Hear poet Lesley James read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Lesley James back next the poet Lesley James is a writer from Wales whose debut poetry chapbook is A Walk With Scissors . She's been published in a range of literary magazines and anthologies, including BOLD , The Broken Spine , Full House Literary Mag and Spelt Magazine . She was shortlisted for a UK Very Short Story award by LoveReadingUK, and won Cardiff Writers’ Poetry, Flash and Article prizes in 2022-23. Lesley's words have also earned her two 2023 Best of the Net nominations. the poems Ways in which a cortado can prompt existentialism (No. 3) 00:00 / 01:09 In the pastel Caffè Nero that used to be my bank, a man nudges a scuffed skirting board with his toe as he moves a chair. It falls off. I realise they’re all fake. Held on by silicone or No More Nails. What’s important is the impression. Never mind the feeling of concealment and being duped. The Doric pillars rise. But not very far. What sits above the lowered ceiling, I ask a barista? Beyond the replicated coving? He shrugs and shakes his head behind the Perspex screen. Bank clerks, no doubt. In a stately two-tone world. Greying and cobwebby. You Don’t Know What I’ve Done With thanks to Rachel Long, Caroline Bird and Arda Collins 00:00 / 01:02 And they say that Polar bears are under threat, but I saw them – one grey one beige – shopping in Cardiff City Centre yesterday. I did one of Harry Styles’ tattoos – and they threw me out of art class aged thirteen. Lizzo chose me to be one of her Big Gurrl Dancers, and I said ‘No, bitch.’ You don’t know what I’ve done. YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT I'VE DONE. I invented squissors, scissory tongs to squeeze the slop from cat food pouches so you don’t get gunk all on your hands. And you know that gunk, the cat food stuff that drips all on your hands … I’ve licked that. I chose an elderly guy – seventy-five – to fuck to end my marriage – Yeah! I stole the cat – that cat, the one who lives with me – from his perfectly good home and made friends with his real mother. And I write it. I write it all. Like I’m writing us. Now. In The Drag Queen Vegan Café Ways in which a cortado can prompt existentialism (No. 5) 00:00 / 02:05 To unsheathe September’s lunaria seed from their waxy shields, you should first lick your fingertips. Take a single flat seed head between two fingers and a thumb, and make to snap your fingers. It falls apart. The crispy ovals flutter down. Catch the falling seeds. Some will jump away, and found the Honesty of two years’ time. Pearl lantern moons remain. On vanilla feet with toffee apple fur, the cat forgets we do this every year. He chases the papery housings like they are secrets I’ve been keeping from him, or his own free will. In darkness he practises sleeping round corners for when winter comes. But for now, everything is drag-queen vegan café, Banksy in Port Talbot, Frida Kahlo on blue brick. The buddleia points tourmaline fingers at pigeon-blood cosmos wearing bee earrings (clip-ons). The wingbeats of overhead sparrows purr like flicked open fans. Last night’s massive bedroom moth (critch-critch) has laid eggs from her orange furry bum, and left the building. Everything is voluminous, daubed-on, lipstick smeared, waiting to die. An apple drops. The astilbe is still. Publishing credits Ways in Which a Cortado Can Prompt Existentialism (No. 3): A Walk With Scissors (Infinity Books UK) You Don’t Know What I’ve Done: exclusive first publication by iamb In The Drag Queen Vegan Café: Full House Literary Magazine (Issue 2)

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

Hear poet Hilary Watson read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Hilary Watson back next the poet Growing up in South Wales and now living in Cardiff, Hilary Watson graduated from the University of Warwick with a BA and MA in Writing. She was a Jerwood/Arvon mentee, and has had her poetry published widely in UK and international magazines, including Atrium , Ink, Sweat & Tears , Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal and The Interpreter's House . Hilary is also an editor at thrutopian writing magazine, Bending The Arc . the poems Accountability Badger 00:00 / 01:31 Badger glares at you in the street from behind the net curtains of his two up two down. No chimney smoke, no love escapes the chamber of his heart. He knows what you did, what you keep doing to yourself each time you choose avoidance, when you’re too fearful to forgive. ‘Unforgivable,’ he mutters, sips tepid Marmite, his claws tight on the handle of the mug. He’s thinking now of earthworms, slugs, of how you hold him hostage in this Valleys town because you crave accountability, refuse to take the test, to do the work yourself, the stripes behind his ears turning grey. ‘One last job,’ he’d said, typically assignments taking half as long. He clasps the teaspoon in his padded paw, stirs clockwise, anticlockwise, tuts, shakes his head as some new excuse issues from your mouth. Excuse 00:00 / 00:59 The excuse arrives in the palm as though it was always going to land there, like a dragonfly out on the hunt, settling to eat its catch. The excuse is effervescent, more delicate than expected but who can deny that weight of legs in the centre of an outstretched hand? Fortunes cannot be read, but look here; that stance across the life and love lines folded into crevices. Who could ask for a more convincing reason, conceive of a lie that cuts so deep as the jaw of that magnificent dragonfly crushing a gnat to cells? Pygmy Hippo 00:00 / 01:05 Lean on my gate. The man in green throws carrots into this stew of my own making. Submerged, I can hold my breath for ages, walk underwater, bob for air, my nostrils bubbling apostrophes. Toss me a dandelion leaf. I’ll show you that to love me is to know no decency. Shy, me? I can go months without making a peep. I sweat blood. Ferocity’s my middle name. The man in green throws cucumber, fern fronds. I am going to die here. A young human climbs an old human. Some fun, at last. Find the diamond resting on my tongue. I’ll open wide. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Anna Milan read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Anna Milan 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 Rachel Smith read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Rachel Smith back next the poet New Zealander Rachel Smith, a chef and Open Floor Movement Teacher, has made London her home. She's had work published in various journals and anthologies, including The North , Magma and The Book of Love & Loss . Her recordings of her text Bed Unbound toured Scotland on a bus as part of the Day of Access . Rachel's poems for iamb are part of her ongoing project, A Manual for Dying . the poems We die in stages 00:00 / 00:55 Claire wakes us at 6am. She’s already called Mike, so we all go to your room. You are still curled up, could be asleep, except your rattling breath is absent. We toast you with whiskey as the sun rises. You are soft dead, still warm. The undertaker comes after breakfast, takes you away. You are back early afternoon, laid out on your bed in your town clothes – moleskin trousers and Guernsey jersey. Ben and Penny come in to say goodnight. Penny says Antone is really dead now, eh . I know what she means. You were soft dead before, now you are dead dead. Firewood 00:00 / 01:03 We all knew Dad wouldn’t want a shiny coffin. But the pine ones are expensive and there’s not much money. So Matt and Mike turn Dad's woodshed into a workshop, get macrocarpa planks from the local sawmill, debate the design. Matt spends three days sawing, planing, sanding, worrying it’ll be too heavy, that Dad won’t fit, that the bottom will fall out. He fusses over the strips along the top: Dad was so good at lines. The morning of the funeral we test it out. Matt gets in and my cousins and uncles lift, shaking it slightly, laughing in the way you do when life and death are close. Matt gets out relieved, shakes himself, speaks at the funeral about Dad’s love of fire, says I’ve built you a coffin of the finest macrocarpa. Provisions 00:00 / 01:12 Six men – sons, brother, nephews, old friend – lift Dad from his bed in a blanket sling, swearing as they carry this body that does not bend around corners. There is relief when he’s in, that he fits. We put in earth from farms he loved. Roses, seashells, fern fronds. A bridle and dog collar. His radio. Rosary beads. Niall Fergusson’s 'Empire': That’ll give him something to argue with. Jamie makes him his cheese and onion sandwich. His teapot that drove us all crazy with its constant dribble but which we miss as soon as it’s gone. The half bottle of Jura from the night before. Tui sing. Father Joe says a prayer and the lid goes on. The men lift Dad into the hearse, silently. We are bound in this ancient rite, where carrying a coffin is still one of the most sacred things. Publishing credits We die in stages / Provisions: exclusive first publication by iamb Firewood: Magma 75

