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Hear poet Suyin Du Bois read poems for wave 19 of literary poetry journal iamb. Suyin Du Bois wave 19 autumn 2024 back next the poet Suyin Du Bois (she/her) is a poet of mixed Chinese-Malaysian and Belgian heritage. She lives in London, and studied for her BA in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Warwick. In her most recent writing, Suyin has explored her multi-cultural heritage and life through food. Her poems have appeared in Propel Magazine , Freeze Ray Poetry , Zindabad and Stanzas , and she was anthologised in Fourteen Publishing's Bi+ Lines: An Anthology of Contemporary Bi+ Poets . When not obsessing over word choices, Suyin spends her time building an early-stage start-up that aims to give NHS hospital staff 24/7 access to nutritious, affordable food. the poems Ode to Kaya 00:00 / 01:45 Egg jam first on my young tongue, palm sugar sweet, coconut milk rich. Thick layers on charred toast, salted butter cubes between, melting in Penang sweat. My Goh Ee Poh stood for hours stirring you in that double-boiled heat. Exports to be swaddled, twisted into pink and green plastic bags, nestled amongst swimming costumes and sundresses, rituals to ward off mid-air leaks in the 14 hours from one home to the other. Back in England your layers thinned, our knives more sparing after each spread. After Goh Ee Poh grew too frail, aunties and uncles gifted us store-bought surrogates. You were labelled Kaya . Our cupboards filled with your empties, aides-mémoire of indulgence repurposed to house fragrant rice, Chinese mushrooms, our longing for Nonya flavours. By the time pandan leaves arrive in Chinatown, I am grown up, have my own kitchen where I can stand for hours. But Goh Ee Poh has long since condensed into photographs, so I sweeten my never-asked regret, trace down someone else’s heirloom recipe. You are needy, threaten lumps, failure, but I stir and stir like her, until my spoon draws the right depths of lineage. I lift a heap of you into my mouth, tongue your clotted grainy sweetness. The First Mouthful 00:00 / 01:41 In the back corner of Pulau Tikus market, tucked in behind uncles pressing fresh santan, trays of kueh steamed overnight, gutted fish, beside batik dresses and the energetic ladling of hawker sellers, I sit still– watch tiny bubbles on the surface of my koay teow th’ng. I’m not sure what’s woken me so early: jet lag or my stomach aching for hot soup in the heat, for kopi strong and Carnation-swirled, for the kinship of their steam. I pull fine white noodles from the broth’s well-oiled clarity, wind them into the flat base of my spoon, chopstick up: a slither of duck, crunchy pork lard, one wide-blinked iris of chilli padi to top the pile. Nudging the spoon back into the liquid so it wells up around this first mouthful, I catch the curious eye of the uncle at the next table. Where are you from? Wah eh mama si Penang lang. The words mis-intoned, or too unexpected from this face, he frowns. The rooster on the side of my bowl hasn’t yet crowed me fully awake, so I say London and we both smile. I turn back, slurp my spoonful down – feel the quick slip of the koay teow, the stock radiating through me, the chilli biting at my throat. On The First Cold Day of Winter, You Ask for Rusks 00:00 / 01:30 Tannie Noeline’s recipe calls for true boeremeisie quantities, so I adapt each measure by awkward fractions— still the batter laps the lip of my bowl as I wed flour to crushed bran to buttermilk. The last step says dry . I had to google it the first time, and even on the thirteenth I worry when to take them out of the oven, leave them in overnight. In the morning, our house smells of a hunger that’s spread wide since our last trip back to your childhood home, my windfall one. We don’t wait. We dunk rough chopped rusks into our coffee, and you tell me once more about your Ouma’s aniseed beskuit, so tall and arid, they’d absorb half a mug in one dip, hang sodden only long enough for your mouth to get under its fall. We reminisce about road trips between Hermanus and Bothaville, how I make us pause at every padstal, seek out the most tempting treats – banana and bran, pumpkin seed and apricot – how every homemade rusk tempts us. You remind me that mine are your favourite, and I reply Jy is my gunsteling . And we keep going until the bottom of our mugs is a beach of sunflower seeds and crumbs with the tide sucked out. Publishing credits Ode to Kaya: Propel Magazine (Issue One) The First Mouthful: Bi+ Lines: An Anthology of Contemporary Bi+ Poets (Fourteen Publishing) On The First Cold Day of Winter, You Ask for Rusks: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Mark Fiddes read poems for wave 1 of literary poetry journal iamb. Mark Fiddes wave 1 winter 2020 back next the poet Mark has published two books with Templar Poetry: The Chelsea Flower Show Massacre and The Rainbow Factory . In 2019, he won the Oxford Brookes University International Poetry Competition, came second in the Robert Graves Prize, and third in the National Poetry Competition. He's recently been published by Poetry Review, Magma, The New European, The Irish Times, The London Magazine and Poem Magazine. He lives in Brexile in the Middle East. the poems After Delius On the occasion of not leaving the European Community, March 29th 2019 00:00 / 01:37 For an hour or two over breakfast the lethal Etonians were hushed on the day we meant to leave. Common or garden birds threshed a chorus from thin British hedges. A bog-standard UK sun rose up sixty non-decimal minutes before Europe to shake off a bleary March. Pigeons paraded along the gables in regimental medal regalia. New blossom reported for duty bunting all the pissed-up alleys. Not a chemist ran short of insulin and the growling tide of lorries failed to make a delta out of Kent. Hate was too hungover to fry up the Full English with trimmings in saucy tabloids and talk radio. On the day we meant to leave, a bird of unsettled status flew in to Devon from an African hot spot laden with unregistered eggs searching the lanes for spare nests and any true love crying “cuckoo.” El Pacto de Olvido 00:00 / 01:30 We walk the canal under plane trees, words in one pocket, silence in the other past palettes stacked for la cooperativa, the air thick with dust and late harvest. We talk of work, cards we’ve been dealt, the missing people, our grown children, whose absences now lengthen beside us. I explain how this hour a lifetime ago, Nationalists executed the men too unfit to march to the “work camps” in France, leaving the bodies somewhere over there to rot, dropped like sacks in familiar dirt. They thought nothing could be quieter than a country of unmarked graves. Once in step, we speak of nothing more. Someone’s taking pot shots at the rabbits. Swallows speed type through pylon wires. An irrigation ditch fills, a tractor stutters. Black damsons clack against dry mouths. Homewards we scrape, shale underfoot. The price of peace is always a bitter fruit. The Kodachrome Book of the Dead 00:00 / 01:55 Frozen in their Kodaks, our old folk wear slippers to protect the carpet from their feet. Colours leech. A tap drips. Dinner lingers in another room. A yucca erupts on the lawn. The lounge is an orgy of fakery: leatherette armchairs, plaster dogs, silk orchids, mock encyclopedias and more fringe than necessary on lamps, hairdos, lips, pelmets plus random tassels wherever there is dangling and come-hither velvet. If a grandparent smiles it is like a wolf had stopped by for tea and a slice of Battenberg. Parents vogue in folky knitwear surrounded by cigarettes and the Sixties. Is this how they will see us, our early years tucked into albums balanced on the knee like babies? Will pages crackle as laminates separate and we stare back red-eyed as hounds from blind pubs? Whereas our last few decades will click past in seconds on a screen, backlit, cropped and cherry-bright. There they can find us, between swipes, catching our breath, wiping the joy from our sleeves. Publishing credits After Delius: The New European El Pacto de Olvido: runner-up in the Robert Graves Poetry Prize 2019 The Kodachrome Book of the Dead: winner of the Oxford Brookes University International Poetry Competition 2019

