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Hear poet Kimchi Lai read poems for wave 6 of literary poetry journal iamb. Kimchi Lai wave 6 summer 2021 back next the poet Kimchi Lai is a bilingual poet based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. She has performed at Urbanscapes 2018 and 2019, and won third place in the 2018 Asia Pacific slam at Lit Up Festival in Singapore. Kimchi's work has also featured on The KITA! Podcast, as well as Speak Easy on BFM. She self-published her first chapbook, Solace in Solstice , in May 2019. the poems Waxing Moon, Waning Lover Featuring《水调歌头·明月几时有》by 苏轼 00:00 / 02:21 明月几时有?把酒问青天。 Tonight, the moon is full. She smiles at me, her gaze illuminating the glass in my hand as if she knows I wish it was you I am holding instead. 不知天上宫阙，今夕是何年。 I wonder if we have met in a different dimension; or if we will meet in heaven. 我欲乘风归去，又恐琼楼玉宇，高处不胜寒。 I would sit with you under an arbour in the gardens. Surrounded by pillars cut from the finest of jade and sharpest of teeth, protecting us from the fierce winds that try to blow us apart. 起舞弄清影，何似在人间? But the air is still tonight, and you are not by my side in this life. So how dare I wish for your presence in another? 转朱阁，低绮户，照无眠。 The moon comforts me from my window. She is trying to coax me into slumber. 不应有恨，何事长向别时圆? “You see”, she whispers to me. “I shine brightest in the face of longing. What need is there for my light if your lover radiates enough warmth? What need is there for a full moon if you already feel complete?” 人有悲欢离合，月有阴晴圆缺，此事古难全。 Perhaps I will never see your crescent smile, or hear your gibbous laugh again. Yet I know this: we are under the same sky. And now whenever the moon waxes or wanes, I will know it is her saying that you are thinking of me. 但愿人长久，千里共婵娟。 Fatal Blossom 00:00 / 01:00 The sprig of leaves I planted the first night we spent together bloomed today. You cup one in your hand, petals the deepest shade of sunset at its final second before plunging into dusk, haphazard but stunning. Ignore the thrum beneath your feet; the tangled vines that pulse and hiss with poison and hidden truths cannot hurt you as long as you keep me near. Let them creep quiet and swift the same way nightfall creeps upon day, curling around your crown to whisper sleep into your temples. Do you understand? This garden started out an angry mess of ivy – it was never supposed to bloom. Do you like periwinkle? Focus on the flowers. I worked so hard on them. Romantic Sentence 00:00 / 00:53 Words are unconfined, not meant to be held. But once in a while I will get lucky and manage to catch some at the tip of my pen, just long enough for me to string them into an ink necklace. Alive with earnest grammar and passionate vocabulary; every dotted 'i' and crossed 't' quivering. Staining my fingers in haste I drape it around your shoulders, fasten the ends with a full stop. The letters startle at your warmth, smudging slightly. They tumble downwards in my clumsy locution and catch at your collarbone. The same way my breath does in my throat when I see them sigh and settle into your skin; dark blue biro etched across your chest. Oh, sayang. You were meant to wear these words. Publishing credits Waxing Moon, Waning Lover / Romantic Sentence: Solace in Solstice (self-published) Fatal Blossom: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Catrice Greer read poems for wave 8 of literary poetry journal iamb. Catrice Greer wave 8 winter 2021 back next the poet Baltimore-based writer Catrice Greer is a 2021 nominee for The Pushcart Prize who spent November 2020 serving as a Poet-In-Residence for the Cheltenham Poetry Festival. Catrice has been published in several local publications and online journals, as well as in an international anthology. She's currently a Guest Editor for IceFloe Press, and Guest Poetry reviewer for Fevers of the Mind. the poems Cortical Cartography 00:00 / 01:54 I give thanks for you bravely doing this again traveling synapse by synapse trails of electric pulses jumping blackhole gaps that used to remember holding the dead space a new soma body birthing from bleating darkness show us the nucleus the middles of what we were made of Axons spread like kamikaze flying squirrel bodies with arms akimbo reaching dendrites touching Grateful for even this axon potential sometimes on sometimes off Praise for brave synaptic dives and jumps Grateful for re-birthed myelin insulating protecting making sure that we traffic on our way by the quickest route charged in this dark matter discovery-space This astronomy building anew, wrinkled city of light, crevices, crannies, gyri and sulci, ridges and valleys jellied, crinkled mass sectioned by lobes all speaking trillions simultaneous synaptic voices prayerfully all at once this chatter mines the neuronal network and we build a whole new world I Am Home 00:00 / 02:20 Lost you Early November When the leaves started falling And time faded backward Sitting here crocheting Stitching memories one loop at a time Your voice in my head swirling Humming a hymn, your favorite And I sing each note yearning, solemn As if you’d appear suddenly solo into a duet and we raise our voices as high as you ascended when it was time For you to be called home I rock quietly ashen stilted lone tree Swaying In a wood still lush knowing I sit with a pain I can barely speak the name awash with memories of you and the absent space we called your chair, dresser, your place at the table the place we used to go every Friday, your touch, your smile beaming a side-eye on an inside joke between us, The memory that had your name all over it that our family can’t tell anymore without crying, laughing, wishing you here And one day I will see your face again We will see you Feel you As your spirit is so close in the air here near me Near us vibrating in the humming I believe I can feel you We will never forget you A whisper softly tells me: 'I am home' The Gathering 00:00 / 03:14 Hear ye, hear ye We are gathered here today family, friends, enemies, enemies of my enemies We are here at the black hole mouth of this isolated cave in the grief painted infected unknown space to bury our dead among us Those dead things between us that hold us back Those things we no longer speak Those things that twine and whip round our vocal chords that prevent the i’m sorries i miss yous, i love yous the pieces that bumble forward like an emotionally blind man heady on drink bumbling home too late for whatever he was meant to be there for knocking over sentimentals, and traditions, passed down collectibles shattered in pieces launched jagged landmine shards speckling the ground Our DNA, our ancestors, mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers long gone our creators ask us to stand here together Ask ourselves if in this space we will abandon Our old skins Our old breath and choose to share anew Can we bury this dead thing between us all so we can stand wrapped in sinew, tendons, blood¹ coursing miracles spiraling through the breath lifting us in a swirl of meditative purpose Can we find a new space a sense of being We are here in this vortex to bury the living dead under loam, clay, rocks, into the broken soil Cover it. Mark it as resting here never to go forward We mark new paths with a sign here as we crawl out heel to heel ... 6ft apart linked in spirit life begins anew we celebrate together mourning yesterdays embracing our multicolored confettied I forgive yous, littered in the air, celebrating our tomorrows ¹ Ezekiel 37:8 — King James Version: 'And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them.' Publishing credits Cortical Cartography: Silver Spring Town Center Newsletter (Ancestral Voices 2020) I Am Home: Afro-American Newspaper (Baltimore Edition) The Gathering: first published under the title Elegy in the Silver Spring Town Center Newsletter (Vol. 8, Issue 9)

