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Hear poet Susie Campbell read poems for wave 12 of literary poetry journal iamb. Susie Campbell wave 12 winter 2022 back next the poet Susie Campbell's poems have appeared in many UK and international journals, visual poetry anthologies and exhibitions. Currently studying for a practice-based poetry PhD at Oxford Brookes University, Susie is the author of six poetry pamphlets – I return to you , Tenter and Enclosures being her three most recent. Her newest work, The Sleeping Place , will be published by Guillemot Press in 2023. the poems A Deictic Miracle, This Boxwood Prayer Nut Exhibit: Waddesdon Bequest, British Museum 00:00 / 01:41 To hold and be held, an uncracked walnut, a little earth. There is something strange about this richness, growing into its own boundaries, rank and subtle as a hunted creature. Time has become a strongbox of interlocking branches. Global complexities, plumbed with pipelines of gold, are reduced to wafer-thin discs, slotted one into the other, light bevelled into a compound syntax of mortise and tenon. An articulation of honest wood, it holds the shape and hard veins of the forest by fitting it to the palm: an armillary sphere circling an internal sun, opened by flicking up a tiny hinge secured on its pin. Ahead, glimmering through a tiny screen, carved and fretted to this terrestrial cage, a thimble saint with his trembling hound bows before the stag. Kneeling here, prayer beads in hand, an intricate system of shadow blows from antler and slender branch to form the cross, thorn-sized and lifted to the wooden sky, as outside bends to imitate this reconciliation. if magic 00:00 / 01:24 if such ordinary box jar tin or burlap and if tested unbought night finds an opening past neighbours fought for squeaking and scratched open by tiny razor- sharp and left beyond and further how the night is done with moss and damp and squelch and how quickly attaching themselves to dark are wet marbles if tied up in a pouch and with mercy new-opened and sticky and still smelling of sleep as sap is and here a soft clink of word against word could be taken for protection a charm new-minted from darkness against theirs ours some dispensable such brittle claims across this globe of glass could be soothed or silenced if won by this as talisman Hush 00:00 / 01:43 A hill beneath and a filled-in door. This bench, its damp wooden flowers. A dead tree stripped clean and time fucking stops. You reach a corner of you are there. You are there. An edge of grief you can park in an empty tongue. The fields are empty. That’s near enough. You expect you have come here to honour the dead. An open field looks like battlefield words: gone, absent, missing. You come to hold it in memory but it becomes spongy underfoot. You do not mean to remember her, the time you brought her here. A list in a notebook of useful words: Blank Nil Null Hush-hush Ssh Shush Sodden ground but your body remembers so you try to follow even as it is hardening and solidifying, becomes a whole, no longer possible to enter nor be held by it. Nil. Null. Hush. Ssh. Shush. You cannot enter nor explore its spaces nor the dead in their apophatic silence that gap in words. Listen. Hush. Publishing credits A Deictic Miracle, This Boxwood Prayer Nut: Shearsman Magazine (125/126 – Autumn/Winter) if magic: Stride Magazine (December 2021) Hush: Tenter (Guillemot Press)

Hear poet Rachel Smith read poems for wave 20 of literary poetry journal iamb. Rachel Smith wave 20 winter 2024 back next the poet New Zealander Rachel Smith, a chef and Open Floor Movement Teacher, has made London her home. She's had work published in various journals and anthologies, including The North , Magma and The Book of Love & Loss . Her recordings of her text Bed Unbound toured Scotland on a bus as part of the Day of Access . Rachel's poems for iamb are part of her ongoing project, A Manual for Dying . the poems We die in stages 00:00 / 00:55 Claire wakes us at 6am. She’s already called Mike, so we all go to your room. You are still curled up, could be asleep, except your rattling breath is absent. We toast you with whiskey as the sun rises. You are soft dead, still warm. The undertaker comes after breakfast, takes you away. You are back early afternoon, laid out on your bed in your town clothes – moleskin trousers and Guernsey jersey. Ben and Penny come in to say goodnight. Penny says Antone is really dead now, eh . I know what she means. You were soft dead before, now you are dead dead. Firewood 00:00 / 01:03 We all knew Dad wouldn’t want a shiny coffin. But the pine ones are expensive and there’s not much money. So Matt and Mike turn Dad's woodshed into a workshop, get macrocarpa planks from the local sawmill, debate the design. Matt spends three days sawing, planing, sanding, worrying it’ll be too heavy, that Dad won’t fit, that the bottom will fall out. He fusses over the strips along the top: Dad was so good at lines. The morning of the funeral we test it out. Matt gets in and my cousins and uncles lift, shaking it slightly, laughing in the way you do when life and death are close. Matt gets out relieved, shakes himself, speaks at the funeral about Dad’s love of fire, says I’ve built you a coffin of the finest macrocarpa. Provisions 00:00 / 01:12 Six men – sons, brother, nephews, old friend – lift Dad from his bed in a blanket sling, swearing as they carry this body that does not bend around corners. There is relief when he’s in, that he fits. We put in earth from farms he loved. Roses, seashells, fern fronds. A bridle and dog collar. His radio. Rosary beads. Niall Fergusson’s 'Empire': That’ll give him something to argue with. Jamie makes him his cheese and onion sandwich. His teapot that drove us all crazy with its constant dribble but which we miss as soon as it’s gone. The half bottle of Jura from the night before. Tui sing. Father Joe says a prayer and the lid goes on. The men lift Dad into the hearse, silently. We are bound in this ancient rite, where carrying a coffin is still one of the most sacred things. Publishing credits We die in stages / Provisions: exclusive first publication by iamb Firewood: Magma 75

Hear poet May Chong read poems for wave 14 of literary poetry journal iamb. May Chong wave 14 summer 2023 back next the poet May Chong, a Chinese/Malaysian poet and speculative writer, has had her work featured in Strange Horizons , Uncanny Magazine , adda , Parentheses Journal and elsewhere. She enjoys spoken word (watching and performing), birdwatching and terrible puns. May's nature-themed micro-chapbook, Seed, Star, Song , is available as part of Ghost City Press' Summer 2020 series. the poems You ask the soil if you belong 00:00 / 02:10 What has always been whispered through other leaves grows bold, thunderclaps laterite-red: never. Transplant, hue and clay, your roots never the right length. Untrue/half-bred not hybrid, weed not plant. Be silent and show some gratitude for this flowerbed, for being at all allowed. If you protest, tear up taproots and leave, raw mandrake words and all. Never mind how we were all planted once upon a time. One more time. The loess left behind answers come home . You will be welcome and warm, one with brethren abandoned before seedcoat thoughts. Come home , you must return to ancestral yellow, mellow alluvium where no others are allowed. (But you have already torn/ been torn tongue from stem to survive. You feel the way you will wither, alone in a field of pinched heads.) Rocks whisper from where black dragons tumbled them riverwise. In your sap runs neverbelonging, mountain thrust into monsoon. We are all of us guests from nowhere. The knowing makes it easier to bear the stones. And still you want. You awaken. Again you ask the soil if you belong, and you should not be grateful for silence. Yet you are. Lockdown 00:00 / 01:11 Grant me space secured with key, myself and I. Walls of my own creation, closest to a one-man hug. A floor to take a stand on, because the letting in has meaning. Give me granite and blood concrete before those who have ripped 'moment' and 'wait' and 'just' from their dictionary. Swallow the deep diggers who think keys are only for those in hiding. My time has its meaning, its rhythm and combinations because bolts in the head are trouble and padlocks through the heart are worse. Ask the selves I debrided, husbanded, ribs toothed like tiger traps. Vulnerability has meaning, meaning let me slam the door closed and fling it wide to let you in, you who means something. And even now 00:00 / 01:19 A radish waxes defiant in the asphalt below JR Osaka station’s pedestrian bridge. A man thinks of its rich tresses, his granddaughter, the last time he felt like smiling. Near Wangsa Maju, a moth flies into a packed LRT. Small as hope, alive. A whole carriage holds its breath until it lands on a Bangladeshi worker's chapalled toe. Some nameless brown bird gurgles into the rain-soaked morning. Soon there will be sun and wind enough for everything to dry gorgeous. Silence is learning how to unlock love, unlock tears from behind teeth, loose them with the gasp of something born anew. You learn from your elders how to make broth from the good bones of a world and still, and still, and still— Publishing credits You ask the soil if you belong: Bending Genres (Issue 19) Lockdown: exclusive first publication by iamb And even now: Banshee (Issue 12)

