Hear poet Zoe Brooks read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Zoe Brooks back next the poet Zoe Brooks returned to her native Gloucestershire to write and grow vegetables after 15 years in London. Her collection Owl Unbound appeared in 2020, and her long poem for voices, Fool’s Paradise , won the Electronic Publishing Industry award for Best Poetry eBook – it will be published as a physical book in 2022. Zoe is a member of the management team for the Cheltenham Poetry Festival, and as well as setting up and running the Poetry Events in UK & Ireland Facebook group , enjoys performing poetry. the poems My Grandfather and Uncle 00:00 / 01:04 My grandfather and uncle both returned to the earth with untimely haste. Although they worked it, broke its back for frost to bite into, dragged sedge from ditches, clawed back lambs from snowheaps, they did not inherit it. Unless it was in the length and width of a man's form. And it claimed them early, reaching up through the chest, pain filling the arms, which had gathered harvests. And still they loved it. And still they cursed on cold wet mornings as it worked like ringworm into their hands. In death they shall inherit the earth. Until this time they have been living on borrowed land. The Call 00:00 / 01:46 You want me to stay a hearthkeeper, a filler of stoves and a bearer of logs. But the forest calls and all the small unspoken things living there listen. You want me to be a guard dog, a lier by the fire. You place dead meat in bowls to comfort me. But the forest is stirring. Can't you feel its mossy paws rising up the walls? Can't you hear it? It scuttles in the attic and leaps on nesting mice, tears their little limbs and chomps on innards. You try to keep out its cold, but the roof insulation is red with the death of vermin. As you pull the rug over your head, I feel my tail grow bushy, my snout lengthen, my teeth turn iron. In the morning you will find my bed empty. Open the door and follow my trail, if you dare. Follow it up the hill, where the track skirts the ruined farm with windows black as the mouth of a gap-toothed hag. Follow it past the heavy cows to where the snow will not melt in the shadow of the birch trees, to the edge of the forest. I am waiting for you there. The Gypsies in the Room 00:00 / 00:43 It is the unstitching of the mind, we tell ourselves, watching as she slips further from us, like an old purse, the lining opening to reveal lost coins. Morphine and dementia see the gypsies in the room, silent in a row. The ancestors come to greet her, we joke, to watch over the journey we cannot take with her, not yet anyway. The coins jingle, crossing the palm of the ferryman. Publishing credits My Grandfather and Uncle / The Gypsies in the Room: Owl Unbound (Indigo Dreams Publishing) The Call: Obsessed With Pipework (No. 85)

Hear poet Jude Marr read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jude Marr back next the poet The Pushcart Prize-nominated non-binary poet Jude Marr (they/them) is the author of the poetry collection We Know Each Other By Our Wounds . Their work has appeared in many magazines in the US, the UK and worldwide. After ten years of living, learning and teaching in the US, Jude is now back in Britain working as a freelance editor and writing coach. They're looking forward to expanding their horizons on the UK poetry scene. the poems Live from the Billionaire Philanthropists’ Banquet 00:00 / 02:06 at this false table appetite is not loss: love cocoons blame while self- proclaimed good servants shave bottom lines and spin kaleidoscopes before the famished (slivered glass as thought salad) as well-tended hands offer bread to shrinking, wrinkled bodies the would-be unhinge their hearts, still filthy from a dream of delights meanwhile children, graveyard wraiths, stuff restructured bread into unlined mouths: their hands hang angular: their eye-skeletons are sockets of birds who sing, featherless in the graveyard of power-hungry minds, dark famine eats air: rainfall’s undelivered: a mess of struts rises around barred gold— three meals feed expectations: a bountiful garden, bread without errors, heart-table dreams and we say, let’s eat expensive: grind night like we grind coffee: remind the pot that we are appetite: but what terror of the rambling heart, rock-fraught and filthy, empties a child’s hand without touching? graveyard children make our sold-out hearts raw: we draw our hands from their hunger: we make coffee without touching the world. Solitary 00:00 / 01:07 spider on a cold expanse