Hear poet Lisa Kelly read poems for wave 1 of literary poetry journal iamb. Lisa Kelly wave 1 winter 2020 back next the poet Lisa Kelly has single-sided deafness. She is also half Danish. Her first collection, A Map Towards Fluency , was published by Carcanet in 2019. Her poems have appeared in Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches Press) and Carcanet’s New Poetries VII. Her pamphlets are Philip Levine’s Good Ear (Stonewood Press) and Bloodhound (Hearing Eye). She sometimes hosts poetry evenings at the Torriano Meeting House in London, and is the Chair of Magma Poetry. the poems from The IKEA Back Catalogue Delivery to ASPELUND 00:00 / 00:58 Don’t lose your way in the snow to ASPELUND like being trapped in a white wardrobe, ARVINN. Arrive intact at this Norwegian Arctic city, reveal yourself, like a folding chair, to the city. Hey presto! Like magic, you appear in ASPELUND no longer up against the wall. Out of the wardrobe, ARVINN, you can shrug off the ward robe of white, which gapes like the wide roads of this city, and take up space. ARVINN, this city is not ASPELUND, ASPELUND is a stub, as a toe strikes against a wardrobe in a city. Aphid Reproduction as Unpunctuated White Noise 00:00 / 01:22 . a full stop is an aphid not a comma nor an embryo an aphid is a full stop is a nymph not a womb holding a comma nor a question mark asks nothing of a slash or a backslash bulges with parentheses bears afterthought after afterthought as a full stop parthenogenetic filled with full stops without stopping without comma without pausing full stop after full stop never comma not a comma until all the space is taken with full stop upon full stop not a comma and a full stop develops wings flies off ! an exclamation mark is an aphid on the wing not a full stop not a comma nor an embryo an aphid is an exclamation mark not a womb holding a comma nor a question mark asks nothing of a slash or a backslash bulges with parentheses bears afterthought after afterthought as a full stop parthenogenetic not an exclamation mark not a comma but a full stop filled with exclamation marks filled with full stops bears exclamation marks filled with full stops until summer heat has happened and love is in the air . an aphid is a male on the wing not a full stop is an exclamation mark and an aphid is a female on the wing not a full stop is an exclamation mark gives birth to a full stop without wings mates with an exclamation mark and lays a full stop a full stop is an egg not an aphid but an egg and the egg it is dormant is a full stop not a pause not a comma nor an embryo but a full stop in the winter without wings an egg is a full stop until spring and it hatches a full stop is an aphid not a full stop Sea Wall 00:00 / 01:20 The sea is maddening, cannot be calmed. I have tried throwing life buoys, rafts, all manner of rope. Once I crushed sleeping pills and slipped them overboard, but it cried for more salt. I have to build a wall to save the sea from itself – constantly crashing, destroying castles, leaking into the land, festering in pools of its own brine. Loss of sediment and sense. I have to hold the line. Others argue about options. Option one, do nothing. Option two, rock groynes and beach recharge. Option three, fishtail rock groynes, rock revetment and beach recharge. Once a wall is in mind, it must be built. Norwegian rock is best, cut from mountains with diamond saws, never blasted. It is cut strong in strong blocks. The wall is on its way from the Larvik Quarry. The sea knows what to expect. Publishing credits Delivery to ASPELUND: Anthropocene Aphid Reproduction as Unpunctuated White Noise: A Map Toward Fluency (Carcanet) Sea Wall: The New European

Hear poet Pam Thompson read poems for wave 20 of literary poetry journal iamb. Pam Thompson wave 20 winter 2024 back next the poet A Hawthornden Fellow in 2019, Pam Thompson is a writer, educator and reviewer. She's been widely published in magazines including Atrium , Butcher’s Dog , Finished Creatures , The Alchemy Spoon , The High Window , Ink, Sweat & Tears , The North , The Rialto , Magma and Mslexia . Pam is the author of three poetry pamphlets – Spin , Parting the Ghosts of Salt and Show Date and Time – as well as full collections The Japan Quiz and Strange Fashion . Her fourth pamphlet, Sub/urban Legends , won the Paper Swans Press Poetry Pamphlet Prize in 2023. the poems Shoes for Departure After Marina Abramović 00:00 / 01:21 You are about to set off on your journey. What will you need? Map and compass? Or