Hear poet Jonathan Humble read poems for wave 17 of literary poetry journal iamb. Jonathan Humble wave 17 spring 2024 back next the poet The poetry of Jonathan Humble, a retired deputy head teacher who lives in Cumbria, has appeared in numerous print and online magazines and anthologies. He's published a short collection of his work – Fledge – and is editor of the much-praised, much-admired children's poetry website, The Dirigible Balloon . As well as delivering poetry workshops in schools for Wordsworth Grasmere, Jonathan was Poet in a Fridge for Radio Cumbria's Poetry Takeaway during the BBC's Contains Strong Language Festival in 2020. the poems Derek’s Theory of Quantum Stiles 00:00 / 00:51 Einstein phoned the other day. Wanted to speak quite urgently with my dog, Derek: said that Derek’s theory of quantum stiles was interesting but lacked empirical evidence and wasn’t supported by the mathematics. Derek disagreed: described the process of walking with me, taking the early morning river route along the side of the Kent under Cumbrian skies. Every gate and stile a quantum barrier, separating countless possibilities of constantly branching parallel universes: facts on the far side of each wall blurred, until the stile is crossed with a new reality created through observation … and sometimes, rewarded with a biscuit. Red Pencil 00:00 / 01:36 I am six years old, my pencil breaks mid-word in Mrs Foster’s class. So I turn to my friend Martin, show him the pencil and whisper, ‘Martin, Martin, my pencil has broke.’ ‘Use this,’ he says and passes a substitute, secretly under our desk. ‘But it’s a red pencil, Martin,’ I say. He smiles a smile. It is an ‘it’ll all be okay’ sort of smile and so I carry on, copying lines of words I cannot read, but which I try my very hardest to replicate, as neat and true to the original as I am able, at six, to do. At the finish, I look down at my page of writing; my teacher’s lines above, with mine in red below, and I wonder about the words I have written. I am happy with the result of my effort; especially the esses, which are smooth and curvy, and flowing and lovely. They are the best I have ever done. So, I walk twenty paces to Mrs Foster’s desk, clutching my paper with pride, and return ten yards with a slapped leg, my work in shreds in a basket, having a brand new perspective on the way of things, and on the reliability of my friend Martin. Early Morning Effrontery 00:00 / 00:59 I fear porcelain is not your milieu and your persistence in performing eight-legged running man dances up sheer white bathroom edifices under the gaze and malevolence of the attentive cat bastard flexing its tail on this toilet seat will prove an effrontery too far. Darwin’s theory of natural selection will happen well before adaptation occurs. Before the hairs on your scopulae develop greater adhesive powers and you are able to ascend unharmed, I suspect you will become terribly broken. So here I am again, 6:30 in the morning, offering toilet paper ladders in the bath tub, before I can shower in peace and the furry purry assassin, so beloved in our household, can be persuaded out of the bathroom to wander off and find something else to murder instead. Publishing credits Derek’s Theory of Quantum Stiles:Tyger Tyger Magazine Red Pencil: Atrium Early Morning Effrontery: Fledge (Maytree Press)

Hear poet Louise McStravick read poems for wave 12 of literary poetry journal iamb. Louise McStravick wave 12 winter 2022 back next the poet Birmingham-based writer, poet and educator Louise McStravick says her writing is concerned mostly with extracting the extraordinary from the ordinary. Her recent work can be found in Popshot , Ink Sweat & Tears , Dear Damsels , Aphelion, Porridge Magazine and several other respected publications. Louise's debut poetry collection, How to Make Curry Goat , was published in 2020. the poems My sister was born a sunset 00:00 / 00:44 When children come out healthy, they are pink. Or the bit when pink meets red like that point in the sky when the sun reminds of its power to make us forget everything that came before it. Even if only a minute. This blood spilled sky an ending. Children are not yellow like a fully baked sun. They said she must have jaundice. My mother tells them her father’s skin holds the burnt ochres of a Caribbean sunset. They do not say sorry when they hand her over. A daughter’s guide to poaching an egg 00:00 / 01:17 Make the water rearrange its insides, shift shape as it is told, steam rise drip drip vinegar, sour the water to not let things stick. Watch it fight its way to the surface. It is not an easy process, such transformation, if not careful it can erupt, break onto skin that has already learned this is too hot, but does it again anyway. Turn the heat down. Don’t hold the egg too high or it will spread itself open, reveal itself, some things should be left to the imagination. Wand a whirlpool and crack it in watch it bring itself together, composed, despite itself. Let the bubbles teach it how to mature, push it to the surface, fully fledged yolk whole, unbroken, ready for charred bread. In one move, let the knife cut it open watch it pour itself out, ready for hungry tongues. Bake yourself some unicorns After Rishi Dastidar 00:00 / 01:19 Start your day with a cheese board; wear lycra to work; decorate your eyelids with glitter made from reclaimed rainbow tears; slay your greetings—wink with both eyes—say goodbye instead of hello; only consume things that are the yellow of the midday sun; defy winter, wear a bikini, manifest warmth; yoga yourself to a luxury holiday at least 8 times a day—the more you do it the more the universe receives; eat squirty cream for lunch straight from the can and inhale the gas after; go on a 24-hour lunch break—if your boss asks why tell her to read your daily horoscope; stop your thoughts at the click of a notification; order yourself a slice of knowledge; you’re owning it babes you’re shitting out that deposit with every reusable cup. You can do this! Start a petition to ban white bread; teach the bacteria in your stomach to recycle plastic; don’t eat anything that could look sound or feel like it could have been crawled on by anything that can be named. Keep going! You know you’re winning when you wake up and it isn’t raining. Publishing credits My sister was born a sunset: How to Make Curry Goat (Fly on the Wall Press) A daughter's guide to poaching an egg: Porridge Magazine Bake yourself some unicorns: Ink, Sweat & Tears