of glass: your padded claws, tiny to the human eye, never misstep: your leg-hairs hear the beat of winter’s wings— find my window’s crack and crawl in: my home’s dark corners do not hide a broom: make my room your own: spin filaments as sanctuary, silk strong enough to catch the light— cold-blooded spider: I know you do not fear winter’s beak: nature has made you predator and prey: stay of execution is my offering: all I seek is fractal consolation from the corner of my eye. Silence Will Not Save Us 00:00 / 01:14 word-heat rises, carbon-oxidised, as oily lies combust: on city streets we are still breathing, just: our children trusted us— masks act as word-catchers, trapping holy lies as halitosis, drowning saviour fantasies in spit: still, the unmasked spew their shit— jugglers, jousters, clowns conjure witty lies to please a crowd: word games to distract: even mimes may misdirect— in my silent room, I pass my cup from one hand to the other: I am the loner I declaim, my wasted words already ash— in my room, silent, I smell smoke. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Sharon Philips read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Sharon Philips back next the poet Bristolian by birth and upbringing, now living in Otley, West Yorkshire, Sharon Phillips began writing poetry when she retired from a career in education. Her poems have since been published, online and in print, in anthologies and journals ranging from The Bridport Prize Anthology 2019 , Under the Radar and The Dawn Treader to Ink Sweat & Tears and The High Window . Her first pamphlet, Liven Yourself Up , appeared in 2024. the poems Prelapsarian 00:00 / 00:44 He is at his most beautiful. Motown is behind him, he’s too strong to be beaten, his cheekbones are sharp, acne scars all healed. At last he feels good about his face. He looks up with a grin, snaps his fingers to the bass line, pushes off the wall with his foot, leaps, moonwalks, spins, slides. He sings, easy, unforced, the songs that mark a decade. There’s no stopping him now, you’d like to think. The hardest thing about hospital 00:00 / 00:45 it’s not the obs trolley rattling me awake not the overhead light blink-blinking not the bleep of stalled infusion pumps not Rachel in the next bed howling whenever she pisses herself not the weary nurse who tells me these ladies are all quite confused not the maggot in my mind worrying why they’ve put me on this ward not cannulas dreadlocking my arms not the steroids prowling my nerves not my mouth gaping for words not the blotches on my brain scan it’s wanting my mum. Consider After Kim Moore 00:00 / 00:59 the early morning cleaners, who rise at five, who dress in the dark for fear of waking their children, who eat cold toast at the bus stop, who lug buckets and hoovers through empty offices, who wipe fingerprints from photos and neaten toys and mascots, who scrub piss and shit from toilet seats and floors, who fear their hours will be cut, who are desperate for money for food and rent and the gas bill, who wonder what it would be like to have a cushy office job, who sweat under sky blue polyester tabards, whose backs ache, feet throb, whose ankles are swollen, who worry they won’t be home when the kids wake up, who'll do it all again tomorrow. Publishing credits Prelapsarian: exclusive first publication by iamb The Hardest Thing About Hospital: Liven Yourself Up (Yaffle’s Nest)  Consider: Black Nore Review (August 26th 2024)

Hear poet Dion O’Reilly read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Dion O’Reilly © Expressive Photography back next the poet Dion O'Reilly has authored three collections of poetry: Sadness of the Apex Predator , a finalist for the Steel Toe Books Prize in Poetry and The Ex Ophidia Prize (now the Richard-Gabriel Rummonds Poetry Contest), Ghost Dogs , which won a Pinnacle Book Achievement Award, The Independent Press Award for Poetry, and which was also shortlisted for both the Eric Hoffer Book Award and The Catamaran Poetry Prize, and the forthcoming Limerence , a finalist in the John Pierce Chapbook Competition. Her work has appeared in The Sun , Rattle , The Cincinnati Review , The Slowdown and elsewhere. A poetry workshop leader, Dion is also a reader for Catamaran Literary Reader , and a podcaster at The Hive Poetry Collective . the poems Old Black Water 00:00 / 01:37 Suzie, I want to tell you how frequently I pass the apartment behind the supermarket where we street-danced to the Doobie Brothers, light shifting as the fog lifted, front-yard roses iridescent in