Hear poet Aysegul Yildirim read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Aysegul Yildirim back next the poet Aysegul Yildirim's poetry has appeared in various international magazines. Most recently, she contributed to Anne-thology: Poems Re-presenting Anne Shakespeare . An academic working at the intersection of environmental humanities and sociology, Aysegul has published a poetry pamphlet titled Plants Beyond Desire . the poems uproot 00:00 / 01:10 Her only childhood memory about plants is picking up flowers. Dahlias from grandmother’s garden; a tiny medley of purple dead nettles, camomiles, vervains, brought home from park visits with mum. By the end of the day, they’d always be in the rubbish bin. Years later, she got put in a tiny medley of humans packed in an aeroplane, never to come back. Those left behind are still tired from grief, even though the plane has not crashed yet. By the time the purple on the hands was cleared, dead nettles flourished. Nobody had cried for them, ever. Later, the idea of home has gone for us all, tiny corruptions magnified. Except for the roots. The Long Stay 00:00 / 01:52 I follow the threads of the dark grey carpet for some time. ‘Fix it before moving out,’ I answer myself. Something creeps through. I start measuring the cold surface of the confined space with my flesh, at once, and wear it. Fits me perfectly, I think, except for the spiders who want to escape. They breathe surprisingly loud. I spoil their fantasies by staying fat and awake. The love-hate relationship. Includes giving space and pesticides. I need to go out. Putting on my coat, doing up the windows, on the doorstep I calculate: if I leave now, the performance. Unforeseen contacts. Time is kaleidoscopic in this stone-built body. I have the eyes of a housefly. The carpet’s cleaning will be reduced from my deposit. My only connection with the anthropocene. My solitude is my image. If vision requires distance, I must have been doing it all wrong. Let’s start again: I need my coat when it rains. I need water too. I can’t unlearn the language of solitude, I can’t speak two languages at a time. It’s real. And it’s dark. I take off my coat. Feel the soft feel of the carpet. The grubby, quiet softness. re-root 00:00 / 00:46 Someone told me to burn sage indoors but the true magic is that no two leaves are identical. And the fact that I took a dry leaf from where it waits for me in the mud. It was the beginning of winter in Falmouth and sometimes you need that moment of acknowledgement of your image by the assemblage of the holy cliff. I’m not able to speak their language. I was receding endlessly. The leaf stayed with me nevertheless. He just fell down, he thinks. But he only had to leave himself gently to the ground. No two fallings are identical. Some- times you need to root faster than you can fall. Publishing credits uproot / re-root: Plants Beyond Desire (Broken Sleep Books) The Long Stay: exclusive first publication by iamb .

Hear poet Caitlin Stobie read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Caitlin Stobie 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 Lysz Flo read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Lysz Flo back next the poet AfroCaribbean Latine polyglot Lysz Flo is an indie author, podcast host and member of The Estuary Collective. She won the Ignyte Award for Creative Non-Fiction in 2024 , was a Voodoonauts Summer Fellow in 2020 , a Grubstreet Instructor from 2020 to 2024, and an Obsidian Black Listening Fellow in 2022. A creative educator since 2020 – with a writing workshop series in MOCA NOMI – Lysz is the author of poetry novel Soliloquy of an Ice Queen . Her poems can be found in FIYAH , The Hellebore , Lolwe and Strange Horizons , amongst other places, and she's done various multimedia projects with O, Miami . the poems a sestina of the grief that lives in yearning 00:00 / 03:11 how do I greet the grief in yearning the hoping for something to happen dreams of hands held in a sea of stars are we a constellation of impossibilities to be poet & ocean—sleeping in a desert a lover lost in a chase of majestic echoes a majestic chase | a lover lost in echoes I am greeted by the grief in yearning to be an ocean—a poet asleep | a desert absorbed in hoping for something to happen is my desire a constellation of impossibilities dreams of hands held | a sea of stars hands dream to be held in a sea of stars love lost in a chasm of magic echoes my grief constellation of impossibilities greet how I remain in yearning the grief of hoping for a constellation to happen to be poet & ocean—forced to be desert to be poet & ocean—yearning in a desert dreams of hands deserted in a sea of stars hoping for something to happen lost | a lover | a chase | met magnanimous echoes how do I agree there is grief in yearning are we a constellation & impossibilities we are a constellation of impossibilities to be a sleeping poet & ocean dried to a desert how does the morning greet grief ‘s yearning a sea | of dreams of hands held in stars a lover majestically lost in the echoes & hoping for something to happen hoping for some one to happen are we a constellation of impossibilities already lost loving majestic echoes cursed to be poet & ocean—emptying in a desert dimming dreams of hands held in dying stars how do we greet grief in all this yearning in how I greet grief in my yearning haunted by dreams holding hands in a sea of stars as a poet & voracious ocean—slumbering in a desert Over the rice 00:00 / 01:07 there has been laughter there is love there is a rice going cold right now watching an argument rice been here wild a few feet tall watching the world go by the sound of births the people fight the feeling of being seasoned in tears the observer of many histories Rice been & as we become there is rice right now holding the mold of a child’s fist & shaking in a plate with an adult’s rice been feeding us through sorrows through deserts food & heat alike rice has stood with us in the rain now replace rice with a name & see how much love rice has given Glimmers 00:00 / 03:22 I woke up and the sky was the bluest of bluest of blues. No cloud—just sun and blue | on shuffle—black like you starts playing and I already know that love is in the suns beams coming through the window. My bestie calls me early and I worry—but they say—have a good day friend. Thank you for loving me. & maybe the world isn’t healing but I am. I am. I am. I woke up and the sky was the bluest of bluest of blues. And I get a random cash app for this meal I was craving—just when I was down to my last few dollars and cents. The sun follows me down the road. Soledad and I drive down to my favorite spot. & they already know my order. I woke up and the sky was the bluest of bluest of blues. My crush mentions to me mangoes. Looking for a way to fill the space between time and perhaps mutual possibility. Or maybe its two Haitians talking about Mangoes. Mangoes were gifted to me after pining for weeks. Big melon sized—golden currency mangoes. And I know ‘I am loved by somebody.’ I woke up and the sky was the bluest of bluest of blues. I have been enclosed from these glimmers. Trapped within my own silence. Calling myself away from home. Frequency waning. But today the sky is the bluest of bluest of blues. And love came with me in a bag with mangoes. This is the closest I get to a kiss and embrace—my hands balancing this overflowing bag. Of golden offerings of joy. A gift. An unknowing answered prayer. I woke up and the sky was the bluest of bluest of blues. My crush compliments me and I am glowing could be the mangoes or could be the compliment. I have forgotten to embody the sun, but apparently everyone can see my beams through the virtual windows. I have been the bluest of bluest of blues. But today I am golden, and sun, and love. I am glimmering in hope. Black like you starts to play and I. Look forward to the possibilities. Of crushes or moreso blooms. No clouds but precise vision & windows—the love. The joy, glimmers Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Róisín Ní Neachtain read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Róisín Ní Neachtain back next the poet Róisín Ní Neachtain is an autistic Irish-Scottish poet and artist now based in County Kildare, Ireland. Though mainly self-taught, she was briefly educated at NCAD and Trinity College Dublin, before studying for two years under Irish artist Gill Berry. Róisín is creator and editor of online literary and art journal Crow of Minerva , and has had her poetry featured in a number of digital publications. She's currently at work on her first collection. the poems Memory 00:00 / 01:12 I held my dreams in my palms Though they were bleeding A soft tremor against my skin Some were shallow Some like a cave Some pricked my conscience Their threads tethered to my flesh And I chewed their weights to set them free My teeth wore down I fell in a haze through our memories When a hollow sound echoed in my mouth And fell past my lips You bit my tongue and hummed The ebb of nameless laughter A cadence of sorrows Spinning a steep melody Now I am unfearful of pain A slow praise of closeness Breathing blue In midnight songs Tightening my pulse Fingers twisting in a frenzied dance To unworded lyrics My last need stilled Remembering Without Believing 00:00 / 01:21 Remembering without believing The stars appeasing Against their obsidian abyss Heat and light unseamed from dust Remembering without believing Questions pressed in psychosis And promises which feel no shame Illegible hypergraphic promises Of love and empty rooms and symbiotic existence And undivided sounds and realities And reproached pain and laughter And dissonant dreams Which lead to my repossession A petty heresy of Silence Look at this earth embedded beneath our nails Our language measured by prayers And lumen a measure of their glare Look at this skin scored by hate Their unfamiliar eye Rooted in fear All truths unchanged in time The Edge of Reason 00:00 / 01:22 A room Like a trite cage Between these four walls Where prodigal sons and daughters return And are rejoiced and bound once more A spiel read like a dead poet A bastard pain The object of such a conclusion Perhaps an accidental gale? Swept and tendering our bones Archaic songs of sorrow That lull us in their readiness Black on white Black on black White on white Letters made barely visible And nonsensical A few steps closer to the edge of reason A past and future arrested in a photograph What will happen if we awake again To see these passings going beyond that edge? To the beginnings of someplace? Someplace more of a sedentary mind A hollowed space in each Man’s chest Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Gillian Craig read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Gillian Craig back next the poet Gillian Craig is a Scottish poet and author who spent 20 years in the Middle East, South East Asia and East Asia. Her poems have appeared in a wide range of publications, including New Writing Scotland , Orbis , Abridged and Black Bough Poetry . Gillian is also a children’s author and poet , with four books published by Marshall Cavendish as Gillian Spiller. She currently lives in Scotland with her daughter, and is writing her first novel. the poems Helen, by accident 00:00 / 00:38 On a windscourged Scottish shore, Hogmanay, three lists brightly wrapped in leftovers. A fire in a biscuit tin, beacon in the storm sparked, smouldered, caught the wishes, snatched them away: a little hope visible as smoke. I intended the catharsis of fireballs; the forgiveness of krathongs. Instead, it seems I stood on the beach in this now foreign land where I’d screamed despair to the howling dark two nights before, and unwittingly vowed to burn it all down. Return to Saigon 00:00 / 01:29 On the long island I too am stranded on, he scans the gaudy propaganda, with its flat figures, stirring sentiments. The traffic laps the kerb. Later a book and a drink and I sit across the street, thinking of the old white castaway, and see him still on the same island, gazing at the traffic. He gives two bright young travellers friendly directions and a story; they laugh and thank and leave him. He resumes his post, staring into hypnotic wheels. ('I've been waiting since early morning to transfer power to you,' said Duong Van Minh, surrendering the South in 1976.) I know, although I do not know, he is no stranger here, and yet seems lost, waiting, watching the road now, not the traffic, for some sign he is remembered too. Eyes trained on the ground, he could be looking with young eyes again, when life was fierce, and any evening wheels could carry a friend, a foe, a flame, himself. As long, it seems, as he is peaceful, makes no sudden movements, things may rearrange themselves with their former brutal clarity. He bows a final look at what was lost. ('Your power has crumbled. You cannot give up what you no longer have,' said Colonel Bui Tin, cutting the strings, tying loose ends.) Stupit fucken wurds 00:00 / 01:01 A man sprawled on the station bench indistinctly opining, gleefully goading you as only a 3pm drunk in hi-vis can or does. When your vape shattered, punctuated the platform, I thought it was a semicolon; I expected something more. The Glasgow train was approaching platform 1. See stupit fucken wurds. That was it. No explosion. A slumped smoulder of despair. The carriage gulped, shunted you on to Kilwinning or beyond. Words can wound, tear, set light winds of fury, we cleave, hew, bark, we resent the toll the sewers we cross exact. We are so often misunderstood. But I wish you knew thae stupit fucken wurds were a poem. That’s all it is: the right words delivered perfectly at the right time. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Emily Cotterill read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Emily Cotterill back next the poet Emily Cotterill is a Cardiff-based poet originally from Alfreton in Derbyshire. Her pamphlet The Day of the Flying Ants was part of Carol Ann Duffy’s Laurate’s Choice selection. Emily has been published in a variety of print and online publications, including Poetry Wales, The North and The Waxed Lemon. She's currently working on a first full collection about celebrity, storytelling and pop culture. the poems Slag 00:00 / 01:12 I have loved coal, like a teenage girl loves an older guitarist with a rough black smudge of eyeliner. I have built my life on it, screamed down decades for it, COAL NOT DOLE – bared my soul for it, but old women gossip about the pit. I know the world has had enough of it. Coal – with its head full of history, strong arms, filthy engines, heavy, the small town sex of it. Broken bodies, white knuckle wives, the silence of canaries – has risen from slag heaps and pit heads to thick air spluttering into anyone born late with an old miner's lungs. I have loved coal but recently, when I sit in the fresh place built on the scar of my grandfather’s pit, I have loved birdsong, greenspace, the safety and hope of it – wind turbines, rising white beacons, sharp armed, slicing clean paths to a future. The Greatest Punk Album In The World Ever (Disc 2) 00:00 / 00:44 I am consciously, consciously picking up women: to carry in my pockets, to throw at rough walls in moments when something might make them stick. I have lined my back teeth with Viv Albertine, replaced my extremities with Patti Smith. I have built a soft curve around a sad razor, there’s blood in my mouth that’s familiar. I do the things men do, just better. I have swapped my memories for the future, but when I whimper, hear Debbie Harry scream. The Cheeseburger Love Song 00:00 / 01:26 At the window is a woman you have loved despite your diet, gorged on the look of her with the guiltiest parts of hunger. Her deft hands dance on the wax wrap paper, forearms flecked with a hundred spitting oil scars. The fast food tattoo. She is always here, and you suppose that she remembers you, from her un-kissed acne years and all the warm paper bags between. You, who would surrender your torso to the drive-thru window, to take her by the faded polo-shirt collar and to have her. Her lips would have the cherry pink taste of market stall gloss, her mouth drenched in free fills of fountain cola and the thing is, she has seen you, all your faces in those repeated flash cars. She could make you in a minute. Plunge your heart and her hand into the deep fat, feel nothing. You are ruined, crisp and bubbling. She scrunches your wrapping, she throws you away. Publishing credits Slag: A Change of Climate (Illingworth) The Greatest Punk Album In The World Ever (Disc 2): exclusive first publication by iamb The Cheeseburger Love Song: The Day of the Flying Ants (Smith|Doorstop)

Hear poet Jerm Curtin read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jerm Curtin back next the poet Originally from County Cork in Ireland but still living in Spain after many years, Jerm Curtin received the 2021 Patrick Kavanagh Award , as well as the 2020 Cúirt International Festival of Literature's New Writing Prize for Poetry . He's also won the Listowel Writers' Week Single Poem Competition on two occasions – first in 2015, then again in 2018. the poems Strangers 00:00 / 02:44 Remember how a traveller, who was unwelcome, would pass through our village in doctrinal black. We were untutored, barely literate. We'd say a low-flying swallow harboured rain, and he'd tut-tut at our weak embodiment of knowledge. We feared his presence; we'd seen strong men drown on dry land after his passing. Now it is no longer the past, nor yet the future, with its tracking devices and sanitary masks. It is the middle of the night. You cannot tell what is life and what is death. Like a newcomer in town, death enlivens even a dull Sunday, which is why, perhaps, we sheltered and adopted an outlaw blacksmith. He could forge the sharpest pike in Munster, a weapon which struck fear among our foes; but he preferred to hide with his descendants in our remote townland and fold them in our midst. Death can ordain like a patriarch, or come for the patriarch, now as human as anyone. It can flourish in the cold, night air like snow before it falls, when a man out of step with himself pulls up in an articulated truck at a service station far from his home and his destination, where he has trouble with the local tongue. A pump attendant, who'd represent Hope in a morality play, comes out to serve him and sees the damaged door mirror, blood smeared on the window, the dent. The attendant can deal with all of this across the barrier of language. There's been a death, no doubt – he catches as much, as the foreign driver proclaims both innocence and guilt and offers him a cardboard box with such beseeching and mumbled grief that the tawny owl inside, open-eyed, stretched on its back, could be either an injunction or a gift. Lola Wakes 00:00 / 02:54 Coffee grumbles on the stove, and Lola wakes. – I had my dream again, she says. At night, she reads in bed, books that lift the streets like bedclothes so that the corpses in the subsoil turn their faces to the light. – Look, she says, and points me to the shock of nakedness in war. My eyes are drawn to a beautiful bush of pubic hair, burning all the more fiercely because the woman's face has an open wound and she's sprawled dead on the street. – There were girls at school with those same names. She reads them out, smarting at the roll call. This is her town. I am a stranger here. I can ignore the grate of rough unwieldy boots on cobbled streets, can take the sandals from beneath the bed as if we lived already in the Arcady we wish to create, where our flowers and potted plants, geraniums on their stalks, might stand in place of severed heads on pikes and so redeem the past. – My sleep was soured, Lola concludes. * * * * * * All our dark childhoods, our backs to the border, only an outlaw's footfall away. I was the child who shrank from the nuns and kept my skirt clean and my mind a blank. I was chaste and silent, and desired above all else to be lifted up into the sanctity of Christ Our Lord. Instead, we were taken over the border for contraband coffee. The bus had wooden seats and smelled of bleach and black tobacco. We visited churches while the nuns went about their purchases. Then we stuffed the bags of coffee grains under our skirts, under our overcoats, under our blouses. On the way back, the nuns smiled their obsequious smiles and the border guards waved us on. We filed out at the convent gates, handing over the smuggled wares. Now the taste of bitter roast grains each morning brings me back to who I am. Cacti / A Poetry Lesson ‘Tan toste que acabada / ouv’ o mong’ a oraçon. oyu hûa passarinna / cantar log’ en tan bon son. que sse escaecéu seendo / e catando sempr’ alá.’ ~ Alfonso X, el sabio ~ 00:00 / 07:16 A time will come when every poem I write will be as ingrained as checking a watch, kneeling or making the sign of the cross. Faith will not matter, nor authenticity. I will come to my page like a blackbird to its branch, repeating the lessons I've learned: something to do with age, and with routine, and a grandmother opening her arms to a child. Years hence, standing above the sinkhole or the stairwell where a child’s look was lost, miles from the delicate arms at rest on a banister or a low windlass wall, I remember the silence on the sunny porch like a poetry lesson as she nurtured life from the dew in the shadow of the cacti. It was a feeling as old as the soft blue hills; the lichened orchard, past its prime, ripened with marvels and moss, like a backdrop to Paradise. Now, as I cross a thoroughfare, hand in hand with a lover, or run my fingers down an arm in the dark as if it were the railing on a deck, and other fingers return the caress, or as I hear the nightingales among the reeds, it is that first heaven I'm reminded of. How she lingered out on the porch, tending to cacti and potted flowers. How I knew I mustn't disturb her. Later she'll bring out her currant bread and Lucozade, a caraway-seed loaf. Meanwhile, I try to keep occupied. I find the mood has penetrated everywhere. In a dusty outhouse loft, I come across damaged and dated toys, school jotters, rusty tools and gadgets, fabulous tarnished fishing flies, American letters stashed in a box, red, white and blue around the borders, solemn statesmen on the stamps. I follow my grandmother, tall and thin, her hair like ermine, back through O. Henry to New York. Her face flashes out above the crowd. The Depression brought her home, in ways I am too young to know. When I am older, I'll remember; another bauble to occupy my time, but nothing on which to rely; I catch a sense of intangible doom – as in a fairytale, where no disguise will free a victim from a lure, or return a wanderer to their course, as if old age had built a wall about its house and time itself had stalled and drawn to it a child who knows they must not enter. But once I turned the key on that outhouse door, a century might well have passed before my grandmother called me from the parlour, her tête-à-tête with the cacti over. And almost as long before I'd read a poem about a hapless monk in an orchard. A worthless monk, beaten round the ears, whose beard cannot hide his sores, one the others can't abide, so he is sent to dig and till the soil, and while he works and weeds, he asks the Blessed Virgin for a glimpse of what's in store for those who enter Paradise. He prays among the seedlings in his care, under trees whose nuts will be their staple through the winter, and fruit trees, whose flowers he loves and worries through frost. He works and hears a blackbird sing. Or is it a thrush? His ear is poor, but the song is beautiful; he spends the afternoon in its thrall until the time to gather tools and join the other monks for Vespers. Wistfully, he hoists the hems of his tunic up. In evening light that bathes the path, some shrubs are now as large as trees, there are others he can't recognise; but it meanders as it always does, and takes him as far as the chapel. Bells ring. He steps inside, and genuflects. He makes the sign of the cross before the Eucharist. And finds himself beside a brother who he does not know, and whispers: 'Who are you? And which monks are these?' After the first outbreaks of plague had passed, the last monk of the old school came in from the garden, in aspect rough, speaking a dialect we barely comprehended. He asked for brethren we knew nothing of, so we first beat him with a stick and bade him talk sense. Then, contrite at our behaviour, we washed and fed him like a stray, showed him to a cell and allowed him rest. Next day we garnered from his nonsense, hobbled in that old tongue, that he referred to monks now long deceased, and a prayer to the Virgin Mother in which he'd asked to savour Paradise, whereupon a bird had sung. We calculate its trill went on three hundred years. Such is the miracle of prayer: a simple monk in a garden granted a glimpse of Paradise, while we hung on his words, and mourned its loss. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Adam Cairns read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Adam Cairns back next the poet Based in South Wales, Adam Cairns is a poet and a photographer whose poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies including Green Ink Poetry , Poetry Wales and The Ekphrastic Review . He's currently studying for an MA in Poetry Writing with the Poetry School and Newcastle University, and runs poetry workshops for the RSPB at the Newport Wetlands Centre. the poems Archaic 00:00 / 01:31 My sister calls, says there's something she's found I need to see— can a wound be buried in the blood could a faint trace of the trench he died in linger, ramped into an impression— a patch of green barley the farmer leaves— she shows me the album, the whole brown and white of him— dark eyes boring through the century between us, that ridge above his nose, familiar—I take the photo to a mirror, hold it up looking back at myself. I tuck the photo in my pocket, climb up Gray Hill to find where the forest crouches, my home hidden in the play of hills and there, beyond the frown lines of spruce, the moraine of stumps, a first go at bracken, I see they have planted trees, row after row of plastic-wrapped saplings shining in cold air, white as graves at Neuve-Chapelle each casting a small shadow—and looking back, the path ducks inside the shelter of archaic trees, the last of the sky going out my visible breath, the ghost of everyone there. Last year the apple tree smouldered 00:00 / 00:52 hidden wires from its roots charging limbs with sparks of blossom. All summer bees droned in sheaths of nectar and we leant together in deckchairs dozing. But this year came a cold spring and though frail blossoms opened a promise of coupling and sap within the flex of boughs surged in traceries of twigs the flowering failed. After you left ice sugared every petal with a touch of death so there are few fruit this autumn the tree alone with its leaves stalling. Only last summer there was still time for everything Balloon 00:00 / 00:46 sadness sweeps the boundary clear— lines of impeccable spruce a touch of sharpness in beech and ash— an old man I saw fifteen years ahead all this loneliness shadowing me the clatter of family I gave away easily a balloon wind-snatched from my five-year-old hand floating off and unable to trace a route back to my hand letting go the crumpled gaudy tin-foil of what we had collapses all the air inside long since voided Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Kittie Belltree read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Kittie Belltree back next the poet Kittie Belltree is a Specialist Tutor for neurodivergent students at Aberystwyth University. She received a Literature Wales bursary for her debut collection, Sliced Tongue and Pearl Cufflinks . Her short stories and poems have appeared in Cut on the Bias , Heartland , The Brown Envelope Book and Cast a Long Shadow . Kittie was recently selected for the Representing Wales Writer Development Programme, supporting writers from low income backgrounds. She's hard at work on a novel, and writing her second poetry collection. the poems The Magician’s Daughter In the fairy stories, the daughters love their fathers because they are mighty princes, great rulers, and because such absolute power seduces. ~ Carolyn Steedman ~ Landscape for a Good Woman 00:00 / 02:36 He draws a silk scarf from a secret pocket in his trousers – snakes it around wrists, splits in two, twists it taut, like her vocal cords, places it over her eggshell eyelids, then offers his hand – white-gloved bowing low, he lets loose the stolen jewels lining his jacket. She accepts – blindly – curtseying into the citrine shaft of spotlight that slices the stage in half, then footsteps into the dead-flat chest, arranges herself – doll-like – inside before he lays the wooden lid to rest. Until now he has kept her for himself, fed on a diet of sliced tongue and pearl cufflinks. The ritual begins before the stage door, before the audience, the dressing room – where he inserts the knife into her velvet and feathers, plucks her hair into tucks and tresses, places a glass slipper on her pillow. Thus, he enters without breaking and she slips seamlessly into the space conjured by his third wife who broke all his spells while he snored by the stove after Saturday matinée , stole the key to his best hat box for her whale-bone combs and peacock frocks and vanished with a ventriloquist from Vladivostok. He feels the thickness of the blade like honey inside her and the strength of his heaving old magic. Why, his wand can cut her in two – separate her bones from her meat like halving a peach. She is ripe, now, for his next trick – Now he has her undone, he will make her disappear. Now – Austerity 00:00 / 01:16 Dirty rat. You’re a fat duck in the House of Lords, fiddling expenses, pinching, farting. You insinuate intemperance, an excess of back-bedrooms, a debauched dissipation in disability benefits, washed down by a superfluity of free school dinners and social care. You point parsimonious fingers into porky pies. You lie with the fishes, the figures. You’re a tight-fisted wrecking ball, punch drunk on stuffing filthy wads into greasy palms and off-shore pension pots. You’re out to lunch, insatiable, voraciously force-feeding families into food banks, mincemeat, rent arrears, debt. You’re a champagne Charlie Chancellor of The Exchequer who neglects to check. You’re specks of white powder smirching naughty nostrils. You’re a glut of gluttony gutting kitchen cupboards, a rip-roaring rusty tin opener doing dentistry on the NHS; an overweight authority on obsessive abscission-making; on cutting things cuttingly; thinking yeah, what the fuck . Bond In 1945, August DeMont drove to the Golden Gate Bridge with his five-year-old daughter, Marilyn; told her to climb over the rail and jump. She did so without hesitation. Seconds later, he dived 'gracefully' after her. A note left in the car stated: 'I and my daughter have committed suicide.' 00:00 / 01:59 i For that was the fact of the matter. The fact of the matter in a sentence. A punishment. The blunt force of its grammar. Pragmatic punctuation precise enough to slice through time like a seam. That night, the rain fell in short, pattering clusters. Your clothes moaned in the closet. A dog slipped out into the dark. The quiet fact of the matter. Seven words for sadness. Words like stones. ii She never spoke. Someone said the car seat was still warm when they found the note. The matter-of-fact fumbling at the rubble of my heart. A cigarette butt tossed into space. iii How to smother a black hole revoke the last wordless slam of doors annul the unspoken bond deeper than any drop leaving me done with life. A sentence followed by a full stop. Publishing credits The Magician’s Daughter: The Lampeter Review (No. 11) Austerity: The Morning Star (May 21st 2020) Bond: Poetry Wales (Vol. 54, No. 1)

Hear poet Shiksha S Dheda read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Shiksha S Dheda back next the poet South African of Indian descent, Shiksha Dheda uses writing to express her rollercoaster ride of OCD and depression – but mostly, to avoid working on her Master's. Sometimes dabbling in photography, painting or the baking of lopsided layered cakes, Shiksha has had her writing featured in Brittle Paper , The Daily Drunk , Door is a Jar and Epoch Press . She's also The Pushcart Prize nominated author of Washed Away . the poems When I think about writing about flowers 00:00 / 01:32 The world is falling apart. Tearing itself into pieces. Then breaking those pieces into tinier pieces. It’s chewing itself up. Crunchingly. Crunch. Chew. Crunch. Chew. Spitting itself out. Vomiting. Convulsing. Should I be writing about flowers at this time? Should I be getting lost in a garden? In a beautiful world of growth and beauty when war rages around me? Should I write about flowers when the weeds of negativity, of malice, of suspicion, of anger, of desolation are fed by the never-faltering winds of my pessimism? Carried on the backs of minute ants – too small to comprehend that the salty sugar pieces that they carry will create a sculpture of paranoia – of nervous frustration – in some abandoned corner of my mind. Should I be writing about flowers when the anxious caterpillars of my obsessions burrow into my hands – eating them from the inside out, leaving behind beautiful wretched blood butterflies – bared, naked for all to see – to marvel, to mock: my insanity; a kaleidoscope of my helpless, vulnerable, aggressive, disappointing scars. Should I really be writing about flowers? Come, eat. Come, drink. 00:00 / 01:18 Come, eat. Come, drink. It’s my party – everyone’s invited. Eat this bread. Made daily – from the labours of my love – from the frustrations of my bored hours. Drink this punch. Perfected now – after months of trying different concoctions – after days of crying on the floor in defeat. Sit at my table. Worn out now – from days spent trying to be productive – from nights struggling to sleep, laughing at endless memes. Lay your hands next to mine. Cracked and raw now – from washing and washing, and washing – from waiting and waiting, and waiting. Speak. Let me hear your voice. I yearn for it now – after months of sobriety – after months of starvation, let your champagne voice flood my home, let your streamer hair flow across my table, let your confetti gaze lock eyes with my parched stare. Come, eat. Come, drink. It's my party – everyone’s invited. You’re invited. Martyr 00:00 / 01:21 I remember the war – intense, bloody – I fought for what I thought was right. Fought for what I thought would make a better country; a better home. For me. For all of us. For you. Wanting to be courageous, reluctantly so at points, wanting to carry you; even if I had to bear you upon my own weary back. I thought we had won the war. I thought it would be worth it at the end. Stumbling back home, I see the native flag. Torn. Battered. I see my home. Torn (apart). Divided. I see you. Embarrassed – by my wounds – – my scars – I cannot bear your silence – your reluctance – – your evading line of vision. Your disdain. Your shame. I yearn now for the sound of bullets, long for the uncertainty of spontaneous explosions, thirst for the imminent possibility of mangled death, – the opportunity to die a martyr. A celebrated hero. Not live as a burden. Fighting – daily – – embattled – – at war – within me. Against this civil society. Against you. Against myself. Publishing credits Come, eat. Come, drink.: Stanchion (Issue Seven) When I think about writing about flowers: Paranoid Tree (Vol. 8) Martyr: Washed Away (Alien Buddha Press)

Hear poet Kerry Darbishire read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Kerry Darbishire 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 Sadie Maskery read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Sadie Maskery back next the poet Sadie Maskery lives in Scotland by the sea. She's had her poetry published in numerous journals – among them, Fevers of the Mind , The Selkie , Green Ink Poetry , Crow and Cross Keys , Lothlorien Poetry Journal and Burnt Breakfast Magazine . Her chapbook Push was published by Erbacce Press, while her debut collection, Shouting at Crows was published in 2022 by Alien Buddha Press. the poems Beginnings 00:00 / 02:42 The first time we meet the shock is there but small, a pause in the celestial clock; a tick of time suspended, potentiality acknowledged. My heart refinds its beat. Life moves on. In quiet moments I find myself replaying the curve of shadows under your eyes and I wonder at your weariness. Another day, a touch of fingers on my shoulder and the heat flows, how can you caress so intimately? I walk away yet feel you across the room. When our eyes meet I know from the way our cheeks flush, we are magnets, an exquisite tug dilating pupils, veins, souls, it is more than imaginary, this pain, this want. We meet by chance, friends of a friend, and I want to say, if you were to take my hand right now, lead me to an empty room, press your leg between my thighs as I pull your face towards me, the wall cold against my back and the warmth of you so overwhelming I almost faint from hunger quenched, ferocity and joy, terror and delight, your tongue in my mouth, my fingers entangled in your hair, your hands caressing beneath the black soft cotton, belly, breast, my sighs, your breath gasping, diffident explorer, urgent devourer and all this Oh my God my dear did you not know? if you were to take my hand it would be beyond words, beautiful, defiled in ecstacy ... and inevitable – it has happened – it – will – happen – remember – the universe played this moment to infinity before we were born but yes, hi, no I don't think we've actually been introduced, although we've met. We've met. We've met. A Nice Cup of Tea 00:00 / 01:02 I knew he had died Because every day he woke first To bring a nice cup of tea in bed. And that morning the kettle Didn't wake me and he lay Still beside me. I eased into my slippers Padded to the kitchen. Made two teas, put them on tray. The nice cups, with saucers, Fine china that needed a wash Because of the dust, for show Usually, we could see our hands Through the glaze. Nice cups. With fresh milk, not yesterday's. Watched the kettle boil. The steam curled Across the worktop And disappeared. Where does it go I wondered. The sugar shook From the spoon a little. A nice cup of tea. Ruth 00:00 / 01:47 When we were young we played at the beach on a blustery day. The waves snapped against our legs. We bellysurfed through spume, not knowing if the wet on our cheeks was foam or rain or tears of laughter. Then you were tumbled by breakers against the groyne, the length of it, up with the wave and then sucked back by its retreat, and I still laughed because you were a rag doll flailing, sand and weed in your hair, mouth wide. You crawled back to me, stood, and from every inch of you blood welled, a thousand striations of intricate symmetry, delicate etchings, red rubies, mingling on skin marbled with the salt water but shock kept you numb, at first. I don't remember how you reached hospital, maybe someone from the pier phoned. I was confused, you went away, your parents came with white-edged lips and no words. I never saw you again. You were safer away from me and the sea. I went to the beach that winter to watch waves surge and ebb. There was no newly realised aura of doom. I ran fingertips along my body at night, wondered if your scars were raised or flat, if they held in their patterns the beauty of those first beads of blood through the pale, that surprise, and the wonder in your eyes. Publishing credits Beginnings: Push (Erbacce Press) A Nice Cup of Tea: Anser Journal (Dec 2020) Ruth: exclusive first publication by iamb