Hear poet Estelle Price read poems for wave 23 of literary poetry journal iamb. Estelle Price wave 23 autumn 2025 back next the poet From lawyer to classicist to charity worker to poet, Estelle Price won the 2025 Kipling Society's John McGivering Writing Competition , 2024 SaveAsWriters Group International Writing Competition (Poetry) , 2024 Passionfruit Poetry Prize , 2023 Mairtín Crawford Award and 2023 Welshpool Open Poetry Competition . Her poetry has been long-listed three times in the UK's National Poetry Competition, and placed or listed in several other prestigious competitions. Often writing from a feminist perspective on her East End past, Estelle has had poems in The Honest Ulsterman , bath magg , The Ekphrastic Review and elsewhere. Featured in Nine Arches Press' Primers 6 , she's working on her debut collection. the poems Blessings ‘It would be infinitely lonely to live in a world without blessing.’ ~ John O’Donohue ~ 00:00 / 02:22 Bless the fox that tears into your bins and scatters your shame in the street. This is not the worst that can happen. Bless the red at the corner of the sky where there is a rip. You are part of it. Bless the blood that wells into the phial to be sent for analysis. Bless your stooped father when you leave him, like a grieving swan, on his doorstep. He needs guarding. Bless the baby you miscarried and the mystery of where she is. Bless the hands that picked the apple you are eating. Somewhere those hands seek rest. Bless the Earth and the voices that sing her anthems in your cities. They are the planet’s prophets. Bless the man you divorced. Bless the man you married after. Both have gardens in your heart. Bless the cupboard you hide in when memory wears laddered stockings. Bless hope when she navigates your mind’s black canals and places her fingers on the lock-gates. One day you will open. Bless the new-born river when it trickles into the light. You are that river. Bless the man in the tweed jacket who delicately lied to you. He is a house by the ocean whose walls are cracking. Bless the stranger in the red coat who jostled you in the grocers. She is the woman you were when your mother died. Bless the boy driving too loud in his souped-up car on the bypass. He is your faraway son. Bless the moments that surge like waves drowning the shore you love best. You are an oyster shell above the high tide mark. Bless the woman you still can be, who waits in your life’s long grass for you to grip her hands and dance. her wrist 00:00 / 01:35 slender like a stick of bamboo. its bone an unexpected table-top balanced on a bed of wrinkles that crease and crinkle like a plate of over-cooked spaghetti. the skin thirsty. its texture roughed by eighty summers to the colour of toffee. freckles grown bold and sassy speckle her forearm where once a bracelet of daisies linked arms and danced a joy-jig until dawn. at the base of her thumb, a scar, napkin white, the pigment burnt lifting a feast from the oven. lean in touch can you feel the demands of steel cuffing her to a fence when the world wobbled on its nuclear tight rope? today she’s watch-less. it’s time to give up on earth’s beating drum. take a moment you don’t have long. rotate. be gentle this wrist is porcelain-frail. there you’ve found her shy-side split in two by a wand of blood. take your chance place a kiss where once a pulse purposed. cut through the hospital tag set free a prayer for your mother as her life softens to memory. Diva 00:00 / 02:17 Let the red curtain go up on the stage at Covent Garden and let it be you, Nan, skipping into silver footlights an audience of toffs in black ties and glitzy frocks clapping, conductor, down in the pit, his baton raised (but not for hitting). Let it be you whose ruby lips trill a Mozart aria who flings fear, like a cadenza into corners of the auditorium out-of-reach of echo. You, who bellowed from a stall down Petticoat Lane, flogging cast-offs from Chelsea. You who stood in factory-rain, a black-sequinned dress dangled off smoky fingers, telling the girl, who turned her perm away, to ‘try it on luv, it’ll fit like a glove, luv’ . Cos if it’s you, Nan, you can choose to be Mimi, Tosca, even Queen of the Night. but please don’t pick Carmen, I can’t watch you stabbed by a soldier or a husband who chases you down the stairs with a knife. Let it be bouquets of freesias, not punches, that fall round your frizzy hair. I can hear you yelling to stop ‘avin a larf but it’ll be fun Nan Trust me. I’ve got an Oxford degree. I know how to get creases out of consonants, how to bleach vowels. Your vibrato will be adored from Rome to Milan. No more whelks in Southend, no more whispers on the pier with your sisters, no more sharing a dodgem with Harry and his docker-fists. Even the King will love you (at least for a season or two). And in the end Nan, instead of wheeling the stall back to the lockup as if it were a pram full of ten children instead of Saturday nights at the bingo, I promise you’ll fly out the window (like I did) head west (goodbye Plaistow!) wearing the black-sequined dress – cos surely you must want to? Publishing credits Blessings: Ten Poems from Welshpool (Candlestick Press) Won first prize in the Welshpool Poetry Competition 2023 her wrist: Manchester Cathedral Poetry Prize Pamphlet 2017 (Highly Commended poem) Diva: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Geraldine Clarkson read poems for wave 1 of literary poetry journal iamb. Geraldine Clarkson wave 1 winter 2020 back next the poet Geraldine Clarkson lives and works in Warwickshire. Her various occupations have included teaching English to refugees and migrants, working in warehouses, care homes, libraries, churches, offices and a call centre, and living in a silent monastic order for some years in South America. She has published poetry pamphlets with Smith|Doorstop and Shearsman Books. Her debut collection, Monica's Overcoat of Flesh , was published by Nine Arches Press in 2020. the poems winding down 00:00 / 01:04 maybe a tree falls or a bear keels maybe all the creatures of song are brought low and the grasshopper drags itself along and the moon fails clearly a light has left the earth bleeding slowly while the waters stopped clapping their hands it’s the end of lilies and liver-freckled butterflies the last flew off this summer the wind is tired now has petit mal is going home shutting up shop just a few scarlet leaves spin in its sigh as it boards up the door Muzzy McIntyre 00:00 / 01:35 Muzzy McIntyre brushed her bangs and went pell-mell down the staircase. The banisters pulled her palms back with their waxy residue and the ball at the bottom looked grey-black with grease. This place has gone downhill, she thought, descending. But she went out onto the front step and the mahogany door was flaming—it was that time of day—and the brass lion knocker, brilliant, was shooting out gold spears. All around, the red brick of the houses was deepening. For the sake of these twelve minutes or so, perhaps, one could tolerate the blanched mornings and the puny electric nights; the dust; and critters; the drunken singing of the wind in the passage; the pious crooning of the neighbours. The waiting. Her other self, the slow Muzzy, ambled out to take the air. She looked up and down the street, laid the flat of her hand to her forehead, against the slanting light. Another fine day tomorrow, she drawled, headlocking a memory. Brood 00:00 / 01:59 After two unhappy marriages, my sister settled on a man who marked their mid-life union by retraining as a vermin operative, the neon strips in his kitchen having turned caramel with cockroaches. He mastered the mechanics and theory of quenching little lives that flickered briefly in strange environs. And noted, for instance, that when roaches infested a disused cooker, it was always the babies who emerged first when you ignited the gas. The gas was, that if you left it burning, little roarers kept on coming, and in increasing sizes, till the fat daddy-roaches finally left the ship. He studied weevils which flourished in flour. And silver fish that slivered at human approach. Rat-trapping was daunting at first, then a thrill. I heard that housewives would call him out to halt fledgling tits which had flown into summer kitchens, twitching behind fridges; pigeons plumped in chimneys; squirrels nesting in lofts, all high hiss and spit. He used to say, my sister’s husband, as he polished his leather belt on a Saturday, ready for church (the belt had a fine silver buckle which shone and jingled), that pests are only creatures who happen to have strayed into alien territory. It made me hope my sister pleased him, and fitted in; was protective of her brood. Publishing credits winding down: POEM (Summer 2017) Muzzy McIntyre: No. 25 (Shearsman Books) Brood: Infinite Rust