the salt-gray seaside morning. You died, what, ten years ago? Not at once, really, though pills took you quickly. It began, I think, when we were children: without knowing why, we wanted out of that rural beauty—the narrow valley and gleaming stream, summers spent diving off crumbling cliffs, as if nearness to death was the closest we came to leaving your stepdad's beery fingers, my Mother who loved to touch the sweaty chests of her daughters’ teenage lovers. Nowadays, everything is a different kind of dangerous: Rain stays away. June mist sucks away too soon, sunlight breaks through before it should. What I want to say, Suzie, is a moment, gone, fifty years, is just a moment, but you’re still here, unfleshed in brightness—elfin, jittery, wan— our arms looped as we turn tight circles, round and round, your eyes locked on mine. Dark Matter 00:00 / 02:02 We see so little of the world, a mere corner, they say, though today, nothing seems scanty— the oaks around the meadow, full of spiked leaves and fear- ful band-tails, life’s matrix pulsing every nerve—it’s more than more: it’s a slow explosion, even if its plenty is mere sliver next to the dark ether that sticks the planets, the stars, even our charged cells to its vision board. It hurts me— this seen beauty, the gleaming outsides of the world. I don’t know why, but inside every spring, a memory— some lost boy, the blooming weed he picked me, his warm hands, the longing, the pleasure. I know gratitude is popular, is inclined to go viral, but it’s whack-a-mole, this old need inside me, so when I hear dark matter—how I desire dark, how I yearn for matter— that intriguing reversal of uncertainty into mass and import— even in my golden-years- garden—meant to uplift me—it’s shadow I seek, the wormy layer, always there, year after year, closer and closer—nameless god, forgotten father, limbic odour of mystery, its source, almost remembered, familiar, beyond my reach. Wading in Soquel Creek 00:00 / 01:11 I still go there—vale of my childhood, nearly unreachable, water-carved furrow to the sea. When I wend around a certain curve, I see my old friend Kev, ghost-slumming at the water hole. He’s still fourteen, still smoking in a surplus jacket, rubbing ashes on his jeans, still bears the silence of the fatherless, never mentions why his mother left him to live with Gran’ma Muster in her motorhome. And I, too, kept my mother’s secrets, the way she rewrote my life with loops of cursive on my back— her whip, an instruction, in the only language she knew. Kevin, why don’t you wade with me again? Like I thought we would forever, listening to the water’s answers to problems we couldn’t name. Publishing credits Old Black Water: New Ohio Review (Issue 34) Dark Matter: won first place in The Letter Review Prize for Poetry Wading in Soquel Creek: Taj Mahal Review (Vol. 20, No. 2)

Hear poet Holly Peters read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Holly Peters back next the poet Holly Peters is a Creative Writing PhD student at the University of Plymouth. She held the position of Plymouth’s Young City Laureate from 2019-2022, and had her poem Artificial Moons featured in the Moths to a Flame: Art and Energy Collective installation at the Glasgow Botanical Gardens during COP26. You’ll typically find Holly hiding somewhere between the covers of a book, or out walking her crazy spaniels, Dotty and Booby. the poems Building the River a Bed 00:00 / 01:12 a river skitters in the dark wriggling like a lullaby’s shh I take the first rock; it weighs the same as the peach pit in my stomach. Clay rolls in the canyon of my palm, squishing between fingers, then shuddering back to shape. An audience of stones, I deliberate, the choice all mine. nothing falls fast in the waves, settling down for its final rest The second breathes dust, hot to touch, singed syllables filling my throat. You don’t have to ignore the craters: use your nails and crack them open. The river shapes beds from burdens: kneel down, whisper them gently. water ages slow, sighs as it swallows my offering Crumbling. I’d avoided the river for years – it no longer able to relieve me – yet I still gather the third rock that slices through the sand timer’s neck. The bank cuts into the hard white behind my shins and I cry as I litter what’s left like ashes. soft drops melt like they were never there at all The Bread Affair 00:00 / 00:53 Her teeth grind in time with the knife that slathers butter over his slice of bread. His dinner steams, fragrant with turmeric and all the time she has spent