Hear poet Suchi Govindarajan read poems for wave 8 of literary poetry journal iamb. Suchi Govindarajan wave 8 winter 2021 back next the poet Writer, poet and photographer Suchi Govindarajan lives in Bengaluru, India. Her poetry has appeared in publications ranging from IceFloe Press and Cordite Poetry Review to perhappened magazine and Usawa Literary Review . Her poems have also been included in two anthologies. Poetry is Suchi's first love – fiction is her newest. the poems Of blood and war 00:00 / 02:10 The first time it happens, you are barely twelve. So much blood must mean either wound or war, s o you run to your mother and ask if you are dying. This is not death, she says, this is existence — just the basic bloodshed of being woman. There will be a celebration next week, she says with silks and jaggery, turmeric and gold. But don't be swayed by such fleeting love; the real gift is an unwritten book, stitched with rope, bound with tradition, its pages ornate and yet so sharp with rules, they only slice the fingers of women. Because you are a child, you take this gift, and you come to believe in this unquestioning dark, the flowers that will wilt, the milk that will spoil, the men and other fragile beings that will take ill. Everything, she says, that can be defiled by you. Last April you helped your aunt make mango pickles. This month, even your touch will spoil them — all that careful soaking in brine and spice — all that ageing in the home's coldest corners where you will now sit for days every month, muffling the many mouths of your pain. You cannot go to temples now, says your mother. You cannot worship the goddess I named you after. You are still a child, she says, but you are enough woman You are still a child, but you are already too much woman for anyone to bear, not the men, not the priests. They must pray to save all their gods from you. You told me once that he loved you 00:00 / 01:29 You told me once that he loved you because you were simple. I wondered then if he had seen your bookshelf or your bathroom. Did he see that small callus at the base of your palm? Does he know the weight of your gaze as you look out the window? Even on cold nights, you never cover your feet with a blanket, yet you show me these socks he bought for you to wear. They are the exact shade of purple that you hate and call violet. You told me once that he loved you even if you weren't beautiful. I wondered then if he had seen you speak about justice or poetry. Has he seen how you hesitate before you burst into laughter? Does he know you have your grandfather's hooded eyes? You told me once, under the yellow light of a station, of your surprise at his love and his existence. It was a windy night, your wild hair was held in a bun. You were wearing a sweater that billowed like a storm. You told me then you would try and love him back. I smiled, and felt a new grief in my limbs. Current affairs 00:00 / 02:05 My teacher told me my poems should be more current, should celebrate things in the news like the breaking of sports records, like the eradication of diseases, new machines in our libraries, or how a child, just six years old, sang like he was born of birds. Don't just write about flowers he said, or philosophy or these clouds of unrequited love that billow about your youth. Until we broke the mosque, I did not follow his advice. Until then, nothing in the world had touched my cocooned life: I had touched nothing in the world. But now I felt like it was my chariot wheels that crayoned dried blood into the tar. I watched my parents turn to wolves at orange moons, cheering for men with pickaxes, waving their fists at a box they could not turn off. But when I went to my teacher my words now a raw torment my pen now moving hard enough to leave round bruises on the page behind (at last, I thought, a poem he would praise) he grew narrow and cold. In a play last year, he had painted my face blue, draped me in shawls of gold and Raamar green. I had broken a bow for him. Now he whispered mantrams to protect his gods, and flung my poem back and told me to stick to love and clouds and flowers. Something that would dissolve and disperse easily. Something that would not leave marks even on the back of a page. Publishing credits Of blood and war: Usawa Literary Review (Issue 2) You told me once that he loved you / Current affairs: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Julie Stevens read poems for wave 19 of literary poetry journal iamb. Julie Stevens wave 19 autumn 2024 back next the poet Julie Stevens writes poems that cover many themes, but often engages with the problems of disability. She is widely published in places such as Ink Sweat & Tears, Broken Sleep Books, The Honest Ulsterman, Strix and Indigo Dreams Publishing. She has 4 published pamphlets: Journey Through the Fire (2024) , Step into the Dark (2023), Balancing Act (2021) with The Hedgehog Poetry Press and a chapbook Quicksand (Dreich, 2020). Website: www.jumpingjulespoetry.com . the poems Piano Practice 00:00 / 01:31 It’s never black and white. Each note may wrap you in the skin of a newborn, scratch at years with a harrowing call or send you humming through the doors at work. When she played, the piano sent time scurrying to find hours that the day had lost, pages that were never read and light now dimming, losing centre stage. A master of the keys was her doing waking a night with the clutch of Brahms, Debussy winding through each morning’s stretch and another three hours packed with fingers alight. For years it was always her bringing the whip to my young hands, a bleeding insight into notes that waited, a battle to race with those elegant turns. They’d stand behind singing words to celebrate call on me to find music to cheer, but all I felt was the sting of their breath shooting syllables into broken fingers. Why I Don’t Like Kippers 00:00 / 01:17 I sensed they were coming when the stench rose up the staircase − a flood of foul-smelling slime that knew just how to net me. Noxious flapping, dives and smoky fins around they went, swamped today’s sweet breath. She urged me to try this ocean sick, swore a healthy body should be full of gills, that I should swim by her side, copy her ways, hook a life with only her in charge. A wave of hate saw me jump through portholes, my belly would retch, whilst on this sea bed. A call from downstairs made me slide on scales, washed me nearer my salty seat. I sat, I moaned, found the perfect bowl of cereal, but my spoon was always full of stinking kippers. Them 00:00 / 00:54 I lived with the volume high, anchored between their protests and stillness, which never turned them off. I lived with my head buried. I didn’t want to take their problems with me, nor judge and deliver the awful verdict. The shouting floored the house. The sudden lurch of a room knocked me into a bedroom cell. I lived with their weapons, their fights; conflicts were nailed down hard in my head. The fear of what could come next was always present. It lived with me, but the real me was never there. Publishing credits Piano Practice / Why I Don't Like Kippers: Journey Through the Fire (The Hedgehog Poetry Press) Them: Flights (Issue Nine)