Hear poet Laura Lewis-Waters read poems for wave 20 of literary poetry journal iamb. Laura Lewis-Waters wave 20 winter 2024 back next the poet Secondary school English teacher Laura Lewis-Waters gave birth to her first son during the UK's COVID-19 lockdown. Small wonder then that motherhood, mental health and traumatic birth feature prominently in her writing. Laura also researches poetry as a means to raise awareness of rising sea levels; her forthcoming collection, Where Sea Meets Sea , will explore the changing East Anglia coastline through writing both confessional and imagined, as well as verbatim. Laura's debut chapbook, Bathroom Prisoners , was born in May 2022. Her second collection, Beneath the Light , arrived in March 2023. the poems The Faceless Lady at Covehithe 00:00 / 01:20 She waits near the edge. Wind catching at her white linen dress. She waits for the fishermen to tread the headland toward her. They’ll come at low tide to the morlog, to the sand and shingle banks for their bass and their sole. And she’ll call to them. Wondering why recognition then fear always flits across their features. They’re too close to the edge again. In the dawn, mist rises off the broads. They don’t hear the cliffs sigh and let go. They don’t hear her moan. She retreats to St Andrew’s. A boy in a red bobble hat weaves himself through tumbling arches around graves on their seaward tilt as though ready to go back. Every William – every John – every sailor – every fisherman. The sea was hungry this year. But she’ll not let her Matryoshka home fall. Somewhere a baby cries, or perhaps it is the wind or sea martins. The bobble hat has disappeared. She hopes the church still stands on its return. From the tower she watches the cliff crumble and creep inward. She cries into the night, but nobody comes. They stay away on moonless nights when milk and mist mingle. The babies are hungry. Come morning she waits by the edge, her face as flat and featureless as the sea while the fishermen’s wives hang their linen out to dry. Haze-bruh 00:00 / 01:01 The sea gives and the sea takes and when it takes, it is with fire it threads itself in sky, lets the air ride its brackish back like a thousand battle-driven horses charging to reclaim township, it is all the elements knotted together; double sheet bend against farmer country. Sometimes it crawls up unnoticed lapping up sand with unquenchable thirst, a love too strong for stratified silt. One winter, the sea devoured two bungalows; the bells of a 14th century stone church destined to toll beneath the waves. Its wilding rampage on yellow gorse- lined path wind-whips the tower; north-westerly, chipping at field-boys’ teeth at teatime. Another winter, it tucked away four houses, shop and bakery overnight its briny breath inhaling more than flat margin brown its craggy sigh raking shrinking cliff top and painting the silty clay horizon where the sea gives, and the sea takes takes. Living with someone else’s anxiety 00:00 / 01:09 is adopting it as your own it’s realising you have counted black linoleum squares 1,000 times sat on the bathroom floor incapable of standing up. It is learning magic tricks the way you learnt to ride a bike, slowly, painfully, rituals that have to be adhered to a couple a day at first until every little task that keeps you alive is riddled with them – it’s turning the tap on off on off just because you brushed your teeth and always stepping into a room with your right foot because if you don’t you’ll never conceive. It is being your own failure you feel selfish for acknowledging because you are the ‘normal’ one, the unmedicated one, reassurance that asbestos is not in the crumbling Artex one. It is filling in the gaps in the grout so one day the house can be sold as a show home when all you really want is to fall down those little hollows. It is slamming doors, crying, collecting swimming certificates faster than anyone around you, legs growing tired, throbbing beneath the water. It is befriending magnolia walls because your husband, best friend, sister, colleague are the ones that need you. Publishing credits The Faceless Lady at Covehithe: exclusive first publication by iamb Haze-bruh: Trees, Seas & Attitude (Black Cat Poetry Press) Living with someone else’s anxiety: Bathroom Prisoners (Written Off Publishing)

Hear poet Kara Knickerbocker read poems for wave 7 of literary poetry journal iamb. Kara Knickerbocker wave 7 autumn 2021 back next the poet Kara Knickerbocker is the author of chapbooks The Shedding Before the Swell and Next to Everything that is Breakable . Her poetry and essays have appeared in Poet Lore , HOBART , Levee Magazine and Portland Review , as well as in Pennsylvania’s Best Emerging Poets and Crack the Spine's Anthology: The Year 2020 . A Best of the Net nominee, Kara has received support with her work from Murphy Writing at Stockton University, Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, and the Gullkistan Center in Iceland. She currently lives in Pennsylvania, where she writes with the Madwomen in the Attic at Carlow University. Kara also co-curated the MadFridays Reading Series. the poems If You’re Asking Why I’m Leaving 00:00 / 00:42 Because this row of brick houses ghosts with heads on backwards, because my skin sleeps under your nailbeds, because there isn’t a color red I’ve loved since the car crash. Because even birds fly south, and because without wings, your lips travel down just the same because I let you, because religion was the well-oiled machine of our bodies. Because thoughts of a baby’s open mouth, because I am egg yolk, Because I cannot imagine anything more breakable than if I stay. Etymology of a Middle Name After Airea D Matthews 00:00 / 01:16 Rose— of Latin origin, rosa, meaning fragrant flower, meaning my mother bloomed with me until I came out, pink & right for the world, the last precious baby dangling on the branch of our family tree, because after my brother & before me there was a seed that only bled where it was planted, never grew into a face, or name, & they crowned me Rosie, because my cheeks flush redder than they should be from petaling my way back to the womb, drunk-blushed attempts to stay long-stemmed, always wild & because a daughter is a beautiful thing, my mother tells me, though I know the letters sound more lovely in her mouth. O, Rose that grew from the concrete, rose into a woman— I wonder if she will ever accept there are thorns around my hips not by nature but by my own doing, if she fully knows I’ve buried bouquets from lovers because what other pretty hurt do you know that both stalks the living & adorns all the dead? Show Me How to Trace This 00:00 / 01:08 & if you had a map out of your body, where would it go? What is the point of exit you’d choose to leave yourself? I’d choose the wounds already claimed: the fried egg-shaped scar burned above my left knee, my crooked pointer finger like an almost question mark, or better yet straight from the new titanium heart— where a stranger sleeps at the wheel, keeping time. That slicing open drove me into questions I still can’t answer, like where is the intersection of my own skin & all that hides underneath? How to steer away from the bump in the road that lives in my chest, unmake detours into strange tomorrows. Pulse lines are wires that got crossed along the way & now I need a key to a home I’ve already lost. These blue veins were never routes that would carry me there. All the rivers I’ve known are muddied, emptying into the mouth of someone else. Publishing credits If You're Asking Why I'm Leaving: Pittsburgh Poetry Review Etymology of a Middle Name: Kissing Dynamite Show Me How to Trace This: Sampsonia Way Magazine