Hear poet Katie Stockton read poems for wave 5 of literary poetry journal iamb. Katie Stockton wave 5 spring 2021 back next the poet Katie Stockton is a welsh poet, playwright, crossword lover and recent graduate of the UEA Masters Writing programme. She's the 2020 Snoo Wilson Writing Prize winner, and was recently longlisted for the Poetry Society's Collaboration Award. Her work has appeared in Hellebore Press, Forward Poetry, Ink, Sweat & Tears and others. Her writing commissions include those by The Sunday Times , Norwich Arts Centre, the Maddermarket Theatre, RADA, Drama Studio London, WalesOnline and Young Norfolk Arts Festival. the poems Basilisk 00:00 / 00:55 Faces have seen older, stranger faces than this, train windows too, which’ve learned a new habit of smudging me out. My face squished between the hardlines of a hat and a collar. Can you will a face into a second state of life? Let me tell you: the universe is a snake – I saw this in a true dream – it sheds and it sheds, leaves behind its echo-brothers on the porches of its next-door neighbours. A face cannot live like this. I’m no universe of cold-blood, I am an egg cracked, slipping. You can shadow-reckon my wrinkles, hear the shadow-people that live in these folds. When my face was a stone, a marble. cold and membraned, when I liked things the shape of a full stop, I used to stare long at the basilisk in the mirror, every morning. Askew Road 00:00 / 00:51 Heat. Around the fruit bowl like flies, dripping from the fridge handle, the upturned door numbers, dropping from the hallway creak. The single periwinkle house beckoned heat down to us. Summer’s fingers run tracks through window droplets. We measure out our stay in Askew Road, London, in the hexagons of limescale, its ones or twos at the bottom of the mug, or the tip of the tongue, if unlucky. The heat of it. The sun a pea pod ready to be split. The neighbours rattling their keys. The people have stopped parking their cars. The buses are carving a new route away. We’ve become our mothers’ daughters, fathers’ sons. We could leave for home, or obey the heat. Genus 00:00 / 01:14 this garden is plotted into the lines of my hands I put an earthworm to my upper lip and whisper for access to my own skin when it comes to butterflies I am a royalist a weatherman craving a wallflower a template of root an earthworm chewing pieces of the dark school happens again in blades stems are paper spines no schoolyard tyrants this time, just those things I’ll never attain the symmetry of and the teacher is the entire memory of winter blinking over the hill’s shoulder making me into flowers unfurling without fear that their twins will be there again this year the earth forgives the worm that needs it the world forgives the wound the hyacinths and I have reached an accord when they’ve gone I’ll construct solariums out of a new genus slink down the garden path to sleep in roses through winter no lullabying flowerbeds the magic birds gone quiet but I won’t be afraid of giving into soil of inhaling the heady pollen that sleepwalks the slopes of mountains into my skin Publishing credits Basilisk: Re-Side (Issue 1) Askew Road: Hellebore Press (Issue 4) Genus: exclusive first publication by iamb / Runner-up in the Hestercombe Gardens Poetry Competition 2019

Hear poet Lisa Tulfer read poems for wave 11 of literary poetry journal iamb. Lisa Tulfer wave 11 autumn 2022 back next the poet Dutch-to-English translator Lisa Tulfer is a UK-based writer of non-fiction articles, poetry and reviews (as well as an occasional blogger ). Her work has appeared in The Pilgrim , The Cardiff Review , the Earth Pathways Diary , Redemptorist Press , Green Ink Poetry and as part of The Poetry Archive's Poetry Archive NOW . Lisa is also a poetry submissions editor at Full House Literary Magazine . Exploring ideas of identity, belonging and home, Lisa is currently working on her first book. the poems Telling the bees 00:00 / 00:54 We told them because we knew it was something that had to be done. Trying to speak the words out loud our voices broke, fragments swept away on our tears, so instead we whispered the words, standing by the hives holding hands, the ‘she is dead’ barely louder than the buzzy breath. Did we imagine that the bees paused for a moment in their vibrating lives? Afterwards, it felt not better, but that the worst was behind us. We had told the bees, said the words, made it real. The average human body is 60 percent water After We’re All Water an art installation by Yoko Ono 00:00 / 01:30 we’re all water and DNA and cells, dividing shared genes and history we’re all blank canvasses and memory intuition and reflexes synapses and electricity we’re all cruelty and pain, potential unrealised or twisted energy discharged in violence against ourselves or others we’re all creative makers of bread, words, art love or babies makers of mischief, belief war, peace we’re all alive, dead fear, hope past, future we’re all strong, weak holding hands and killing clinging to life and dreaming nightmares and visions we’re all hate, fear and othering we’re all love, surprised, consumed we’re all water Blue 00:00 / 01:53 There is a certain kind of blue that happens at six o’clock on a February evening, when the sun has slipped off the edge of a clear day, trailing strands of candyfloss clouds – improbably pink – leaving behind a grey dullness that feels like a bereavement. Then paradoxically the sky begins to brighten, gains a depth not only of colour but of dimension, and as the colour shifts from grey to blue it begins to glow, luminous, greenish at the horizon, indigo overhead, striped with lines of cloud now darkest midnight against the cerulean blue. The bluest blue, bluer than a Cornish bay, bluer than the skylark-thrilling sky of summer, lying in the grass, squinting sunwards, bluer even than my lover’s eyes. Backlit blue, achingly fleeting, the blueness reaching a climax, unbearably intense and then suddenly dying, fading, becoming flat, two-dimensional. Now Prussian, darkening, dark. And into the darkest blue a sickle of silver rising, cold and clean, scything across the stars to gather the last blueness and leave the sky black. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Jim Newcombe read poems for wave 12 of literary poetry journal iamb. Jim Newcombe wave 12 winter 2022 back next the poet Born and raised in Derby in the heart of the English Midlands, Jim Newcombe moved to London in 2006. Since then, he's lived in every quarter of the capital – enjoying an active cultural life of concerts and visits to theatre productions, museums, galleries and taverns. Jim's writing has appeared in numerous publications, and was shortlisted for the prestigious Bridport Prize, as well as for the Pendle Prize for elegies commemorating the First World War. the poems Eight Owls for Hieronymus Bosch 00:00 / 01:43 I Between the inward and outward wave upon the shore a rhythm in feathers that wasn’t here before called into being its substance and its law. II Between the masculine and feminine, between the how of her and why of him, came one with wings who shamed the seraphim. III Out from opposing poles that brought us here with eyes of sun and moon that knew no tear a tremulous presence maintained the biosphere. IV Between one nation’s customs and the next a primal entity that left the scholars vexed denied in its descent the doctrine of each text. V In the skewed trajectories of time and space it roosted aloof and in the darkest place rotated the clock of its expressionless face. VI The wood has ears, the field has eyes, and dawn reveals the eyes in every ear of corn that scans our thoughts, their verdict full of scorn. VII It is the decoy to all you think is true, to everything you ever thought you knew; the one note in its voice asks Who-are-you? VIII Both the signal to a secret and a lure, it hears the silence of a spider on the floor and sees most clearly when it’s most obscure. The House 00:00 / 02:16 Boundaries were defined by harsh words and bolted doors, yet by night I snuck past sleeping sentinels, the dark air pregnant with unanswered prayers, the page of each wall scripted with shadow, seeming to swell with pressure, as though something passed through it. Rain tapped at each window where the gloating stars peered in like patient voyeurs, the rhubarb blanched in moonlight as the clematis loomed, scaling the house, rending foundations I could not fortify. Spiders were hatched from cracked corners. I searched for clues, listened at keyholes for conspiracies, my memory mapped with creaking floorboards that betrayed my presence. I would spend hours in prayer and soliloquy trying to subsume the guilt I had inherited. Before they could be caught or killed the spiders would scuttle back to their dark dimension, as though a gash could suck up its own blood. Somewhere in hiding was the eight-legged mother of them all, her deftly strung web a