if you’re at sea – telescope, sextant – to track angles between you and the stars. Tonight Polaris is brighter. You are no stranger to True North. No one is awake to wave you off. Suitable clothing is taken for granted – the hood of your parka, fur-lined, detachable or your blue raincoat, as light as the song of itself, is groundsheet and sail, folds into the size of your hand, the hand which feels under the bed for the shoes for departure, hands which find shoes of pale carved amethyst. Putting them on is like stepping inside the Earth, and as you do, the room, your city, the galaxies, spin away and you are the fixed point, each foot, re-making gravity, hardly moving at all, travelling far away. Reading my mother’s diaries 00:00 / 00:59 admiring again her sloping handwriting. I have been trying to fill in the gaps in my memory. No that’s a lie. I have been trying to bring her back, to unspool her words and sentences until they loop themselves into her own true form. Mum, where have you been? All evening I've watched for the blur of your shape in the stained-glass panel of our front door. I have been a watcher at the gate. What kind of mother would stay out for so long, stay out this late? I have been reading my mother backwards, standing on the slope of my own life, looking down to that squiggly, tangled path. She is so far ahead, the sun’s bright, I’m shielding my eyes. In Whitby 00:00 / 00:53 on a January morning my heart climbs the 199 steps turns, takes a breath, and for seconds is terraces, the swelling North Sea, Inside St. Mary’s Church, my heart reads a notice, Do not ask the staff where the grave of Dracula is because there isn’t one and my heart smiles, moving very slowly between pews looking for, but not finding, a carved effigy of itself. Instead, is an offering and a candle that stays lit even in the day’s sudden gusts which blow inside and outside my heart in the abbey where it settles at last, in front of a statue of St Hild. Publishing credits Shoes for Departure: The High Window (Autumn 2023) Reading my mother's diaries: Sub/Urban Legends (Paper Swans Press) / winner in the Paper Swans Pamphlet Prize 2023 In Whitby: Mary Evans Picture Library

Hear poet Louise Longson read poems for wave 19 of literary poetry journal iamb. Louise Longson wave 19 autumn 2024 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 Matt Merritt read poems for wave 4 of literary poetry journal iamb. Matt Merritt wave 4 autumn 2020 back next the poet Matt Merritt was born in Leicester and now lives in Warwickshire, where he works as a wildlife journalist and writer. He's published four poetry collections: Making The Most Of The Light , Troy Town , hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica , and The Elephant Tests – his two most recent with Nine Arches Press. Matt has also published nature memoir, A Sky Full Of Birds . the poems Grail Birds After Tim Gallagher 00:00 / 01:19 Somewhere the cypress swamps give up their ghosts and the grail birds emerge to their two-note tattoo, the distant fanfare of toy trumpets. Mist-smeared mirror of bottomlands, dark with sweetgum and water tupelo, catches escape-flight peripheral flicker that scuds them intact from out of our past. Somewhere someone is startling at the sound and sight of things that shouldn’t be. The wires are humming with righteous incredulity, discussion of digital artefacts, wingbeat frequency. But I need to believe that things like this exist, that something might be borrowed against probability without incurring any debt, that impossible things can happen even as we swallow our own small extinctions. Dusk comes on. The swamps settle for their own version of silence. Our knocking receives no answer, but we watch and watch until cold and strain pricks at our eyes. And there, again, the impossible thought takes flight. Gabble Ratchet 00:00 / 00:25 Corpse hounds, he calls them, each one the soul of a child taken too soon to be baptised, or gabble ratchets, with all that suggests of infernal machines, devices of a consciousness that bedevils our gentle swoop into sleep, dying only in the first confusion of new light. The Meeting Place ‘ … within us, balanced like a gyroscope, is joy.’ Elegy , Tomas Tranströmer 00:00 / 00:53 Nothing leads up to it. No sudden voltage, a whiff of ionized ozone mingling with diesel, damp cardboard and takeaway grease. Traffic lights maintain their sequence, diaries continue to get written in lamplit bedrooms glimpsed from near-empty top decks. Timetables are still met. But she is there at the junction of all things, and at once the better part of you is persuaded out of balance. Moments fray to a fine thread. The past is startled into a sudden eloquence. Nothing need follow. Publishing credits Grail Birds: Magma (Issue 75) Gabble Ratchet: hydrodaktulopsychicharmonica (Nine Arches Press) The Meeting Place: Troy Town (Arrowhead Press)