Hear poet David Pecotić read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. David Pecotić back next the poet Born a poet nearly five decades ago, David Pecotić has had many adventures in the years between then and now: as seeker after truth, academic, partner, public servant, father and counsellor. Recently, tragedy reawoke in David a need to express himself in poetry. His poems have so far appeared in the Australian Poetry Collaboration and The Canberra Times . David lives in Australia, where he's in a complicated relationship with his daimon. the poems There are Days You Cross Hunted 00:00 / 01:08 There are days you cross hunted in rivers, shaded and breezed. Foot after sucked foot, this little can be a lot if it’s yours in the solid dark. Where you stand, others barely there move slightly unseen and you see to live is to live around yourself closer and finer and doesn’t take the eyes in a face. Where they narrow, they blow in. Where they long, they draw out. Such small round things slip through the net strings. Even at the last strung at the estuary’s edge. Inheritance 00:00 / 02:00 Out of time, I am become what I was: a fisherman off & on a black goddess island, where the fish that make dreams school their poison. Back on shore, I tell the bees the names of every gutted vision earned. A million glass wings beat sweetness in return. Further inland, I am the goat man, hoofed hard-on chasing every woody piece of arse, even my own. Up on the mountain, I’m his father, equally erect but frozen, the holy thief whose hungry mouth made the music. A dead ringer for shades who wings for tricks. Only in the forest dark can I reach down my throat to pull myself out, a vukodlach , wolf-skin turned inside-out, drum-like and ruddy. Village monster I kept down for so long, I had cut my hams, pricked my whole body with pins to prevent this: I cannot pretend after this operation I won’t walk about forcing your submission. Strigun —human by day, demon by night; held in check by my krsnik : the warlock gift with his hawthorn stick, that takes away, gives peace by piercing, the heart again. Hoarfrost Future 00:00 / 01:02 Winter is always colder half-broken— the frost bleeds out as a sacrifice to what comes. Today is as hard and cold, sparkling a sharp wet razor. So many melting facets, so much hoarfrost future. Glass candy hard on a ground we can’t feel getting warmer, so subtle the seasoning. I flow out the same, rhyming the solid ebb-tide— wounded words and eyes swallow unsatiated spongey beds of loved leaves. What does the sun-warmed wind mean to their delicate rise and fall? They tell me to my autumn and spring I don’t owe anything at all. Publishing credits There are Days You Cross Hunted: Australian Poetry Collaboration (Issue 34) Inheritance: Australian Poetry Collaboration (Issue 30) Hoarfrost Future: The Canberra Times (February 2021)

Hear poet Lewis Wyn Davies read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Lewis Wyn Davies back next the poet Lewis Wyn Davies is an emerging poet from an impoverished upbringing in Shropshire. His words have been published in Dreich , streetcake , VAINE and Free Verse Revolution , as well as in Broken Sleep Books' Masculinity: an anthology of modern voices and the Macclesfield Samaritans anthology, 100 Poems of Hope . Lewis has also collaborated with illustrator Saffron Russell on his debut pamphlet Comprehensive and the A E Housman-inspired A Shropshire Grad , featured on radio as part of BBC Upload, and been shortlisted for two literary prizes. the poems Son of a Hooligan 00:00 / 01:27 It’s another Saturday away from home and I'm hurtling towards the capital, picking up accents, mingling with tinnies, trying to hide my identity while all the boys wear Stoney badges on their sleeves. They sway together and fill the carriage with jarring songs about their Black heroes. They joke about their bird being in control back home and howl like the cavemen who first spoke of such roles. A couple of them spot the crest on my chest and ask if I'm in a firm. I suppose I am through birthright – my family tree has the same crass banners hanging from the branches directly above me. I ponder how I escaped the fate that befalls all these boys from all these towns. I think about my father and his brother – who wear the gear, watch the videos, read the manuals. Yet when a blue bird’s wing streaks across the Severn, or a robin’s red breast hops out of a nest, their ego is punctured. And I thank their mother for flying those banners, as the lads on the train bash cameras while marching out into Milton Keynes. The Last Time 00:00 / 01:02 No one knows the last time is happening as the last time happens. For example, today is my ex-best friend's birthday and I think about him more in five minutes than I imagine he's thought about me in as many years. I still see his wild eyes in every bottle of Captain Morgan and whenever I hear my favourite band’s biggest riff – or his. He used to pick me up and we’d sing and bitch hard in supermarket car parks deep into the morning hours, even with brightening skies warning us of our looming shifts. I’d Snapchat his rants and we’d ignite belly laughs that burnt so long they nearly made us sick. But I can’t tell you the last time we did any of this. And I feel as if he’s just made me laugh again after tearing out my heartstrings. To the Boy on Rhossili Beach, 00:00 / 01:30 As the final days of my twenties were spent hopping across Mordor terrain with my partner in hand – the breeze pulling me up by the hair and exposing my widow's peak, waves from Venezuela finally finding the trim of my jeans to seep and rest in, the pair of us planning our next blockbuster season together – you walked the shore with a spirit that channelled an abandoned bus shelter. We were on a washed-up stump, scrubbing sand off our exposed toes and watching your wounded figure crouch to etch a note, not knowing how right we were in our prejudice. When we finally approached, life is unkind at the best of times blared across the bay with you still in frame, and killed us completely as you slowly became just another human ant in the fifty-mile mist. Enter Shikari fan or hollow young man, you may not care to know that I wished for happiness every starry night in my forgotten cul-de-sac, or that my shabby street cat watched on as I cried in silence (I certainly wouldn’t have given a fuck about some stranger’s better life at that time). But it might be worth knowing we replied with love. Publishing credits Son of a Hooligan: Free Verse Revolution (Issue XII: Ancestors) The Last Time: Masculinity: an anthology of modern voices (Broken Sleep Books, 2024) To the Boy on Rhossili Beach,: Dreich 11 (Season 6, No. 71)

