Hear poet Fidel Hogan Walsh read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Fidel Hogan Walsh back next the poet Hailing from Ireland's County Cavan, Fidel Hogan Walsh has seen her poetry appear in many journals, including Poethead , Pendanic , The Irish Times , The Storms Journal , and in the University College Dublin Archives. She's been heard reading her work on the Eat the Storms poetry podcast numerous times, and was a featured poet on A Thousand Shades of Green . Fidel's poem What Peace Feels Like made her a winner of the inaugural Enlighten Prize (with Hambly & Hambly), which she won again in 2021 with her poem for you . Her first collection, Living with Love , was published in 2020, while her second – Time , a collaboration with photographer Julie Corcoran – launched Ireland's Culture Night that same year. the poems We Are the Night Lovers (save our souls) 00:00 / 01:00 A canvas showing off on a sweeping splendorous indigo sky crowded in bright twinkling trailing stars Waning nightmares seek solace in the silver crescent of a moody moon Nocturnal shift ends on a peeking pink sunrise whisking away dreams Death itself wanted part of A river lullaby lulls sleep on a meadows lush green grass in the dark shadows of love — we are the night lovers Travel Through Time 00:00 / 01:07 We are born of water in a white mist of sea & of everlasting memory Where land & ocean touch wild wind storms sing in a whistle of waves Loud natural eerie sounds erupt from ancient callings of man & of beast On a rough morning tide with poor visibility I see you out of reach You adrift of free movement wandering aimlessly where memories have no meaning I now must travel through time to bring you back to our sacred beginnings Surreal ~ 22nd May 2024 ~ The life you know, is no longer known. 00:00 / 01:08 the mountains half in shadow & hues of deep blue they beckon only then do i whisper out your name quiet quickening echoes take you to my outstretched arms nonexistence reality were we of this world & of our time the sea we dip down to those stormy crashing dreams the end we are no more / you / me / & of now what remains deep green lush mountains & a calm sea Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Kara Knickerbocker read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Kara Knickerbocker back next the poet Kara Knickerbocker is the author of chapbooks The Shedding Before the Swell and Next to Everything that is Breakable . Her poetry and essays have appeared in Poet Lore , HOBART , Levee Magazine and Portland Review , as well as in Pennsylvania’s Best Emerging Poets and Crack the Spine's Anthology: The Year 2020 . A Best of the Net nominee, Kara has received support with her work from Murphy Writing at Stockton University, Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and the Gullkistan Center in Iceland. She currently lives in Pennsylvania, where she writes with the Madwomen in the Attic at Carlow University. Kara also co-curated the MadFridays Reading Series. the poems If You’re Asking Why I’m Leaving 00:00 / 00:42 Because this row of brick houses ghosts with heads on backwards, because my skin sleeps under your nailbeds, because there isn’t a color red I’ve loved since the car crash. Because even birds fly south, and because without wings, your lips travel down just the same because I let you, because religion was the well-oiled machine of our bodies. Because thoughts of a baby’s open mouth, because I am egg yolk, Because I cannot imagine anything more breakable than if I stay. Etymology of a Middle Name After Airea D Matthews 00:00 / 01:16 Rose— of Latin origin, rosa, meaning fragrant flower, meaning my mother bloomed with me until I came out, pink & right for the world, the last precious baby dangling on the branch of our family tree, because after my brother & before me there was a seed that only bled where it was planted, never grew into a face, or name, & they crowned me Rosie, because my cheeks flush redder than they should be from petaling my way back to the womb, drunk-blushed attempts to stay long-stemmed, always wild & because a daughter is a beautiful thing, my mother tells me, though I know the letters sound more lovely in her mouth. O, Rose that grew from the concrete, rose into a woman— I wonder if she will ever accept there are thorns around my hips not by nature but by my own doing, if she fully knows I’ve buried bouquets from lovers because what other pretty hurt do you know that both stalks the living & adorns all the dead? Show Me How to Trace This 00:00 / 01:08 & if you had a map out of your body, where would it go? What is the point of exit you’d choose to leave yourself? I’d choose the wounds already claimed: the fried egg-shaped scar burned above my left knee, my crooked pointer finger like an almost question mark, or better yet straight from the new titanium heart— where a stranger sleeps at the wheel, keeping time. That slicing open drove me into questions I still can’t answer, like where is the intersection of my own skin & all that hides underneath? How to steer away from the bump in the road that lives in my chest, unmake detours into strange tomorrows. Pulse lines are wires that got crossed along the way & now I need a key to a home I’ve already lost. These blue veins were never routes that would carry me there. All the rivers I’ve known are muddied, emptying into the mouth of someone else. Publishing credits If You're Asking Why I'm Leaving: Pittsburgh Poetry Review Etymology of a Middle Name: Kissing Dynamite Show Me How to Trace This: Sampsonia Way Magazine