stewing over it. Not that he takes any notice. Whatever plate she presents him with – matsutake mushrooms, moose cheese, wagyu beef – his mouth waters only for the ample half-wheat bread. Her arrangement of lip-pink tulips has already been extracted from the table’s heart, so his bulging loaf can fill its centre. He takes his time massaging butter into the bread’s porcelain cheek. He cups his hand, its back arching, then spoons his dinner inside, letting the slice envelope it like skin. He chews it, mouth opening wide, tongue slopping. The crumbs cascade, shredded like the last slivers of her patience. I Want to be a Forest 00:00 / 00:49 You won’t know which part of me you hold in your hands: my lower lip, a worn-down heel or knobbly elbow – because it’ll look no different to dirt. You’ll be given a watch-sized box filled with two palmfuls of what’s left of me, and even though I’m only saying it, those flakes, like tree bark, are my heart. All the rest, enough to fill a wheelbarrow, will be mingled with the remains of others. What was once kneecaps, earlobes, eyeballs will become part of the damp woodland floor. But in that forest, it will always be a part of me you hold in your hands. It will be earth, and worm food, a home for tentative tree roots, a world unravelling in the planet of your palm. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Leanne Moden read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Leanne Moden Lizzy Doe back next the poet Leanne Moden is a poet, performer and educator based in Nottingham, UK. She's performed at WOMAD, Sofar Sounds, Bestival on the Isle of Wight, the Fourth Wave Feminist Festival, Trinity College Cambridge, and the TEDx WOMEN event at University College London. Leanne was a semi-finalist at the BBC Edinburgh Fringe Slam 2018, and a national finalist at both the Hammer and Tongue Poetry Slam in 2016 and the Camden Roundhouse Slam in 2014. She took her first solo show, Skip, Skip, Skip , to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in 2019, and in 2020 published her second poetry pamphlet, Get Over Yourself . the poems Becalmed A Golden Shovel after Mary Oliver 00:00 / 01:50 I wanted to be the kind of someone who could always fix things. I clung to my competency like hull-side barnacles. To be loved, you must be good enough and I was, once. Back when the sight of the sea still gave me chills. Now, I don’t know what will become of me. I am a storm-sunk schooner, rigging unravelling. I am a boatyard ransacked by vandals, and I can’t find the box where I stored my secrets. I am so full of nothings; regretful ghostly half-recollections. Fearful of everything I can no longer do. Forgetting is a kind of darkness, a mist that thickens slowly, by degrees. It is so much harder to navigate when the stars are extinguished. It took so long to realise what was happening to me; on the journeys between the kettle and the sofa, years passed. Now, I am left alone to make catalogues of the missing parts. Understand this: there is no way that I can know what is absent. The blank space is this unmarked page in my logbook. A fog too heavy to ever lift again. If I was still a sailing man then maybe I could endure this forecast as a storm passing. But today, it feels more like penance than a gift. Creation with an Axe 00:00 / 01:00 A blazing, sanguinary wound of light, this reddish star – our sun – a brutal breach. The viscera of moonlight bleeds through night and stains the sky with triumphs out of reach. While shoulder blade tectonics move beneath the sinew soil of slowly shifting dunes, Creation swings its axe and grinds its teeth and softly hums an ever-changing tune. A god can give their body to the earth, their bones transferred to sediment and scree. A violent world demands a violent birth; the axe must bite the bark to fell the tree. A god can give their body to the earth; a violent world demands a violent birth. Humanity 00:00 / 01:00 This is humanity: sit back and let everything fall apart. It is ridiculous to assume we would want to help people we don’t even know. We will go out of our way to seal ourselves off from our problems. We will never think about others before ourselves. We can’t contemplate the future so we’ve stopped trying. We can’t imagine a world where there is hope. There is hope. We can’t imagine a world where we’ve stopped trying. We can’t contemplate the future so think about others before ourselves. We will never seal ourselves off from our problems. We will go out of our way to help people we don’t even know. It is ridiculous to assume we would want to sit back and let everything fall apart. This is humanity. Publishing credits Creation with an Axe: Hecate Literary Magazine (Issue 1) Becalmed: Dear Reader Humanity: Dreich (Season Three, No. 12)

