in the hope you will turn around. You don’t. I shout it out 28 times aloud in my head. When I empty my Mooncup, the blood remains crescent lonely in the daytime bowl. I like the absolute discomfort this causes you. I envy the plastic backed sanitary sleeping bodies on their unfamiliar coastal beds, their one-night stand leaving them free for me to feel their single use guilt. A naked tampon in the cervix of my bag is exposed only by a useless string lifeline, the wrapper from the orange tampon flatlines at the bottom of my bag. Our Turn to Host 00:00 / 01:25 That the dinner party is ours is a bad start / I open the door / smile / take coats / observe new hair / enhanced romance between the couple we sit down with / every sentence I begin with I self-censor / make sure I’m not going to disclose too much / B notices but she’s got the headfuck rush from the Pata Negra I bought at Madrid Airport / I’m struggling after two glasses of wine and 12 drops of Rescue Remedy / I want to smoke too fast / exhale this shit sham of an evening / At eight seventeen and we’re one hour and sixteen minutes in / after melon and lamb and Hasselbach potatoes / here is the part when I want to cram soft sponge into my mouth like a gag / this is when B’s husband asks about my job / I'm lying on the table naked / exposed as he dives in with precision / cuts into the decisions I make laid out on the table / dissecting me in parts / judging and measuring and weighing and labelling / I want to eat trifle and cry Pelagos After Barbara Hepworth What happens when I look from the side? When I can’t see the strings completely? Does that mean the sea disappears? 00:00 / 01:47 It is Pelagos I always go to first at The Hepworth . From the front, the repeat, the shadows, the stitches transform my vulva into a perfect circle as you reach around my waist, from the side repeat, trace finger on back. I hear a moan from the centre (my voice) your cock is between my lips I am the opposite to hollow now the stitches are laced with immediacy they mimic breathing they rise – pause – fall I move to the side, hold my breath the sea stops moving – land locked, absent body. In the gallery we meet at cat’s cradle we begin on an elm flat base lick salt off plate, off body into the space, fold shouldered waves into me sea wall curves over arms – wrap around, repeat I look at Pelagos from the side I think of myself open mouthed an empty estuary the size of an unspecified sea, downy breathing I’m almost complete in this part. I am Pelagos . From the side from the side, make my strings dissipate. Publishing credits All poems: Plastic Tubed Little Bird (Broken Sleep Books)

Hear poet Ilisha Thiru Purcell read poems for wave 17 of literary poetry journal iamb. Ilisha Thiru Purcell wave 17 spring 2024 back next the poet Ilisha Thiru Purcell is a poet from Newcastle upon Tyne. She is one of the three poets in the inaugural Poets of Colour Incubator (2023/4) and was a Young Creative Associate with New Writing North. Ilisha performed at the 2023 Newcastle Poetry Festival and her work has appeared in publications such as Butcher’s Dog and Bi+ Lines Anthology and she was shortlisted for Nine Arches Primers Volume Seven. She is part of the group Brown Girls Write. the poems Coast | 00:00 / 00:51 I stand before the north sea and think that a coast | is a lie. I look for the definitive | separating the sea from the shore, water from land, wet from dry. Where is the cartoon | you see in children’s books dividing the yellow from the blue? I search for a | or _ or even a ---- telling us what is ours and theirs, but all there is is negotiation between the land and the sea. Haven’t you seen a chunk of cliff plunge into the sea toes pointed? Or how the water takes larger chunks out of the sand, ignoring the white |s on a map saying stay ? Germination 00:00 / 01:05 My shadow strikes out from my body/ as if I am announcing that now is the time the time is now/ I have been kept in time and now I am the keeper of it/ Meeting my own gaze/ I expand like the lungs of the city I rest my feet upon/ I smile a wry smile/ a “you can’t even imagine” smile/ A man on a child’s bike asked me where I got it from/ this crescent of grapefruit flesh/ and I replied my mother/ My mum/ who shines brightest in a sea of saris/ who circles my thumb with her forefinger/ like a planet in orbit/ My mum/ dressed in black, absorbing everything, is everything/ a river running to and from everything/ If these images could talk they would tell you that there is more than one way to pray/ more than one way to bless a journey/ Dust to Dawn 00:00 / 00:37 The last night I spent alone I couldn’t remember ever seeing daylight and all that came from my mouth was dust. This time I beat back the thoughts like dust off a rug, sank into this new shade of alone. I found within myself a light. Soon I will not need lamplight to protect me from the parts of my mind that have collected dust, I will be content and unafraid alone. Only alone can I watch the dust of my past dance in dawn’s light. Publishing credits Coast |: Bi+ Lines – An Anthology of Contemporary Bi+ Poets (Fourteen Poems) Germination: Sanctuary – Brown Girls Write Anthology (New Writing North) Dust to Dawn: exclusive first publication by iamb