Hear poet Elizabeth Langemak read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Elizabeth Langemak back next the poet Elizabeth Langemak’s poetry has appeared in AGNI Online, Shenandoah , Pleiades, The Colorado Review, Literary Imagination , Sugar House Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal and elsewhere. Her work has twice appeared in Best New Poets: 50 Poems by Emerging Writers , and been featured on Verse Daily . Elizabeth lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and is the recipient of fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center and Breadloaf. the poems What Everyone Has Done vs What Everyone Would Do 00:00 / 01:36 Even taught hard and so long the truth is we have and would always back out again. I think. Really, who has not, is not still ready to erase their own name, to flip and come up new. Not unsing the Song, precisely, just stop singing. Like seeming stopover or changing clothes, like promised return but stepped or stepping out for good, into Gray: how simple it was and would be again. Each wolfthought behind us reappears fresh, everyone did and keeps flicking back hoods, revealing our faces changed and still changing. So many faces behind and beyond us. With lap-hands, with crossed legs, an upright spine of baked bricks and stiff, Virtue forgot us and never remembered. Unfooled and refooled by gnawing and guilt, each breath and Choice was and still would be lastingly fixed, decisions made wholly from cinders, from shadows and sparks hopped free of our fists. So here’s what we did, what we would still do despite having done: eyes shut and necks turned we reached and keep reaching shoulder-deep and our hands fell still falling on something blind but Beating O Beating and warm. We are pulling it into the Light. All My Questions Become Their Own Answers 00:00 / 01:23 When her legs struck out shuddering like fat lightning bolts. When my breasts turned to stones within stones on my chest. When I couldn’t tell hindmilk from foremilk, and my collapsed tent of gut held no guess. When she wouldn’t sleep and so no one would sleep, or vomit flew like a fist on the end of a long, gloved arm from her throat. When I knew better, but still. When over a phone, when in fever, when in the puce doctor’s office with my list and all I’d forgotten to write there. When I held her up to the mirror I looked like a person holding her question like it could be her answer if only she could coax it to speak. Is she sick. Should the doctor. What should I. Who should you. When I finally nippled a finger into her mouth would you believe I felt first punctuation squatting under her tongue full stop like a fat bud of cartilage, an unfused bone of statements from which all questions understand how to grow. I asked then, I keep asking: who planted this pea an inch under soil, who waits for that pea to lift its hand into the light, who knows what it will want to know. Conspiracy Theory 00:00 / 01:48 In Arkansas, the red-wings go down, nearly two thousand slapped out of the night. Beaks pointed, wings drawn to their sides as men shot from cannons, they land unseen, on their sides, like pepper shook out on a small Southern snow. They fall in a scene now cut from the movie. They fall together with a noise mistaken for gunfire, or soundless as dust falls, one to the ground at a time. One burrows up from the earth. Like a stone from a sling, one kills a deer with a crack to the head. When they’re poisoned or struck or sucked whole through the props of a low-flying plane, when they cramp, when wind ices their sails or God licks them with lightning, they fall. They fall from great heights, not as Icarus fell, flailing, but they duck into the dive and go down as though grateful, or, some say, they fell upright like jumpers whose chutes wouldn’t open, feet first toward accordion crush. Not every faller makes for the grass, but some plunge into the false skies of blue cars, some are delivered to doorsteps like badly thrown papers. Before you wake up, some are dog-gotten or swept downstream like small ships, one lands in a nest, one is not dead but crawls into the hand of a man dressed in orange. While you sip coffee and news of air travels over the ground, an enemy folds one into your bed. Most are gone by noon. Some were never there. Wherever they go to, they stay. Publishing credits What Everyone Has Done vs What Everyone Would Do: earlier version appeared as The Be Good in Yew All My Questions Become Their Own Answers: originally appeared as The Answer to Everything in Storyscape (Issue 19) Conspiracy Theory: Shenandoah (Vol. 63, No. 1)

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