Hear poet Jane Ayres read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jane Ayres back next the poet Jane Ayres re-discovered poetry while studying part-time for a Creative Writing MA at the University of Kent. Soon after, she was longlisted for the 2020 Rebecca Swift Foundation Women Poets’ Prize. The following year, Jane was shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, and became a winner of the Laurence Sterne Prize (she also picked up an Honourable Mention in the 2022 Wergle Flomp Humor Poetry Contest ). Twice nominated for Best of the Net, once for The Pushcart Prize, Jane has had her poetry published in more than 100 publications. She's also read her work for Eat the Storms , Upload , The Blue Door , Ó Bhéal , Medway River Lit and iamb . Her first collection, edible , appeared in 2022. Her most recent work is micro-chap, my lost womb still sings to me . the poems Giving my ex-boss a hand job for £20 (mates rates) 00:00 / 00:44 His request took me by surprise since I’d only invited him round for coffee making it clear there was to be no more sex. But at the time I was working four part-time jobs to pay my rent and cover the bills. It really would be easy money (I told myself) and I was right because it took my gloved hand just two minutes to achieve the desired outcome – less time than it took to write this poem. Not a bad rate of pay and to be honest, I wondered if he might want to make it a regular thing, although he said afterwards he usually had it done professionally. final witness 00:00 / 00:38 this thing you did this thing this thing you did that splinters needles gnaws claws caws calls you out calls you in burrows deep deeper seeps leaks loops leaches feeds this thing that taunts haunts hunts preys takes fright invites the want to do a good thing the right thing because the time you had the times we had the time you have dissolving wilting tilting twisting this thing this thing we did requiem for an age-inappropriate lover 00:00 / 00:55 i see you my body becomes cotton & the trickling wound will not heal or shut the knot in my back is spreading loaded with sticky expectation wearing my coming & going dress / firefly-bright a handful of knitted moments / charred seeds just a little crush in the bluebelled forest hollow promises made easily the curve of your cheek / a buried moon / bone-white this hand / nettle-woven / pinking the sinuous hive blurring the tongue-choked lines scraping the chalky narrative i’ll walk for miles to keep our secret Publishing credits Giving my ex-boss a hand job for £20 (mates rates): The Friday Poem (May 19th 2023) final witness/requiem for an age-inappropriate lover: Cōnfingō Publishing (Spring 2021)

Hear poet Di Slaney read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Di Slaney back next the poet Di Slaney lives in Nottinghamshire, England, where she runs livestock sanctuary Manor Farm Charitable Trust and independent poetry publisher Candlestick Press . She was the winner of The Plough Poetry Prize 2022 , and has had her poetry broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Di's poems have been published and anthologised widely, as well as highly commended by both The Forward Prizes and the Bridport Prize. She is the author of two poetry collections: Reward for Winter and Herd Queen . the poems Creation 00:00 / 01:48 In the beginning there was a farmhouse without a field, and a woman and a man without children. The man was content but the woman wanted. The old farmhouse knew, it had always known what the people who lived in it wanted, although most wouldn't listen. This woman listened. She heard the house breathe her thirst through its beams, wear her desire into its scuffed flags. She smelled its loss when wind spat ancient soot down the chimney, saw how every spring wildgreen crept a little closer to the back door. So the farmhouse and the woman made a pact, a promise without words. They sealed the bargain with palmpress to wood, flesh on oak. She proved her faith first, reclaimed the land though it wept scars of rubbish when it rained. The woman marked the field with scent and sticks, walked it over and over till she knew the pits and folds like her own body in the dark. The farmhouse waited, humming on a frequency only she could hear. That first winter, with planting done and