Hear poet David Butler read poems for wave 11 of literary poetry journal iamb. David Butler wave 11 autumn 2022 back next the poet David Butler's third poetry collection, Liffey Sequence , was published in 2021 – the same year as his second short story collection, Fugitive . His novel, City of Dis , was shortlisted for Irish Novel of the Year 2015. the poems Distancing 00:00 / 00:53 Now we are wintering – the whole hive stupefied to silence, each in their cell who isn’t soldiering, an inmate of a new Shalott – the cities, simulacra: drone-shot piazzas; enchanted palaces; empty trainset trains; vistas dreamed by de Chirico; traffic lights sequencing the memory of traffic – confined while, ineluctably, somewhere else, the toll, the toll, until we’re numbed by the scale of it; each week, the heat and bustle more distant, more unlikely; nothing to feed but waxing apprehension: what will eclose this long cocooning, and on what tentative wings? And then the sun broke through 00:00 / 00:46 A sea of jade and muscatel; the sky, gun-metal. Landward, the storm-portending birds, white-lit, Riding wild contours of wind, uplift To tilt at the raucous crows. This Is how it is to live, the ticker tells, Looping the floor of the newsfeed. Somewhere, an outrage; an airstrike; Somewhere, a politic withdrawal. This Is how it is to live: the wind blowing The charcoal of crows’ feathers; The rent in the clouds; oblique tines beating Sudden ochre out of a sullen ocean. These Are Not Days 00:00 / 00:46 These are not days, they are shadows flitting over the too-familiar ground, dry and rubble strewn, where our choices are buried. These are not days, these shades, tremulous, mere changes of light. Quiet as thieves, as witnesses, they slip past in silent legion. Count them up, and they come to years, but years empty of substance. They are the dry husks of our lives, the whisper inside the hourglass. Days are not the coinage of will, as once we imagined. One day they rise like locusts, to devour us. Publishing credits Distancing / These Are Not Days: Liffey Sequence (Doire Press) And then the sun broke through: All the Barbaric Glass (Doire Press)

Hear poet Karen Pierce Gonzalez read poems for wave 24 of literary poetry journal iamb. Karen Pierce Gonzalez wave 24 winter 2025 back next the poet Award-winning poet, writer and intuitive artist Karen Pierce Gonzalez is the author of several chapbooks and poetic librettos. These include Coyote in the Basket of My Ribs , Moon kissed Earth wrought Vision drunk , Down River with Li Po , Mountains of Ocean: 10 Waves and RavenSong . Sun and Moon Wired Together is forthcoming from Midsummer Dream House. Karen is also a performance poet, and several of her one-act plays have been staged at San Francisco Bay Area fringe festivals. She publishes the Ekphrastic Folk Art flipbook, co-hosts North Bay Poetics, and hosted The Broken Spine Arts' #NotJustPretty . the poems Fortunee’s Mandolin 00:00 / 01:47 My maternal grandmother’s mandolin lies in a bed of wet brown-green seaweed at my feet. Most of the strings broken; hardwood varnish licked off by salt water. Its melodies meant only for the man she had to leave behind. Did the bowl-back instrument slip from her hands as the ship entered the New York harbor? Did it ride the crest of outgoing tides carrying it forward five decades—cold, damp, and swollen — to me? Her cross-country train ride, Ellis Island to San Francisco, ended on the eve of High Holy Days. The arranged wedding to a stranger had to happen quickly. Borrowed dress, hem hand-stitched with prayers for happiness. I think of that when my fingers, thin like hers, lightly trace the mandolin’s slim neck. a sea breeze whistles eddies of memory swirl briny notes play long In a Bird Cage 00:00 / 01:13 Strong coffee, my paternal grandmother Ruby’s favorite. Boiling liquid poured slowly into her favorite cup, thick and hand-painted like her. Then condensed milk, easy to store in very small spaces, stirred in. With broad strokes, she spoon-mixes the two until hot and cold meld. Battered hands rubbing the mug’s decorative buds, she whistles to her canary wake up . When it warbles back, Ruby sits on their shared plaid perch and sips while it sings. winter blooms stay closed morning sunlight too late petals won’t blossom Last Mother-Daughter talk 00:00 / 00:57 The telephone cables between us stretch from San Francisco to Seattle. Long-distance tollgates intercept phrases, disconnect sighs from gasps. Our taut voices travel through conductors semi-muffled, sometimes slipping out through cracks in sun-blistered rubber coatings. The entirety of what you say after Daughter drops. Was it I’m sorry? forget-me-nots bloom wild grasses lay down their blades westerly clouds drift away Publishing credits Fortunee’s Mandolin / Last Mother-Daughter Talk: exclusive first publication by iamb In a Bird Cage: GAS: Poetry, Art and Music (Feb 16th 2023)

Hear poet Phillip Crymble read poems for wave 18 of literary poetry journal iamb. Phillip Crymble wave 18 summer 2024 back next the poet Phillip Crymble, a physically disabled poet originally from Belfast, now lives in Atlantic Canada. He's a poetry editor at The Fiddlehead , and has had work published in Poetry Ireland Review , The Stinging Fly , The North , Magma , The London Magazine , The Irish Times , The Forward Book of Poetry 2017 , Bad Lilies , Couplet Poetry , The Honest Ulsterman and elsewhere. Phillip's debut collection is Not Even Laughter . the poems North American Birds 00:00 / 01:21 A world is firstly made of names and labels — what the nascent heart is desperate to possess. For you, my son, the chickadees and finches at the feeding table — nesting in the eaves and calling each to each atop our backyard maple — filled the empty spaces in your head. Next came the illustrations — colour plates you memorized by rote — the simple work of saying like a spell — a song of invocation. All winter long our little house made warm by ornithophily — a reverence of words — the age-old human dream of flight. These days toy trucks and robots dance like planets in your mind. Bird boy, must you leave so soon — sit down with me and stay awhile. Mealworm 00:00 / 00:34 Brought home from school and cast aside — discarded in the mud room — left for me to find by accident weeks later. Confined like one of Bluebeard’s wives — interred beneath a substrate that the kids made out of oats and sliced up orange rinds — the mealworm — newly calcified — abides — waits out its aftertime. Forcing House 00:00 / 01:15 It never worked the way we planned. Our oil furnace always ran too rich. The winter days were damp, and though a grand, romantic gesture, living by the sea was desperate. Socks and underpants on radiators, heating pipes — wet woollens, windows clouded white. A forcing house of laundered clothes, the boiler ticked and bubbled like amalgam in a crucible. The jars of potted jam and marmalade we kept in store. Mornings were the worst of all — the lino kitchen floor as cold as stone. Each day we trundled down for tea and toast you checked the letter-box — as if the news from home might warm us. Publishing credits North American Birds: The New Quarterly (Issue No. 123) Mealworm: THE INDEX: A Quarterly Anthology of Prints (Issue No. 6) Forcing House: Michigan Quarterly Review (Volume 46, Issue No. 1)

Hear poet Jo Bratten read poems for wave 4 of literary poetry journal iamb. Jo Bratten wave 4 autumn 2020 back next the poet Jo Bratten writes and teaches in London, but was raised off-grid on a farm in Ohio’s rust belt. She moved to the UK to study at the University of St Andrews, where she completed a PhD on the modern novel. Her poetry has appeared in Ambit, Butcher’s Dog, The Interpreter's House, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Ink Sweat & Tears and elsewhere. Jo is working on both her first pamphlet, and a novel about cicadas. the poems Sunset Over Watford 00:00 / 00:52 I am not terribly good at love. Yet I begin to think I could be, if love is loving small things: the moment when the second magpie lurches across the path; or the girl in the purple coat running towards the dog she doesn’t know; old men on the bench with sandwiches in the rain; the back of your neck; breathing you in quick, thick gulps, like cold water after bedtime; the smell of dying daffodils that still strain to hold their heads bravely towards the February sun as it sets over Uxbridge, Ruislip, Pinner, Hatch End, Watford – all bright and glittering in the smoky air. Amulet 00:00 / 00:57 In these times we tighten, fasten locks like lips, stockpile pills, believe our own haptic power to summon the fever-gods, draw blood to rub across the lintel, into apotropaic scratches cut into doors and walls. You touch me like a mezuzah, hang me by your heart, an omamori, a scapular, a locketed caul; hold me on your lips a cicada of jade, in your pocket like a hare’s foot, a whelk’s shell; I circle you like hag stones, word you a breverl: the skies are quieter, clean; a blackbird pauses, tilts her head, builds a nest. After Us 00:00 / 00:53 When the floods clear what will be left, washed up at our gate or lodged between the polite paving stones along our tree-lined road? Other people’s newspapers, bags for life, little rusted badges with an old slogan, lost socks and dreams, righteous anger bloated like a dead rat, effluent thoughts and prayers sludged blackly across our doormat’s smiling welcome; bits of ourselves we’d cut away and scattered in the river as fish food stuck now on the stern brick of our house, obscene in their pinkness, puckered like little sucking mouths, trying to get back in where it is so warm and so dry. Publishing credits Sunset Over Watford: Ambit Amulet: The Mechanics’ Institute Review After Us: Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal

Hear poet Katrina Moinet read poems for wave 24 of literary poetry journal iamb. Katrina Moinet wave 24 winter 2025 back next the poet Katrina Moinet is published in Raw Lit , Black Iris , Poetry X Hunger , Poetry Wales , Ffosfforws and Barddas . Their debut pamphlet, Portrait of a Young Girl Falling , was shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year. She followed this with her award-winning pamphlet The Art of Silence . Longlisted in The Poetry Society's National Poetry Competition 2024, Katrina's also been nominated for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize. She got her creative writing MA from Bangor University, hosts monthly poetry open mic Versify , and enjoys surfing. Katrina's latest pamphlet is State of the Nations . the poems Elemental | Elémentaire 00:00 / 00:52 Tell me all the ways you’ll conquer me a gentle chuchotement à l’oreille a ramrod battement between my enjambe- ment sweet châtiment ça chatouille bare skin fingertip frissons tiptoe to seduce la nuque , misuse your langue civilisée to recite a malaise of easy beats to slipknot bind me à l’horizontale I’ll tell you the way I’ll conquer you as hawthorn borne over by prevailing winds as loosened dune concedes to groundswell flood as a flame-scorched page disintegrates to nothing but love, relentless love Kuss mit der Faust After Klimt 00:00 / 01:15 There’s something quite unheimlich about your tightened lids & tilted moon face, toes curled to grip dear ground; your solid bound to his expression – glued, in semi-serene dream. Something gefährlich about his stiffened finger clasp, fists grasping at oval bone no shimmer space between your split shapes your swirls boldly blocked by black, silver, gold. That etwas unnatürlich which endures: a portrait posture held in clutched embrace disguised trace facial clues, a light signal surface tripwires – never step out of frame. This century’s sinnliche Masse adores a brow of smooth acquiescence, gentle wilting gesture conceals tender splendour knelt low, as nature’s gift slips to the abyss. An ekphrastic response to Gustav Klimt’s painting ‘Der Kuss’; title references Florence + The Machine’s ‘Kiss with a Fist’ from the 2009 album Lungs. The cost of living 00:00 / 01:32 I suffered a panic attack today: my shopping bag felt light-headed my milk turned my eggs shrank back from the sides of their cardboard nests and had a wobble I've tried to never watch the news, never keep abreast of what government think-tanks think or whose stroke of genius is making headlines spin and yet I couldn't help but notice the cost of living-breathing-eating-heating rise I couldn't help but notice the pound slip between the stitched seam of my pocket A lady over the phone checks my state of consciousness asks me if I'm having difficulty breathing? I'd hardly noticed lately I've been breathing less (more shallowly) living less (more shallowly) loving less (more shallowly) And yes I'm having difficulties yes it's left me breathless The lady on the phone advises me: 'Take deeper breaths' but I can't find my words to explain I can't afford to take deeper breaths I can't afford to phone a friend I can't afford to use a lifeline can't afford to survive so I breathe less & less & less & less & less Publishing credits Elemental | Elémentaire: Firmament (Vol. 2, No. 4) – appearing originally as Sonnet | un sonnet in a trio of poems titled Growing Pains Kuss mit der Faust: Poems for Gustav Klimt (The Hedgehog Poetry Press) The cost of living: Mslexia (Issue 98)

Hear poet Jinny Fisher read poems for wave 12 of literary poetry journal iamb. Jinny Fisher wave 12 winter 2022 back next the poet Before writing poetry, Jinny Fisher was a classical violinist, a teacher, and a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Her poems have since appeared in Lighthouse, Against the Grain , The Interpreter’s House , Under the Radar , Tears in the Fence , Prole , Ink, Sweat & Tears and Osmosis . Jinny's writing has been commended and placed in national and international competitions. She was first runner-up in The Interpreter’s House Open House Competition in 2016, as well as in Prole Laureate in 2020. Jinny also runs the Poetry Pram: taking poetry to audiences at festivals for random one-to-one readings. Her pamphlet, The Escapologist , was out in 2019. the poems Privilege 00:00 / 01:25 Aged eight, my brother walks through the cathedral school’s stone doorway. He is assigned a number, to mark with indelible ink inside his shoes. He is taught only by men who have been taught only by men. Big boys creep to the beds of shaking small boys, who wake in cold, damp sheets. Masters walk pretty boys upstairs, for personal attention, special education. * But my brother can pitch a note, so is chosen to be an apprentice chorister, learning melody and polyphony from the boys around him. Cantoris and Decani , the Cathedral choir stalls become his refuge; his friends are animal misericords under ancient polished seats. He floats to the rhythm of versicle and response, to refrains of psalms and canticles that swirl up to the fan vaulted Sanctuary ceiling. Praetorius, Tallis, Purcell—their anthems shall cradle and comfort him always. And in peace he shall both lie down and sleep. Retrofocus 00:00 / 01:32 Brownie 127: The Beach. As we skimmed the deeps, his freckled back was my boat. I felt the rise and fall of shoulder blades under my thumbs, his mouth swivelling into view as he gasped for breath. Look: a squinty grin, a cartwheel, a sandcastle – fortified against the tide. Asahi Pentax: The Shed. Dust-coated cobwebs, thick as tea towels, draped the windows. I dangled my legs from the workbench, viced the battens while he sawed, and there were so many splinters to be gouged. Look: a table – sanded and glossed, a captain’s chair, three splay-backs. Nikon F: The Studio. A windowless shed at the end of the garden. Only my friend was with him. We all knew there were cameras on tripods, banks of flash-guns, umbrellas to diffuse the glare. I imagine his camouflaged murmurs as her blouse falls to the floor. Listen: Lovely – peep from under your lids. Now – a little smile? Little Brother, Big Sister 00:00 / 00:38 At the back of Deb’s wardrobe, Dan finds the frock: pink satin frills, unicorns, fairies— soon to be sent to the charity shop. Grandma’s beads from the dressing-up box set off the shine in his wavy blond hair. His unisex trainers match Deb’s rainbow socks. Dan poses and pouts to the full-length mirror, catwalks into the kitchen with a shrill ta-da! Father’s eyes roll. He storms out, slams the door. Publishing credits Privilege / Little Brother, Big Sister: exclusive first publication by iamb Retrofocus: The Escapologist (V. Press)