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 Gerry Stewart read poems for wave 10 of literary poetry journal iamb. Gerry Stewart wave 10 summer 2022 back next the poet Gerry Stewart is a poet, creative writing tutor and editor based in Finland. Her collection Totems is to be published by The Hedgehog Poetry Press. the poems Barnhill, Jura 00:00 / 01:10 My backpack saws against my jacket highlighting each stride, 198 4 miles signposted to Orwell’s haunt, the distance doubled to my sore knees. My friend offers scout-leader patience at my toddler concerns of ‘Are we even halfway there yet?’ For her, this is a mere warm-up for tomorrow’s trek of all three Paps. I’m not here just for the mountains, the smack of island blue or long-lost friends, but to reconnect with my first self who stepped blindly on her own path and discovered those things had meaning. Lunch among the thistles, ferns and cow pies below the house, blue seas and sailboats, I relish each aching moment. Back down The Long Road, words on snapped tiles, embedded in mud, read like the poetry of sore feet and bumbling boots. Turned Page 00:00 / 00:44 if I start with soil and the random pull of the sun the hours lost would have a root a truth the glisten of rain solemnity potential in my weight behind the spade’s edge promise in the lilt of a cabbage white from the dark corners of the compost heap if I could start with soil till the hours clean open there would be poetry The Kick Sledge 00:00 / 01:23 I want to take the potkukelkka across a frozen lake on a sinivalkoinen* day. With its mitten-worn grips, wooden seat smoothed by generations, it voices a squeaking, scraping language I can lean into. Trees bow to me under the weight of a fine dry snow. My boots pound, setting up that perfect glide over the singing dark ice. Wind-bitten cheeks, lungs burning, I kick a last fleeting contact with the earth and then fly into silence, uncapturable. When I tire, a fire pit waits with a hand-carved kuksa of tea and a fresh korvapuusti. I pretend to be Finnish. Then I remember: I hate winter, its piercing, truthful glare. Finland and I are barely on speaking terms. I crawl under my duvet until spring. *Blue and white: another name for the flag inspired by Finnish lakes, sky and snow. Publishing credits Barnhill, Jura: StAnza's Poetry Map of Scotland (Poem No. 351) Turned Page: Ten Writers Writing (Lochwinnoch Writers) The Kick Sledge: Spelt Magazine (Issue 1)

Hear poet Mary Ford Neal read poems for wave 13 of literary poetry journal iamb. Mary Ford Neal wave 13 spring 2023 back next the poet A writer and legal academic from Glasgow, Scotland, Mary Ford Neal is the author of poetry collections Dawning and Relativism , as well as an assistant editor of Nine Pens Press . Mary's poetry has appeared online and in print in a wide span of journals that includes Bad Lilies , After… , One Hand Clapping , The Interpreter’s House , Atrium , Long Poem Magazine , The Shore and Janus Literary . Her work has been nominated for both The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. the poems Mammina proves the existence of God 00:00 / 01:42 The day is on its hands and knees. Mammina basks on the balcony in great-grandmother dignity in all the quiet of a woman who has outlived her daughter, collarbones glistening, little cross flashing pink and gold among rivulets of August evening sweat as the sun finally loses its grip and goes down fighting, painting the duomo in eyeshadow colours. The whole horizon is made of churches. An ambulance squeals along an unseen street, not the smooth wail of the ambulances back home, but a desperate, discombobulated sound like the cry of a confused animal. Mammina makes the sign of the cross, lets loose a fast prayer. Her words are a string of small, round beads, tumbling one after the other. How can you be so sure anyone is listening? I ask in her bubbling tongue. My head is dusky with the sweetness the city gives off at the height of summer, and with all my days and nights at university. Mammina opens one eye, closes it, smiles back in her chair, takes a fat medjool date between leathery thumb and forefinger, squeezes it lightly, and says This perfect thing does not exist by accident. O California After Danez Smith 00:00 / 01:18 California’s an empty page, but scented like a candle so you have to write over someone’s idea of loveliness. No matter how delicate the fragrance, I could write a fist. I could write a swollen eye. I could write a lie. Perhaps a little blasphemy is okay. Bruises are not okay in California. Perhaps I bother about bruises but don’t even notice my snapped neck. Whatever you do, don’t move me. I’m resting on the lip of an ocean, and I want the ocean badly, but not this one. This one spits cold. I need the one so vast its edges are always gentle. I’ve told them that by evening I’ll be on a plane. I know if I could get to California it would sand me smooth. I know if I could get to California I could die big, die pacific, melt into the horizon like a god. We all fell silent except for the men 00:00 / 01:03 their solemn mahogany baritones closing around a keening гармошка, deepening, swelling, snaking between us, causing our skins to shed, winding around the hissing braziers, and it was as though all the longing in the earth’s bones sprouted, serpentine, charmed from sleep by Russian chords, and I decided just to dissolve into this longing, this sinuous lament, this отравление, uncoil myself from the hold of home, of language, of all my loves, and from now on my home would be this poison-apple moment, my language a dirge rich with consonants, and my only loves would be милый, любимый, Ангел мой. гармошка: a Russian accordion отравление: intoxication or poisoning милый: darling любимый: beloved Ангел мой: my angel Publishing credits Mammina proves the existence of God: Amethyst Review O California: The Shore (Issue 15) We all fell silent except for the men: Dust Poetry Magazine (Issue 7: Connection )

Hear poet Clarissa Aykroyd read poems for wave 1 of literary poetry journal iamb. Clarissa Aykroyd wave 1 winter 2020 back next the poet Clarissa Aykroyd grew up in Victoria, Canada and now lives in London, where she works as a publisher. Her poetry has appeared in UK and international journals such as Black Bough Poetry, The Interpreter's House, The Island Review, Lighthouse, The Missing Slate, The Ofi Press Magazine and Shot Glass Journal. Her pamphlet, Island of Towers , was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2019. the poems I dream the perfect ride 00:00 / 00:36 It was raining and the cheap black gloves chafed my hands. The reins and curved neck’s crest, a wave. I blinked the rain, I was horse and river – we flowed the jump but my clumsy mouth-jag scared the horse and I had to dream sunlight to calm him. He listened with his mind, breathed, so black and sleek and slicker than a seal in the patience of the rain, the white noise of the rain, his cantering a mountain beneath me, breaking the earth, living-deep. Amrum 00:00 / 00:22 Cloud spiral. Here – pale bone of the light. Sand riddles hissing – at my feet, my neck. Rising now the rosehip moon. The sky, bitten. All flags torn. Watson on Dartmoor 00:00 / 00:53 I first saw it in sun, edged with yellow like the dragged note of a violin: and yet, and yet something just out of tune like the faintest rot beneath the sweetness. It’s not of the earth, the moor. You drive as though ascending – to hell; mist rolled in, the wet air choked me. The light walked backwards and vanished. The grey tors grinned down on us. Holmes would love this, I thought. The touch of drama. And then came the gates of Baskerville Hall. Well, you know the rest. But the moor, that space, that’s what I can’t explain. How it was not of this world. How its clouds were close enough to touch, and yet its skies were high enough to elude my faltering translation. Publishing credits I dream the perfect ride: exclusive first publication by iamb Amrum: Island of Towers (Broken Sleep Books) Watson on Dartmoor: Ink, Sweat & Tears (July 1st 2017)