everything suspended, she doubted the bargain. The cold seemed to freeze out good intentions, make every possible thing one step closer to impossible. But the house still thrummed its constant yes , and when spring returned, and new trees perked first buds east to face the pale sun rising, hope fluttered like greedy sparrows on the feeder. Diptych 00:00 / 01:18 i. Brick by brick If I could lift it up and move it, brick by brick, I’d gladly build it all by hand again myself, and pick the best location here, against these trees, back to the wood, view facing clear downhill towards the stack of small red chimneys huddled round the church, where it sat waiting, calm, untroubled, four hundred years, knowing that such vigil would pay off, timbers aching for it, stone hearth breaking. ii. Buying it back Fitting that this field returns, unharmed, now that the deal is sealed, to where they farmed hard living those long days before, leaving no trace but bones and stones, their ways at odds with my mad pace stuttering slowly to a crawl along the sloping rocky track, across the weatherweary wall with seedlings pointing every crack, my greedy eyes fill up with green, buying it back, borrowing a dream. History of a Field 00:00 / 01:39 Roll it back, roll it back, this greentipped scroll, this loosetop layer, from how-it-is to how-it-used-to-be; unplant the trees, dig up the hedge, blur out the track, return the moat, the gate, the square of earth you see behind the church, give sheep those other lives or deaths, keep rolling till loose cattle stroll black graveyards late at night, pigs begrudge their lack of straw in tinlid huts, hayyield begets huge stacks and roll, keep rolling while World War II Italians pick fat fruit from applepears and sing sweet songs and trick young localhearts with tiny matchplanes crafted under candles in the loft, keep rolling back past all their prayers, soil shifting, harrowed, furrowed, shires turning, bridled, harnessed, tacked; keep rolling – now land is wider uphilldownhill, woodside, broadside, trees reaching overunderround, leaves smacking heads, rumpsandtumps, the forest’s knack to spread and swallowwhole this little patch, its shack of small dominion, its stamp, its hearth, your heart. Stop rolling. Fold it back, fold it back. Publishing credits Creation / Diptych: Reward for Winter (Valley Press) History of a Field: winner of The Plough Poetry Prize 2022

Hear poet Shaw Worth read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Shaw Worth back next the poet Shaw Worth is a student living in London. His work has received three commendations in the Foyle Young Poet of the Year competition, appeared in the Waltham Forest Poetry Competition anthology close , and is forthcoming in World-dream. Shaw also co-edits Meanwhile Magazine . the poems Breaktime on the Toddlers and Tiaras Set 00:00 / 01:24 Today my two-year-old is Regional Beauty Supreme. She will be Princess Kansas. She will devour the world. Her two main hobbies are broad daylight and temporary teeth called flippers; we throw them in the summer river, we watch them dance like mayflies. Before she goes on stage they play Wichita Lineman for me and the soft string whine comes to get me, and these all-time winner women and the local bowling alley recede. I go back to my father, who hated me; he said our name was Resaca for fighting but I stayed here in the county to listen through the wire for the future, which is my champion daughter. At home I marry the mirror and try her lipstick on at dinner. I am the quality controller. She knows we need the money and she brings it back each Monday. I wash the dresses. We sing together every weekend. We storm like thunder through the waxed music halls, then I pass her the mic, and her glitter in their golf ball eyes makes the world see more clearly and the cinched March sun walk out to greet the judges and these endless plains, where we are unloading a pickup of trophies and rejoicing in endless victory. Dharma Talk 00:00 / 01:31 Ani Pema says we would prefer to remain asleep in the West. Just like that: quietly. And she laughs loud and jokes since her wisdom overflows. But distraction is freehand and creative, I think; while I walk in the shop I listen— I should be bolder at adding new people on Facebook, whose images I glide over nightly a fish through a reef, or a bored mountain goat, tripping on the space between crags. It’s so important, she says, to get out of this pool of steamy slash fictional nothing, of thoughts that crawl like sci-fi animals, of unwatched