Hear poet Heidi Beck read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Heidi Beck back next the poet Heidi Beck grew up in a small New Hampshire town – emigrating to the UK in 1998, where she now lives in Bristol. She holds an MA in English Literature from the University of Chicago, and an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University. Her poems have been published in The Rialto , Magma , Poetry Ireland Review, The North, Butcher's Dog , Finished Creatures , Under the Radar and The Alchemy Spoon . Heidi also has poems with The Friday Poem and And Other Poems . She was longlisted in the 2020 UK National Poetry Competition. the poems Hunting Season 00:00 / 02:35 A girl steps from a yellow bus at Loon Pond Road, anticipating a long walk home—down the hill, around the pond, past the swamp with the beaver dam, the final stretch just woods—with her heavy bag of books. It’s hunting season, and the men are out in pick-up trucks, stalking through the woods with ammo, scopes and shotguns, dressed in their camo, carrying coolers stuffed with cans of Budweiser, Coors, Tuborg Gold. The girl puts on a safety vest, flimsy fabric in fluorescent orange, begins to sing—Supertramp, Fleetwood Mac, all the lyrics to Evita —loud and long, so they hear she is not a deer, so loud she does not hear the pick-up truck slow behind her. It pulls ahead, stops, just past the swamp. Hello, Honey, where you heading to? She smells the beer as they corral her. Let us help, all smiles and hands. The book bag drops, the vest falls off, she’s on her knees, white rump to the air, trying to keep her tail down. She shakes her head, now fuzzy and furred, nose dark as dirt, everything narrowed. Her ears stretch, eyes widen, gaze becomes fixed, the world slows. She remains still, their laughter like an echo, then lifts herself on spindly legs, fragile bones at risk as she attempts to kick, hooves flailing. She tries to buck and punch, awkward in these limbs. Flanks damp, she spins, all panting ribs, spins again, falls. A girl steps out of the forest, arriving for dinner, late. They glare at her clothes, her hair, her wet, evasive face. She tries to describe how she was a deer. Stop! they cry, stop with your lies, your make- believe tales. Don’t bring this trouble here. All the Things Flying are Overwhelming 00:00 / 01:34 Even here, which feels like home, I need to be ready for the planes, the sucking sound and roar, the possible explosion— I’m mapping the trajectory of falling and flame while trying to track the flamingos, their splayed-out necks, the pink under wings as they jockey and speed, then they’ve gone too far and a flash of godwits whistling past, turning white turning black left white right black white black and he shouts You’re missing the spoonbill, just over your head! Didn’t you get it? and I swing my lens and there’s only an egret flapping to splash too late but then storks, Shit , my settings are all wrong, wheeling higher and higher, keep calm, find the pattern, pull them into the frame and keep on walking past the mountain of salt to Iberian magpies in the pine tree shade and don’t startle the hoopoe on the manicured grass, then the bright yellow spot of a weaver bird calling from the reeds by the lake, but look up, maybe an osprey or eagle, how the gulls squawk and lift in a tangle and a pintail duck crash-lands by an ibis, startling a grebe and everything’s flying and the crack of a golf ball and I flinch, remembering that man and the blood pouring out from under his hands. Family Bible 00:00 / 03:00 GENESIS On the first day I watched The Flintstones , The Jetsons , Sylvester and Tweety. I created sculptures from slices of American Cheese. I climbed up my slide and saw that it was good. EXODUS And so 2.6 million men were sent to Vietnam; another 40,000 fled to Canada. LOTTERY The Law said birthdates should be placed in capsules, mixed in a shoebox, transferred to a glass jar. NUMBERS The birthdates of three of my uncles were chosen. GEORGE He raised his hand when they asked who could type, and stayed behind the lines, tapping out words like defoliation. He didn’t know about the truce between Agent Orange and his chromosomes until he was nearly sixty, when we learned how acute lymphocytic leukaemia could kill you, and how quickly. HARRY He remained in combat, first with ‘the Gooks,’ who took out part of his intestine, and then with Benedictine and brandy and blackouts, with nicotine and nightmares. The hemochromatosis turned his skin grey, the liver cancer waited for the lung cancer to get him first. He died on the bathroom floor, haemorrhaging from a shot of chemotherapy. 1 PETER He once kept a pet duck and ordered a crocodile by mail. He could recite the statistics of every attack by a Great White Shark. He met the love of his life over there, Heroin. He married her, became a panhandler, settled down to a lifetime’s free access to methadone. 2 PETER He sits in a classroom of medical students at Yale, Exhibit A, a shrunken, shivery gnome in a beanie, insisting that everyone would be happier with Heroin. WIDOWS Katheryn and Antoinette. REVELATION On Christmas Day my father is on his seventh mission, flying cargo out of Okinawa, with seven Vietcong shooting at his tail. I visit Santa on his Throne in the belly of a Lockheed C-130 Hercules, the seventh child to sit on his knee. I beg him please could he bring me a Barbie. He gives me this Bible, full of Good News, instead. Publishing credits Hunting Season: Live Canon Anthology 2020 (Live Canon) All the Things Flying are Overwhelming: Finished Creatures (Issue 6) Family Bible: The North (Issue 63)