grid of carcasses; wings, shells, corrupted husks mauled and festering. I couldn’t sleep for fear of it. Sometimes I would try the cellar door: deep and forbidding, that underground lair, where steps descend into a darkness that writhed with apprehensions. I couldn’t reach the light switch to dispel my suspicions which grew like rumours of a secret sin. One day I would confront whatever was down there and return victorious (if return at all) to where another, like me, would dare to descend along the cellar’s corpse-cold walls, dank and mildewed, the treacherous gloom now bristling, bristling and black with all that is unassumed. The Moon and The Sea From A Shake of the Riddle 00:00 / 01:00 VIII The moon and the sea – are they in harmony or at war? The martial marriage of the pale satellite and the brisk lush rasp of breakers – their sickly scurf and slosh, the weft and warp of crawling froth, and the pendulum tide like a nag gone berserk in its bridle, while the blind pupil of the milky moon dumb and vacuous, dimpled with craters, barren as the soul of an atheist. Holding dominion over the toiling water, that wormy, comet-scuffed wafer, that shrunken bauble of colourless light, still separate despite its travelled distance, its clean light of clinical intellect frozen from shadow, whose oblique brilliance does not illumine, but only reflect. Publishing credits Eight Owls for Hieronymus Bosch / The Moon and The Sea: exclusive first publication by iamb The House: Eunoia Review

Hear poet Barnaby Harsent read poems for wave 23 of literary poetry journal iamb. Barnaby Harsent wave 23 autumn 2025 back next the poet Placing third in The Rosemary McLeish Poetry Prize 2024 , and with poems in 14 magazine and Propel Magazine , Barnaby Harsent has work forthcoming in the 2025 Black Bough Poetry Christmas/Winter anthology. His three poems for iamb form part of a sequence of short narratives he's currently working on. the poems Wormwood – speaking to spirits 00:00 / 00:37 The air is thin, the sky just beginning to bruise. She gathers wormwood to burn under the sycamore tree. The smoke curls low and slow like breath in winter, she closes her eyes to amplify any whisper. Light fades, crows settle like thoughts in bare boughs, a leaf in the ash still green – as if it has secrets left to share. Mandrake – hallucination 00:00 / 00:46 Lie still. Let the room grow distant. Let the walls forget you. Let the straw, heavy with the stench of piss, disappear from under you. Men’s faith in what you’re not has made you what you are. Fall upwards. Do not cry out. Do not return. Refuse to bring yourself back to bone. Move with weather, find a wind to hold you. And leave your root, that knotted thing, bleeding its shape into air. Valerian – rest 00:00 / 00:53 She doesn’t ask for comfort, just the calm of quiet seclusion, a slowing of the pulse. Still they turn their heads and spit, weigh her worth out loud. She lays plants out on a rack, the sun pulling moisture from the root. Still her nights are restless, sleep as thin as frost on slate. There’s a gate where the treeline thins. It opens and she walks until the path forgets her name. Still the milk sours, still the crops fail, still the children of the village cry at shadows. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Jean Atkin read poems for wave 4 of literary poetry journal iamb. Jean Atkin wave 4 autumn 2020 back next the poet Jean Atkin's latest collection is How Time is in Fields , in which there’s a lot of walking and witnessing of place and the natural world. Her work has featured on BBC Radio 4’s Ramblings with Claire Balding, and appeared recently in The Rialto, The Moth, Agenda, Lighthouse and Magma. In 2019, Jean was Troubadour of the Hills for Ledbury Poetry Festival, as well as BBC National Poetry Day Poet for Shropshire . She works as a poet in education and the community. the poems The not seen sea 00:00 / 01:54 Under cliff, under white chalk, Under Hooken we walk down the throat of the harts tongue and talk. Our boots are glossed with clever ivy. Overgrown, overhead and soft under old man’s beard, bosomy June leans down on us, up close to cyclical drift, centimetre shift of earth. While, sunk in its cage of feathers, a blackbird rots, deflates into the flint step down to the beach. Shingle rumbles in our ears. It hisses, passes, as we wind the path between the cliffs, and only now and then we catch the hill-high lurch of chalk in mist. Keen in the nose, the salt and fret of sea. All the while we twist a flint descent by rungs of ivy root, and all the while a thrush repeats repeats its song to coil to coil inside our ears. And another blackbird sings, so blackbird answers it in audible waves. By our feet a chasm of ash and fog. Low in our bones, not visible, churrs the sea. The tattoo’d man 00:00 / 01:26 has had a skinful, to go only by what shows. His bull neck’s chained, a padlock swings above its own hatched shadow. In scrolling calligraphic script, his knife arm pledges faith in love, and brags his unsurrendered soul. His other arm is tidal. On the backswell of a bicep lolls a mermaid, tits like limpets, eyes like stones. An anchor lodges in the flesh above his wrist: its taut rope twists across his sturdy, sandy bones. But much of him’s of land, for deep in the humus of his cheek a splitting acorn roots. An oak leaf grows towards his mouth on sappy, pliant shoots. With men, it’s never easy to be sure, but here’s one who’s tried to take the outside in. He’s shifty as gulls and bitter as bark. Every night he reads that skin: his library of pain and virtue, bright and thin. The snow moon 00:00 / 01:18 On the night the snowfields above the cottage became bright maps of somewhere else, we climbed up in the crump of each others’ boots. Capstones of walls charcoaled the white. The hawthorns prickled it. And a leaping trace below a dyke was slots of ghost deer gone into the fells. There were rags of sheep’s wool freezing on the barbs and lean clouds dragged the roundness of the moon. Jupiter shone steady to the south. It was so cold. And the children threw snowballs, all the time. My old coat took the muffled thump of them. Night snow shirred our mittens with silk. We turned for home, left our shouts hung out in the glittery dark. Publishing credits All poems: How Time is in Fields (Indigo Dreams Press)

Hear poet Hilary Watson read poems for wave 23 of literary poetry journal iamb. Hilary Watson wave 23 autumn 2025 back next the poet Growing up in South Wales and now living in Cardiff, Hilary Watson graduated from the University of Warwick with a BA and MA in Writing. She was a Jerwood/Arvon mentee, and has had her poetry published widely in UK and international magazines, including Atrium , Ink, Sweat & Tears , Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal and The Interpreter's House . Hilary is also an editor at thrutopian writing magazine, Bending The Arc . the poems Accountability Badger 00:00 / 01:31 Badger glares at you in the street from behind the net curtains of his two up two down. No chimney smoke, no love escapes the chamber of his heart. He knows what you did, what you keep doing to yourself each time you choose avoidance, when you’re too fearful to forgive. ‘Unforgivable,’ he mutters, sips tepid Marmite, his claws tight on the handle of the mug. He’s thinking now of earthworms, slugs, of how you hold him hostage in this Valleys town because you crave accountability, refuse to take the test, to do the work yourself, the stripes behind his ears turning grey. ‘One last job,’ he’d said, typically assignments taking half as long. He clasps the teaspoon in his padded paw, stirs clockwise, anticlockwise, tuts, shakes his head as some new excuse issues from your mouth. Excuse 00:00 / 00:59 The excuse arrives in the palm as though it was always going to land there, like a dragonfly out on the hunt, settling to eat its catch. The excuse is effervescent, more delicate than expected but who can deny that weight of legs in the centre of an outstretched hand? Fortunes cannot be read, but look here; that stance across the life and love lines folded into crevices. Who could ask for a more convincing reason, conceive of a lie that cuts so deep as the jaw of that magnificent dragonfly crushing a gnat to cells? Pygmy Hippo 00:00 / 01:05 Lean on my gate. The man in green throws carrots into this stew of my own making. Submerged, I can hold my breath for ages, walk underwater, bob for air, my nostrils bubbling apostrophes. Toss me a dandelion leaf. I’ll show you that to love me is to know no decency. Shy, me? I can go months without making a peep. I sweat blood. Ferocity’s my middle name. The man in green throws cucumber, fern fronds. I am going to die here. A young human climbs an old human. Some fun, at last. Find the diamond resting on my tongue. I’ll open wide. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Ken Cockburn read poems for wave 10 of literary poetry journal iamb. Ken Cockburn wave 10 summer 2022 back next the poet Poet and translator Ken Cockburn spent several years at the Scottish Poetry Library before going freelance to work in education, care and community settings – often in collaboration with visual artists. His most recent collection is Floating the Woods . Ken's also the man behind the pamphlet Edinburgh: poems and translations , which features work written for the guided walks he leads in the city’s Old Town. He also translated from the German Christine Marendon's Heroines from Abroad . the poems Hands 00:00 / 01:37 These hands have buckled belts and fastened buttons These hands have howked the tatties from the ground These hands have handled cutlery and weapons These hands have picked the apples from the bough Hands to hold a pen or blade Hands to strike and cup a match Hands to give the eyes some shade Hands to take another catch These hands have spooned out medicines and teas These hands have painted watercolour scenes These hands have tinkled old piano keys These hands have worked industrial machines Hands to turn another page Hands to hoist and set the sails Hands applaud those on the stage Hands with dirty fingernails These hands in tearooms picked up cakes and fancies These hands have sharpened pencils with a knife These hands held partners at the weekend dances These hands have mapped the progress of a life Hands to scrub and peel potatoes Hands to cup a baby’s head Hands to knit a balaclava Hands to smooth the unmade bed Hands to give a proper measure Hands to stitch the binding thread Hands up when you know the answer Hands to shush what’s best unsaid Ward 00:00 / 00:48 I keep my diaries in a large bookcase my mother told me crossly, years ago, she was now giving to my sister. Fine, fine. I left with what did belong to me, returning sooner than expected when, days before the move, my father collapsed. I went to visit him in hospital as he convalesced and took my daughter who, at eighteen months, was still innocent of past and future, caveats, grudges, grip and slow release. Let property wait. The ward dispenses all we need for now. Rodney 00:00 / 00:58 At that school at that time there was no choice: rugby. Skinny, tall and slow I was put in the second row, scrummed and pushed on cue. Asthmatic, on cold days I wheezed until my lungs gave in. I was keen. I wanted to be good enough for the first fifteen unlike Rodney, disinclined to bother. Played at full-back to avoid set pieces, on the whole, he was left untroubled. Once we were on the same team; a breakaway left only Rodney between the runner and our line. 'Tackle him!' I shouted, but he stood his ground and the ball was touched down. At that moment I could only admire his simple refusal to play the game. Publishing credits Hands: part of Lapidus Scotland's Working with ‘Hands’ and Living Voices Ward: exclusive first publication by iamb Rodney: Poetry Scotland (No. 101)

Hear poet Emma Kemp read poems for wave 10 of literary poetry journal iamb. Emma Kemp wave 10 summer 2022 back next the poet Emma Kemp is from Coventry, where she runs the local Stanza of the Poetry Society. Her work has been published in journals including Transpositions , Ekstasis and The Rialto , as well as in anthologies such as the forthcoming Looking Out, Peering In from The Hedgehog Poetry Press. the poems A warning to myself not to entertain your preliminary advances 00:00 / 02:13 I buckle on the edge of myself, my virtue, your passenger seat. Some unholy unknown, taut between us. Your skin is ash. The thin blue off the instrument panel. My cheeks flushed in the dark, keyed up. You tell me that you are hard as regards rejection, given to press on in the face of defeat. I can believe that. I can believe you would impress yourself upon me. I can believe you leave a mark. Think back: you smothered your self in plastic irony. Admit you are untrue as Coventry blue. Admit inside that plastic shell you are spring loaded, a nichrome coil pressed hard to a twelve-volt socket. On charge, not blue but blaze red. You must know by now I am bone dry as summer brush, as tinder. Would you like me to tear you out of yourself so you can enjoy us destroy each other? I wonder. How much fire it would take to separate you into your fractions. Not a lot, my dear, not while I am feeling all prodigal. I could insist upon you, light you up, draw down bitumen from your contempt and naphtha from your audacity. Perhaps we would get high on what was left. I imagine that I can distil you and live happily alongside some residual fragile goodness. You say I want better . I say you want to forget yourself. I suspect you already have. I cannot take part in your remembering. Know this: you do not want me the way you think you do. See here. I can unbuckle. I can exit. I can take my dry bones elsewhere. I can wish you very well. A nichrome coil/twelve-volt socket was used as a cigarette lighter in older cars. Rovings 00:00 / 00:47 Tell me, love, why we addle ourselves in our search for truth, when we know that all there is is a heap of hastily shorn fleece from which all the time we are spinning? Fumble in the wool and pull some out, rove between your hands to form loose strands. I will do the same. We will spin from these rovings, at times alone, at times together. And then we knit. See how what takes form is neither yours nor mine but defines us? Forgive my dropped stitches; you may have dropped a few, too. Please do not hide yourself away and try to knit from your own pattern. I am in it. Render 00:00 / 01:27 You have seen that image of Thích Quảng Đức burning to death at a crossroads in Saigon and wondered at it. A mixture of knowing and incomprehension. That the human spirit can achieve self-mastery to the point of self-destruction. You have longed to sit cross-legged by the vast ocean, have it lick at you and carry you away; you have longed to become a symbol. A soup of sorrow and raging self-pity. That the human spirit can flare and burn out is a given, but you must pour water on the altar. You have stationed yourself on shingle and felt the insistent pain of every stone. You have waited for the tide to come in, and the tide has come. Every tide refusing to send you to the sea floor. The sea buoys you, dismisses you, light as flotsam returns you to the shore. You have felt the pang of the anticlimax. There is no one here watching; nothing has gathered around you. Your clothes are heavy with salt shame, streaming from you as you walk on, chilled, not shivering. To find what is next. You are rendered to yourself. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Abigail Lim Kah Yan read poems for wave 15 of literary poetry journal iamb. Abigail Lim Kah Yan wave 15 autumn 2023 back next the poet Abigail Lim is a Malaysian engineer and spoken word poet who will point out to you, every plane she sees in the sky. She has a poem published in the 2021 Malaysian Millennial Voices anthology titled 'How to Paint the Rainbow When You're Colourblind'. She is also the winner of the 2022 Kuala Lumpur Youth Literary Arts Festival Poetry Slam. the poems Domestic Arrival 00:00 / 01:50 You told me I felt like home earlier on. But the way you bring my feet up to your lips to kiss them makes me feel like a church instead, an altar. Catholics are called to repent during Lent, and it feels like we're always apologizing in advance. When I cry, and I cry a lot, you do not tell me to stop. You reach out to hug me just as soon as my eyes turn glassy like yours, watching the rims of my glasses catch the first drops of tears. You told me to write sad poems about you, but you're the happiest part in all of them. Because you bring offerings too, of fancy chocolate, and the Killer Queen champagne and so many burgers. The remnants of smoke and ash in my bathroom like the incense wafting from thuribles. And teaching me Jeff Buckley's hallelujah on the electric guitar is the closest thing we both can agree on for a hymn. You told me I'm your matriarch, because in the words of Taylor Swift, fuck the patriarchy (in more ways than one). You told me I felt like home earlier on, and I told you, you make me feel like Eve, you, my Adam, I want to split open my chest cavity, dig around for the one rib that always felt misplaced in me, break it off, hands scarlet and ivory, offer it up to you, say, "I think this belongs to you, how long have you been without it". Kintsugi Inspired by Robert Frost 00:00 / 02:28 Nothing gold can stay and nothing good can stay I want you to stay so bad, I only wear silver jewelry, keep the gold rings and necklaces for special occasions. because nothing gold can stay and an orange sunset only casts its glows for so long on my Kelana Jaya condo we watch it fade together, from the swimming pool, floating, hands reaching out like otters at sea, afraid to drift too far away because nothing good can stay I am afraid to wonder if we'll ever trade our silver rings for golden ones di tanah yang sudah mengenal rasa darah kami, yet still demands its pound of flesh why do I need to renounce my faith for something you have ceased to believe in We are mere casualties of the 1984 Islamic Family Law I wonder if there are those before us Who did not yield to this pressure, a cult, beckoning Gold is typically a malleable metal darah mereka bukan lagi milik tanah ini and I want to break your IC in half, Make you a new one, take my last name, You're already more of a Lim than I am, Christened the Lim Jetty in Penang with spills of beer and cigarette ash teaching me to speak my ancestors' tongue 'Wah ni hui Chiang hua yi ah' all the aunties say Can we make gold stay? Because I'm an engineer, and you're pretty smart, Together we'll polish the little gold we have until they shine constantly, We're both clumsy, but we seem to have a pretty solid track record of keeping our silver rings safe If we can make good stay, I will follow you beyond a sunset's horizon, To a land where personal beliefs are kept personal (I don't need a church or a government to recognize our union) And if gold rings are too precious a commodity, I'd marry you with paper rings in a heartbeat. Icarus 00:00 / 01:47 I think some planes were meant to stay grounded - like the 737Max after the Ethiopian Air crash. I think I am what happens when a plane stalls, suddenly, there is not enough lift to keep me off the ground, and my internal pilots suck at recovering. I think this is as close as I get to Icarus, he too has felt the thrill of flying high, hair tickled by the wind, waxy wings white against a golden blue sky. I think I am as stubborn as Icarus, somehow believing I can touch the sun, but gravity will have us in its grasp at the last second. He too would've felt the air sucked from his lungs as he fell all the way down. I think we both do not have time to grieve unsuccessful dreams, we just die along with them. I think some dreams are meant to be forgotten the moment you wake up, but I remember all my sleep paralysis demons. And I think I do get a little sad each time I see a plane in the sky, knowing I am so far removed from ever touching it. But I hope my love still finds it adorable when I compulsively tell him, 'see plane' or 'got propeller, looks like ATR72', neck stretching out windows to get a better view. I think, on some days, he is the dream I get to wake up to. I think I am trying to be happy staying grounded, at the very least, you can't have a good flight without a safe landing. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Zelda Chappel read poems for wave 3 of literary poetry journal iamb. Zelda Chappel wave 3 summer 2020 back next the poet Zelda Chappel's first collection, The Girl in the Dog-tooth Coat , was published by Bare Fiction Press in 2015. Her work has also appeared in a number of journals, anthologies and collaborative projects online and in print. Formerly the Editorial Curator of the now defunct Elbow Room mixed arts journal, Zelda continues to work as a creative mentor and workshop facilitator. She won the National Poetry Library's Battered Moons in 2014 , and has been commended in a number of other competitions. the poems PTSD season 00:00 / 00:42 It is at the most inopportune of moments I am caught remembering the pressures of lip on lip & needing the salt of something to savour it, remembering there is a sea & it is ravenous for gritty light & bare skinned sky, all vulnerable & daring it’s delicious & blasphemous to think of what I wasn’t, what it was, what failures I wore instead of you I was sinking still gladly taking on water, unknowing This time of year 00:00 / 00:50 they’re out pushing leaflets through the doors again asking if we left our baby at St Peters if we know who did and it gets me every time I want to confess I left my baby in a chapel too once but she had already left me on Skype we joke about time travel me six hours ahead and you ask for no spoilers so I tell you a have a new desk plant that I called her Callie that there’s a delay on the line and I can hear myself and it’s strange I ask if you’re coming back soon you don’t know your aunt survives another season and no one thought she would Bad air 00:00 / 01:07 and it was in this place I got caught growing light-sick weed’s damp smell a bitter vexation, sweet urine stench a warning in the alley we take every time this is the beginning of the line and the end and the light is tight as a lime, under-grown between my lives, bad air is a grievance I can’t settle this is the beginning of the line and the end and I mutter our griefs constantly, solitude a scream in a fist kept closed, the beginning of the line, the end and water absorbs everything or simply unmakes what we made beginning, the line, the end is tether and death gets proved in our kneading so hard I am breaking, breaking this beginning, end Publishing credits PTSD season: exclusive first publication by iamb This time of year: The Interpreter ’s House (Issue 72) Bad air: Luminous, Defiant (Listen Softly Press)

Hear poet Jeremy Wikeley read poems for wave 12 of literary poetry journal iamb. Jeremy Wikeley wave 12 winter 2022 back next the poet Jeremy Wikeley is a writer and poet. His poems, essays and reviews have appeared online and in print in publications including New Welsh Review , The Observer , Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal and The Friday Poem . Jeremy's poems have also been anthologised in three collections from The Emma Press. Originally from Romsey in Hamsphire, Jeremy now lives in London, where he works in the arts. the poems Train to Cambridge After Louis MacNeice 00:00 / 00:48 Beyond the window the sky is turning pink and it’s more surprising than that song I wrote about how surprised I was that the sky was turning pink. It’s turning slowly, like it’s enjoying itself, as if there’s no hurry. The evening is encouraging the sky to follow it, and the sky is following, in its own time, pink and pacing itself while the train and I are racing to get ahead of the turning of the world only to find no matter how hard we try to push ourselves we are always a sleeper behind the evening as he strides along outside, crushing the sun under his thumb, mixing red dust with wet clouds and swiping dark streaks across the cheeks of the sky. The Vandals Remove the Ark of the Covenant (as told by the Ark) 00:00 / 00:33 Carnage! And then we were rocked across the Mediterranean – a box in a box in a box … over the chopping winter sea until a strange tongue told us we’d come to Carthage. And they plonked us down on the edge of the quay, as if we were any old package. Which we are! A box in a box in a box … under tarpaulin on African docks in Carthage. Poetry in Wartime 00:00 / 01:08 If this was a war I could be sad for myself. What bad luck (I’d say) to get caught up in this. So, the inevitable conscription into the most statistically dangerous wing of the armed forces (half the bombers didn’t make it back) would be more bad luck, like the hole in the kitchen ceiling. If this was a war, I would be worried about dying, not other people dying and the very possibility might make the uncertainty tolerable. If it were a war, every survivor would have a different set of stories, or at least there would be enough variation in our experiences for them to bear the repetition. As it is, nothing we do seems very important and because we don’t know what’s working, we don’t know what’s worth it, or what kind of world will come next. All I know is I will have to live in it. And it’s right, it’s right, it’s right. I’m not saying it’s not right. But like everything right, it is unbearable. Publishing credits Train to Cambridge: In Transit: Poems of Travel (The Emma Press) The Vandals Remove the Ark of the Covenant (as told by the Ark): exclusive first publication by iamb Poetry in Wartime: From the Silence of the Stacks, New Voices Rise, Vol. 1 (The London Library)

Hear poet Rebecca Goss read poems for wave 16 of literary poetry journal iamb. Rebecca Goss wave 16 winter 2023 back next the poet A poet, tutor and mentor who lives in Suffolk, Rebecca Goss is the author of four full-length poetry collections and two pamphlets. Her second collection, Her Birth , was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2013 – while in 2015, she was shortlisted for both the Warwick Prize for Writing and the Portico Prize for Literature. Rebecca is the 2022 winner of the Sylvia Plath Prize, and her newest collection, Latch , was published by Carcanet in 2023. the poems The Hounds 00:00 / 00:48 It’s as if something calamitous is coming. Their lament rising across fields, its claim on the dawn keeping all the birds silent. I want to know what stirs them, the force of this pack. What causes them to stand, muscled frames trembling, throats full of baleful song. I am wakeful, rapt and disrupted, their bays sonorous against glass. Should I slide the thin pane, push my upper body into emerging light let them scent out my sex, and tell them we are all afraid. O this night, this bidding, claws at the latch, pure thunder of them running, my mouth opening to the cool and agitated air. At the Party I Shadowed Susie 00:00 / 01:02 who was happy to slip away walk with me into the back field where I drank her 17-year-old wisdom could look at her hair the opposite colour of mine her blue jeans convincing myself my twelve years were not an issue both of us plucking at grasses when we got almost to the oak we ventured back to the adults neither of us missed I lost Susie in the drunken stir of my parents’ garden until night got ready to flood the party I thought I might go in search of her or the cats so went to the furthest barn and in the black that had rolled inside I saw Susie being held by Richard the boy I’d ignored because his punky clothes confused me now his left hand inside Susie’s back pocket as they sought each other’s mouths air urgent unfamiliar standing there considering myself betrayed waiting until breakfast to utter it the sudden turn of my parents’ heads curious to know what I saw my mother sensing something flicker staring at her daughter so full of heat and blood and questions Gate 00:00 / 00:27 Here she comes, hair a stream, path home, dog’s ears pricked to the latch, and I’m in the garden, pear tree spilling, day of poems behind me, hiding my stored dark, thinking I must look old and not extraordinary, her skin the truest surface wanting to kiss her as she drops her bag, turns, every atom of her near me, and I make my slight gesture, feel the quickening. Publishing credits All poems: Latch (reproduced with gratitude to Carcanet Press for its kind permission) Author photo: © Natalie J Watts

Hear poet Heather Quinn read poems for wave 4 of literary poetry journal iamb. Heather Quinn wave 4 autumn 2020 back next the poet Heather Quinn is an artist and poet living in California. She was a finalist in House Mountain Review's Annual Broadside Contest (2019), a semi-finalist in both Cutthroat's Joy Harjo Poetry prize (2020) and Prometheus Dreaming's Unbound Competition (2019), and has featured in Palette Poetry's 'Poetry We Admire' column for Shroud with Lead Wing, published originally in Raw Art Review. Heather's work has appeared most recently in the New York Times, 42 Miles Press, Cathexis Northwest Press, Ghost City Review, High Shelf Press, Inkwell Press, Kissing Dynamite Poetry and Burning House Press. the poems Kaddish for Grandma Irene 00:00 / 02:08 Her bony body is naked underneath a dress of translucent leaves. The knobs of her knees are burls of a willow tree. I place the paper cut-out of a blackbird on her left shoulder. In an open green field, we drink warm milk from cracked teacups painted with tiny yellow birds. She unknots the twine from a Rosenbloom’s cake box. I remember sugar cubes perfectly stacked in her silver caddy. Its delicate silver tongs. One lump or two, angelah? The way she would sing to me in Yiddish, Shlof, shlof, kindela. She was shaky, made of glass. I was a sparrow, terrified that even so small I might break her. Her heart pieced together with string saved from 1930s Pittsburgh, from that Hill District row house where seven children shared two bedrooms. All those socks and sweaters darned for her six younger siblings. All those beatings by her mother with a washboard or wooden spoon. Her father, the cantor, practicing for Shabbat service, Oseh shalom bimromav, hu ya’aseh shalom aleinu. At the Monroeville Mall she bought my first purse, flowered and pink with a gold clasp. Oy! It’s exquisite, kindela, she said. Tearing up, she pinched my blushed cheeks. In her leafy dress she is the green field, her white hair catching flecks of dusklight. From a phonograph, Billie Holiday’s voice scratches, I’ll be seeing you. Grandma closes her eyes and sings. sparrow 00:00 / 01:40 i watched a fledgling sparrow fly from its nest to its mother no, let me begin again it did not fly but landed at my feet after it was propelled from the tree in front of my childhood home by a rock thrown by a gangly boy bigger older the tree was painted with dry pigment & rabbit skin glue no, it grew of bark & leaf but i reconstruct the sparrow’s slippery skin damp slickened feathers its seedling heart visible through translucent membranes beak snapping open & closed squawk with no sound Munch’s Scream i picked up the baby bird held it like a damp lung in my hand nursed it with water & seed no, what really happened was dad said we had to leave it or momma sparrow would never return we knew momma was off building a new nest the O of the baby’s beak an alarm, until feathers wings flattened in shallow grass like a fried egg yet the sparrow lives pecking at my sternum, sipping oxygen from my windpipe clawing for its perch the history of light: a burning haibun After Torrin A Greathouse 00:00 / 02:15 i examine the bones of an incandescent bulb, crystalline glass, base & socket, thin wiry v relic of winged light i remember being chased by a ghost from my bed to the landing crying out to dad his face cast in television lowlights he scooped me up, tucked me back in, kissed my forehead & clicked on the bedside lamp ghosts always disappear in the light, he said dad died months before my wedding day his wedding band bound to my wrist with satin ribbon i imagined him as we wrapped his & her bulbs in black velvet smashed the glass beneath our feet later we picked up the broken shards, crushed metal burned the remains in a fire pit sealed them in a mason jar tonight i shake the jar like a snow globe watch the ashes bloom into embers, into dad’s image as it flickers, a reel of celluloid lit by one struck match // i examine the bones of an incandescent bulb, crystalline glass, base & socket, thin wiry v relic of winged light i remember being chased by a ghost from my bed to the landing crying out to dad his face cast in television lowlights he scooped me up, tucked me back in, kissed my forehead & clicked on the bedside lamp ghosts always disappear in the light, he said dad died months before my wedding day his wedding band bound to my wrist wi tesatin ribbon i imagined him as we wrapp hed his & her bulbs in black velvet smashed the glass beneath our feet later we picked up wroken asha s, crushed metal burned the remains in a fire pit sealed them in a mason jar tonight i sha r like a snowobe watch ashes bloom into embers, into dad’s image as it flickers, a reel celluloid lit by one struck match // bones of an iof winged light dad s face ca ghost always before bound to my e d like a snow he loom ins a s a reel ofcelllits c atch Publishing credits Kaddish for Grandma Irene (earlier version): Minnesota Review (November 1st 2016) sparrow: Prometheus Dreaming the history of light: Cathexis Northwest Press (October 1st 2020)