films & love poems— you are not who you think you are. You never were . But before I get discursive and freehand about dinner, I remember again that still I can breathe, and adopt a posture of repose in the air, like a fly on a thousand-petalled lotus. I twist my left hip & it hurts for a week; I bruise my calves on the flow of time, I get dinner, again. There are road stops on the path. On the four hundredth petal of my long trashy thriller, the gang climb the glacier in search of the body; the killer impersonates below. They find her, filled with love and righteous action, dig her out from the hard-set snow. Landscape as Guided Meditation 00:00 / 01:24 No, I’m serious. Imagine you’re fifty one hundred fathoms tall, big head up with blue generous Neptune, and your feet down in the Cape Cod lake where there were eels and you met your teacher. You have no pain and high dexterity. You think aloud with your shoulder blade the size of the province: it says don’t trust the work, do it again, you might just find that something in all this boundless space, these foamy bits of lake that lodge beyond the breath. Look, there’s Jupiter. I guess breath is the end of be all. You’re so massive you can’t float by. Uncombing your hair the length of Cape Cod will send a theta wave to Earth with the power to make the highways curl up on themselves then heal all beings of hope and fear. So do it. Go do the dishes and strike the bowl till it becomes a portal. Crawl through to a large non-conceptual room, the first of ten final perfections. We don’t need to list them here quite yet. The lake has dried up with waiting for you the wallpaper is Neptune imagined. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Peter Scalpello read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Peter Scalpello back next the poet Queer poet and sexual health therapist Peter Scalpello hails from Glasgow. Their work has been published internationally, and their debut collection, Limbic , will be published by Cipher Press in 2022. the poems when i was in two bodies, halved 00:00 / 03:10 insisting on life i dressed myselves up, like a wound as a bigger me, older & more engendered than i am even now though, then, i of course defied age & sex my father’s masculine was anger i first gauged as urges indulged to etch, as caveperson the letter S with a (nondescript) wrench, made up of roughened integers so erasure shaped our liminal space & the inside of his testicles read sis let’s say the impulse to deface already had infinite rotational symmetry it seems to surface in me today screaming on regent street at the injustices of the world my mother’s feminine was doubt i sensed in her primary colours & her venus, which is the name of a razor i took to both eyebrows though barely there & now vanished, replaced them with love hearts; sky, sun, wine but the security, i could literally inhale it! i was untarnished & fine & when i looked back up i was already here when i was two people, doubled everything served disappeared down my throat until the suburbs brought it all back up again with seven pints of revelation to ingest the suede shoes & the unwell man you see all the time is you both cells unmarried & yet a replication, as healing means to be repeatedly broken over again when fingertips were viscous & not-yet yellowed, the matter of us tasted so gorgeous— are you coming with me, or just merely going begin again when i was in two Shetland 00:00 / 01:17 at the tideline the surfacing sun overwhelms the horizon like an ingrown hair and a fish -erwoman i bothered proposes that the mackerel here thrive because when they see the scenery they’re compelled to make love it reminds me of a couple i’ve recently been spending time with who met at the memorial of a friend in ’86 a generation removed my thumb taps on chests of dads to replace my own and assigned-at-birth flesh shapes that make the gulls above scream with laughter over the indelicacy of human orogeny how one-dimensional the race for intervention of an all-out stranger must seem from up there— my handheld dreamland the realistic sea beneath us winking Devil Works 00:00 / 02:26 In the reptilian squish of this horned skull, the faggotry I once neglected and tangential victimhood I again entertain coexist, distinct but sensorially linked. Science! Had I further bulldozed both, I could’ve been the gayest construction worker you ever laid eyes on, all YMCA-looking and mid-breakdown. At any rate, I’ve landed on an alternate form of mimicry, evangelism. Decked out like the bent great-grandson