Hear poet Simon Middleton read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Simon Middleton back next the poet Simon Middleton lives in Dorset with his wife and small children. His writing has appeared in Envoi, IOTA, The Cadaverine, Firewords Quarterly and The Best New British and Irish Poets 2017 . His poetry has been shortlisted for The White Review's Poets Prize 2022 and The Magma Open Pamphlet Competition 2020. Simon's work was also highly commended in the Winchester Poetry Prize 2020, and has earned him the 2018 Bridport Prize's Dorset Award. the poems Daedalus III 00:00 / 01:18 The parameters of our prenatal world are governed by the gospel of The Pregnancy Bible where life is measured in weeks and foodstuff. (I feel uneasy likening embryos to food. Like Saturn devouring his children.) Still, Kate marks each new seven-day cycle with a new object of comparison: from the first, tentative days as a poppy seed to a kidney bean, from fig to peapod to lemon. It challenges my knowledge of fruit and vegetables. I was scuppered at week ten, when the baby was the size of a kumquat. The weekly shop has become a scientific exploration where the grocery aisle spans an installation of life. The Bible says, 'Fully formed, head to heel, baby will be the size of a small pumpkin.' Near term, I find myself standing absently at supermarket shelving, head tilted, imagining bodily features on a melon. Space Was a Material 00:00 / 02:18 Next time we see him, he is a still-life arranged in a plastic box. A Special Care Nurse leads us like a guide at a museum, where we stand, examining the thin rise and fall of his back. We stand as we did once in Hepworth’s studio, natural light alive against whitewash walls, our focus centred on a table with a plinth that held the polished form of an ‘Infant’. Remember how little air there was? How the whole fabric of our lives seemed to fray then re-thread, so the room felt pliant? And how, standing before ‘Three Forms’, we were told, For Hepworth, space was a material, distance a quality – as much a part of the composition. In the ward, machines draw his life on a screen in shallow peaks, as he lies beneath a knitted sheet. Remember how little air there was in Hepworth’s room? Seeing the child she shaped, knowing ours was forming in the dark of your womb. Was that the texture of longing? Or do we feel that now? Seeing his half-strapped face. The ventilator trunk. The scalp crowned with gingering blood. The newness of his body mapped by wires. Remember how the air seemed to cement, suddenly? As we found our hands parting a break in the air, venturing a terrified palm inside to trace the frightening space above his tiny form, afraid to cup a part of it, in fear we may dent the fontanelles, disrupt the shallow concertina of his lungs. Is this where we are now? Feeling the material of our lives tighten around us, as we wheel him in a tank through the world’s corridors. Isolette 00:00 / 01:13 Thank you for holding him while we can’t, for keeping him safe inside your little frame, for the solace in knowing, clear plastic crib, that at the end of a long white corridor, you exist to prevent his life from faltering, that an object of such sadness, with a most beautiful name, is there, whirring quietly like an undertide, like a holy mother, blessed altruist. Let’s praise these small mercies, despite their slightness: he’s warm, at least, we can still see him through your transparent walls, in your crystallising brightness, and we can pray the grey-lilac of his newborn form will settle, that his knotted pulse can harden, that the prone lightness of his body will brace. Thank you, small plastic island, for bringing him back. Publishing credits Daedalus III: IOTA (Issue 98 – 'Bodies') Space Was a Material: The Bridport Prize Anthology 2018 (Winner of the Dorset Award 2018) Isolette: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Aaron Caycedo-Kimura read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Aaron Caycedo-Kimura back next the poet Aaron Caycedo-Kimura is a poet, painter, and cartoonist whose poetry has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal , Poet Lore , DMQ Review , Tule Review , Louisiana Literature , The Night Heron Barks, and elsewhere. Aaron earned his MFA in creative writing from Boston University and is a recipient of a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry. With Ubasute , he won the 2020 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition. the poems Family Anthem 00:00 / 01:11 I walk into the garage from side door sunlight ELO on my Walkman my eyes dissolve the darkness to discover my parents locked in a slow-dance embrace whispering to each other like lovers but my parents aren’t lovers they’re Japanese never kiss hold hands say I love you not even to me once I asked Mom if she loved me she replied my mother and father never said it but I knew they did my parents hear my shuffle separate like guilty teenagers she escapes into the house he into the Ford opens the garage door I fumble forget what I was looking for but all afternoon replay that dissonant chord What’s Kept Alive 00:00 / 01:27 She crunches her walker into the sea of pebbles surrounding the stepping-stones, tells me, This bush with flowers is Japanese. That one is too, but different. I hover close behind, ready with an outstretched arm as if to give a blessing. Pick that large weed near the lantern — by the roots — and throw it into the pail. My father planned and planted this garden fifty years ago— hidden behind the fence of their Santa Rosa tract home— but he’s gone now. She hires a hand to rake leaves, prune branches once a month. Soon she’ll be gone. I’ll sell the house, return to Connecticut. A stranger will buy it, become caretaker of the garden, but won’t know that from their San Francisco apartment my father transported the Japanese maple, cradled in a small clay pot — the momiji now guarding the north corner— and that my mother chided him for bothering with a dying shrub. The Hardest Part 00:00 / 01:50 The fire truck siren downstairs raided the air of my mother's dreams. She'd scream in her sleep , my father told me, even after we married. More than a decade past the Second World War — for him, American concentration camps, for her, the firebombing of Tokyo — they moved into a San Francisco apartment that rented to Japs, a one-bedroom walk-up above the Post Street fire station. They painted their bathroom black — It was in style then— shelved books, unboxed a new rice cooker, watered a shrub of Japanese maple potted for their future garden. When the station got a call in the middle of the night, the rumble of the overhead door crumbled into the wreck that was once her home. Swirling lights flashed ancient trees into flames through the thin silk curtains of her eyelids. No warning, no drill, no cover. My father stilled her body, his broad hand on her shoulder or hip as they lay in the dark listening to the slowing of her breath. The hardest part of those nights , he said, was waiting— sometimes hours—for the truck and the men to come back. Publishing credits Family Anthem: DMQ Review What’s Kept Alive / The Hardest Part: Hartford Courant

Hear poet Barney Ashton-Bullock read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Barney Ashton-Bullock back next the poet Barney Ashton-Bullock is the poet and librettist in the Andy Bell is Torsten music/theatre collective, as well as the narrator of his own verse on Downes Braide Association albums. Barney's poetry has been published in a wide range of cult poetry journals, the Avalanches In Poetry tribute anthology to Leonard Cohen, Broken Sleep Books' poetry tribute to Aphex Twin, and Pilot Press' Queer Anthology Of Healing and Soho Nights . His most recent books are Café Kaput! , F**kpig Zeitgeist! and Bucolicism . the poems apoplex-perplex-complexities 00:00 / 01:56 bicarbonate frenetics; the genesis? multi-generational, tape-to-tape deck dubs, their foamy flumes of playback hiss as rattly, miscued mixtapes mis-struck in bonkerz flanged brushstroke percussives of amp-max gated smash o’snare – metronomic melismatic wonk, polychromatic sub-glottal alien sprechgesang aligned to time signatures noodled in varispeed; in fraying flays o’dubsy drubbin’ vectored beatz. nu-alt clubbin’ zeroed in on decorous glitchin’ and ad hoc, thereof, repeatings as if spiked reportage to mux a retro cha-cha stomp distort to crunching churns irradiate; to arcing, vaulting interference compacting in a vice of abstruse its apotheosis to gungey grunge – maced in such displace, an aura; billowed streaks astray in strobics, we all, thrift of light limb, aflail in apoplex-perplex-complexities. Aphex et al in the cans, sofa-slothing in Glaxo infused confuse of veiled glissando drippage, arrhythmic mallow sonics of opaque, oracular, aural twistesse; irregular polygons transduced to audible, to choriambic vassals in vibrato sensoria, splice-spruced micro-loops, re-up sampled to peak infinities flippering as fractals in mid-air … Village 00:00 / 02:12 These dew dashed Ballard Downs at dusk, Their flannelette filtered translucency, Their ethereally gust thwacked sparsity, Their muted refractions of wheatsheaves asway, Grainy as y’like in the drawn light; We, mere pinpoints a-prance, Free-styling in the flashlights ‘Midst their giddy levity … Our scruff of signature left in the stomped crops trample. We vortices of loneliness Eschew the coital co-substantiates Of a GPS iPhone app engineering freelove Betwixt such brittle strangers … Who melt for lust and pour for sex. The top road through which we, as e’er, shuffling exeunt To the 09.07 market day bus; The rusting hoops of stanchions of the withered Wreck of shelter in which ‘first time’ memories were made … Cigs, ket, stout, cide, hash, snog, blow, laid, vom, chuck. On that trusty bus immemorial, now, only e’er on a Thursday, Sometimes, silently, without word or intimation, Through the wanding wonk of cattle pong that sands the breeze, A youngster won’t return And an aged farmer’s wife in well-versed, mock concern Will glintily gliss ‘er tamps o’goss … 'Dreckly, all spuddlins hath ped off thru d’dimpsey of a yoretide eve Dey’ll match an’ hatch as t’were e’er thus; ’cordin’ t’dis eye, ’tis ne’er a goodbye!' As, in absentia, all flaxen fledglings were wont t’do As, in perpetu, all sylvan nestlings e’er ‘av and must … 'Afore the byre’s been tromped to mere dander dust.' inferno al forno (impact +3 days) 00:00 / 01:55 Cobalting cinders in soot-storms A blanketing-dust graphite Dead-black clinker spun Back into nightfall With no morn, nor star You said I was ‘ telegenic’ Until my taste for ash Until the bankrupt shop units Were hulled to make befilthed Lino lain concourses For various novelty vending machines Purveying massprod sundries of a sexual nature With a comedic saucy bent Until the rebellion, until the bootstomp Until the hefty cruciforms borne by looters Had wireless CCTV nailed to each axis Arcing each orifice Our wan limbs shackled by bracelet and anklet tags Our movement shadowed by weaponised tannoy drones I have no coins to spend or insert All long since smelt or dealt All pockets full of oxides … I’d rather have been pilloried and cook-pot quartered Than be in this scourge of rootless, retroid reminisce Recalling when urinals and not welted legs Were lacquered in perma-drip masticity of piss And your soul, and my soul, Miles adrift, miles apart, Cankered in a centrifuge of dead, dead sparks … Publishing credits Apoplex-Perplex-Complexities: You’ve got so many machines, Richard! – An anthology of Aphex Twin poetry (Broken Sleep Books) Village: Bucolicism: Alt-lite verse for a post-pastoral England (Cherry Red Records) Inferno Al Forno (Impact +3 days) : Response (Dreich)

Hear poet Cora Dessalines read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Cora Dessalines back next the poet Cora Dessalines is a queer, London-based freelance writer. They were former assistant editor of their university’s creative writing magazine ~FACTORY~ and editorial assistant at Guts, an independent publisher of memoirs and short-story anthologies. Cora has had their work published in Lacuna, a literary magazine that showcases the writing of young women and non-binary people of colour. They are a lover of fashion, space and anything colourful, and are currently at work on their first afrofuturist science-fiction novel for adults. the poems takotsubo cardiomyopathy 00:00 / 01:53 they say it feels like s i n k i n g that tectonic plates shift and create fissures wide enough to swallow you whole quite the opposite, in fact it isn’t quicksand nor an overlap of scrambling hands and clawing fingers craving to drag you under no, it is a rupture in the laws of physics a losing battle between mass and energy where gravity knows no bounds— it is the feeling of your feet g n i t f i l and your body capsizing gnizispac to mould with this wretched world in which you rise, climbing the clouds, your head facing the ground all the way they say it feels like a cavernous well but the devil is a liar that chilly water is the fluid in your lungs, sib the build-up from elevating to such high altitudes where dew droplets crystallise on your eyelashes and your oxygen is slowly snatched while you ascend them six layers as punishment by this, a most wicked cosmos to be honest, you should’ve guarded your rassclart heart instead of looking up and thanking the universe for blessing you with syrup and silver and steadfast loyalty that love was on loan, little horror and the night sky tricked you into thinking those were jewels stitched onto a dark tapestry instead of black sheets stuck on using a roller and wheat paste i wish i could’ve warned you the light you saw are just bullet holes we call stars. so this is love 00:00 / 01:35 i want it to be glorious. i want us to douse ourselves in it to take a match in each hand light them and set ourselves on fire! our mixed ashes must ripple and rumble until we, two phoenixes, rise birthed from the pyre of our own making— it needs to be … ravenous. and make us forsake all earthly foods save the tongue-plucked cherries that grow above our inner thighs, swallowed and savoured a sempiternal reminder that we are the fruits of a supernova, dual spheres of magma. we will steal matter from each other like two thieves in the night gorging in tandem lava— combust we until i only want it if it’s going to bring me beyond the brink of destruction and make astronomers believe planets will form from we, these dead stars’ disk. stars above, it must be r a p t u r o u s! and so fucking consuming that my lungs become your air becomes my lungs fill faster than what my breath can catch. trust, we best be willing to lean over balconies sever our bloodlines and make a pact that our hearts may only beat at the same time as each other or else, leave us permanently breathless. … i want it to leave us breathless. because to us that is love. love in reverse 00:00 / 02:38 legend has it our meeting made flowers blossom in the gloom of winter, spurred leaves into elevating back to their branches as they shifted from red yellow to green again with every day we spoke we, two divergents, formed our own timeline and while everyone else’s nights came quicker the sun would spread its arms just for us, purposely setting when the rest of the world rose for work this was back when i thought my love for you shattered laws when i believed the night we met caused mangoes to grow in the north pole like a unity of contradiction sprouted from life’s continual war of opposites instead of lying in that field of tension i made my love for you alter the meaning of cause and effect in the hope i could understand how the imprint of your head on my shoulder was there before i even knew you see, i used to think we would be infinite to spite the general line, that even though we’d submitted to the logic of change, pledged our lives to nada hay absoluto y