Hear poet Mark Fiddes read poems for wave 1 of literary poetry journal iamb. Mark Fiddes wave 1 winter 2020 back next the poet Mark has published two books with Templar Poetry: The Chelsea Flower Show Massacre and The Rainbow Factory . In 2019, he won the Oxford Brookes University International Poetry Competition, came second in the Robert Graves Prize, and third in the National Poetry Competition. He's recently been published by Poetry Review, Magma, The New European, The Irish Times, The London Magazine and Poem Magazine. He lives in Brexile in the Middle East. the poems After Delius On the occasion of not leaving the European Community, March 29th 2019 00:00 / 01:37 For an hour or two over breakfast the lethal Etonians were hushed on the day we meant to leave. Common or garden birds threshed a chorus from thin British hedges. A bog-standard UK sun rose up sixty non-decimal minutes before Europe to shake off a bleary March. Pigeons paraded along the gables in regimental medal regalia. New blossom reported for duty bunting all the pissed-up alleys. Not a chemist ran short of insulin and the growling tide of lorries failed to make a delta out of Kent. Hate was too hungover to fry up the Full English with trimmings in saucy tabloids and talk radio. On the day we meant to leave, a bird of unsettled status flew in to Devon from an African hot spot laden with unregistered eggs searching the lanes for spare nests and any true love crying “cuckoo.” El Pacto de Olvido 00:00 / 01:30 We walk the canal under plane trees, words in one pocket, silence in the other past palettes stacked for la cooperativa, the air thick with dust and late harvest. We talk of work, cards we’ve been dealt, the missing people, our grown children, whose absences now lengthen beside us. I explain how this hour a lifetime ago, Nationalists executed the men too unfit to march to the “work camps” in France, leaving the bodies somewhere over there to rot, dropped like sacks in familiar dirt. They thought nothing could be quieter than a country of unmarked graves. Once in step, we speak of nothing more. Someone’s taking pot shots at the rabbits. Swallows speed type through pylon wires. An irrigation ditch fills, a tractor stutters. Black damsons clack against dry mouths. Homewards we scrape, shale underfoot. The price of peace is always a bitter fruit. The Kodachrome Book of the Dead 00:00 / 01:55 Frozen in their Kodaks, our old folk wear slippers to protect the carpet from their feet. Colours leech. A tap drips. Dinner lingers in another room. A yucca erupts on the lawn. The lounge is an orgy of fakery: leatherette armchairs, plaster dogs, silk orchids, mock encyclopedias and more fringe than necessary on lamps, hairdos, lips, pelmets plus random tassels wherever there is dangling and come-hither velvet. If a grandparent smiles it is like a wolf had stopped by for tea and a slice of Battenberg. Parents vogue in folky knitwear surrounded by cigarettes and the Sixties. Is this how they will see us, our early years tucked into albums balanced on the knee like babies? Will pages crackle as laminates separate and we stare back red-eyed as hounds from blind pubs? Whereas our last few decades will click past in seconds on a screen, backlit, cropped and cherry-bright. There they can find us, between swipes, catching our breath, wiping the joy from our sleeves. Publishing credits After Delius: The New European El Pacto de Olvido: runner-up in the Robert Graves Poetry Prize 2019 The Kodachrome Book of the Dead: winner of the Oxford Brookes University International Poetry Competition 2019

Hear poet Anna Milan read poems for wave 13 of literary poetry journal iamb. Anna Milan wave 13 spring 2023 back next the poet Currently based in Hertfordshire, England, Anna Milan has had her poetry featured in various publications – Butcher’s Dog , Under the Radar , Eye Flash Poetry , Black Bough Poetry and Ink Sweat & Tears among these. the poems The wind is not yet awake 00:00 / 00:47 Patience, eyas. The wind is not yet awake. Wait for its breath to rise and turn till you can scoop the air under pointed wing. Your eyes are not windows, but walls. Enamelled with anger, watchful, siege-ready; mistrust kept safe behind ashlar and buttress. Although the frosts snap at your feather buds the spathes will grow curved and strong. When the barbs lock firm to collar the wind then, eyas, we’ll be ready to begin. Eyas: a young hawk; especially (in falconry) an unfledged nestling taken from the nest for training money & sex 00:00 / 00:46 I’m doing it for me she says & though in a way that’s true she speaks the softened vowels of her great grandma who heaved out the bastard child of the earl of bath & wrecked her voice in the process so forever & ever after it had an echo of the master’s tenor like the bass notes below the hymn’s melody in the estate chapel on the big hill & when she’s in those killer heels doing it for her I can’t help but wonder how many male choirs are in the harmonics singing yes yes that’s my girl you don’t answer to god or man do you what a chance to write yourself your own sweet song girl House guests 00:00 / 01:01 My mother drew cedillas in lipstick on the mirrors, scrubbed the skirting boards clean, and left stands of autumn grasses growing right up against the patio doors. Afterwards, my sister came to throw wet leaves at the ceiling and do handstands in the kitchen. The first man I loved told me a lady never bares her feet until she is alone in her room. He always turned off the light with his thumb before he shut the door. The next one, a man with grey curls and eyes saddened by the sea, hammered nails into a newly decorated wall to put up a shelf, and heaped sand onto it in restless piles. Others roam about outside, waiting to come in. Someone once said to me, In the end, aren’t we all just guests in someone else’s house? I think it’s true, but these days, I am more careful about letting people touch the walls. Publishing credits The wind is not yet awake: Atrium money & sex: Butcher’s Dog (Issue 16) House guests: Under The Radar (Issue 25)

Hear poet Matthew Haigh read poems for wave 1 of literary poetry journal iamb. Matthew Haigh wave 1 winter 2020 back next the poet Matthew Haigh is from Cardiff, Wales. He is the author of Death Magazine (Salt Publishing, 2019) and Black Jam (Broken Sleep Books, 2019). His work has appeared in numerous journals, online and in print, as well as in anthologies by The Emma Press, Sidekick Books and Bad Betty Press. He is co-organiser of CRASH: a quarterly poetry night in Cardiff focused on the experimental, surreal, humorous and strange. the poems A Luxurious Death 00:00 / 01:03 After years working as a makeup artist, I decided there had to be a death with a velvety finish. To be honest, our whole lives are unnecessary. The fabric of life is thick silver, fruitless. The person you love has a 100 per cent chance of embarking on a kitchen renovation project. We think of death as the heart of the home. Be vulnerable, be young. Death happens to everyone; it makes you laugh so hard you snort as your eyes well up with beeswax. The challenge is a familiar one: breathe new life into a widow with a black pencil. Advice on how to die well? I start with skin butter, followed by nude lip loss. Christian Bale 00:00 / 01:11 Bale has become so milky that simply spending an hour in his presence probably leaves a faint gleam. The actor was determined to incorporate petals, seeds and fruits into his skin. He trained six hours a day, six days a week, for six months to bottle a happier future. Synonymous with physi- cal transformations, Bale developed plant leaves as his body adapted to changes in technology. He reportedly puts a soft little cushion between his face and a thistle. Ironically, American Psycho was interpreted as a moisturiser by many reflexol- ogists. The precise nature of his soothing presence is unknown, but the smart guess is that he is like a mountain of white lily. What Will Your Sims Do Now? 00:00 / 01:32 Like a good nephew, I save your computer from the skip’s slew of lifelong wreckage, lug its black lake-weight back to my room even though the tower is now a humming grave. Inside still live the pixel kids you abandoned to a timeless paradise, still frolicking poolside, spouting gibberish, clownish, in a summer that will never end. They know nothing of the absent God act you’ve pulled, these tiny Adams and Eves in cherry-print kaftans. I feed and clothe and shower them, strange skin cells you’ve shed in your swift exit, my head haloed by the screen’s Heaven- blue, the way yours must have been as you crafted your craved reflection. Here is the candy-haired mohawk girl modelled on your ideal. I push her around her little kitchen, fingers lingering on the keys that yours last touched. Her chip pan has caught fire. The girl’s face bursts open with tears. Scorched walls. Her kitchen is ruined. I can’t console her. Publishing credits A Luxurious Death: Burning House Press (November 28th 2018) Christian Bale: exclusive first publication by iamb What Will Your Sims Do Now?: Anthology of Aunts (The Emma Press)

Hear poet Joanna Nissel read poems for wave 5 of literary poetry journal iamb. Joanna Nissel wave 5 spring 2021 back next the poet Joanna’s debut pamphlet, Guerrilla Brightenings , is forthcoming with Against the Grain Press. She was the runner up for the Poetry Business 2018 International New Poets Prize, was Pick of the Month for Ink, Sweat, and Tears in July 2020, and won the Bangor Literary Journal 2020 Ekphrastic competition. In her day role, you will find Joanna organising and facilitating online literary events, including the Stay-at-Home! Literature Festival, Tears in the Fence Festival, and a variety of events with Paper Nations. the poems Thoughts on Mothers’ Day 2020 00:00 / 01:23 This is not my first poem about washing hands Dad learned the spell of lipid-based soaps alcohol gel cracked knuckle-skin to enter Dave’s hospice room festooned with cards balloons Did you know flower-water is so germ-ridden it can be lethal? Twenty years earlier the diagnosis then the fall down the stairs cracked his skull The friend who found him scrubbed her hands of his blood The ritual of it clutch of talismans worn around the neck without knowing if it would protect her For Mother’s Day I sketched a bouquet of spring daffodils bluebells roses hibiscus in biro The last time I saw Dave The grooms declaring wickedness laziness his wedding my 11 th birthday Buddha-bar-bling-themed golds fuchsia lighting rigs from the boys at the Old Vic They stopped the ensuing rave February frost melting against steamed windows to bring me a cake with candles that when I blew on them relit themselves never went out. Delicious 00:00 / 00:43 She drops the word into conversation, sprawling and red like unfurling fire lilies. The audacity of it makes me stutter, and she, comfortable and languid-limbed, moves on to the next topic as if she hasn’t just released the scent of raspberries and honeysuckle into a rainy afternoon catch up. Afterwards I wonder if I’ve just seen a glimpse of the world as she sees it, life in all its mundanities rippling across her taste buds: simply delicious . I find myself mouthing the word, revelling in the sibilance so petal-soft it burns. It’s the Only Time I See Them On coming out – Hove Lawns 00:00 / 01:08 the lesbian couple, joining me to amble the pebbles at dawn, meandering the artery between one pier and the other. They’re gone by the time the light proliferates, turns the world from fragile pinks, pale blues to brash cerulean and shamrock lawns, and the promenade has filled with clots of joggers, children with training wheels, shirtless beer bellies. I can’t blame them, when sunrise offers us a clear stretch of saturated sands, which shift underfoot like the texture of damp biscuits, which thrum with ancient energies and offer fragments of shells, whole ecosystems on the groynes, encrusted with mussels until the walls resemble the puffed wings of preening crows and the bright shallows under 7am sun overlap like scales. This morning, three women waded in and, as the water broke against their stomachs, they were Leo standing on the prow, the horizon building in them, building, until they released their screams. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet April Yee read poems for wave 6 of literary poetry journal iamb. April Yee wave 6 summer 2021 back next the poet April Yee is a writer and translator of power and postcolonialism. A Harvard and Tin House alumna, she reported in more than a dozen countries before moving to the UK. April reads for Triquarterly , contributes to Ploughshares online, and mentors for University of the Arts London’s Refugee Journalism Project. the poems Kopachi / Pripyat / Vilcha 00:00 / 02:07 In the cloud that drifts online, I discover an image of myself, notebooked, remember I toured Ukrainian villages in April, the anniversary of their before and after, the date they understood dirty and clean , touched new energies released into air. My recollection floats ungraspable as air. The high-res photograph does not recover dead actions to the hippocampus, now clean as a blank notebook sheet. I remember the detailed email from my father after I said I’d go to Chernobyl that April. He cited a scientific study: Dear April, Mushrooms, exposed to soil and air, can remain radioactive for years after. For breakfast, the local hotel covered pasta in mayonnaise and dismembered hot dogs. I also half-recall the clean white shirt of an engineer. He’d keep clean our air in a then-future, now-past April with a steel sarcophagus to stop the embers from dispersing particles in global air. His metal tonnes could fully cover the Statue of Liberty, he intoned, after a meal of many courses. I marvelled, after, how he kept his white shirt so pristine clean. A visiting Japanese mother, face covered, gripped two Geiger counters an April and a half since Fukushima blew the air. She earthquaked her body to remember. Actually, I use records to pretend-remember. I Google articles I must have written after that trip, read emails maybe sent from air- craft raining pollutants over unclean nimbuses. I trigger cruellest April, places where every root was covered in irradiated air and nuclear embers. After, I wash my consciousness clean, allow the cover to contain all of April. Listening to Lola Flores 00:00 / 01:03 In your ghost berry house, you screw the leg still tighter in its wooden frame, the hoof suspended, question mark. Botanists peg the mulberry to man, their shots at life quick decades. No estás más, corazón. Silkworms spin threads from fruit before it spoils. You shear off fat, locate shrunk flesh. Off bone it falls. He plumps the fruit your maid slow boils to blood-gelled jam. In your arguileh’s crown, his coals burn orange hot, each breath you take cremation. Hide your father’s jamón bone in the slingshot shadow of the lamp you break, below the mulberries, their blinded lobes seen too in cemeteries of my home. West / East 00:00 / 01:53 My eyes are the hammered edge of a Chinatown butcher’s cleaver, heavy and heaved with momentum, not sharp. There’s enough sharpness in sheared bottles, wires embroidered with barbs, paid bills that slip inside the flesh. I heave my eyes on discards, cleaving past from present: Who touched this can, and can it buy my lunch? My butcher heaves his cleaver through a duck’s shiny body, and I see the X-ray of its bones, perfect whites circling congealed purple cores. The rice: free, my butcher’s Buddha plea. I swallow slowly, seeing with my tongue for paddy stones that seek to crack my teeth. I picked one time a book, heavy with large font: The Geography of Thought. A man inside theorised mankind’s mind cleaved in the age of the ancient Greeks, each fisherman hauling his solo catch while Chinese strewed rice across collective fields. West sees the thing; East sees the place the thing sits in. I can see I am now West: sifting, sorting, seeing the trash, and not the street the trash sits in. Someone saw this book as trash. Were I East, I’d be the rice, the duck, and the butcher, whole in every grain. Publishing credits Kopachi / Pripyat / Vilcha: Commended in the Ambit Poetry Competition 2020 Listening to Lola Flores: Ware Poets 22nd Competition Anthology 2020 (Ware Poets) West / East: Live Canon Anthology 2020 (Live Canon)

Hear poet Courtenay Schembri Gray read poems for wave 13 of literary poetry journal iamb. Courtenay Schembri Gray wave 13 spring 2023 back next the poet Born and raised in the North of England, Courtenay Schembri Gray reared her head as a budding poet with a penchant for the macabre. Since finding kinship in the rich verse of Sylvia Plath, Courtenay has amassed a large amount of publishing credits. Her poetry collection, The Maggot on Maple Street , was published in 2023. the poems Charlie 00:00 / 01:18 His stubby fingers grope me, and I scream only air. I am a huntress, yet I despise the taste of flesh and blood. With his half-dead slant, the man buries my despair. Muddy waters slough the sin off my back while I violate my pear. Daddy’s belt loops around schoolboy errors, threatening to flood. His stubby fingers grope me, and I scream only air. Upon the eve of moonstruck men, I open my cervical lair. You heave rare meat onto the table, harder than you should. I am a huntress, yet I despise the taste of flesh and blood. You swaddle her like a baby, leaving only shoes for her to wear. When we first met, I don’t think you understood. His fingers grope me, and I scream only air. We stand on porcelain cracks, silent, with nothing to declare Somehow, despite it all, you found me like an earring stud. I am a huntress, yet I despise the taste of flesh and blood. You have turned me into a woman, but I will not share. Let’s leave the world with a gift, richer than others would. His fingers grope me, and I scream only air. I am a huntress, yet I despise the taste of flesh and blood. June Bug 00:00 / 01:19 With Bambi eyes all aflutter, I drink from the well of men. A paper lantern hangs from every bloody coat hanger. Under the cloak of 6 am, I am to be born again. Lost in a June bug cocktail, I fall for a Parisienne. He bought me roses, and I threw them in anger. With Bambi eyes all aflutter, I drink from the well of men. You know, I think about you every now and then. For a red-blooded man, you were placid in manner. Under the cloak of 6 am, I am to be born again. To my dirty photographs, you would say très bien . Rubbing coconut rum into skin, I would yammer. With Bambi eyes all aflutter, I drink from the well of men. Darling, I need you like I need goddamn medicine. Inside a chrysalis, I preach grief-stricken slander. Under the cloak of 6 am, I am to be born again. You left me with echoes of Non, je ne regrette rien . With starry thighs and coal miner skies, I languor. With Bambi eyes all aflutter, I drink from the well of men. Under the cloak of 6 am, I am to be born again. The Maggot on Maple Street 00:00 / 00:55 Shaken from my sleep by yellow taxi dreams; toothpaste is my cork, stopping the wine from sloshing around the great caboose that is I, way off the wagon, face down in the sludge. Moontime butter shoots me in the eye, hot syrup; that sticky pudding, fat with guilt and irony. O’ how I fabricate the lowest despair, the deadliest joy, finer than lace, as impure as rendition. Swear me a fishwife, an earwig, a flotsam woodlouse with but a cube of cheese to stay afloat. I must get back to the desk, to the coffee rings and grassy knolls. To the looking glass, without delay. Publishing credits Charlie: The Book of Korinethians (Pink Plastic Press) June Bug: Idle Ink (March 2022) The Maggot on Maple Street: Roi Fainéant Press (Oct 2022)

Hear poet Amantine Brodeur read poems for wave 3 of literary poetry journal iamb. Amantine Brodeur wave 3 summer 2020 back next the poet Amantine Brodeur is a literary alchemist seeking out the universes inside words. Her work can be found at paragraph planet, Pink Plastic House, 100 Words of Solitude, Black Bough Poetry – Deep Time (Vol 1). Forthcoming in Thrice Fiction later this year are two commissioned pieces: her surreal short fiction The Anaphora House, and her poem in four acts, In a Scattering of Tongues, on the women in the works of Samuel Beckett. She's currently at work on a novella, due out in 2021. the poems Body Standing 00:00 / 00:50 I leave his body standing; the preserve of collaborative paper. Disorder. Entrances. Words. An ease of Uncertainties. And then redemptive emptying out of memory. Along this landscape of prayer, his lines suffer their partial evidence. Purpose. Breathing. Rivers drawn. Invasions dissolved. Standing. Layers. Later, much later, Bodysilt. Holding Space 00:00 / 00:50 Once upon a time, where The Bosporus imbued the Marmara Sea, our dense salinity rose upward. In this rich up-swelling we drank up all our silt. Like laundry, we spread our lives openly breasted to the wind and tall trees, our dyed sails ripped and unstitched. The remains of our wooden ships, unmasked in this wild stillness. In this vertical motion of water and lint, we’re holding fast along darker edges, turning salt into air, and us into a study of porous water. Jalopy Poison 00:00 / 00:54 You lark the heart of my frivolous wing; beat the soar of my day, dark – and wondrous. You play discordant against love’s laughter. You line the shore, gull-cawed to fishing the tackle of our mindplay: Pretending the afternoon’s cool swagger into dusk against the tide, when the sun slides deep into the awe that floors me. You hip the jilt of poppy stems, red, to become my jalopy poison. You are my proposition hazard, you’re the In-between of Auden and ice-cream: The string to trip my fall. You’ve become my voyage across God, into Reason ... and none at all. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Ruth Wiggins read poems for wave 12 of literary poetry journal iamb. Ruth Wiggins wave 12 winter 2022 back next the poet Ruth Wiggins is a British poet, based in London. Her work has been included in UK and international journals & anthologies. Her first pamphlet, 'Myrtle', was published by The Emma Press and her second, 'a handful of string', was published by Paekakariki. Her first full collection, a lyric history of Barking Abbey, is forthcoming from Shearsman. the poems Daughters 00:00 / 01:34 The feral dogs can smell the glitch inside the cardboard box – two salvaged female pups, not yipping much as they are carried across the un-adopted lot, their sister discarded on the sidewalk. The tourists (like us they are here, and yet they are not) can't quite get with the program. We have three weeks on them and watch as they make for the grocery store, cardboard crib fading in their arms. Next morning, we see them outside the temple. The pups have spent the night in a tee shirt, dining on peas and tuna. A food bowl improvised from the bottom of a bottle, moulding not unlike their mother's paw print. They have a sign that reads – TO TAKE – a little heart to encourage the monks and stallholders. But no one wants a girl pup. In the National Gallery behind Sükhbaatar there is a bust entitled Give Me a Daughter. Give me a daughter, one with a soft-furred belly, fat with peas and tuna. Make her golden eyed and skittle legged, and with a bark to raise the dead. Kallisto From Playing the Bear 00:00 / 01:12 Do you feel my weight pressing on the atmosphere? Out here, circling. Jointed with stars, my dazzling exile. Not to touch the Earth, nor wet my toes – Hera's vow, extracted from the Ocean. But gingerly the Earth shifts its hip and I am dipped, a claw to prise off the lid, to get at something sweet. As one entering sacred water I will tear away the sky and climb back in. Your woods recede, do you think of me? The girl that once ran at your Virgin side. Me, who could bend the bow like no other, spit olive pits further than the rest. O thumb away the black smudge upon my lip kiss me again, the winner. K is for Keats 00:00 / 01:17 In bright white sparks I try to pick your whole name from the night sparkler in my hand the whip of the upright the K that is gone the K that is velar plosive tongue against soft palate pulmonic consonant after which all airflow ceases gone before the flourish of t into s really takes in the air And so instead I slip you finger deep into estuary mud that holds you holds until tide yearning to be held by reeds steals back into the creek lifts you out to sea how cease holds the sea which does not cease how cease holds the sea holds the sea which does not cease Publishing credits Daughters: The Poetry Review (Vol. 108, No. 4) Kallisto / K is for Keats: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Melita White read poems for wave 4 of literary poetry journal iamb. Melita White wave 4 autumn 2020 back next the poet Melita White is an Australian poet, writer, and spoken word artist. Her blog, Feminist Confessional , features feminist poetry, essays and personal non-fiction pieces in a confessional style. Melita is also a composer and a classically trained musician, and loves making all kinds of things. Her creative work is a form of activism, and she enjoys examining and debunking gender constructs, as well as focusing on topics such as the #MeToo movement and domestic violence. Her writing has featured in anthologies from Rhythm 'n' Bones Press and Indie Blu(e) Publishing, and various places online. the poems When God Was a Woman 00:00 / 01:36 When God was a woman there was no God There was only you and me and many other humans besides and there were animals and trees and rivers both wide and skinny and spans of land and oceans deep and crystals and sand and stars and comets and heavenly bodies galaxial When God was a woman the moon presided and the sky and weather and seasons were full of infinite knowledge both intimate and beyond When God was a woman there was no God and power filled each entity and no one thing dared take from another what was rightfully theirs And all had food and tenderness and air and water and learning and life and respect and there was enough of all of these things because there was no God to rule or to punish to preach or to take or destroy or to flood or to incite us to rape or to kill or to conquer (in the name of God) and all was exactly as it should be and there was love and balance and the Earth was just so Only ever as it should be Always When God was a woman Sardines 00:00 / 00:33 Bodies silver similar bodies Firm and plump they lie in a row Synchronised swimming silver sequins Similar bodies headless whole Salty sparkly oily striptease Turn my key and open me up Slippery cold skin to swallow Exhale life and crunch my bones Zoë means life 00:00 / 01:53 To my friend Zoë whose name means life who is a poem much richer than this a love letter a witch’s dictionary sage of all that is known or felt Zoë a Dada dandy my surreal sister humourist in the face of death she touches up my pain with the tiny brush of absurdity dials up the light on my chiaroscuro until we howl and the bitter tears of joy run over round cheeks Zoë stands and faces and says fuck you to the things that should be fucked well off — she is soft rose velvet blue glimmers of giggle plush cushions of cuddle sharp spikes of valour she is my chainmail armour and it is lined with cashmere   she is my posture straightening my cradled soul weeping my voice heard and my anger multiplied she is my mother and my other and my brother she is every soul’s lover she is 12 and 15 and 20 and 46 and 87 she is timeless and ageless she is a living ancestor the ground and the feed the seed and the sun the rain when it came she is all that she knows and she knows like no other Zoë means life — happy birthday Publishing credits When God Was a Woman: Whisper and the Roar (September 4 2019 ) Sardines / Zoë means life: Feminist Confessional

Hear poet Caitlin Stobie read poems for wave 12 of literary poetry journal iamb. Caitlin Stobie wave 12 winter 2022 back next the poet Born in South Africa, Caitlin Stobie holds a PhD from the University of Leeds where she lectures in Creative Writing. She's won both the Douglas Livingstone Creative Writing Competition, and the Heather Drummond Memorial Prize for Poetry. South African literary journal New Contrast named Caitlin one of the country’s ‘rising stars’ in poetry. Her debut collection Thin Slices appeared in November 2022 – the manuscript of which was shortlisted for the Melita Hume Poetry Prize. An earlier version was also shortlisted for the RædLeaf International Poetry Award. the poems Five Ways of Looking at a Period 00:00 / 01:48 I A ruined pool party. Cat-scratch in the pants. Thighs tight and plastic-wrapped. Luxury cotton towel sex. Soggy apologies like I’m-on-my . II Peach’s pit-flesh. Cherryburst anemone. Pomegranate plasma. Beet-cloaked clover. Hibiscus nimbus. III Brings muddy sleep, long as gumtrees. Quenches anxiety with slippy lip sap. Approves full-bellied foods, potatoes, ginger root. Pulls distraction’s tubers and unearths certainty. Teaches how to stand being lonely. IV When eggs crack jokes about coming first. When proteins drag blush over queenly cheeks. When lipids birth another month’s dead doulas. When sickle cells group under coven moons. Hello, capillaries. Hello again, iron age friends. V Cramping coloured like conception’s twinge. Craving the ever-ready chocolate advent. Carving papayas with turmeric fingers. Wishing for its mercurochrome tinge. Then, sudden puddle of thank-fuck . Ngiyakuthanda 00:00 / 00:36 In Zulu there is no difference between like and love. Between 'I want to hold your hand' and 'Can I see your ring finger?' Between wanting to know where you stand and wanting a one-night stand. Between the sheets, between two lives, just one phrase makes it come together. I’m still not sure whether open interpretation makes love easier, or just lost in translation. Even Birds For Faith 00:00 / 01:12 We arrive in Cambridge after a long night’s flight: eighteen twenty-somethings with a hangover of Africa. What really matters, the man says, is everyone’s comfort. We wouldn’t want anyone to be out of place. Don’t ask and don’t confess potential transgressions. This is a tour, after all. So I keep clear of the line, sick, tight with my truth. Faith is still too but later that night she knocks on my door and cries for skin she’s never been in. These queer constructs: towers cut on ancestors’ backs. We discuss spectrums of shame. Late dawn is lilac phosphorescence crossed with migrating shadows. There’s no snow, just white ash. Surely the others see; they must sense our bent. Even birds know silence is also an answer. Publishing credits Five Ways of Looking at a Period: Banshee (No. 12) Even Birds: The Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Anthology Vol. VI (Jacana Media) Ngiyakuthanda: uHlanga Issue 1 (uHlanga Press)

Hear poet Kerry Darbishire read poems for wave 19 of literary poetry journal iamb. Kerry Darbishire wave 19 autumn 2024 back next the poet Living in the English Lake District and writing most days, Kerry Darbishire is inspired by her wild surroundings. Her poems have won – and been placed in – many competitions, and her work has appeared widely in anthologies and magazines. Kerry's three poetry collections are A Lift of Wings , Distance Sweet on my Tongue and Jardiniѐre . There are also her pamphlets A Window of Passing Light , Glory Days (in collaboration with Kelly Davis) and River Talk . the poems River Talk After Raymond Carver 00:00 / 01:21 I’d slip across mossy rocks to catch your intonations clear as glass splintering morning air, accents you taught me before the scent of pine lifted from your tongue, before blackbirds and traffic spilled over the bridge. Come autumn you’d growl open-mouthed through the woods towards me louder than a stream, faster than a beck, bold as a heron, I’d wait on the brim. Sometimes a rush of hungry dippers murmured through marigold edges like angels, but I didn’t need saving. I learned to measure the highs and lows of your voice even in winter when your lips barely moved, and you held me like a mother in a perfume of breathy lullabies sinking deep into my pillow and I clung as if I was your child to every word you whispered, like fog shifting from your skin. All night I’d lie awake listening to the sound the water made until I was fluent. Jardinière 00:00 / 01:43 When I lift the lid, I let go the ghosts of kings and queens tombed in their paper-dry beds – buds and petals still clothed in the palest dawn, bonfire-grey, evening-sky-pink, thunder-cloud-yellow, honesty’s sheen like rainstorms that often sent us back inside with the smell of drenched earth in our hair. When I lift the lid, I could turn a field into a garden, work all day, become Vita Sackville-West or Gertrude Jekyll using her painterly approach to colour. Season after planted season I grew, cut and gathered aquiligea, rosa rugosa, alchemilla, poppies, larkspur; honoured their brief blooms in vases until they threw themselves down like confetti. When I lift the lid, forty summers rise and wake from slumber: lapsang souchong and cake, birdsong, afternoons fading in deck chairs, slow-scented evenings folded in the wings of moths; my daughter’s tenth birthday, the spring she broke her arm, the autumn she left home and my mother fell ill. It is a thing to leave your soil. When I go I’ll take my garden with me. Song of the Fell 00:00 / 01:40 When you say fellside a woodpecker drums spring into the ghyll, curlews turn their tune inland on salt clouds scudding west to east fast as a fox crossing high slopes where runnels of earth slip from lairs and whins begin to yellow the air. When you say fellside an evening in summer swims out of my children’s eyes as they race to the beck where lizards soak up warmth from boulders, foxgloves guard sheep trods, firm as stone, where reeds lean in like old friends and distance spreads a blue cloth. When you say fellside owls haunt low light, the first frost snaps at hedges of hazel and thorn, snow steals boundaries without a second thought from high intakes at rest, hollow nests, berries shrivel and all evidence of life before is squirrelled under white. When you say fellside celandines must be opening, a half-moon floating in a lake-blue sky lifting sun, swallows and flights of geese over Whinfell; our bright steps climbing a new path to find water-mint, frog spawn, primroses waiting for rain. Publishing credits River Talk: Flights (Issue Five) Jardiniere: Jardiniere (The Hedgehog Poetry Press) Song of the Fell: Finished Creatures (Issue 5, 'Surface')

Hear poet Isabelle Kenyon read poems for wave 18 of literary poetry journal iamb. Isabelle Kenyon wave 18 summer 2024 back next the poet Manchester poet and novelist Isabelle Kenyon is managing director of Fly on the Wall Press . She's had four poetry chapbooks published – most recently, Growing Pains and Potential . Isabelle has also published debut thriller, The Dark Within Them . Her poetry appears in IceFloe Press , Ink, Sweat & Tears and elsewhere. the poems Afternoon Tea with Self 00:00 / 00:54 We are in Ali’s café at the end of the world – it must be for I am sharing scones with myself at sixteen our legs gangly under table and much the same, though one pair is wrapped in electric blue, and I find there is always an Ali’s café to be found somewhere. She says she is ready to understand, dabbing lip-gloss curves with napkin. I say she never will, sorry, some things, people, you pass on from, like wraiths, better to shrug the last five years off like glitter. She says I am lying, of course, and I smile for I knew she would say it and we finish our tea like a stubborn, married couple. Gestures which are really about inadequacy and absent fathers 00:00 / 00:41 I like you experimental hair strands traversing the colour spectrum, sheep-shorn at base, wild deep, like your laugh. Lately, you've tamed nature to Mouse for a man who requires bread pre-chewed into starch. You mother-bird hop; I text silent space bars of an argument which is really about growing up and out as two separate shoots of grass one nestled in the same compost, one fidgeting for further fields. Wonder 00:00 / 00:30 She gives him hair on his chest downy like the otter, playful and familiar. He gives her her lips from the pit of a plum, all spring and juice she finds herself delicious. She has found answers: why his spine is sculpted just so why his hands are warm bowls of milk. Publishing credits Afternoon Tea with Self / Gestures which are really about inadequacy and absent fathers: exclusive first publication by iamb Wonder: Sarasvati Magazine (Indigo Dreams Publishing)