Hear poet JC Niala read poems for wave 8 of literary poetry journal iamb. JC Niala wave 8 winter 2021 back next the poet JC Niala’s poetry is influenced by her relationship with the land of the two countries in which she dwells: England and Kenya. She spent the growing season of 2021 recreating a 1918-style English allotment on a site at Oxford as a living memorial to the 1918-1919 pandemic, and to those who served in the First World War. Poems written as part of that project will be published by Fig under the title, Portal . the poems Brood 00:00 / 01:44 You were the odd amongst the keets. The one, who would as I nursed Okelo fall off the earthenware pot-turned-perch by the confusion of black and white spotted siblings on my mother’s veranda. And I did not name you. It was enough that you would not be eaten by my family at least but learn to forage and like a seamstress pick out dudus, from the fabric of soul underneath the bombax and bottlebrush trees. The overhanging roof descended to cocoon us, Okelo at my breast, born on the same morning you all hatched. You who would not be contained. Your bright chirps would unveil my mornings when still wrecked by broken sleep I would slip along, slowly to the outside and listen to the sound of Okelo’s suckles amidst your birdsong she would later mimic and sing, as she toddled on the silken sandpit near where I lunched, while she snoozed. The day you were taken Your mother, would have I am sure, uttered the same warning as when she pecked you back into line. Stay close. Do not go into the open green space. but you strayed and into the talons of Kite so swift you, your mother or I were caught on a breath and did not cry out. We watched you reduced to a cluster of feathers, picked clean. The mobile’s shadow hovered over Okelo’s cot. Okelo stirred, I leapt for her. Sprawl 00:00 / 00:30 Watch me grow. I suck it all in to feed the giant. Out of a swamp I rose like Omweri, Squeezed through poorly laid pavement. Still, I welcome those rich enough And those who put them up. Boundaries vanish. I swallow whole suburbs, kijijis. People forget that I once wasn’t here. Changes 00:00 / 01:11 Insects still tell the seasons here. Dusk, when the cicadas, an environmental tinnitus, obliterate thought with continuous sound soften into a lullaby above which the chorus of bullfrogs arise in a vibrato echo and then fall. Call and response, that talking drummers once imitated across the savannah. Beating out news on carved hollow trees skins tightened over cut trunks to produce sound. Messages that carried over lifetimes until they were dulled by walls of concrete that rise from swampy plains to bring Development. Now, ringtones cut through the night air like a panga shearing elephant grass. Yet just beneath the fired earth, red ants, termites crawl along their regurgitated tunnels up and down and through every building’s crack, dashed lines, urgency on parchment, an invisible shelter-trail to inside where I listen for the smell of rain. Publishing credits Brood: The Lamp Journal (September 2016) Sprawl: peripheries: a journal of word and Image (No. 4) Changes: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Annick Yerem read poems for wave 10 of literary poetry journal iamb. Annick Yerem wave 10 summer 2022 back next the poet Annick Yerem is a Scottish/German poet who lives and works in Berlin. She's been published by River Mouth Review , Anti-Heroin-Chic , 192 Magazine , Green Ink Poetry , Sledgehammer Lit and more. Annick has also been a guest reader on Eat The Storms and Open Collab . Her first chapbook, St. Eisenberg & The Sunshine Bus , is due out in 2022. the poems St. Eisenberg & The Sunshine Bus 00:00 / 01:10 I am sure now that you were sending me signs Heavens opened and closed, heat blazed through me. The smell of freshly poured tar on the motorway, turbines, sunflowers, left right centre We stopped for a break near parched woods, found raspberry gifts, barley spikelets, wispy and gleaming like fairy hair The damp, green quiet after a big rain, fog hanging low in the mountains, blurred brake lights Midway, I lay down in a parking lot, crying on my dog's blanket, trying to make sense of what we were doing You were sending me signs: robins, rainbows, star fish trails That day, we drove towards your body, to that uncluttered, bright space which enclosed your darkness in those last, long years That room where, when you left, someone opened the vast window, so that your soul could find its way out Belonging After Brené Brown | For Ankh and Cate 00:00 / 00:45 You wordful mindsmiths, you seawitch patterned beauty along cat-eared shores. You fill cars with music, You send love over thousands of miles (I imagine) the air around you smells of sandalwood You are who you are, no need to feed those unkind fires You belong here, stand your ground, will a forest of breath and light into being. Then steady its roots with your ways, your wonders. When you call me six times at 1am, I think of One Art 00:00 / 01:06 I've made a science out of listening to the space between books, the silence between songs, tiny increments of time suspended mid-word I bring songs to this fight, make mountains of lingering doubt disappear, send arrows into apple trees. Say windfalls , say what you see, what you don't. Forgetting is so hard to master. It is not purpose, not spite, but years of fights and fears pulled to the surface of an unquiet lake. A code for your memories, how was your day, your breakfast/lunch/dinner, the last book you read? Tell me, what can I do to make this better? I offer sugarcoated words: take a pick, pick three. Say I love you . Mean it. Publishing credits St. Eisenberg & The Sunshine Bus / When you call me six times at 1am, I think of One Art: exclusive first publication by iamb Belonging: Bale of Joy (The Failure Baler) Author photo : © Barbara Dietl

Hear poet Usha Kishore read poems for wave 7 of literary poetry journal iamb. Usha Kishore wave 7 autumn 2021 back next the poet Indian-born Usha Kishore is a British poet and translator, resident on the Isle of Man. She is internationally published and has been anthologised by Macmillan, Hodder Wayland, Oxford University Press and Harper Collins India. Usha’s poetry is featured in both British school and Indian undergraduate syllabi. Her third and latest poetry collection, Immigrant , was published in 2018. Usha is currently undertaking a PhD in Postcolonial Poetry with Edinburgh Napier University. the poems Postcolonial Poem 00:00 / 02:36 You are the enterprising seafarer, in search of adventure. I am the wild orient, waiting to be discovered. You cast your imperial net. I welcome you like a God. You trade. You invade. You conquer. You divide. I bleed in saffron and green. I sing patriotic songs in mumbo-jumbo. You exorcise my pagan spirit with cross and book. You teach me your language. I curse in your language. I unite. I shout slogans. I subvert. I burn you down. Your guns thunder down. I die. But I rise again. You imprison me. You call me traitor, in the name of the Crown. I engage in non-violence. I desire truth. I non-co-operate. I fast unto death. My swelling masses flood you out. Your sun is set. You saw me in two. Yet, I rise again. I build nations. You seek new horizons. We pretend to ignore each other. But we need each other. I dream of the western skies. You dream of a new empire. I come. I see. I conquer. I teach you your language. Together, we journey through Prospero-land. My pagan spirit resurrects in mumbo-jumbo. I people your island with little Calibans. You hurl abuse. You discriminate. I resist. You make new laws. I teach you my language. You mumble my name in your colonial tongue. In-between Space 00:00 / 02:16 The red of the morning contouring itself on the black of the night, a chiaroscuro