of Lucifer, crimson cherub in PVC and knee-highs, divorced from a creator I was groomed to love or be in love with. Source of an endless eye-roll on behalf of the street preacher, his camp little megaphone calling for my eternal incineration. Religion! Were I devilish enough, I’d mince upon its unorthodox pedestal, sibilanting archaic love and radical acceptance: praise the idiosyncrasy, a blessing! The only kindling in hetero-sight graced by the foil of a nation ’s communal pipe, held safe by something at least. I had the fire stomped out of me an eternity ago, it wasn’t even biblicised. Like our survival, faith is leaving a pleasure path doused in question marks, theology and natural order inter secting with prophetic desire. The devil works hard, but queers work harder. Publishing credits when i was in two bodies, halved: Consilience (Issue 2) Shetland: The Selkie Devil Works: In The Past The Future Was Better (Cipher Press)

Hear poet Harula Ladd read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Harula Ladd back next the poet Poet, performer and facilitator Harula Ladd is based in the South West and is the current Exeter Slam Champion. She's also the founder of the Postal Poetry Library , and loves writing on-the-spot poems for the public. Fascinated by the power of the imagination, Harula is passionate about the way creativity connects us. She gathers ideas for her writing while out walking. the poems Skin 00:00 / 01:40 is hard to put back on at a moment’s notice, when someone knocks on your door to offer a piece of their mother’s Christmas cake. You wipe wetness from your cheeks, demand your skin quickly swallow you in again and keep the hand where the skin is cracked behind your back. Reach out with the other to receive perfect Christmas cake, complete with miniature marzipan holly. You make eye contact with this new mother, pushed to the edge of her own skin until she’s shining. She’s beautiful. *** The skin you live in is tight, thin, bulging with broken that just wants to breathe. At night you pin your skin to the edges of your room, to the curtains, hook it over the door handle, trap a corner under the weight of a table leg so at least you can be free while you sleep. When you wake, skin won’t shrink to fit. You wonder if you should give up your free feeling dreams where skin is so big you can swim in it, inside it, exploring it from underneath like swimming underwater looking up at the surface not wanting to break it yet. It’s quiet and fascinating down here. People can’t knock on the surface of the sea. They’d have to wade in and get wet to reach you, so swim swim swim The girl who brought the world home 00:00 / 01:38 She brought the world home like an injured bird found by the road, shrunk to one metre across to hang safely from her ceiling like a breathing glitter ball behind closed curtains. She lay on the field of her carpet to watch the living world above twirl cobwebs in miniaturised hurricanes. That first night, she couldn’t sleep. Got up to warm some milk and heard the oceans burst. 'What’s wrong?' she asked. The world replied, 'To shrink is no protection. I cannot give life like this. 'You deny my power, hanging me here behind closed curtains. I need to be!' 'But I only … ' 'You don’t even know you haven’t met freedom yet.' Forests inhaled. Exhaled. 'To live is to be willing to die. 'Look. You are taller than me now. Is that what you wanted? To make me small and you big? 'In order to control something beyond your understanding you have to shrink it for it to make sense. 'For it to be safe. You shrink what is vast only to grow more of what has no importance.' What's inside 00:00 / 01:15 I roll myself out flat, squeeze all you don’t need to know from me and fold over seven times, until I’m the size of an envelope. I slide in to send myself to you. Once sealed it’s too late to take back bits added to me since we last met. It’s fine. I can deny them or cross them out before you open me. At the weigh in the lady working the Post Office counter raises an eyebrow. 'May I ask what’s inside?' 'Skin. No guts.' I ask for second class. Gives me more time. I land on your doormat stiff and sore. You soak me in a bath like those teas that bloom in a mug, and the little I’d been prepared to say dissolves, and goes the way of the bathwater. Once dry, I dress, all fresh and empty. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Suyin Du Bois read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Suyin Du Bois 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