Hear poet Elizabeth Osmond read poems for wave 26 of literary poetry journal iamb. Elizabeth Osmond wave 26 summer 2026 back next the poet Neonatal doctor and poet Elizabeth Osmond published her debut chapbook Hatchery , about her work in neonatal medicine , in 2026. Her poems have appeared in The Aftershock Review , The Alchemy Spoon , Dust Poetry Magazine , Atrium , Ink Sweat & Tears and After… She's twice won prizes in the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine, having started writing originally as a form of reflective practice on her clinical work. Elizabeth's wonderful family, including her autistic son – for whom she wrote Becoming – are both her joy and a source of inspiration. the poems Rubies 00:00 / 00:54 Little red doughnuts, bob along, jostle for space in a plasma sea. Slow drop on a fresh slide. I push my eye into the viewfinder. Count each perfect clone, each stroke of luck, each ruby. Nuclei lost, shortened lifespan to make space for oxygen. On Fishtail Mountain I saw a woman glide skyward, back bent under a woven basket. Born in marrow to carry life, they hang in the bag over the incubator. Love as the washing-up After Clare Shaw 00:00 / 01:07 Required by most people on most days, some circumvent it on special occasions. I have heard about take-out but can’t abide all that plastic. This summer on the island there was a water shortage. I saved every drop, returned to preschool where I tipped from bucket to pot. Remember that advert? A woman stroked her manicured hands in bubbles whilst a baby rolled about in a terry nappy. After our second, I dreamed of a dishwasher. We joked about discovering a low-carbon concrete alternative, in the form of dried Weetabix. I am content at the sink, facing Cromwell’s castle. Boats bob in the bay, a dolphin plays, as I scoop congealed porridge, swirl, and pour the dregs down the drain. Becoming 00:00 / 01:36 I have been trying to understand by becoming him. So far, I can only manage a section at a time. A liver, a foot, an atrium. My femur understands that birthdays are a demand bringing expectations of joy, a picture book with a giant cake, friends around a table, an unknown item under paper. My stomach clenches at the smell in a swim bath, detecting what my untransformed nose cannot. My auditory processing area lights up on functional MRI: a red warning, at a tone and pitch my ears cannot yet detect. My fifth lumbar vertebra feels a sense of constant disorientation when not inside the house. My right seventh maxilla tooth can no longer talk to people I don’t know and has difficulty with those I do unless all demands and expectations are removed. It needs total acceptance. My legs get ready to run whilst my fingers stim regular movements. But my arms are still my arms, reaching out. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Samuel Tongue read poems for wave 7 of literary poetry journal iamb. Samuel Tongue wave 7 autumn 2021 back next the poet Winner of a New Writers Award from the Scottish Book Trust, and former poetry editor at The Glasgow Review of Books, Samuel Tongue is a widely published poet with a debut collection, Sacrifice Zones , and two pamphlets – Stitch and Hauling-Out (Eyewear Aviator, 2016). His recent work has appeared in Finished Creatures, Butcher’s Dog, The Scores, and One Hand Clapping. A selection of Samuel's poems is to be published in Ukrainian translation by KROK in 2021. the poems Emergent Properties 00:00 / 02:01 a church is enveloped by a forest and the forest is the creator and redeemer of the church. the hermits who can disappear into the trees, are trees. every time a tree moves it is a brustling prayer. susurration as supplication. the habit of the tree is its dwelling in the world. yes, Heidegger was wrong. no, the stone is not worldless; no, the animal is not poor-in-the-world; no, man is not only world-forming. the stone can be ground and underground – a negative capability – and the animals are adept at dwelling. neahgebur – they who dwell nearby. try not to think that clearing the forest is a clearing for thought. leave it dark for all the neighbours who are essential. My life and death are in my neighbour and a church is enveloped by a city and the city is the creator and redeemer of the church. the anchorites who can disappear into their cells, are cells. every time the bus doors hiss open, it is a shushed prayer. pneumatic pneuma. the habit of a tower-block is its dwelling in the world. yes, Le Corbusier was wrong. no, the house is not a machine for living in; no, the streets do not belong to the automobile; no, ornamentation is not a religion of beautiful materials. the tower-block can be forest and bewilderment – a negative capability – and the streets can be recovered. différance – that iterative, unrepeatable stranger. try not to think that deciding on anything will stop more emergence. leave it dark for all the strangers who are essential. My life and death are in each stranger and Fish Counter Fish that have a pebble in their heads; fish that hide in winter; fish that feel the influence of stars; extraordinary prices paid for certain fish. The Natural History Pliny 00:00 / 01:08 Cod that have been skinned. Cod that have a pebble of dill butter in their heads. Cod breaded. Cod battered: tempura or traditional. Smoked haddock. Dyed haddock. Wise lumps of raw tuna. Scaled, pin-boned pollock, de-scented: There are olfactory limits. Bake in the bag; no mess. 'This piece of halibut is good enough for Jehovah'. Fishsticks pink as lads’ mags. Skirts and wet fillets of sole. Fish fingers mashed from fragments of once-fish. Hake three-ways. Extraordinary prices paid for certain fish. Monkfish defrocked , gurnards gurning, fish so ugly you must eat them blindfold. Choose before the ice melts. Farm Boy 00:00 / 01:01 We rattle through the lanes in his ancient Austin Metro, footwells filled with welly boots and dried mud, clutches of sparrows bouncing around the high hedges. We pull off-road into gateways, warm dens of hawthorn; with a wink, he tightens his dog collar, disappears into a field, then returns with cauliflowers cradled baptismal under his arm, or broccoli blooms green as heaven. The Lord giveth and I taketh away , he laughs. One farmer gives us a brace of rabbits, still warm, leg-lashed with pink bailer-twine, and I hold them like newborns in my lap, soft as gloves. His theology is rich stews and a full belly before the Lord, Bible verses broadcast like seedcake on dry ground. I love him without understanding. In the evening, he holds me close and his prayers buzz sweetly in my ear. My pillow is a honeyed God. Publishing credits Emergent Properties: Finished Creatures (Issue 4) Fish Counter: Gutter (No. 17) Farm Boy: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Jack B Bedell read poems for wave 2 of literary poetry journal iamb. Jack B Bedell wave 2 spring 2020 back next the poet Jack B Bedell is Professor of English and Co-ordinator of Creative Writing at Southeastern Louisiana University, where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. Jack’s poetry has appeared in Southern Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Pidgeonholes, The Shore, Cotton Xenomorph, Okay Donkey, EcoTheo, The Hopper, Terrain and other journals. His latest collection is No Brother, This Storm . Jack was Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017 to 2019. the poems Neighbor Tones ‘All a musician can do is to get closer to the sources of nature, and so feel that he is in communion with the natural laws.’ ~ John Coltrane ~ 00:00 / 01:07 In Coltrane’s circle, all tone shares a common ancestor. The vibrations between F and F# wave in invitation. Tremolos whisper desire, not dispute, and every pitch shares a bit of itself with its neighbor, like electrons swapped during the intimacies of physics. Even when scales cannot reconcile themselves geometrically, we can choose to hear them together. We can transpose the culture of sound, make room for the diminished and the supertonic. These connections yearn to be made, even if our ears resist. How much of ourselves do we leave with each other taking the same seat on a bench, or grabbing the same spot on the handrail to pull our weight upstairs? We share the breeze, the noise it carries. The space between us, never empty, is full of us. Summer, Botany Lesson 00:00 / 00:43 No matter how many blossoms I point out exploding overhead on our neighborhood walk, my daughter isn’t buying it. She’s in love with the sound of bougainvillea, thinks the word’s so pretty, there’s no way it stands for something real. She believes I made it up, strung long vowels and kissy, soft consonants on a strand of rhythm to make her giggle. I wish I could tell a story that would win her faith, but learn to let it lie. Some truths beg for a fight. Some would rather echo on branches in crooked light while you just walk off holding hands. Dusk, Meditation ‘ … like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air.’ ~ Herman Melville ~ 00:00 / 00:40 Sometimes the truth hides in the wide open of a shorn cane field, and no matter how you stare its lines will refuse to define themselves. They’ll pulse in the dull breeze, and spread like ribbon snakes across furrows in the dirt until the whole ground blends and furls in waves. Squint all you want, or close the distance on foot. What’s there to see won’t shine any brighter. Open yourself to the field’s expanse like a shell in salt water. Purge your questions before they pearl. Publishing credits Neighbor Tones: The Cabinet of Heed (Issue 12) Summer, Botany Lesson: L’Ephemere (Issue 7) Dusk, Meditation: One (Issue 18)

Hear poet Samantha DeFlitch read poems for wave 12 of literary poetry journal iamb. Samantha DeFlitch wave 12 winter 2022 back next the poet Sam DeFlitch, author of Confluence , is a National Poetry Series finalist. Her work has appeared in The Missouri Review , Colorado Review , Iron Horse Literary Review , Appalachian Review and in On the Seawall , among others. Sam has received awards and fellowships from the Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, The Massachusetts Poetry Festival, and the University of New Hampshire, where she completed her MFA. the poems Confessional 00:00 / 01:39 This is what happened: I found the wren frozen stuck to the ground and I kept on moving. The onion snow came too late this year; the hard freeze took out the plums. Some farmer kept the coal barrels burning through the night. Another lit half his land on fire to save the grapes. Some theologians think God gave us grapes— but not wine—so we, too, could find joy in creation. See: we make bread to be torn apart, hot. Hot and full of yanked-up wheatsheaf. We love the dog even though we know, we know— be it love or oats, we know it when we plant it— most things don't make it out alive. This is just to say: I'm not a theologian, or a farmer, or even the woman who scooped up the wren's body, tucked it in a plastic bag, and kept it in her freezer between the berries and winter greens, waiting patiently for the final thaw to bury it in soft earth. I'm just a girl with an emergent deer in her cupped palms; a girl saying: Look! This is what I have created with my grief. This is what love has made out of me. Garbage Night 00:00 / 01:54 It is Thursday night. It is garbage night. The trash is my old clothes and my old clothes are slipping through my hands. My hands are a box full of flies. The flies are taking off with my hair – look! I am bald. I am my mother’s truck engine. I am the space the deer left sleeping in the ferns. I am 7:52 in the evening. See, the sun has already set and the dog is crying to go out. Am I her, too? Her nose raised, twitching, into the evening air? My parents are getting old. I don’t like to say that out loud, but it’s true. The dog is old, too. I am rubbing the dog’s legs. I am a car full of empty coffee cups – see, I can’t bring myself to dump them. They remind me of yesterday. I am all the days that the sky has broken clear and cold, spilling oranges across the dawn-line. I am the Ohio line. I am West Side Road after all the tourists have left for the day I am laying myself down on the asphalt to watch the stars come out in real soaring spires above my head until the dog begins her howling. I am waking all the days. I am the ferns, and I keep space for you, for the coffee cups. I am peeling my long body off asphalt, and gone round back to feed the chickens. Final Thaw of Soft Earth 00:00 / 01:29 Something's not right with my river, my mother says. And it is Truth: each night the beavers pull apart saplings, pull them apart fresh and at the edge. The river gets blocked. The water stops and at night I hear howling in the east. In the year of the year of the plague — this the age I restring my mother's mother's Miraculous Medal and hang it from my dash — the days are long as a year. Ticks fall like spring melt from branches and cling to the legs of the moose calves. A great fir tree falls on a man as he sleeps. The mountain is angry, my mother says, and it is Truth. In the days after this, another surgeon would open me. There is never any good explanation for my pain, which is real. I must have it. Night after night, this racket in the woods; the re- building of the thaw-rushed dam which, this time around, might make a good home. This remarkable rumpus chirping hope. Publishing credits Confessional: Barren Magazine (Issue 19) Garbage Night: On the Seawall Final Thaw of Soft Earth: Moist Poetry Journal

Hear poet Liam Bates read poems for wave 18 of literary poetry journal iamb. Liam Bates wave 18 summer 2024 back next the poet Originally from the Black Country and now living in Lancashire, Liam Bates is a poet whose work has appeared in Ambit , Bath Magg , Magma and elsewhere. His poems have been translated into Spanish and Latvian, and in 2023 he won a Northern Writers’ Award for ongoing work. Liam's first two pamphlets, Monomaniac and Working Animals , are available from Broken Sleep Books , as is his debut collection, Human Townsperson . the poems The Agency 00:00 / 01:20 I ate the mushroom growing on the wall of the downstairs toilet in the house we rent. I folded a thick slice of brown bread around it and gobbled the lot raw. They might try charging us extra at the end of our tenancy because the mushroom wasn’t meant for us. But in their assessment, what is? See what I have in my hands. It’s nothing. See it moving. Like devotees bowing round a colourful altar. They forbid us painting over the white but I painted anyway on the white of the sink with the rainbow of my vomit. I am thirteen again. I am hovering a foot above the ground like a god. They don’t want us skating on their office block steps as if the concrete isn’t there for us. Smooth as a dream of endless falling. Shouting watchmen emerging to shoo us off the premises. What are they thinking, that they can contain this? It’s only my folded arms holding me together. If I raise my hands towards the sky, so bright and boundless I ache, a thousand canaries will take flight. Understudy 00:00 / 00:37 This again—my student has crammed his pockets with gravel and cannonballed into the reservoir. Sopping, and cold as a milestone on the bank, I take his word this isn’t about suicidal thoughts, he saw the tell-tale green and gold of treasure blinking on the bed and isn’t that what we’re doing here? Sure, but wouldn’t growing gills be covered during induction if that was all it took? Tomorrow, I’ll pull him from a different waterbody. We’ll sit in the sun getting warmer. Open Wide, a Little Wider 00:00 / 01:09 We were misled by a sat nav quirk, the circle sun at an unexpected inclination. The country’s vestigial tail, you dubbed this snaking A road. Still inevitably a wealth of luxury cars on hand ready to elbow by, tinted window undertakers, cutting us up and getting a mouthful: cunt, do your indicators not work or are we invisible? The final word flashing in their rear-view. And then we turned a corner and on the hill opposite was a line of houses, a familiar-seeming close in a town we’d never been. You said, Who do you think lives there? and I knew then someone must, a street of someones, each with their own purposeful face. I had to chew on it in a lay-by: the abundance, it won’t all fit in my head. But that’s the thing, you said, it doesn’t have to. Publishing credits All poems: Human Townsperson (Broken Sleep Books)

Hear poet Leeanne Quinn read poems for wave 8 of literary poetry journal iamb. Leeanne Quinn wave 8 winter 2021 back next the poet Leeanne Quinn's poems have been widely anthologised, appearing in The Forward Book of Poetry 2013 , Windharp: Poems of Ireland Since 1916 , and elsewhere. Her debut collection, Before You , was published by Dedalus Press and highly commended in the Forward Prize for Poetry 2013. Her second collection, Some Lives , was also published by Dedalus Press, and was noted as a 2020 Book of the Year by The Irish Times and The Irish Independent . Originally from Ireland, Leanne now lives in Munich, Germany. the poems Interference 00:00 / 01:15 Try not to listen, avoid admission. Electrical currents emit perceptible sounds. Don’t power down appliances, let sound carry. Try not to think in terms of the body, the racket of the blood is not your concern. Learn the habit of distraction, above all don’t personify, don’t permit, this is not a human voice. Electrical currents do emit perceptible sounds. The trick is not to listen. Avoid admission. The racket of the blood is not your concern. Don’t power down. Learn the habit of distraction. Don’t think in terms of the body. Electrical currents do emit. The racket of the blood. Above all, try not to listen. Don’t personify, learn the habit. Let them carry perceptible sounds. This is not a human voice. Accidents (An excerpt from a poem of the same title) 00:00 / 00:59 Winter has culled the city, edging all colour out. Salt covers ice, stark and stubborn, on the pavements below. You walk with your thoughts elsewhere, think of the different worlds you have known. There is little here to love—this is a place where loneliness grows, where memories wake you like a gun going off in the night —a night that takes care of what you have done or not done, of who you have loved or not loved, of those you have saved, or forgotten. You walk the winter streets, hoping to catch the last of the light, as it fades where the snow falls. On a Flat Earth 00:00 / 01:07 What colour is the sky? Why does a ship’s hull disappear before the mast? What is the true distance of the Sun from the Earth? Explain the cause of tides. What is the dip sector? What causes the Sun to rise? Explain lunar and solar eclipses. Account for daylight. Explain winter and summer. Account for loss of time when sailing. Explain the deflection of falling bodies. Elaborate on experiment three. Account for the moon’s phases. Discuss the planet Neptune. Elaborate on experiment six. Explain the stages of the Earth. Give Earth’s true position in the Universe. Account for formation. Account for destruction by fire. Publishing credits Interference / On a Flat Earth: Some Lives (Dedalus Press) Excerpt from Accidents: Before You (Dedalus Press)

Hear poet Jenny Mitchell read poems for wave 12 of literary poetry journal iamb. Jenny Mitchell wave 12 winter 2022 back next the poet Jenny Mitchell is the winner of the Poetry Book Awards 2021, and joint winner of the Geoff Stevens Memorial Prize 2019. She also won the inaugural Ironbridge Prize, the Bedford Prize and the Gloucester Poetry Society Open Competition. Her best-selling debut collection, Her Lost Language , was one of 44 Poetry Books for 2019 as chosen by Poetry Wales. Jenny's second collection, Map of a Plantation , was an Irish Independent ‘Literary Find’, and is on the syllabus at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her latest collection is Resurrection of a Black Man . the poems Bending Down to Worship 00:00 / 02:42 Church Mary said her God was in the ground, not Satan but all the things that grew, and flowers were the gems upon His crown. She made a garden all around her house – a broken shack she called a palace where she reigned. You couldn’t step beyond her door unless you brought her a bouquet or something green and pulsing full of life. She filled each glass and bowl she found with blooms she called her jewels though they were better as they gave a lovely scent. She tended to her tiny Eden till the flowers reached above her head – the colours bold against dark skin, so filled with shining light. Her headwraps were like floral wreaths, and every dress was made of faded flowers, the age-old boots like clumps of mud. The days when she was forced to work out in the fields, she feared the sun might scorch her garden. She ran out of the cane the moment that the whistle blew and went to fetch pure water from the stream. Her flowers had to live as they were all the freedom that she knew. On nights when she was grieving, she went outside to kneel amongst the plants, bend her head and talk to God. He answered back by showing her another rock or stone she had to move, revealing yet more ground on which to grow more buds. One Sunday, when the white priest tried to make her go to church, she offered him her shining patch of land with one sweep of her arm. She said I never saw your Jesus, but when I die I’ll end up in the ground to feed the things I love to grow, and that is all the heaven I will need. He damned her as a Godless slave. But when he left, she heard the voice of God again. He spoke to her of flowers as she bent to ornament His crown. Black Men Carry Flowers 00:00 / 01:23 red blossoms on their palms. hibiscus blooms from fingertips. waterlilies circle wrists in contrast to their shade heavy-laden with this crop, they move with grace. vines cling to arms. ferns worn as green insignia. warriors of peace they grow on any street. if you look up. see men are grand estates. a wealth of plants. once torn from land. they burgeon in the wild reach out in dappled light. wide shoulder blades replete with yellow orchids. chests are dappled lawns rolling to a bank of leaves delicate but strong morning glories shape their legs. bougainvillea bends the knees. ripples as it clings to thighs tumbling to the shins. agile on the ground jasmine moves the feet. every step a heady scent rising through a man-made-plant. flourishing. their words fall out as petals. The Seamstress For my grandmother 00:00 / 01:33 I’ll be the dress she never owned – immaculate for special days, the only burden heavy frills and English lace along the hem. I’ll never trail in dirt or suffer dust from cane fields. My heart will burst to make a bodice, stitched with bold Jamaican flowers: yellow orchids, red hibiscus. There will be a giant fern appliqued on her back: my ribcage opened to its full extent. I’ll raise my chin to make the high, firm collar – a throat so elegant, with space to hold my voice. I’ll ask her what she really wants – plain cuffs or golden buttons. Underneath the dress, I’ll make myself silk underwear, a soft and pretty petticoat. Its one equivalent will be her newly coddled skin. My feet will make such dainty shoes, and she will go like Cinderella to the ball. But if she doesn’t want the prince this time she’ll dance away without a care. The English lace will shimmer as she moves. Publishing credits Bending Down to Worship: Map of a Plantation Black Men Carry Flowers: Resurrection of a Black Man The Seamstress: Her Lost Language (all collections from Indigo Dreams Publishing) Author photo: ©Billy Grant

Hear poet James Nixon read poems for wave 11 of literary poetry journal iamb. James Nixon wave 11 autumn 2022 back next the poet James Nixon, who teaches at Arden University, is completing his doctoral research into the legacy of Arthur Rimbaud and hauntological poetics at Goldsmiths, University of London. He's a former Royal Holloway Emerging Writer Fellow, a Writer-in-Residence at Cove Park, and a Writer-in-Residence at Phytology, Bethnal Green. the poems Pillowtalk 00:00 / 00:50 The night is a cul-de-sac we’ve been chased into – the houses have foreign coin for eyes. The innocent quiet is not what it seems. Clerical figures carrying taxidermy for comparison roam the undercrofts of sleep slips into place like a contraption round my head. I have been alive today and not done much about it. I have drifted complacent I'm in crisis. Why your arm, slung across my chest, feels so real, I squeeze its meat to send myself some signal, clamp my body to yours. Cashier 00:00 / 01:42 ‘M A T T’. Rhymes with flat, as in deflated, as in a kept birthday balloon shrivelling & bleeding air, as in smoker’s lung. ‘M A T T’, as in not shiny, unremarkable. I don’t think you’re that, ‘M A T T’, but I can tell this shift has you feeling tragic, as in self-esteem, as in the future’s lost collateral. That I should not kiss you, ‘M A T T’, makes me want to smother you lovingly, but always with the idea of quietus in mind. ‘M A T T’ named in air quotes as if you’re hypothetical. Do people feel WELCOME wiping their feet on you ‘M A T T’? Do you wish to leave? Not just this store but this this life. Sea levels are multiplying ‘M A T T’. The planet is ready to belch all over us. Now is not the time to be passing avocados from your right hand to your left hand & mixing greys on your palette of sighs, but slinking from bed while your wife sleeps in & driving undramatic to some port town. As in lobbing your smartphone, ditching your car. As in deciding on an outgoing ferry that colour & thrill are still possible, while the sun is delivered and opened. As in an invitation. As in come away with me ‘M A T T’. The Weather 00:00 / 01:21 When my appendix was removed it was incinerated. There is nothing extra about me. The sun feathers through the blinds – my hip-scar shines like a hieroglyph. The house is climate. I test the acoustics with subtle applause and swan about the patio paved a healthy pink – hit the pool occasionally – – my heart small and hard. Alligators doze in the middle of roads beneath detergent skies. Palm trees droop like exclamations propped against the horizon. The tennis courts – A darker reflection in sliding doors at dusk looks like fire taking off its nightgown. Moths inhaled into the hurricanes of wheel arches are likely screaming on the interstate. And there are widespread riots in urban areas. But I hear blue whales have returned with calves to the Sea of Cortez. I drove through a storm at night but not recently. Sedate is the word – the weather is sedate. Publishing credits Pillowtalk: exclusive first publication by iamb Cashier: earlier draft was shortlisted for the Bristol Poetry Prize The Weather: earlier draft appeared in Ambit (Issue 234)