dawn, baring her vermillion bosom to the rising sun. A night flight between two continents, turning into light somewhere over brooding desert skies, where the drifting mind soars on falcon wings. You have dreamt between distracted archipelagos, floundering coral reefs and lost peninsulas, hitching dragon rides in a world of camels and elephants. You have mapped cultural spaces with crepuscular icons of demons and demiurges churning immortal serpents in the misty oceans of the milky way. You have lived in fear of Jupiter’s thunderbolt and Indra’s vajra, gathering gemstone legends from the lands you traversed in search of a dark eternity. You have inherited the scent of jasmine flowers, the loss of womanhood hanging on pomegranate trees and the fate of the ever-wandering khanabadosh . Lounging on the peacock throne of in-between space, you sip cloudy twilight from a tall glass and fathom the sensuous curve of the sky as it meets the sea. Blinded by the light of the rising sun, you lose time in a kaleidoscope of bewildered geographies, each glass bead, flowering as second, minute and hour. Now, it is landing time – you stretch, fold away the blanket of sleep, apply your kajal and lip gloss and tune into the dulcet tones of a language that melts into turquoise sea and emerald palm fronds. Indra: Indian equivalent to Jupiter Vajra: Sanskrit for 'thunderbolt' Khanabadosh: Urdu for 'gypsy' Absent Sky (Manasarovar) 00:00 / 01:18 Snow dyes the mind, freezing the myth of time. Passing clouds wax astral batiks into the fabric of still air, mandalas and yantras for wandering souls. Thought translates into blue eternity, veiling the kneeling earth in immortal hue. In the paling distance, on a mist-clad rock dome, jewelled in glacial ice, a celestial being, wearing the crescent moon on his forehead, contemplates the world. Day and night merge into cosmic dreams as winds gasp between sound and silence. Rainbow flags flutter in tranquil prayer and a twilight mantra rises on wings of fire, as the mind lake meditates on an absent sky. Manasarovar: translated from Sanskrit as Mind Lake , is a freshwater lake on the Trans-Himalayan Tibetan plateau. Resting on the foot of Mount Kailas (Gang Rinpoche), the lake is associated with Indo-Tibetan myths and religious beliefs. Yantras/mandalas: symbols/diagrams used in Hindu and Buddhist religious art. Publishing credits All poems: Immigrant (Eyewear Publishing)

Hear poet Tracey Rhys read poems for wave 17 of literary poetry journal iamb. Tracey Rhys wave 17 spring 2024 back next the poet With a New Writer’s bursary from Literature Wales, Tracey Rhys finished her first pamphlet, Teaching a Bird to Sing . Its theme of parenting a child with autism, told through poetry, would later feature in two touring theatre productions, and as part of an exhibition at The Senedd. Tracey’s work can be found in journals from Poetry Wales and New Welsh Review to The Lonely Crowd and Ink, Sweat & Tears , and she's no stranger to being long and shortlisted for poetry competitions – the Cinnamon Press Pamphlet Competition, Poetry Wales Pamphlet Competition and Cardiff International Poetry Competition among them. Tracey was also among the 20 winners of The Poetry Archive’s WordView Now! competition in 2020. Her first full collection, 21st-Century Bathsheba , will be published by Parthian in 2025. the poems Flood 00:00 / 02:07 Flood woke up on the wrong side of her bed, flowed over the bank with displeasure. There was power in her upsurge, the great swell of her being. Birds who waded in, the egrets and cormorants, recalled that once Flood was happy, but now was better. By better, they meant Ocean. Flood was broad and tidal estuary. She left a salty ring around their beaks and gave them shells. Flood was beautiful, they said. She should stop and feel it. But how could Flood pause when she was all reflection? Moon-driven, surging to sea. * Flood recalled her first taste of tarmac. Compared it to fennel. Preferred it to liquorice. She drawled, No need for glass when you have fibreglass. Or slate stacks, when you have those aching aluminium greys: the skeletons of automobiles. Ever since she’d drunk her first bollard, Flood had regretted concrete. The way it sunk into her pit and stayed there, trolley-bound for years. * Stories began circulating that Flood had been a stream, had thought big and got lucky. She was fast becoming folklore. It was true that she’d tried all the tricks; consuming lakes, spouting dams. I am braver than I know, Flood told the starlings. Bigger than is necessary. Beaks rippled in. The sun gave her prisms. Soon, she was run through with flowing, even as she was imbibed. I am always inside other bodies, she confided to the water rats on the underside of her skin. Interview with a Flood 00:00 / 01:41 I appreciate you must be busy … Well, I’m nothing without my fans. And your fans love you. Why, thank you. They want me to ask what your favourite colour is? My favourite colour is calcite. Pearly, like the inside of a tooth, all pulp and tusk. It reminds me of better days; snow quartz skies, rain on the way, white horses rising to pummel the hard brick houses. Where do you go on holiday? The fat berg. Everyone will be surprised by that! I think we imagined the Maldives … The fat berg is an island destination, a busman’s holiday if you like. Not everyone’s choice but I confess to enjoy oozing up through a drain grille, along waste pipes to vanity units, coating myself slick on the gunge loaded with hair in the trap. The limescale on the U-bend is a good day out. What keeps you going? It has to be the Blob Fish. Have you seen how ugly they look, dead on land? That nose! Almost human. 4,000 feet under the sea they don’t look half bad. I live by that. What are you afraid of? Jugs. What advice have you got for our youngsters, starting out? Get yourself a spot, it doesn’t have to be nice. Grow into it. To be small is no small thing. I always felt as big as I could be. As if the air was with me, walls parting at the dam. Shame 00:00 / 00:43 Though she’s old enough to have forgotten all the embarrassing beginnings, Flood lets them in at night, which is when the wind rushes at her edges and the riverbank is audible in its silver spoons. Flood remembers her great shames, burns with them. Her vast stupidities. Didn’t she once boast to the moon that she had the bigger tides? She pours herself into the earth, spreads herself thinner than vapour. Nothing will find her until morning, when the tinny glug of her belly will answer the flushing loos. Publishing credits Flood: Poetry Wales (Vol. 56, No. 3) Interview with a Flood / Shame: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Rachel Carney read poems for wave 18 of literary poetry journal iamb. Rachel Carney wave 18 summer 2024 back next the poet Writer, creative writing tutor and academic Rachel Carney is based in Cardiff. She won the 2021 Pre-Raphaelite Society Poetry Competition, and has had work place highly in several other competitions. Her poetry has appeared in One Hand Clapping , The Interpreter's House , Ink, Sweat & Tears and elsewhere. Rachel's debut collection, Octopus Mind , with its themes of perception, creativity and neurodiversity, was one of The Guardian’s Best Poetry Books of 2023 . the poems Self-Portrait as Pieces of a Saint After Saint Teresa of Avila 00:00 / 01:01 you may kiss my jaw in Rome or grip my finger bones in Avila peer through thick museum glass at my shrivelled drooping heart and see how they transfigured me at death into a slice of pious art my humble flesh spooned out in prayer my left arm pinned for you in crystal decomposing slowly in its own realm I am exhumed again my skin ripped from its frame plundered for your touch your taste devoured by your curiosity your faith in me and though you hold the pieces of me in your hands I am not here I never was Dys 00:00 / 00:56 I want to dis/ entangle the sly hiss of dys, to dis/embowel the fraught dis/ease of it, as it slips in front, so sure, so certain. I want to dis/turb its dis/avowal, crumple it, curtail its sudden fist, flung like an abuser’s kiss. I want to dis/arm the beast of it, dis/dain its dis/approval, dis/pel its dis/paraging taste, its dull dis/gust, how it dis/ figures our praxis, dis/misses us. I dis/inter dys – its cold corpse dis/carded on the kitchen floor, like an old god. Mine 00:00 / 01:18 I’ve known you, always, in the small pearl of your absence, drifting slowly away from me across the years. I’ve felt your restless waters, your crumbling edifice, your waves. I’ve seen how dark this cave is, full of dancing shadows, echoes of echoes. There is no avoiding the possibility of you in the ebb and flow of ongoing tides. I’ve seen you in the flash of the sun on the water. I blink, and then you’re out of sight. I’ve heard your quiet breath, as you lap against my surface. Your shore is wide and open, your song a song of life, your ripples hardly there. I’ve always known how impossible you are. A bubble, faint with light. The skin of you so thin. What would it take to turn you into flesh? How can we know what could have been? Publishing credits All poems: Octopus Mind (Seren Books)