todo revoluciona me and you would stay the same but this was back before i knew my honesty would have me barred indefinitely, would have my words chewed up and spat back to me at a later date, with the mushy remnants of them laid on my palm like a spoiled crop you told me afterwards you didn’t want us to end like this but i’d already washed my hands i only wish you hadn’t waved the wrong red flag, my love it was better when whatever we were was an unspoken thing, curved into your left cheek like a tiny sickle it is said our meeting unravelled the rules of the cosmos, burned the cool red stars so hot we made one another tremble, as proof that in the last analysis we could’ve won this world together if either of us just had some compassion now the thought of you reminds me that we are in the time of monsters, running parallel to each other so that our contradictions never overlap, never reveal that me and you were in the bloom of life, from a planet where you don’t refuse to see me even after i beg the politburo for a meeting Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Kelly Davis read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Kelly Davis © Clare Park back next the poet Joe Williams is a writer and performing poet from Leeds. His latest book is The Taking Part : a pamphlet of poems on the theme of sports and games. His other work includes the pamphlet This is Virus , a sequence of erasure poems made from Boris Johnson’s letter to the UK during the COVID-19 pandemic, and the verse novella An Otley Run , shortlisted for Best Novella in the 2019 Saboteur Awards. the poems Calling them in 00:00 / 01:33 On platform zero, the next train departing is the 08:26 to Oblivion, calling at Emptiness, Nihilism and Existential Dread. This train has no carriages. Please mind the gap between illusion and reality. If you require assistance, stand on a chair and scream. On platform zero, a man has been waiting for the 10:44 to Scarborough for 87 days. To pass the time, he has grown a beard and memorised the names of every Secretary of State for Transport since 1919. The information screen says On time. On platform zero, the 12:15 to London King’s Cross has been replaced by the 16:22 to Inverness. The Tannoy says they apologise for any convenience. Please wait for the doors to open before boarding the train. First-class passengers are advised to go somewhere else. On platform zero, you can view the plans for Northern Powerhouse Rail and the HS2 extension, which will definitely be completed by 2048, latest, unless it is delayed by planned engineering works or llamas on the line or societal collapse or unprecedented coastal erosion. On platform zero, they are building platform minus one. Grandfather 00:00 / 01:16 The bairns play under the tables, waiting for Lisa to finish her sweep of the room that tastes of tab smoke and last year’s graft. Lisa gets to Denny, head down, checking the bingo in the Daily Star. She lifts her bucket, delivers a practised line: It’s for the miners . Denny hoys in a pound coin, bright from a nylon pocket. You can ha’ this, pet. Ah divven’t like them. Tha wus nowt wrang wi’ the nurts. When Lisa’s done working the room she takes the bairns outside, where glass from a stoved-in nearside window catches her palm, drawing blood. Meeting in deep time 00:00 / 01:20 The first time was magical, baked in psychedelic sun, a third summer of love. Sat outside the dance tent, passing smuggled spliffs, our skins scraped the parched earth to sounds curated by Massive Attack. On stage, someone broke the news: John Major had resigned. Raised the biggest cheer of the day. The second time was Biblical, rain-slapped, mud-soaked. We didn’t see the papers that compared it to the Somme. Pre-mobile, we had no means of contact over ravaged fields. I never found out why I ended up in the rescue van. Might have been something in the whizz. I waited for you for hours. Publishing credits Calling them in: Dusk: Stories and poems from Solstice Shorts Festival 2017 (Arachne Press) Grandfather: exclusive first publication by iamb Meeting in deep time: Magma (Issue 81)

Hear poet Steve Smart read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Steve Smart back next the poet Poet and poetry filmmaker Steve Smart is based in Angus, Scotland. His poems have appeared in Atrium , Firth , The Poetry Shed , The Writer's Café , Ink, Sweat & Tears , Poetry Scotland , Gallus , Consilience and elsewhere. Recent collaborations have meant Steve's poetry has featured in anthologies published in New Zealand, Canada and Scotland – while his poetry films have been screened at various international festivals and exhibitions. In 2023, funding from Creative Scotland helped Steve and Irish poetry filmmaker Colm Scully deliver a new poetry film workshop for the Scottish Poetry Library. the poems luminous without being fierce 'Light in Scotland has a quality I have not met elsewhere. It is luminous without being fierce, penetrating to immense distances with an effortless intensity.' Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain 00:00 / 01:20 We meet were ridge meets sky – your kin are only here, above a rising contour of warmth, an unrequested flood shrinking your island tundras, stranding you upward, a feathered bellwether. You switch from being, to being unseeable – lichen-hill-skin you’ll speckle-wait me away, hunker into arctic whites – if the high corrie snows hesitate, else doubtful greys for spring. I forget so much, but remember each of all our meeting places. The map knows their names – I recall stones and land and the rise and fall, where you were, were not, and were again. I saw your presence shimmer, while I gazed breathless – while you waited, while I was not too much, while you were still. entrenched 00:00 / 24:07:02 Mine hunters with doll-sized trowels, flense the russet soils with caution. Is that slight discolouration the circumference of a wooden post? That line a distant season's burning? Stratigraphy layers the plot, yields the story. Circumstantial evidence – is that scrape a street number, a mason’s strike, or just more tumbledown sandstone subtext? The palm gifted a stone tool finds an easy accommodation, caresses as if to cup a cheek – to retouch, re-dress familiar bodies, in more than a change of clothes. How much for ten minutes chat? Of different days and other treasures – of how children always fight, of what the sky says in the dark, of one mind horde to another. sidelong From the United States Library of Congress details of the first photographic portrait image of a human produced in America: Robert Cornelius, head-and-shoulders self-portrait, facing front, with arms crossed. (Daguerreotype, 1839.) 00:00 / 00:59 Robert Cornelius remains sceptical. He does not trust that it will work, or that a specific future develops when this image will be visible. He does not pause to comb his hair or consider us, but guards himself against the possible exposure, against the theft, of unmarshalled spirit. Slow counting silent hesitation, he glances sidelong from 1839, doubtful of our existence, his focus on what he next intends. Publishing credits luminous without being fierce: Alchemy and Miracles (Gilbert and Hall Press) entrenched / sidelong: exclusive first publication by iamb , though sidelong was previously blogged by the author

Hear poet Robert Harper read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Robert Harper back next the poet Robert Harper’s poems have appeared in The Interpreter’s House , Prole , Acumen , Ink Sweat & Tears , And Other Poems and elsewhere. He's also had work featured in anthologies such as Fathers and What Must Be Said , A New Manchester Alphabet , The Every Day Poet , An Anthology to Seamus Heaney and The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry . Robert founded and edited the magazine Bare Fiction , and has recently launched online poetry magazine Disjointed . the poems An embarrassment of poverty After Michael Hoffman 00:00 / 01:09 At 1pm you sit and look at the poem. Among the other things you should be doing, you drink water to allay the sweat and read, squint at, your midnight endeavours, a tower of books leering like an old professor. You, compelled, or just desperate to let the thoughts flow, lay on your side unable to sleep. She, right there, like the painting you love and for which a light is always on. A thought enters your head. You tried too hard, yet held back and, subsequently, pushed too far forward. You wonder if the sleeping, the loss of it, curled like a cat in an empty box of paper, is what is up. You read it again. Embarrassment comes and you thank the gods for your humility, ask of the page – How dare I look at you and think of poverty? Obstacle 00:00 / 01:14 A boy sits alone (a roundabout) watching cars oblige as they dutifully trust an indirect route around the obstacle. He considers himself ‘obstacle’, traces his eyes via entrance to exit and nods his head. Half yes, half whatever appears on the road around him—obstacle. JCC 428H, Bangor 1970, Cortina Mk III, yellow and chrome trim. HFK 015E, Dudley 1967, the lost Ford Zephyr, abandoned, a yard monster. Dreams plagued with red trucks, green buses, black Austins to remind boy of time before his own existence. Dad, car, ahead, his birth. Obstacle. What is he looking for behind the seven inch sealed beam of a Hillman Imp? A connection to his beginning—an accidental merging where 2 people, going past obstacles, become stuck. How do others make such 00:00 / 01:31 Forked tongues. Unsure how to proceed, I detach my arm, look inside the open flesh for morsels hiding beneath the skin, quivering before the opportunity to be plucked or nurtured in the between state of draughty window by a slavish boy who wishes for nothing but new worlds and the road right in front of him. The road, full of signs, made up symbols to delay the choosing of the path, the leaving of one, one side which will not be taken, will take time. So I remove my leg and look beneath the skin; surely hidden there is knowledge of the groove, how one hops in and out needling the unsung sound — like a shellac 78 left in the heat of the sun to warp and throw you off the scent of music long lost; the jive and the rock, hard places rolling beneath your single step, out of reach of your one arm. I cannot see anyway so I pop out an eye, peel back the layers for clues — something observed but missed, known yet forgotten. It conjures nothing new, but I begin to understand the little boy whose appetite is itself ready to be swallowed whole. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb