Hear poet Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig back next the poet Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig (MIMS) is a freelance translator, editor and author. Her poetry publications include her pamphlet kinscapes and the anthology The Joy of Living , which she edited to support the Maggie’s Centres . MIMS' work has been published by Dust Poetry Magazine , Dreich , Nine Pens Press and Visual Verse . She lives in Dunfermline, Scotland. the poems Breathe through my roots 00:00 / 01:20 nights of waking amid coal-smoked absence of air gasping dark horror mother’s voice guiding me back to surface where corals of plastic lungs grow on the desks of pulmonologists afternoons spent before metal dragons that spit healing vapours or in a body plethysmography diving bell connected by mic to the outside of effortless intake of nitrogen oxygen carbon dioxide a thing of course unless dad tears up when he leaves me in the Alps for expert strangers to reset my faulty pulmonary system close to the Eagle’s Nest where Hitler owned the mountain skies while Special Children’s Wards dealt those considered weak sedatives depressing respiration or let them starve a slow deliberate death meant to appear natural while German physicians in the 1960s still opposed ventilating neonates & the GDR let wee preemies suffocate or drown – at which point in this poem the girl in my womb kicks hard & hesitates to no madeleine 00:00 / 00:33 walking the dog down a window-lit street the wind delivers a familiar heady fragrance it draws my gaze to the back of a woman grey bob, dark jacket wide skirt swishing red brown white she unlocks a door and the thought this could be my mother now cuts right through my middle Tobi’s tales 00:00 / 02:26 Each morning we uncurl, you from your safe corner, I from bed, into this, our togetherness. Garden patrol, maybe a morsel of toast, buttered. Then we put on armours: harness, shoes, a coat. The lead, two-ended cord umbilical between us, we stroll: always expectant, in any weather. You rarely aim for straights but zigzags, backs and forths. The hour strays along. Each patch of grass, each leaf and stem hold so much information. They’re endless message boards, smells stacked on smells, scattered by strangers, not quite randomly. We walk, discovering: you stop, I stop, and vice versa. We dance, wait for each other. Sometimes you put your paws up on a wall and raise your nose, take note. Then you plop down onto all fours, stride on. You seldom share what secrets you’ve uncovered. Though we have some fixed routes – around the golf course, into the deep sea of the woods, down the old country lane filled with with feathered life and the occasional deer, each time we step out, it remakes us, we never walk the same path twice. The world is wondrous, frightful sometimes: feet, disembodied, stick out under hedges, canines off-lead bounce towards us fast, humans are nervous, or calm, open-hearted. You’ll be outside some more during the day with A., and then at sunset, we three go around the pond together, feed ducks and swans, play hide and seek before the great Forth amphitheatre, the bridges red, grey, white, the harbour’s crane, blue, Pentland wonders. At nightfall then, we tuck you in, cuddle, maybe hum a lullaby, until you’re quite relaxed. And soon, with twitching legs, huffing and puffing, a growl, a little whine, you tell us stories of your old home back in Bosnia, and with a deep intake of breath, just like a sigh, you bind yourself to us and us to you. Publishing credits Breathe through my roots: Visual Verse (Vol. 10, Ch. 4) no madeleine: exclusive first publication by iamb Tobi’s tales: kinscapes (Dreich)

Hear poet Nicola Heaney read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Nicola Heaney back next the poet Nicola Heaney is from Derry, and has poems in a number of journals across the UK and Ireland – including The North , The Cormorant , Crannóg , Skylight47 and Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal . Her poetry has also been shortlisted twice for the Bridport Prize (in 2019 and 2020). Nicola recently published Ulster Fairytales & Legends with The O'Brien Press, and is now working on her first collection. the poems Aviatrix 00:00 / 01:52 I Amelia Earhart popped in for tea on a hot afternoon in 1932. Destined for Paris, she landed instead on Gallagher’s field in Ireland’s North West. As out of place as her Lockheed plane amongst the grazing sheep and cattle, she stood in her trousers and leather coat, calm as a Sunday stroll in the country. 'Have you come far?' a farmhand asked. She grinned, wide eyes the colour of sky. 'America.' II Years later, on another island, in a different ocean miles across the world, she was found by another Gallagher, an Irishman conquering the Empire’s last colony on a rocky outcrop. He identified her by her bones, a bottle of Benedictine and a tube of hand lotion – a broken rouge compact, a woman’s shoe and the remnants of a pot of freckle ointment all pointed to her. But the scientists disagreed. 'It’s a man', they said. She stayed missing, despite Gallagher’s protests. 'It can’t be her – the bones are too long … Plus, this person survived for weeks, distilling drinking water in flames, living off turtles, fish and birds. It can’t be her.' The authorities closed the case, lost her bones. Gallagher died on the island. She’s still missing. III In an estate on the city fringes, a museum marks where she landed, its entrance bricked up against trespassers, windows long gone to teenage vandals. In the carpark, half-naked children play among caravans, weeds and burnt-out cars, running around with arms outstretched, trying to build enough speed to fly. Beachcombing 00:00 / 01:17 I Burrowed in black blistered seaweed that splits the beach in two a whelk shell lies empty. I don’t know why I notice it, rough bran mottled with cream, nothing like the shining white ones we used to collect. You taught me how to select the best. I’d bring them to you and you’d turn them over with long hands so similar to mine, red fingernails tapping for blemishes. At home, you’d coat them in nail polish until they shimmered like nebula, placed on the kitchen windowsill where I’d gaze up at them, forbidden from touching. II I pick the shell up, trace the ridges, turn it to expose iridescent white and pink within, like the innards of a fresh cut. Placing it to my ear, I listen to the churn of waves calling it back out into grey seas. I could take it with me, place it on the windowsill next to the sprig of shrivelled heather picked on a Donegal hill, add it to the cairn I’m building in my English kitchen – instead, I replace it gently between tidemarks in wet sand. False Monument 00:00 / 00:56 In Plaza Mayor, a bronze horse stamps on air, his belly filled with sparrow corpses. For centuries, they sought the promise of shade within, hopped onto his tongue, went deeper, fluttered down his throat, found themselves trapped, unable to fly back up into light. Hundreds died in his belly, suffocated by fiery darkness. Cardboard shelters fill the porticoes around the square, the city’s homeless hiding from the searing heat. At café tables, people sip coffee under shade of frescoed buildings, eyes hidden by sunglasses reflecting sky. During the war, someone threw a bomb into the horse’s mouth which opened its guts and belched out the corpses entombed inside sending them skywards, back into air. Publishing credits Aviatrix: Riggwelter (Issue 25) Beachcombing: Crannóg (Issue 52) False Monument: The Cormorant (Issue 4)

Hear poet Dave Garbutt read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Dave Garbutt © Brigitta Hänggi back next the poet Dave Garbutt is retired, lives in Switzerland and has been a keen birder since he was 12. He was born in North London, less than a mile from Keats’ House, and began his writing career while still at school. Recent publications to include Dave's poems range from Deronda Review and The Brown Envelope Book to BOLD! (an anthology on masculinity) and Sound and Vision . His poem Thirteen White Birds was shown at Leigh Spinners Mill in April 2023 as part of the Paper Birds exhibition. Dave's poem ripped was long-listed in The Rialto's Nature and Place 2021 competition. the poems Walk, Stand and Sit by the Hornbeam 00:00 / 01:30 Come with me into the moment the world relaxes We talk, chatting, gesticulating, not drowning. Here, the hornbeam catkins are out— wait. Stand. Sit. Still. Breathe. Watch. —Count six hundred heartbeats— A Great Tit calls, moves past, twig to twig it stops to sing— a bit early, but sunshine makes it right. Now more birds move, quiz twigs, parse branches, a Tree-creeper sings, a Dunnock from the hedge releases its ‘short unassuming warble’ my first for this woody place. Four Magpies swoop past. A Nuthatch hammers a hazelnut A Hawfinch sits and watches drops to the ground ... here is the world when humans are still— this world, without us, is the one we live in best. Water Vole 00:00 / 00:54 The first time I saw a water vole it didn’t see me, and I watched it for half an hour. I had time. I was running away from the last quarrel of my marriage, from the last quarrel of my life, into my last sunset. And this tiny whisker-twitcher, tiny grass chopper, reed wrecker, ate, looked, sniffed, groomed itself, sniffed, rested watched for sky-scares, watched for water-shrieks and for a few seconds slept. Then it slipped off its rest place, and swam, leaving me with a life still to come, and a future yet to happen. Magnol.i.am 00:00 / 01:20 Although I am but one cell budding into a line I am just as much a petal although I am spread, to wind & sun I am just as much a petal although I am creased, folded back by frost I am just as much a petal although there are bruises marking my satin white I am just as much a petal although I rest now, released, on the ground I am just as much a petal although a footprint crosses my silvery tongue I am just as much a petal although time pushes the bruises to cover me I am just as much a petal although I am dissolving to moss and leaf I am just as much a petal and tell me human with eyes and ears and hands and pen how about you? are you a petal now? or still a human? Since when are you both? Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hear poet Charlotte Oliver read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Charlotte Oliver back next the poet Charlotte Oliver lives in Yorkshire. She's had poetry commissions from the BBC, as well as from Scarborough’s South Cliff Gardens Restoration Project. Her work has appeared in various publications including Dream Catcher, Green Teeth, Ice Floe, Black Bough Poetry, Cape, Spelt and Fevers of the Mind . Charlotte's debut chapbook, How To Be A Dressing Gown , was published by Dreich Chapbooks, and she's currently working on a radio ballad funded by Arts Council England. the poems How To Be a Dressing Gown 00:00 / 01:11 Your role is that of a hug in clothing form, you must channel the softness of a lullaby and the gentleness of true love. And, of course, have big pockets with a tissue inside. A valuable source of warmth you must be a mobile retreat in times of illness, heartbreak, a good Saturday book after a hard week or a crisp Christmas morning. Be always ready, lurk in unexpected places (the bathroom floor? the dining room? Monday lunchtime?) and your greatest gift: the trump card the un-ignorable siren to the world and uninvited visitors at the door, that the wearer is OFF DUTY and no questions can be asked (but this must only be used in extremis or its force will fade). You have the power of an unexpected sponge pudding with custard but stay humble and keep yourself together – lose your belt and you will probably become dusters. Nothing Happens But Everything Happens 00:00 / 00:40 Like the imperceptible inhalations of rising bread. Like bare soil in winter. Like Mondays in Lockdown when the earth scrapes round with grief. Like when I cook dinner, everyday. Like a feeling you didn’t ask for. Like a yes or a no. Like the silence when you ask if they’re okay and the words in their throat crumple up like a paper straw sucked too hard and you can’t straighten it out for them. Hope 00:00 / 00:45 I want the belief of an ant with a giant leaf, of the Alsatian that escorts its owner down the street, of a herring gull leaving land behind, of a wasp. I don’t remember what it used to be like, just the clatter of freedom like waves on a pebbled shore, and eternity’s breath on my bare neck. I don’t remember how it felt just the early taste of you – fresh water from a quiet stream. I don’t remember much except the view that embraced me from all directions: a thousand greens, stitched together with hope. Publishing credits All poems: How To Be A Dressing Gown (Dreich Chapbooks)

Hear poet Giovanna MacKenna read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Giovanna MacKenna back next the poet Giovanna MacKenna can be found looking at the black bits of life and finding ways to make them shine. Her work has been published by Nine Pens , Robida , Abridged , SouthChild Lit , Bear Creek Gazette , Brag , Tether’s End and The Speculative Book 2021. She can also be heard on the Eat the Storms poetry podcast . Giovanna is currently working with The Museum of Loss and Renewal Publishing on her debut collection. the poems Someone else’s ending 00:00 / 01:40 My father’s ending came first. It was surprising to him, to me. He saw it there, immovable before him as if all other life had been replaced by a gaping chasm of death, bleeding across his once-expected future. I kicked and screamed and wept and stabbed at it. He stepped calmly, readily, into its black, silent embrace. My mother’s ending was postponed, delayed by her flaming energy. She was affronted by death’s early arrival; the decade she had counted on, reduced to months. She was not pleased. Her ending nearly broke my life. She bare-knuckled her way to an extra year denied her ending, at the end clawed back a scrap of living from death’s sure hands. My mother stole the minutes, hours, days. She made death wait and wait and wait until with every slowing beat each failing organ an affront she keened for her life as it left her. Stranger 00:00 / 01:17 After your funeral, in a house weighted with people you had known and loved and loathed, I stood, under the narrow attic stairs and turned the pages of the book I’d made. The book with photos that showed you grow from bold-eyed infant immigrant, to blazing adulthood to crochet-wrapped and smiling in the hospice garden. Visitors flowed around me, bitter coffee and tiny meringue clouds flavouring their talk, easing discomforts. A woman I didn’t know hesitated as she passed. I grasped her hand, pressed pen to palm and asked, Will you write about my mother? Later, when there was nothing left but dirty plates and echoing rooms, I found the stranger’s words for you: She took me in. She taught me how to make an omelette, so I would not go hungry. hidden/object 00:00 / 01:07 It is the thing you find at the back of a drawer when clearing out your mother’s house. It is the object nestled in the dusty, fly-corpsed grey of a wooden corner amid layers of old receipts, rubber bands, dry pens and keys that have lost their doors. There it is, silent crouching, stealthy, the one small thing which at first glance, has no form other than its mystery. It is the fragment you salvage, dust off, polish slowly with the corner of her old blue cardigan. It is the thing you hold to your breast as you sink down onto the pins of your grief. Publishing credits Someone else's ending: exclusive first publication by iamb Stranger: Tether's End Magazine (Issue 1) Hidden/object: Things to Do with Love (Dreich Themes)