Hear poet Christopher Arksey read poems for wave 19 of literary poetry journal iamb. Christopher Arksey wave 19 autumn 2024 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 Iris Anne Lewis read poems for wave 17 of literary poetry journal iamb. Iris Anne Lewis wave 17 spring 2024 back next the poet Born in the Rhondda in Wales, Iris Anne Lewis is a featured writer on fellow countryman Matthew M C Smith 's Black Bough Poetry website . She was highly commended in the Wales Poetry Award 2022 , having previously won first prize in The Gloucestershire Poetry Society's 2020 Open Poetry Competition . Iris is a regular at the Cheltenham Literature Festival, where she's so far been invited to read seven times. In 2018, she founded Wordbrew : a group of poets based in the Gloucestershire Cotswolds market town of Cirencester. the poems I make myself a skirt of fish skin 00:00 / 01:25 Mother stitches mackerel eyes as sequins to my bodice. They wink dark gold in the sun. My sisters leave their baskets brimming full of gutted herring. They braid my hair with seaweed. Grandmother binds my thighs together, strokes my silver scales. Her hands are rough with barnacles. Trawler men sing shanties of storm- tossed ships and foundered boats. There is salt in their voices. Women lead me to the water’s edge, show me how to dance to the surge and suck of the waves. They break in a bridal froth of foam. Spindrift settles as confetti on my shoulders. I flip my tail, rip through the tide, dive deep in the ocean. Claim the sea as my own. I shall have to be punished for writing this After John Wieners' Children of the working class 00:00 / 01:06 I do not want to write in colour, red, purple, yellow, blue – those shades of blood and bruises. I do not want to write in orange – that haunted hue of halloween. I must be bold, plain-speaking; tell of prisons, beatings, blistered skin. And so I write in black. The blank screen glimmers mirror-bright. I start to type. Words, those ghosts of thoughts, unfurl across the page. I highlight all my text, change the font to white. The Tomb of the Eagles 00:00 / 01:53 Like a trow, he just appeared, led me through the coastal heath, the bladed grass sharp against my sandalled feet. The air is restless here , he said, a harshness always in its breath. His voice a lilting burr of Nordic vowels and rolling ‘r’s. He tells me stories of island ceilidhs, treeless landscapes, a cache of bones and talons of white-tailed eagles, that sailed the Orkney skies four thousand years ago. We reach the cliff – the drop below, precipitous. The sea glints silver cold. Wild flowers flicker in the coarse green sedge. And then we are upon it – the grass-topped tomb. Its drystone walls curve round, form a shallow entrance. Lie down , he said. Use this – two planks side-by-side slung low on nine-inch wheels. And through the long dark tunnel I belly-skated five thousand years to the pitch-black chamber of the cairn. Stand up , he said. Flicked on his torch. A row of human skulls grinned up at me. He chuckled at my shock. The skulls kept on beaming. Publishing credits I make myself a skirt of fish skin: Seaborne Magazine (Issue 3) I shall have to be punished for writing this: Fresh Air Poetry (June 2019) The Tomb of the Eagles: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Victoria Spires read poems for wave 23 of literary poetry journal iamb. Victoria Spires wave 23 autumn 2025 back next the poet It's been two and a half years since Victoria Spires began writing, and she thinks eight-year-old Vic would be proud of her for living up to her childhood dream of publishing a book – her debut pamphlet, Soi-même . Shortlisted and commended in several prizes and competitions, including the 2024 Ledbury Poetry Competition , Victoria’s poetry has appeared in Berlin Lit , Dust Poetry , Stanchion , The Winged Moon , The London Magazine and After... In 2025, she placed third in The Rialto's Nature and Place Poetry Competition , and won The Alpine Fellowship's Poetry Prize with her poem I try to model kindness to all living beings, and it's hard . Away from writing, you'll find Vic playing wrestling action figures with her son (The Undertaker is her favourite), running, or crouching down to look at something interesting. the poems Artemis of the Salt Works (Brine Shrimp) 00:00 / 01:16 The way you glide, if glide were both shutter and frame The way your bodies are a thing that moves, and stays in place The way you flute eleven simultaneous pairs of legs The way the space you make is always being rearranged within itself The way your separatenesses fit, as different imprints of the same feather The way fucking is – for you – a state of grace, which can be achieved alone, or together The way you are see-through, like the pleats of time made visible The way your face, if you have a face, is entirely abstract, beatific The way you synchronise with light The way you loop with the aimless precision of a rehearsing figure skater The way you (the skate) feathers you (the ice) Your soft lives, that begin and end with swim in one unbroken temporal chain The way you don’t need to believe in heaven, to describe it From a train 00:00 / 00:42 For a while, only field and trees – the world pleached, into a certain frame of reference by a letterbox eye. Few things change, except the particular angles and location of a pylon, the rain or not-rain in this or that envelope of sky. I expect this is how some loves arrive: the head idly resting at the window pane, the almost unnoticeable re-arrangements in the interior set design. Until gradually it is suggested, that a great journey is underway, and has been, for some time. Mother-Substitute 00:00 / 00:59 There are 294 mothers in our solar system Astronomers are discovering new mothers all the time The smallest and most distant mothers will no longer be given mythological names All mothers are mythological On Earth, claims of the existence of other mothers have not been disproved My mother is called Lilith When I can’t sleep, I root for her nipple in the pale flesh of the window I display a fearful-avoidant attachment style entirely in keeping with her orbital eccentricity The composition of a mother depends on its distance from its own mother Some mothers are almost constantly volcanic Some mothers will never be knowable To mother means to measure time Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb Author photo: © Peri Cimen