Hear poet Louise Longson read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Louise Longson back next the poet Widely published in print and online, Louise Longson is the author of Hanging Fire and Songs from the Witch Bottle: Cytoplasmic Variations . She won the inaugural Kari-Ann Flickinger Literary Memorial Prize with her upcoming collection These are her thoughts as she falls , and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. She was also Highly Commended in The Hedgehog Poetry Press' second A Proper Poetry Pamphlet Competition in July 2024. Translated through the twin prisms of myth and nature, Louise's poetry brings together her personal and professional experiences – she's worked for many years with survivors of trauma at Rape Crisis, as well as with charities focused on alleviating loneliness and supporting mental health recovery. the poems Drowning on Dry Land 00:00 / 01:41 We go in a drought year, and she remembers a sacrifice that was made to the god of Water, when the village was buried under the flow that ate the river and the broad pale fillet of rock where she used to bathe and fish. Huge metal bulldozers rumbled like tanks, planes practiced overhead for a dam-busting raid over the water, unaware of the irony. Twisting streets she walked to school and clean white stone houses became slack and rubble. The foundations of her childhood crumbled away with them. In this dry summer of baked mud, the reservoir breaks its silence. The village has come up, gasping for air. Her memory gushes out in a flood of nostalgia that is hard to bear. It is a hunger, remembering. An ache that hurts more than all the forgetting. By spring, it will slip back beneath the water and she, too, will be gone. Only a pile of sad stone remains; the shaped and faced remnants of a former beauty. History will hold them; both no longer existing and existing at once in an ellipsis of space, a lacuna of fluid time. Battered Woman 00:00 / 01:03 That’s what she was called, back then, like something you’d get from a chip shop. She was the chicken on a spit with the life cooked out of her. Pasty skin, pied with bruises ebbing in colour from Baltic-blue-black to sick mushy-pea-green. Dried ketchup in her nostrils, split lips. Told by her mother she’d made her bed and must lie in it, she could have her cake but couldn’t eat it. Knowing her place is in the queue, waiting her turn until he shouts. Who’s next? Wrap her up in words: newspaper stories said she screamed so quietly the neighbours never heard. Nobody saw her until she slipped back into the waters; disappeared with the slap of tailfin and quicksilver flash. I trawl for her in my dreams. How I Find and Lose My Mother 00:00 / 01:29 Hope is what keeps her going down the street, to the unremarkable house that, like her, needs a new coat of paint. To be repointed, given an extension. I only had twelve weeks. She comes with a shopping bag and a social worker. It’s a crash course in redemption. Pass, and we can leave together. Fail and we will be sent off discretely in different directions. We were never left alone. Each moment of interaction kept in a detailed logbook. You were to be picked up, hugged, fed, changed into a non-risk situation. But, sleep deprived, there were two things I could not keep: my anger at bay and you. Now, forty years later, she tells me her story. History scrapes me, scribing pain onto my scrimshawed bones. Here I am. Unbroken, whole, and as perfect to her as the day she walked away, alone. We only have twelve weeks. Publishing credits Drowning on Dry Land: The High Window (Summer 2023) Battered Woman: Songs from the Witch Bottle: Cytoplasmic Variations (Alien Buddha Press) How I Find and Lose My Mother: Allegro Poetry Magazine (Issue 30)

Hear poet Christopher Arksey read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Christopher Arksey back next the poet Writer and voice actor Christopher Arksey's debut poetry pamphlet, Variety Turns , appeared in January 2024. He's had poems published in Anthropocene and The Friday Poem , as well as in the anthology, Companions of His Thoughts More Green: Poems for Andrew Marvell – while his poem Ceremony was Carol Rumens' Poem of the Week in The Guardian . Christopher lives in Hull with his wife and two sons. the poems Nil 00:00 / 01:03 As each left more arrived. Old friends, colleagues, church regulars joined to say goodbye. I gave up my seat and perched on the windowsill, edging in and out of last conversations. A one-time congregation of sorts. Some dredging holiday stories and office jokes to keep it light, stifling croaks of laughter. Some were all prayers. While others warmed their chairs in sniffled vigil and waited for the next to take their places. Your life’s work concentrated to one room. In their faces flashed sides I’d not seen in you. Roles outside of mum and wife, the ones that rounded up your life, were now diminishing in full view: loyal companion, beloved boss, true believer. My singular loss humbled by multiple thefts, as each arrived and more left. The Laugh 00:00 / 00:37 It was like you’d surfaced after a spell underwater; spent and roused at the same time, breathless towards the inevitable big reveal of your long-delayed punchline. Then you let fly – the laugh of someone twice your size – with such potency it rocked your frame and sent you seeking my arm for balance, stopping short of doubling over from the strain. Only this soundless record of it exists. And I forget the joke, but I’ve got the gist. Tried Praying 00:00 / 00:20 While time travelling in Google Street View, I spot your try praying sticker. A year or two uproots the bay tree and plants a new For Sale sign, while pansies bloom in the entrance. Not one of these made a difference. Publishing credits Nil / Tried Praying: Variety Turns (Broken Sleep Books) The Laugh: The Friday Poem (November 4th 2022)

Hear poet Jeremy Wikeley read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jeremy Wikeley back next the poet Jeremy Wikeley is a writer and poet. His poems, essays and reviews have appeared online and in print in publications including New Welsh Review , The Observer , Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal and The Friday Poem . Jeremy's poems have also been anthologised in three collections from The Emma Press. Originally from Romsey in Hamsphire, Jeremy now lives in London, where he works in the arts. the poems Train to Cambridge After Louis MacNeice 00:00 / 00:48 Beyond the window the sky is turning pink and it’s more surprising than that song I wrote about how surprised I was that the sky was turning pink. It’s turning slowly, like it’s enjoying itself, as if there’s no hurry. The evening is encouraging the sky to follow it, and the sky is following, in its own time, pink and pacing itself while the train and I are racing to get ahead of the turning of the world only to find no matter how hard we try to push ourselves we are always a sleeper behind the evening as he strides along outside, crushing the sun under his thumb, mixing red dust with wet clouds and swiping dark streaks across the cheeks of the sky. The Vandals Remove the Ark of the Covenant (as told by the Ark) 00:00 / 00:33 Carnage! And then we were rocked across the Mediterranean – a box in a box in a box … over the chopping winter sea until a strange tongue told us we’d come to Carthage. And they plonked us down on the edge of the quay, as if we were any old package. Which we are! A box in a box in a box … under tarpaulin on African docks in Carthage. Poetry in Wartime 00:00 / 01:08 If this was a war I could be sad for myself. What bad luck (I’d say) to get caught up in this. So, the inevitable conscription into the most statistically dangerous wing of the armed forces (half the bombers didn’t make it back) would be more bad luck, like the hole in the kitchen ceiling. If this was a war, I would be worried about dying, not other people dying and the very possibility might make the uncertainty tolerable. If it were a war, every survivor would have a different set of stories, or at least there would be enough variation in our experiences for them to bear the repetition. As it is, nothing we do seems very important and because we don’t know what’s working, we don’t know what’s worth it, or what kind of world will come next. All I know is I will have to live in it. And it’s right, it’s right, it’s right. I’m not saying it’s not right. But like everything right, it is unbearable. Publishing credits Train to Cambridge: In Transit: Poems of Travel (The Emma Press) The Vandals Remove the Ark of the Covenant (as told by the Ark): exclusive first publication by iamb Poetry in Wartime: From the Silence of the Stacks, New Voices Rise, Vol. 1 (The London Library)

Hear poet Bill Sutton read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Bill Sutton back next the poet London-based Cumbrian poet Bill Sutton (he/him) creates visceral, abstract reflections of nature in his work. His poetry has appeared in Anthropocene and new zine Overgrowth . In 2015, Bill and his brother formed music project Slabtoe, which has released several albums and EPs. Bill's recently lent his poetry/song-writing abilities to the BFI-funded short film The Leerie , and his debut screenplay Corpse Road will be produced later in 2022. the poems Helton 00:00 / 00:22 to see stars, the hulk of barn, the rise behind and silent. to see rain, smoke wrapped, the valleys slope and dreaming. to all orbits, a ripple, and the quiet fields sleeping. Lend The River Rain 00:00 / 00:32 The lights on the hillside are a constellation, scattered. A half-remembered conversation; a friend lost, a family gathered under a winter sky, whose clouds are torn and tattered. 'It’s just a shadow cast from a different day, but none of that now matters … ' I lend the river rain. It lends it back again. Black Barn Rise 00:00 / 00:23 shadows in the mist, an echo where a wood once was. moon cold mist, settled on the river's twist. above and behind, black barn rise, there, where an echo of a wood once was. Publishing credits Helton / Lend The River Rain: exclusive first publication by iamb Black Barn Rise: Overgrowth (Issue No. 1)

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