Hear poet Cora Dessalines read poems for wave 8 of literary poetry journal iamb. Cora Dessalines wave 8 winter 2021 back next the poet Cora Dessalines is a queer, London-based freelance writer. They were former assistant editor of their university’s creative writing magazine ~FACTORY~ and editorial assistant at Guts, an independent publisher of memoirs and short-story anthologies. Cora has had their work published in Lacuna, a literary magazine that showcases the writing of young women and non-binary people of colour. They are a lover of fashion, space and anything colourful, and are currently at work on their first afrofuturist science-fiction novel for adults. the poems takotsubo cardiomyopathy 00:00 / 01:53 they say it feels like s i n k i n g that tectonic plates shift and create fissures wide enough to swallow you whole quite the opposite, in fact it isn’t quicksand nor an overlap of scrambling hands and clawing fingers craving to drag you under no, it is a rupture in the laws of physics a losing battle between mass and energy where gravity knows no bounds— it is the feeling of your feet g n i t f i l and your body capsizing gnizispac to mould with this wretched world in which you rise, climbing the clouds, your head facing the ground all the way they say it feels like a cavernous well but the devil is a liar that chilly water is the fluid in your lungs, sib the build-up from elevating to such high altitudes where dew droplets crystallise on your eyelashes and your oxygen is slowly snatched while you ascend them six layers as punishment by this, a most wicked cosmos to be honest, you should’ve guarded your rassclart heart instead of looking up and thanking the universe for blessing you with syrup and silver and steadfast loyalty that love was on loan, little horror and the night sky tricked you into thinking those were jewels stitched onto a dark tapestry instead of black sheets stuck on using a roller and wheat paste i wish i could’ve warned you the light you saw are just bullet holes we call stars. so this is love 00:00 / 01:35 i want it to be glorious. i want us to douse ourselves in it to take a match in each hand light them and set ourselves on fire! our mixed ashes must ripple and rumble until we, two phoenixes, rise birthed from the pyre of our own making— it needs to be … ravenous. and make us forsake all earthly foods save the tongue-plucked cherries that grow above our inner thighs, swallowed and savoured a sempiternal reminder that we are the fruits of a supernova, dual spheres of magma. we will steal matter from each other like two thieves in the night gorging in tandem lava— combust we until i only want it if it’s going to bring me beyond the brink of destruction and make astronomers believe planets will form from we, these dead stars’ disk. stars above, it must be r a p t u r o u s! and so fucking consuming that my lungs become your air becomes my lungs fill faster than what my breath can catch. trust, we best be willing to lean over balconies sever our bloodlines and make a pact that our hearts may only beat at the same time as each other or else, leave us permanently breathless. … i want it to leave us breathless. because to us that is love. love in reverse 00:00 / 02:38 legend has it our meeting made flowers blossom in the gloom of winter, spurred leaves into elevating back to their branches as they shifted from red yellow to green again with every day we spoke we, two divergents, formed our own timeline and while everyone else’s nights came quicker the sun would spread its arms just for us, purposely setting when the rest of the world rose for work this was back when i thought my love for you shattered laws when i believed the night we met caused mangoes to grow in the north pole like a unity of contradiction sprouted from life’s continual war of opposites instead of lying in that field of tension i made my love for you alter the meaning of cause and effect in the hope i could understand how the imprint of your head on my shoulder was there before i even knew you see, i used to think we would be infinite to spite the general line, that even though we’d submitted to the logic of change, pledged our lives to nada hay absoluto y todo revoluciona me and you would stay the same but this was back before i knew my honesty would have me barred indefinitely, would have my words chewed up and spat back to me at a later date, with the mushy remnants of them laid on my palm like a spoiled crop you told me afterwards you didn’t want us to end like this but i’d already washed my hands i only wish you hadn’t waved the wrong red flag, my love it was better when whatever we were was an unspoken thing, curved into your left cheek like a tiny sickle it is said our meeting unravelled the rules of the cosmos, burned the cool red stars so hot we made one another tremble, as proof that in the last analysis we could’ve won this world together if either of us just had some compassion now the thought of you reminds me that we are in the time of monsters, running parallel to each other so that our contradictions never overlap, never reveal that me and you were in the bloom of life, from a planet where you don’t refuse to see me even after i beg the politburo for a meeting Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Robert Harper read poems for wave 8 of literary poetry journal iamb. Robert Harper wave 8 winter 2021 back next the poet Robert Harper’s poems have appeared in The Interpreter’s House , Prole , Acumen , Ink Sweat & Tears , And Other Poems and elsewhere. He's also had work featured in anthologies such as Fathers and What Must Be Said , A New Manchester Alphabet , The Every Day Poet , An Anthology to Seamus Heaney and The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry . Robert founded and edited the magazine Bare Fiction , and has recently launched online poetry magazine Disjointed . the poems An embarrassment of poverty After Michael Hoffman 00:00 / 01:09 At 1pm you sit and look at the poem. Among the other things you should be doing, you drink water to allay the sweat and read, squint at, your midnight endeavours, a tower of books leering like an old professor. You, compelled, or just desperate to let the thoughts flow, lay on your side unable to sleep. She, right there, like the painting you love and for which a light is always on. A thought enters your head. You tried too hard, yet held back and, subsequently, pushed too far forward. You wonder if the sleeping, the loss of it, curled like a cat in an empty box of paper, is what is up. You read it again. Embarrassment comes and you thank the gods for your humility, ask of the page – How dare I look at you and think of poverty? Obstacle 00:00 / 01:14 A boy sits alone (a roundabout) watching cars oblige as they dutifully trust an indirect route around the obstacle. He considers himself ‘obstacle’, traces his eyes via entrance to exit and nods his head. Half yes, half whatever appears on the road around him—obstacle. JCC 428H, Bangor 1970, Cortina Mk III, yellow and chrome trim. HFK 015E, Dudley 1967, the lost Ford Zephyr, abandoned, a yard monster. Dreams plagued with red trucks, green buses, black Austins to remind boy of time before his own existence. Dad, car, ahead, his birth. Obstacle. What is he looking for behind the seven inch sealed beam of a Hillman Imp? A connection to his beginning—an accidental merging where 2 people, going past obstacles, become stuck. How do others make such 00:00 / 01:31 Forked tongues. Unsure how to proceed, I detach my arm, look inside the open flesh for morsels hiding beneath the skin, quivering before the opportunity to be plucked or nurtured in the between state of draughty window by a slavish boy who wishes for nothing but new worlds and the road right in front of him. The road, full of signs, made up symbols to delay the choosing of the path, the leaving of one, one side which will not be taken, will take time. So I remove my leg and look beneath the skin; surely hidden there is knowledge of the groove, how one hops in and out needling the unsung sound — like a shellac 78 left in the heat of the sun to warp and throw you off the scent of music long lost; the jive and the rock, hard places rolling beneath your single step, out of reach of your one arm. I cannot see anyway so I pop out an eye, peel back the layers for clues — something observed but missed, known yet forgotten. It conjures nothing new, but I begin to understand the little boy whose appetite is itself ready to be swallowed whole. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb