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Hear poet Laura Theis read poems for wave 19 of literary poetry journal iamb. Laura Theis wave 19 autumn 2024 back next the poet Writing in her second language, Laura Theis has work in POETRY , Oxford Poetry , Magma , Rattle and elsewhere. As well as being nominated for a Forward Prize, she's been the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize , the Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize and the Hammond House International Literary Award. In addition, Laura's collection, A Spotter’s Guide To Invisible Things , won the Live Canon Collection Prize. She has two new volumes of poetry due out in 2025: a collection with Broken Sleep Books, and her debut children’s poetry book with The Emma Press, Poems From A Witch’s Pocket . the poems in my mother tongue the name for grand piano is wing 00:00 / 01:00 in my mother tongue words can be feathered which turns them into old jokes or proverbs owning a bird in my mother tongue is sign of great madness: you can accuse someone with an outrageous opinion of cheeping and chirping if you want to convey that you are flabbergasted or awed in my mother tongue you might say: my dear swan which is what I think when I first hear you play as your fingers move over the keys I wonder what gets lost in translation between music and birdsong whether both soar above our need to shift between words then I remember in my mother tongue the name for grand piano is wing Medusae 00:00 / 00:59 Do not lose faith on the day you wake up with spiders instead of hair. Do not cry as you look in the mirror. Remember: They may stay. They may not. They are here for now. If you must, take pains to cover your head. Hide their crawling under your most elegant hat lest people recoil from you in the streets. Or don’t. Remember Medusa and her snakes. She’d turn anyone to stone if they looked at her frightened. She was a monster and proud. All hiss, curse and scorn: danger. And yet to think someone must have loved her enough to name half of all jellyfish those moon-glowing blooms of floating fluorescent umbrellas and bells after her. miðnæturblár 00:00 / 00:47 we have to look up when we search for our dead even though we buried them in the ground but the dead like to call to us from the moon they try to spell out their wildering words in clouds or meteors they try to wave at us through murmurations and other such avian patterns in significant moments they do this to teach us to make lifting up our eyes a habit remember   they say once every day for a couple of  minutes the entire sky turns your favourite colour: the very darkest shade of blue Publishing credits in my mother tongue the name for grand piano is wing: won first prize in the Poets & Players Poetry Competition 2023 Medusae: how to extricate yourself (Dempsey & Windle) winner of the Brian Dempsey Memorial Pamphlet Prize miðnæturblár: POETRY Magazine (April 2022 'Exophony')

Hear poet Jerm Curtin read poems for wave 14 of literary poetry journal iamb. Jerm Curtin wave 14 summer 2023 back next the poet Originally from County Cork in Ireland but still living in Spain after many years, Jerm Curtin received the 2021 Patrick Kavanagh Award , as well as the 2020 Cúirt International Festival of Literature's New Writing Prize for Poetry . He's also won the Listowel Writers' Week Single Poem Competition on two occasions – first in 2015, then again in 2018. the poems Strangers 00:00 / 02:44 Remember how a traveller, who was unwelcome, would pass through our village in doctrinal black. We were untutored, barely literate. We'd say a low-flying swallow harboured rain, and he'd tut-tut at our weak embodiment of knowledge. We feared his presence; we'd seen strong men drown on dry land after his passing. Now it is no longer the past, nor yet the future, with its tracking devices and sanitary masks. It is the middle of the night. You cannot tell what is life and what is death. Like a newcomer in town, death enlivens even a dull Sunday, which is why, perhaps, we sheltered and adopted an outlaw blacksmith. He could forge the sharpest pike in Munster, a weapon which struck fear among our foes; but he preferred to hide with his descendants in our remote townland and fold them in our midst. Death can ordain like a patriarch, or come for the patriarch, now as human as anyone. It can flourish in the cold, night air like snow before it falls, when a man out of step with himself pulls up in an articulated truck at a service station far from his home and his destination, where he has trouble with the local tongue. A pump attendant, who'd represent Hope in a morality play, comes out to serve him and sees the damaged door mirror, blood smeared on the window, the dent. The attendant can deal with all of this across the barrier of language. There's been a death, no doubt – he catches as much, as the foreign driver proclaims both innocence and guilt and offers him a cardboard box with such beseeching and mumbled grief that the tawny owl inside, open-eyed, stretched on its back, could be either an injunction or a gift. Lola Wakes 00:00 / 02:54 Coffee grumbles on the stove, and Lola wakes. – I had my dream again, she says. At night, she reads in bed, books that lift the streets like bedclothes so that the corpses in the subsoil turn their faces to the light. – Look, she says, and points me to the shock of nakedness in war. My eyes are drawn to a beautiful bush of pubic hair, burning all the more fiercely because the woman's face has an open wound and she's sprawled dead on the street. – There were girls at school with those same names. She reads them out, smarting at the roll call. This is her town. I am a stranger here. I can ignore the grate of rough unwieldy boots on cobbled streets, can take the sandals from beneath the bed as if we lived already in the Arcady we wish to create, where our flowers and potted plants, geraniums on their stalks, might stand in place of severed heads on pikes and so redeem the past. – My sleep was soured, Lola concludes. * * * * * * All our dark childhoods, our backs to the border, only an outlaw's footfall away. I was the child who shrank from the nuns and kept my skirt clean and my mind a blank. I was chaste and silent, and desired above all else to be lifted up into the sanctity of Christ Our Lord. Instead, we were taken over the border for contraband coffee. The bus had wooden seats and smelled of bleach and black tobacco. We visited churches while the nuns went about their purchases. Then we stuffed the bags of coffee grains under our skirts, under our overcoats, under our blouses. On the way back, the nuns smiled their obsequious smiles and the border guards waved us on. We filed out at the convent gates, handing over the smuggled wares. Now the taste of bitter roast grains each morning brings me back to who I am. Cacti / A Poetry Lesson ‘Tan toste que acabada / ouv’ o mong’ a oraçon. oyu hûa passarinna / cantar log’ en tan bon son. que sse escaecéu seendo / e catando sempr’ alá.’ ~ Alfonso X, el sabio ~ 00:00 / 07:16 A time will come when every poem I write will be as ingrained as checking a watch, kneeling or making the sign of the cross. Faith will not matter, nor authenticity. I will come to my page like a blackbird to its branch, repeating the lessons I've learned: something to do with age, and with routine, and a grandmother opening her arms to a child. Years hence, standing above the sinkhole or the stairwell where a child’s look was lost, miles from the delicate arms at rest on a banister or a low windlass wall, I remember the silence on the sunny porch like a poetry lesson as she nurtured life from the dew in the shadow of the cacti. It was a feeling as old as the soft blue hills; the lichened orchard, past its prime, ripened with marvels and moss, like a backdrop to Paradise. Now, as I cross a thoroughfare, hand in hand with a lover, or run my fingers down an arm in the dark as if it were the railing on a deck, and other fingers return the caress, or as I hear the nightingales among the reeds, it is that first heaven I'm reminded of. How she lingered out on the porch, tending to cacti and potted flowers. How I knew I mustn't disturb her. Later she'll bring out her currant bread and Lucozade, a caraway-seed loaf. Meanwhile, I try to keep occupied. I find the mood has penetrated everywhere. In a dusty outhouse loft, I come across damaged and dated toys, school jotters, rusty tools and gadgets, fabulous tarnished fishing flies, American letters stashed in a box, red, white and blue around the borders, solemn statesmen on the stamps. I follow my grandmother, tall and thin, her hair like ermine, back through O. Henry to New York. Her face flashes out above the crowd. The Depression brought her home, in ways I am too young to know. When I am older, I'll remember; another bauble to occupy my time, but nothing on which to rely; I catch a sense of intangible doom – as in a fairytale, where no disguise will free a victim from a lure, or return a wanderer to their course, as if old age had built a wall about its house and time itself had stalled and drawn to it a child who knows they must not enter. But once I turned the key on that outhouse door, a century might well have passed before my grandmother called me from the parlour, her tête-à-tête with the cacti over. And almost as long before I'd read a poem about a hapless monk in an orchard. A worthless monk, beaten round the ears, whose beard cannot hide his sores, one the others can't abide, so he is sent to dig and till the soil, and while he works and weeds, he asks the Blessed Virgin for a glimpse of what's in store for those who enter Paradise. He prays among the seedlings in his care, under trees whose nuts will be their staple through the winter, and fruit trees, whose flowers he loves and worries through frost. He works and hears a blackbird sing. Or is it a thrush? His ear is poor, but the song is beautiful; he spends the afternoon in its thrall until the time to gather tools and join the other monks for Vespers. Wistfully, he hoists the hems of his tunic up. In evening light that bathes the path, some shrubs are now as large as trees, there are others he can't recognise; but it meanders as it always does, and takes him as far as the chapel. Bells ring. He steps inside, and genuflects. He makes the sign of the cross before the Eucharist. And finds himself beside a brother who he does not know, and whispers: 'Who are you? And which monks are these?' After the first outbreaks of plague had passed, the last monk of the old school came in from the garden, in aspect rough, speaking a dialect we barely comprehended. He asked for brethren we knew nothing of, so we first beat him with a stick and bade him talk sense. Then, contrite at our behaviour, we washed and fed him like a stray, showed him to a cell and allowed him rest. Next day we garnered from his nonsense, hobbled in that old tongue, that he referred to monks now long deceased, and a prayer to the Virgin Mother in which he'd asked to savour Paradise, whereupon a bird had sung. We calculate its trill went on three hundred years. Such is the miracle of prayer: a simple monk in a garden granted a glimpse of Paradise, while we hung on his words, and mourned its loss. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Catrice Greer read poems for wave 8 of literary poetry journal iamb. Catrice Greer wave 8 winter 2021 back next the poet Baltimore-based writer Catrice Greer is a 2021 nominee for The Pushcart Prize who spent November 2020 serving as a Poet-In-Residence for the Cheltenham Poetry Festival. Catrice has been published in several local publications and online journals, as well as in an international anthology. She's currently a Guest Editor for IceFloe Press, and Guest Poetry reviewer for Fevers of the Mind. the poems Cortical Cartography 00:00 / 01:54 I give thanks for you bravely doing this again traveling synapse by synapse trails of electric pulses jumping blackhole gaps that used to remember holding the dead space a new soma body birthing from bleating darkness show us the nucleus the middles of what we were made of Axons spread like kamikaze flying squirrel bodies with arms akimbo reaching dendrites touching Grateful for even this axon potential sometimes on sometimes off Praise for brave synaptic dives and jumps Grateful for re-birthed myelin insulating protecting making sure that we traffic on our way by the quickest route charged in this dark matter discovery-space This astronomy building anew, wrinkled city of light, crevices, crannies, gyri and sulci, ridges and valleys jellied, crinkled mass sectioned by lobes all speaking trillions simultaneous synaptic voices prayerfully all at once this chatter mines the neuronal network and we build a whole new world I Am Home 00:00 / 02:20 Lost you Early November When the leaves started falling And time faded backward Sitting here crocheting Stitching memories one loop at a time Your voice in my head swirling Humming a hymn, your favorite And I sing each note yearning, solemn As if you’d appear suddenly solo into a duet and we raise our voices as high as you ascended when it was time For you to be called home I rock quietly ashen stilted lone tree Swaying In a wood still lush knowing I sit with a pain I can barely speak the name awash with memories of you and the absent space we called your chair, dresser, your place at the table the place we used to go every Friday, your touch, your smile beaming a side-eye on an inside joke between us, The memory that had your name all over it that our family can’t tell anymore without crying, laughing, wishing you here And one day I will see your face again We will see you Feel you As your spirit is so close in the air here near me Near us vibrating in the humming I believe I can feel you We will never forget you A whisper softly tells me: 'I am home' The Gathering 00:00 / 03:14 Hear ye, hear ye We are gathered here today family, friends, enemies, enemies of my enemies We are here at the black hole mouth of this isolated cave in the grief painted infected unknown space to bury our dead among us Those dead things between us that hold us back Those things we no longer speak Those things that twine and whip round our vocal chords that prevent the i’m sorries i miss yous, i love yous the pieces that bumble forward like an emotionally blind man heady on drink bumbling home too late for whatever he was meant to be there for knocking over sentimentals, and traditions, passed down collectibles shattered in pieces launched jagged landmine shards speckling the ground Our DNA, our ancestors, mothers, fathers, grandmothers, grandfathers long gone our creators ask us to stand here together Ask ourselves if in this space we will abandon Our old skins Our old breath and choose to share anew Can we bury this dead thing between us all so we can stand wrapped in sinew, tendons, blood¹ coursing miracles spiraling through the breath lifting us in a swirl of meditative purpose Can we find a new space a sense of being We are here in this vortex to bury the living dead under loam, clay, rocks, into the broken soil Cover it. Mark it as resting here never to go forward We mark new paths with a sign here as we crawl out heel to heel ... 6ft apart linked in spirit life begins anew we celebrate together mourning yesterdays embracing our multicolored confettied I forgive yous, littered in the air, celebrating our tomorrows ¹ Ezekiel 37:8 — King James Version: 'And when I beheld, lo, the sinews and the flesh came up upon them, and the skin covered them above: but there was no breath in them.' Publishing credits Cortical Cartography: Silver Spring Town Center Newsletter (Ancestral Voices 2020) I Am Home: Afro-American Newspaper (Baltimore Edition) The Gathering: first published under the title Elegy in the Silver Spring Town Center Newsletter (Vol. 8, Issue 9)

Hear poet Kate Caoimhe Arthur read poems for wave 23 of literary poetry journal iamb. Kate Caoimhe Arthur wave 23 autumn 2025 back next the poet Kate Caoimhe Arthur lives in Co. Down, Ireland, having spent time in Cambridgeshire as the 2017 Fenland Poet Laureate where she collaborated with fine art printmaker Iona Howard . As well as winning the award that secured her the poet laureateship, Kate also won the 2023 Spelt Magazine Nature Poetry Competition with her poem, The Irish farmhands mourn the death of a child at Denny Abbey . Currently at work on her first collection, Kate has poetry in The Stinging Fly , Blackbox Manifold and After... the poems MOTHER ... After the Studio Morison installation MOTHER ... at Wicken Fen (2020) 00:00 / 01:23 I am coming back inside / you the hayrick oikos I’ve been looking for / I know there are some changes I should make / need stilts now to lift these hems off the hostile earth / my basal body temperature dropped as my skin puckered up / I felt my skin ripple to a sheen in its tansy beetle phase / I made for the haywalls but the light fell on my oil-spill flanks / I knew myself reflected in the eye of a bird / braced and pushed files of keratin / -like needles along my back and sides / grew down and feather fold over fold / I flew up to a rafter near your apse mother / but all I could taste in my throat was beetles beetles / in my hunger I could feel my leg muscles extending / my claws contracting into nubby pads / I didn’t know what I was any more / but my lips wrenched back so my face was all teeth / at least part of me is shadow and needs to be dragged / I will be ready when the next one comes through Bewildered Mothers 00:00 / 01:09 like a nuclear facility in a suburban zone to an Artificial Intelligence operated drone is the nutrient-dense squalene-rich liver of the Pacific Great White Sleeper tucked tenderly by its other vital organs behind the plate-glass reflection sheening a baby-plump underbelly to the taste of an orca, specifically the Flat-Toothed Ecotype or the North Pacific Offshore these same Killer Whales who can pinpoint the precise location to disjoint unctuous purple lozenges slow-releasing of potency are those bewildered mothers propelled through coastal waters say, off San Juan Island, Washington, pushing and holding aloft its dead baby regardless of the state of decay for seventeen days bearing the carcass offering the ocean a chance to witness squint 00:00 / 01:04 I entered the cell slowly and delicately cringing to fit the space this action accorded with a version of myself I admired 4ft x 6ft subfusc but for a cross shaped slit through which meaty drops of candle flame or is it god steal either way I lap it up opposite a puckered flap through which food comes and shit goes I always wanted to inhabit another body and now here I am a woman constantly on the edge when the host is held to my tongue I swoon it burns through my body licking at the tips of my numb limbs they say I tether the church to the earth on which it stands Publishing credits MOTHER ... : After... (Dec 8th 2022) Bewildered Mothers / squint: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Oliver Comins read poems for wave 8 of literary poetry journal iamb. Oliver Comins wave 8 winter 2021 back next the poet Growing up in Warwickshire, heading north to York, then finally south to settle in West London, Oliver Comins has had his poetry collected in pamphlets from The Mandeville Press and Templar Poetry. His full collection, Oak Fish Island , was published in 2018. the poems Brown Leather Gloves 00:00 / 00:58 These are my Father’s gloves with which I am wrestling as I walk down to the station on another crisp morning of frosted cars in a frozen suburb. Who’s holding whose hands now? Inside the gloves’ fingers there’s more of him than there is of me – all those years of rubbed skin. Leather gives a better grip, doesn’t really overcome the cold. But it’s better than nothing, this thin layer of brown which keeps the weather off. On the platform I remove one Father, reach out to greet a friend. My other Father holds me steady. Eight for (Almost) Nothing 00:00 / 01:09 Doug bowled floaters which travelled slowly through the air, almost settling as they landed. Some days the ball soared over the boundary, cutting his spell short. On others, their batters, groggy or over-excited, made a pig’s ear of it, so our hero bowled through them with a smile, not knowing much more than his opponents. That day was one of those, his eight for (almost) nothing a remarkable feat, and their captain said he’d write it up for the local press. Daft, really, to have believed he’d do that and not be left, twenty-five years later, writing and wondering if anyone out there reading this remembers the all-night grin on Doug’s face, celebrating. Not a Stranger 00:00 / 01:21 My neighbour’s carer does not come from round here. The same can be said for most of us who call this place home after moving in from somewhere else. Water running in the taps on this street tastes different to what we drank before. Light slants another way above the roofs to shadow the paths that run between these orderly semis. For some people my neighbour’s carer is still a stranger. This positioning is neither correct nor fair. She is one of us and she is living here with a purpose. My neighbour has needs. I often overhear the two of them talking – re-confirming the day of the week it is and deciding what ought to happen next. Occasionally, I hear my neighbour’s carer singing in the kitchen, and at these times, I hope my neighbour is sitting nearby, tapping out the melody with her fingers. Publishing credits Brown Leather Gloves: Anthology of Fatherhood (The Emma Press) Eight for (Almost) Nothing: The Rialto (Issue 94) Not a Stranger: first published under the title She is Not a Stranger in Westerly (Issue 66.1)

Hear poet Wendy Pratt read poems for wave 20 of literary poetry journal iamb. Wendy Pratt wave 20 winter 2024 back next the poet Author, poet and editor Wendy Pratt lives and works on the North Yorkshire coast. She's written several volumes of poetry – her most recent collection being Blackbird Singing at Dusk – and her nature/landscape memoir, The Ghost Lake , was described by The Observer as ‘ remarkable ’. Wendy is also the founder and editor-in-chief of Spelt Magazine , which celebrates and validates the rural experience through poetry, creative non-fiction and poetry film. the poems Nan Hardwicke Turns into a Hare In memory of M 00:00 / 01:14 I will tell you how it was. I slipped into the hare like a nude foot into a glorious slipper. Pushing her bones to one side to make room for my shape so I could settle myself like a child within her. In the dark I groped for her freedom, gently teasing it apart to web across my palm. Here is where the separation ends: I tensed her legs with my arms, pushed my rhythm down the stepping-stones of spine. An odd feeling this, to hold another’s soul in the mouth like an egg; the aching jaw around her delicate self. Her mind was simple, full of open space and weather. I warmed myself on her frantic pulse and felt the draw of gorse and grass, the distant slate line at the edge of the moor. The air span diamonds out of sea fret to catch across my tawny coat as I began to fold the earth beneath my feet and fly across the heath, the heather. Sometimes I Pretend I am a Dog 00:00 / 01:51 When we are alone together I allow myself to become pack. We stop and I sit and you move about the place in silence. Sometimes we both lie down with our sides against the parched earth and let our eyes close. When people are near, I act as if I am also a person. Mostly it is just us and the Wolds or the chalk farm roads and wind turbines and rocks and cloud shadows, the fast pace of the sun over great distances. You do not look at the view as I do but you understand how to move within it. When I was a child, I hid under the teacher’s desk and would speak only in dog. I did not pretend to be a dog. I was a dog. I willed myself to canine. The family dog was my brother. I ate from his bowl, slept in his bed. I long to be that animal again. Sometimes I test myself to see how dog I still am. I run my tongue along my canines and feel for the movement of my ears. I slouch my back, and pull my knees up let my spine fall between my shoulder blades. Sometimes I climb a fallen tree or a boulder like that and it pleases me, and it pleases you to see me down at your level. This is joy. In these moments I feel as the earth must feel, and I feel as the glacial till must feel and what it might be to exist only in sensation. Eleven 00:00 / 01:16 I want you to know that we are happy. I want you to know that we laugh. That some days I think I have forgotten what you look like. That we sit on the patio drinking wine and sometimes we don’t think of you at all. That I can’t imagine you at the age you would be now. I want you to know that I keep your clothes near our bed, where I can see them. That your photo is faded and everyone in it looks dated, except you. I want you to know that sometimes I live in the days of your death. That sometimes I can smell the bereavement suite, sometimes the sound of the heart monitor wakes me and the sound of the fan whirring and the smell of toast on the ward and the squeak of trolleys wheeling drugs in the corridor and you in the Moses basket is all there is. I want you to know that on those days it is difficult to let you go again. I want you to know that today isn’t one of those days, I want you to know that today I carry you up to the cemetery like a goldfinch on my shoulder and that you bob away in the air and then back again, and that it makes me happy to imagine us this way. Publishing credits Nan Hardwicke Turns into a Hare: Nan Hardwicke Turns into a Hare (Prole Books) Sometimes I Pretend I am a Dog / Eleven: Blackbird Singing at Dusk (Nine Arches Press) Author photo: © James Thackeray

Hear poet Pascale Potvin read poems for wave 16 of literary poetry journal iamb. Pascale Potvin wave 16 winter 2023 back next the poet Pascale Potvin, who writes as Viola Volée, has published several chapbooks – her newest, SEX, GOD, & OCD , arriving in February 2024 from Naked Cat Publishing. Thrice nominated for Best of the Net, she's also had her work put up for The Pushcart Prize and Best Microfiction, as well as longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50. Pascale's work has appeared in Juked , Eclectica Magazine , trampset and many others. She's Editor-in-Chief of Wrong Publishing, and writer/director of feature film, Baby Fever . the poems Down a Seized Throat 00:00 / 00:38 How can hair be healthy if it’s dead? My bloody earlobe says the most about me. A leaf falls onto the street and it hardens then softens back into a baby. Yet while summer brings old lusts, like birds for others, I never understood song; On the trail, I place a bandaid for blisters in my mouth, till the ridges of my tongue are gone. Because, what if a wasp dove into my Flavor Aid, like taste creates cult? What if it was a bird? It’d have to swim. What Does It Mean When a Guy Says You Look Pretty While He’s On LSD? 00:00 / 00:38 It means he closes his eyes, like umbrellas stop feeling the rain. It means that, when I wave to him, I make the grass move with the sky. And it means that, when I say hello, he’ll hear a rhyme: je te veux (my therapist said u might have a crush on me, so i need you too scared to become famous cause the people past our deaths might dissect your pages: there, they would find me folded up, up in the letters’ livers like you still tried to get me out). Museum One 00:00 / 01:03 did i ever tell you that i stopped at a museum, just a block from my house for the wifi? i couldn’t wait longer to be touched by you; teenage bodies are too fertile and we were the bodies in the god oh kiss my neck, like cutting a dandelion stem, i’ll do it, like rain water’s submissive to its leaf (i promise if one chair in the history of the world ever got turned on in a flash of unsolved natural mystery, it would be that one) like nature photography (selfie of me in a top that reminds me of u) and so what’s the point of living, or writing, i wonder? if there’s no one left to fall for? if there’s no one to seduce, in that order? i’m free, my pussy against the dirt, like it’ll never taste me again as an artefact or a grave i would’ve worn your name, gone on display Publishing credits Down a Siezed Throat / What Does It Mean When a Guy Says You Look Pretty While He’s On LSD?: exclusive first publication by iamb Museum One: excerpt originally from Fifth Wheel Press' 2022 calender (Fifth Wheel Press)

Hear poet Shaw Worth read poems for wave 6 of literary poetry journal iamb. Shaw Worth wave 6 summer 2021 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 Lesley Curwen read poems for wave 17 of literary poetry journal iamb. Lesley Curwen wave 17 spring 2024 back next the poet Plymouth-based poet, broadcaster, sailor and winner of the inaugural Molecules Unlimited poetry competition , Lesley Curwen writes about loss in the natural world – loss she saw inflicted by the global capitalism she used to report on. Together with Jane R Rogers and Tahmina Maula, she collaborated on the pamphlet Invisible Continents . Lesley's solo work, Rescue Lines , was published by The Hedgehog Poetry Press in July 2024. A Wales Poetry Award finalist in 2022, Lesley has found homes for her poems with journals and publishers including Black Bough Poetry , Broken Sleep Books , After... , Atrium , Spelt Magazine , The Alchemy Spoon and Ice Floe Press . the poems Running free 00:00 / 00:59 rippled mane spits white beads sun gifts endless diamond flash on stippled flow sheets pulled iron taut a cloud-line shadows Plymouth slides south to Spain my boat tips and yaws I ride her like a gaucho rockinghorsebronco through seas finite but giant a cornflowerblue bling robe to cool a planet my boat and I plough through plastic, oil slicks, submarines shit, bodies, melted ice fleets of sardine, shark whale and cell-wide life in celebration, grief, what you will A parent never known 00:00 / 00:42 In the gym, mirrors meet at a dark seam where body is apprehended but face is half a line of flesh, a ghosting, nothing real. Impossible to see whose breath is misting glass. In this fashion, the unmet father/mother is present and concealed. The solid whole that lies beyond the join feels close, a step away, just missed. Faceless, the kin we lost and lose again. Ocean City 00:00 / 02:52 We are on the edge of the world. Always the draw of water’s tinselled margin, urgent roar. Tattered pigeons bleach bronze heads of mariners who left Mayflower steps flush with gold and hard tack. Spattered eyes look to ocean’s light its crooning, sweet unknown. Monuments to the infinite spivvery of seizing new worlds not new to inhabitants not worlds at all same planet, same air, same cursed seas. We are on the edge of everywhere at stone steps beyond pasty ‘n’ fudge shops decorated by a dozen plaques copperplate or fat capital. A toxic pink sprayed across the globe from here this nub and den of chancers, rogues astride their wooden barkys aching to leap over the edge. It is not the ocean’s fault. It skitters in morning sun without intent, tides swung by moon’s slide at gravity’s dictate. Blameless it sighs, waves rainbow-flashed by diesel meniscus sucking at particled air. No launches now from Mayflower steps though exploits persist. Three frigates anchored in the Sound, tankers hauling fossil juice, dark fin of nuclear sub. A multi-storied cruise ship squats the bay its orange shiplets bound for pirate shops. The ocean is not what it was. Neoprene swimmers lash arms through green soup herbed with heavy metals from dead mines fine solution of faeces from overflows swarms of plastic iotas rinsed and smashed by diurnal tides. In the dusty Minster clouds of purple fish swim sunlit glass. A creation window hurls scarlet atoms on cobalt sea. Harbourside, loud horns call. Another vessel docks in Plymouth’s endless back-and-forth. The swell licks iron ring in weathered stone, blurs a rusty edge. Publishing credits Running Free: Invisible Continents (Nine Pens Press) A parent never known / Ocean City: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet K Weber read poems for wave 1 of literary poetry journal iamb. K Weber wave 1 winter 2020 back next the poet K Weber lives and writes in the midwestern United States. Her writing has been included in issues of Memoir Mixtapes, Detritus Online, Black Bough Poetry, Writer’s Digest, Moonchild Magazine, Theta Wave and others. Her most recent project, THIS ASSEMBLY, features poems written using words 'donated' by more than 165 people. the poems In lieu of flowers 00:00 / 00:42 These Indiana corn fields never apologize when their soil is turned or the crops burn. Whole trees remove their leaves. Some roots snap. Sturdiest trunks don’t know how many annual rings they have. Their birthdays are belated at best. There’s no haggling over who’s most forgetful or forgotten. I say “sorry” when someone runs over my foot with a shopping cart. I say “sorry” when the bruise of verbal abuse hits my ear; excuse myself for being alive, with deepest sympathies. Abundance 00:00 / 00:38 Another holiday passes in pay-it-fast-forward but in guilty rear-view was a million colors and textures long. So much glass and scuffed, new shoes. Decorations hung themselves when we walked by, unnoticed. Jesus wept. Those little glowing lights: electric bill a giant who’s wielding unnecessary stress. Left- overs became counterfeit nutrition through January. We did or did not loosen belts when it came to doubt. Commune and commute 00:00 / 00:41 No one put the salt outside your apartment building. I slipped in the parking lot while watching the frost- bit moon have another cigarette. No one put the salt down inside your apartment. I slipped into your bed- room, thawed my bruised hip in neutral sheets. I didn’t leave until the last cigarette after breakfast. I passed the salt trucks as I slid an hour; my grip was not slippery but each knuckle was sick as a ghost’s stomach. I started smoking the last of my cigarettes for the next three years. 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 Sue Spiers read poems for wave 17 of literary poetry journal iamb. Sue Spiers wave 17 spring 2024 back next the poet Sue Spiers was born in Cyprus and lives in Hampshire. She works with the Winchester Poetry Festival and spoken word group Winchester Muse , and edits the Open University Poetry Society ’s annual anthology. Sue has self-published three collections: Jiggle Sac , Plague – A Season of Senryu and De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da . Her chapbook More Than a Late-Night Drink was shortlisted in 2023 for the Dreich Classics Chapbook Competition. the poems Christ the Redeemer as a Flamengo F C Supporter 00:00 / 01:37 Look at that span, spreading arms wider than two articulated trucks, never raised above parallel to the horizon, as if to question the referee’s rule: that off-side pass was far too close to call or, poised to raise his hands and start a chant. Straight and tall on top of Corcovado with his Art Deco pleated underskirt, the gauzy drape of tunic past his knees, proudly wrapped in a scarf of red and black overlaid grey by soapstone and concrete. Can you find its logo of a vulture? Too stiff to bend his knees come Ash Wednesday, dance the Bota Fogo to samba drums when carnival erupts along the streets. A downturned mouth reminds us of the score when Papa pulled him off before half-time and team mates didn’t want to take his place. A hundred years since construction started, some ninety since the bishops blessed his toes, all that time watching over Flamengo and catching, from the corner of his eyes, the Maracanã pitch and glory goals. No doubt he’s inch for inch their biggest fan. Borgan Borgan 00:00 / 02:19 Wem come up from the country, north on the barges, show the ankle-biters the gurt city with its biggity-bigness, show um how suited folk make their daily kerching. First wem go to the nob-house with its grandioso fountain like coal bins leaking drench from a heighty-high pole. Wem hear the fakish gorstering from posho bints. In the whiny hovver wem sits toppity-top with hair rush past perilous lifts sliding up plastic-white office blockers, (self-spickandspan!), where the Pillpop factory makity-makes. Outside the shoutyloud theatre its bungaroush walls peep flint and pea beach like it needs a good overdo. Playfolk bodyshape in the streets with groundhats, canny-craicing. There’s a greenspace in the East by the trickity-trickle, birdhouses naility-nailed back-to-back like branch growers, caterwise over irontwissets there’s a wapple way beastride. Soon mother-wife’s purse opens for the gimcrack arcade, with tossitathome scraddle for her nosybitch bestie, son-elder wants a dolphin swoosh-ride and daughter-mid wheedles a dosset. Wem footsore of stepping and thinkity-think it’s bapmunch. Um call it a slum but Frumsted has the worldy-know eateries. Wem skittish by flitterfolk, um shun countrykins like wem. Mostity-most come from worldy-spread places like wem, A snooty-toity foodserve gets us an eatplace and a seegrub. Soon wem tuckity-scoff in to a tankbowl of snag-slub. Yum! Son-toddle eyedroops, wem juggered as wilty-wilts in dunes. Wem eyeball Borganners guzzle poppy-lite, ogle teleoptics, stridety-stride gormless and roofless. Wem skedaddle latty. Wheatfield with Cypresses (1889) After the painting by Vincent Van Gogh 00:00 / 01:28 The paint is alive with harvest Mistral; lines and curves of emerald cypress, the swirl of lemon-tipped wheat, mustard stalks, a suggestion of poppies low in the frame. One dark hill, out of kilter, as mountains pale towards turbulent cloud which sweeps eastwards, but where is the sun? Sky reflects water not wheatfield and there are no humans, no animals, nothing manmade, except the wheat; elsewhere a farmer, a scythe, a miller, bread from an oven. He visits the cypresses many times, sits at a distance, up close, working their shades on canvas trying to imitate what they give. He goes over and over his own imperfection; why no one wants what he offers. Who would buy anguish? Who would want these thoughts wrought in oil? Publishing credits Christ the Redeemer as a Flamengo F. C. Supporter: commended in the Ware Poets Open Poetry Competition 2022 Borgan Borgan: South (Issue 65) Wheatfield with Cypresses (1889): placed third in the 2019 Battered Moons Poetry Competition

Hear poet Ivor Daniel read poems for wave 7 of literary poetry journal iamb. Ivor Daniel wave 7 autumn 2021 back next the poet Ivor Daniel’s work has appeared in the Cheltenham Poetry Festival's wildfire words , Steel Jackdaw Magazine and Writeresque . He lives in Gloucestershire, where he works as an English tutor. the poems Perfect Bed 00:00 / 00:56 I dream I am at Bembom Brothers Dreamland funfair park with Tracey Emin. Hard by Margate sands. I know I shouldn’t drink that Vodka on the Helter Skelter. Apart from that, a Day as Perfect as the Lou Reed song. We Kiss with Fish and Chips Lips, Join Hips. A Turner Sunset Going Down. I guess it is the Golden Hour. Blair’s Babes and even some of his men MPs are busy Changing a whole heap of things for the Better. Back in your room we remember that we even Changed the Bed this morning. The linen soft and cool next to our Optimistic skin. Questions & Starlings 00:00 / 03:01 Wow! Can the sun set blue azure and flame at the same time? How do starlings twist and turn as one? Who decided this is called a murmuration ? And who was that, going behind that awesome tree? No...It couldn’t be.. sweeping turning swooping......soon arriving from all directions. swelling then melting then swelling. streamlining safe in such numbers. pirouetting protection from predators. twist turn swoop swirl your genie is out of the bottle. shape-shifting unsolid sculpture of starling. you spinning top you sundown twister. a magic carpet has slipped its cave. . ...a cloud of iron filings .. ... dancing from... ..and to .. . . ..an ecstatic magnet. if we could cast the ashes........ of our loved ones as elegantly as your silken swirl then that would be the perfect way to go. intuiting when to turn in complex shifting patterns through a liminal space between remarkable and miracle. flying like no one is watching or maybe like God could be watching. oblivious of compass points and rocket science yet also knowing more than this. murmuration motion poetry in motion your swarm is the truth. black mustard seed beauty. then in the last of daylight at the secret signal a final funneling collective swoop down an unseen chimney to land on your roosting grounds. I labour with my leaden words, and muse on whether starlings know how spellbinding they are. And God. Is that you behind that awesome tree? Is this the last, the only, evidence that you exist? Was this your hobby all along: the choreography of sunset starlings? And is that just the slightest hint of disappointment on your face at how the human cohort of Creation has performed? Tread Lightly 00:00 / 01:31 I navigate the micro fathom ocean charts of flat portal ice puddles on a January farm track With their trapped air bubbles whorling patterns coils gyres spirals curls Trapped otherworldly whirls Secret as fingerprints coiled like intestines mysterious as a foetal scan marbled as the white fat in Spanish ham Iced lava lamps but underfoot Liquid light shows behind psychedelic bands but monochrome The frozen surface flat as frosted glass The patterns captive Zany This is the cat ice So named because it can only bear the weight of a cat Cold-pawed agile Although I am yet to meet the cat who would leave the warmth of the hearth to test ice puddles with its paws or fret on other scientific laws as hydrostatic pressure capillary action et cetera I make a resolution to tread lightly Publishing credits All poems: Exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Christina Strigas read poems for wave 4 of literary poetry journal iamb. Christina Strigas wave 4 autumn 2020 back next the poet Christina Strigas’ work has appeared in Coffin Bell Journal, BlazeVox19, Feminine Collective, Neon Mariposa Magazine, Rhythm & Bones, Thimble Lit Magazine, The Temz Review, Pink Plastic House Journal, Twist in Time Literary Magazine and many others. Her collection Love & Vodka was recommended by CBC News – making it onto its 'Your ultimate Canadian poetry list' . Christina is a full-time public school teacher, and part-time course lecturer at McGill University. She lives in Montreal with her husband and two children, and is currently working on publishing two poetry books and a novel. the poems Measured Teaspoons 00:00 / 01:52 Who loves me anymore? People like to rehash old said shit, From five years ago … You punched a door, There’s still a wrecked hole to remind me. Pin their poetry on your forehead. Jinx, touch red, it’s identical now. Someone brings you red wine you smile taking about reading and writing you try to tell a joke fail miserably. Look around the room like a stranger. That’s not what I meant at all. Who loves me anymore? They see me with fugitive themes, Forgive me for always leaving, Flinch at the sign of my danger Writers like to play sex games in the day, hunting Adventurous and dangerous love. I can never tell who wants me, Damaged and wounded from giving away My secrets for cash or fantasies for free, Or if they do My ego never knows, Did you take out the garbage? I can never tell time anymore. It keeps rambling on and on like a song on the radio you can’t listen to anymore Indifferent to the wrinkles on my skin. It’s not Friday today? When was my birthday? I may be losing my witching powers, Maturing into the skin of my mother and father Perhaps they never existed, Maybe normality is flowing stillness into my veins, I have become what they feared. Old and out of date, Expired. I have walked into a party In the wrong era’s outfit, And when you try to explain it: The meaning of poetry, When they ask, Why you're wearing nylons with sandals, You keep repeating, Because I want to. Yet you realize no matter How you express yourself What you really want to say is: That’s not what I meant at all. 1973 00:00 / 02:55 i have authentic white tiny flowers in my hair the way i was supposed to live walking for my aunt, down the tiny cobblestone roads in the middle of summer, following the gorgeous bride, in the village, my parents were born and fell in love, singing Greek songs in the open air, watching how the Mediterranean sun plays golden tricks on my mother's short 70s crew cut. It's 1979 on the plane with my dad emergency landing to tend to the sick his father is dying and everyone is talking about olive trees. my hair is too short for Europe my knees too knobby but everyone loves my accent they say i'm beautiful i sleep at the top of the hill with my cousin Mimika and two other cousins have my name and moles. I find it weird that we all look alike yet no one sees the sun's brilliance like me or notices how the moon shines at twelve years old. they want all my clothes and look at the brand names while i care more about the sky and my grandmother's sad eyes. she likes to hug me like it's the last time she will every hug feels like her last hug. i felt death hug me when she squeezed and kissed me like that. we sleep in the afternoon or climb out the window to play with the hens. It's 1991 everyone my father loved has died I'm backpacking through Europe with my best friend and we visit my childhood but it's so long gone, i slept all through Paros Santorini saw all our dirty laundry Pensioni Andre had no mirrors so we hid well under the sun's rays. Every day lasted forever every love a lifetime. It's 1998 I'm three months pregnant in Agadir and doing some kind of pregnancy test it feels like this baby will live and he does. my life will never be the same again i'm a mother now. It's 2001 the ultrasound indicates it's a girl and i cry like a baby praying she'll stay warm and safe and never leave me stranded. with blood and tears. it's 2011 everyone sees Greece through the eyes of my children and we love each other madly every year every ocean brings us closer to death and the cup we were meant to drink together and finally alone is full of memories and our future is still full of dreams. he says no matter how old you are you are always young to me you never age. i love you. these are the years that grab me make me cry to our song and i sign death certificates. i grab hold of my soul and shake it a bit then i silence it. you thought you knew me but truly it's 1973 and the sun is the brightest i've ever witnessed and my mother's beauty haunts me. Dead Wife 00:00 / 01:05 I wrote you all the things I cannot tell your hazel eyes. I do not want to even look at you how unromantic of a poet like me. I wrote about— that time when Little Wing played in the 70s basement of Lily’s house on McKenzie Street. We did not know each other then you were at some other party playing spin the bottle, starting to brew your player moves, charming chess pieces. I spent my love on you like a gambler. I can’t I don’t want to be that girl That writes so many letters to her ex-boyfriends ex-lovers ex-husbands where they all have a conversation. They all have a substitute teacher when love calls. My ex was a teacher I killed myself for you like a murderer. I can’t I won’t wish for you to visit me refresh my six-year-old memory when love stumbles you sometimes forget to get up. I pretend your wife is dead. My reality has no filters. Publishing credits Measured Teaspoons: exclusive first publication by iamb 1973: Your Ink on my Soul (Underwater Mountains) Dead Wife: Coffin Bell Journal (Vol. 2, Issue 4) Nominated for Best of the Net 2020

Hear poet Natalie Crick read poems for wave 8 of literary poetry journal iamb. Natalie Crick wave 8 winter 2021 back next the poet Studying for an MPhil in Creative Writing at Newcastle University, Natalie Crick has had poems in Stand , The Moth , Banshee , The Dark Horse , The Poetry Review and elsewhere. One of her poems was commended in the Verve Poetry Festival Competition 2020, and awarded second prize in the Newcastle Poetry Competition that same year. Another of Natalie's poems received a special mention by judge Ilya Kaminsky in the Poetry London Prize 2020. In 2021, Natalie was highly commended in the Wales Poetry Award, and nominated for The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. She is co-founder and poetry editor of small literary press Fragmented Voices , which is based in both Newcastle and Prague. the poems Cut 00:00 / 01:17 the lovely fairies in Sister’s room have blades on their backs and lately Lee sucks lemons for their sharps looks for wounds in snow on his morning walk with Mam fantasizes he is sliced like a pear but today the blood smells real he wipes his hands on his trackies dizzy tries to walk not run because he doesn’t want to scare and blooming like a cherry tree stumbles out there is a metallic grinding scream when Next Door ignites the hedge trimmer the winter sun pierces Lee’s eyes blue sky sawn open in that moment the sky is too big for Lee far too big and empty he wants to find the stars wants a knock on his bedroom door wants to be red for somebody Doctors and Nurses 00:00 / 01:10 Lee’s Sister is upstairs Septembering in the back bedroom where Lee sometimes eats old bread. After long days of waiting, Lee moves like an infection up stairs that smell of cigarette smoke. Sister’s shadow is a boy of five in the right light. Lee lights her smile with a tickle, breaks the pill onto the spoon’s curve and tells his patient to suck on it. She coos. This is what doves do, excited through open lips. Lee tends to Sister’s most-hurts, examines the cut on her toe and kisses it. Allows her to undress to rub salve into her cattle state. Sombre Doctor Lee, grave in gloves, checks her pulse: Miss, there’s something you should know. Girlfriend-Watch 00:00 / 01:55 Poorly Girlfriend sleeps like a parched stone. Boyfriend watches her instead of television. Boyfriend watches when light slats dangerously expose her black eyes to him. His hand is a quill; the crow feather a flutter to ease out her bad, the nib a point stroking her cheeks. Boyfriend makes up Girlfriend’s face with motes of ash from his fingers. Her face is lengthening, looking up. To Boyfriend she seems Unsafe. Undelicate. He plays love with her, plays fetch, plays harm. He likes her to suck his fingers, He likes her to smile, always. Boyfriend likes to use the biggest knife to slice Girlfriend’s strawberries, likes to see the red of them against the lap of white at her throat. Boyfriend confesses how much he loves Girlfriend to the mirror. He whispers the names of the others he loves, but can never change the channel on the remote. Boyfriend watches Girlfriend instead of television. He turns the ceiling light on and off to see just what she will do, lights up the room bright to check she is still breathing. Off and On. Publishing credits Cut: The Manchester Review (Issue 23) Doctors and Nurses: The Interpreter's House (Issue 76) Girlfriend-Watch: placed second in the Newcastle Poetry Competition 2020

Hear poet Ozge Lena read poems for wave 15 of literary poetry journal iamb. Ozge Lena wave 15 autumn 2023 back next the poet Özge Lena's poems have appeared in The London Magazine , Ink Sweat & Tears , Green Ink Poetry , harana poetry , Verse of April , Carmen et Error , The Phare , After... , The Selkie , Red Ogre Review and elsewhere. Her poem Celestial Body was picked for Flight of the Dragonfly Press' 2023 anthology Take Flight . Özge's poetry was shortlisted for both the Ralph Angel Poetry Prize and the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition in 2021, as well as for The Plough Poetry Prize in 2023. the poems Rose Tragedy 00:00 / 01:25 Whenever I think of roses, I feel a palm of thorns down my throat. I remember you. Your last smile. I remember that June day. That we were in the garden, drinking wine the colour of the lonely rose. Deep, dangerous magenta. That you were laughing. Then wind, and a petal floated in the air before falling softly into your glass. That it reminded me of something that had thorns, something happened a long time ago, some deep thing that pricked into my belly, eating me from inside. That you took the dangerous colour into your mouth. You chewed it to make me laugh. Wet pieces on your teeth shone like jewels. That you coughed. And you choked. Dark pink foams burst out of your lips. Then the ambulance. And the funeral. At last came the calm of autumn. With me, alone in the garden. With a glass full of innocent pink. With the thorns. I think of you while spraying toxin to kill their larvae. Because once a rose blooms, they grow eating its ovary from inside. Amaranth 00:00 / 01:04 there it was all of a sudden in the middle of the city bursting out asperous clusters of extensions bleeding shamelessly onto the pale ice like punctured lungs / you are in a collapsed world / you are in a fallen city in a collapsed world / you are with the white death in a fallen city in a collapsed world / you are a hungry thing / there it was all of a sudden in the middle of the city blossoming amaranth veins of extensions bleeding deathlessly onto the pale ice like exploded hearts / you are a hungry thing running naked / you are running naked to run into the last flower / imagine the taste of the last flower / imagine the sweet poison / Last Summer Before Seasons Disappeared 00:00 / 01:25 It was the summer of star shaped ice cubes on your pink chest or between my breasts. It was the summer of bottles of blushed wine that we kept drinking from each others’ mouths in the abiding afternoons when it was forbidden to go out both by the doctors and the government. It was the summer of daily curfews, of no work. It was the summer of not knowing what to do but to love each other and to hate each other and to swim on one another’s aflame body within cerise sheets, naked all day, hungry. It was the summer of sirens, of announcements, of heat-stricken bodies collapsing in the streets. It was the summer of dust, the summer of lust when your fingers were drawing love words on my skin in a language that I didn’t know. It was the summer of your going out to buy another bottle of blush and coming back later as a funeral. It was the summer of knowing the world was going to be the same never again, that it was falling into a starry void, falling free, forever, just like me. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Tom Weir read poems for wave 24 of literary poetry journal iamb. Tom Weir wave 24 winter 2025 back next the poet Highly commended in The Forward Prizes and commended by The Poetry Society's National Poetry Competition , Tom Weir won the Magma Editor’s Choice Prize with his poem A Man Blames the Dent in the Bonnet of his Car on Two Deer. He was also one of the inaugural winners of Templar Poetry's iOTA Shot Pamphlet Awards for The Outsider . As well as publishing the collections All That Falling and Ruin thanks to a grant from Arts Council England, Tom's had poems in Stand , The Scores , iOTA Poetry and elsewhere. After many years spent living in the north of England, he now calls Bristol home. It's here that he's working on his third collection. the poems Trampoline After Gerard Woodward 00:00 / 00:58 I should probably mention the dark, the distance, how we sank a little deeper into the waves the further we got from land, and how tired we were after ten days camping in that heat. And then there was the brandy and the brandy after the brandy the waiter poured from the bottle hidden beneath the bar that he didn’t charge us for, that the kitchen staff came out to watch us drink, that he told us they used to clean the windows and an hour later, when these children started springing from the earth, I was no longer sure he was joking – all these faces appearing on the air, held at the tipping point where the dim light strung them up like photographs above a ground that continued to refuse them – faces stretched from all that falling, all that trying not to fall. Show Me The Way to Bahrain 00:00 / 01:16 At half time, while the stewards tried to keep the steel fence that separated the two sets of fans from collapsing, you told me your favourite part was the chant about Bahrain. But it was loud and there wasn't enough time to explain that what they were actually singing was show me the way to Plough Lane. So you must've spent the second half thinking these 300 fans who’d made the long trip from London, arms outstretched and shouting at the sky as if discovering rain for the first time, these men and women drinking vodka hidden in bottles of coke and falling over plastic seats and laughing, these men and women treating this stadium by an airfield up north somewhere like the house their parents left one weekend when they were sixteen, were all paying homage to some place in the Middle East they’d never been – its heat, its deserts, its duty free. So when I read that the plans to build a stadium back in Plough Lane have finally been approved, I think of you, of Darlington away, that cold, damp, beautiful day. Walking with Annie 00:00 / 00:39 What else is it for, this night – but the compromise it makes with the city to call off its threat the way you might draw a pack of dogs from the scent. Just you and me, little fox – sack of skin and bone I carry close to my chest as we head further into the dark than I’ve ever been – so dark the river below has become an imagined place. We’ve been here each night since the week you were born but never this late. Look how vulnerable you’ve made the dawn. Publishing credits Trampoline / Show Me The Way to Bahrain: All that Falling (Templar Poetry) Walking with Annie: After Sylvia (Nine Arches Press)

Hear poet Emma Lee read poems for wave 15 of literary poetry journal iamb. Emma Lee wave 15 autumn 2023 back next the poet Poet and reviewer Emma Lee is the author of The Significance of a Dress and Ghosts in the Desert . She was Reviews Editor for The Blue Nib , and the co-editor of Over Land, Over Sea : an anthology of poems expressing solidarity with refugees crossing the Mediterranean on small boats and rafts. Emma's poetry has featured in many print and online journals including Fevers of the Mind , Ink, Sweat & Tears , Clear Poetry and more. the poems The Bridal Dresses in Beirut 00:00 / 00:41 Each dress hangs from a noose. One is plain satin with scalloped lace, another an orgy of tulle, dreamy organza with appliqué flowers hanging from wire strung between palm trees. One is short, a shift with a tulip skirt, the sort of dress picked in a hurry to satisfy a shotgun or Article 522. The breeze breathes through them, bullies the dresses into ghosts, brides with no substance, angels bereft of their voices. What the Dust Left Uncovered After art installation The Fading Afterglow of Creation by Dave Briggs and Jack Squires 00:00 / 01:10 A screen sculpts a crumpled mass in an empty house, a 3-D image that takes the shape of what could be a heart. A sci-fi trope: machines outliving us. We all hope what will survive of us is not the pile of admin, worthless warranties, the embarrassing tweet, the spilt coffee, but our Insta life, our filtered wishes. The sculpture is not the easy outline of an emoji, but the complexity of valves, veins, a possibility of an organ, a human's engine. Here, what's left is our digital footprint, the avatar we taught to fight, scavenge, collect. Playerless it repeats the same responses, contact only from bots, a drift of binary lint. It's the unedited part of us that decided who we touched. The digital heart waits for us to breathe emotion into it, sculpting the memory of what it most wanted. The Wrapped Hedges 00:00 / 01:26 It looks as if a fog has whirled around the hedges, wrapping them in a swirl of candy floss like a fleece protecting them from frost. The implication is the hedges will be unwrapped to show a healthy growth, firm stems, perfectly green leaves, branches stretched in welcome. The covering takes on the texture of a regular weave, as if a team of spiders had worked solidly for months, but the structure is too crude to be natural, too regular to constructed by anything but a programmed machine. It reflects a grid of lines running from left to right with rectangular holes. If laid flat, it would represent a map of a housing estate, plans made by those seeking to enrich themselves on the grounds councils cannot demonstrate they have an adequate housing supply, that somehow executive, four bedroom homes, beyond the pockets of those on waiting lists, will meet and it’s fine to build in the country out of reach of public transport and amenities but it’s just these birds who will prevent building during the nesting season that are the problem. So man-made webs are their suggested solution; mimic nature to prevent it. Publishing credits The Wedding Dresses in Beruit: The Significance of a Dress (Arachne Press) What the Dust Left Uncovered: After... (December 8th 2022) The Wrapped Hedges: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Elisabeth Sennitt Clough read poems for wave 15 of literary poetry journal iamb. Elisabeth Sennitt Clough wave 15 autumn 2023 back next the poet Elisabeth Sennitt Clough is the author of the 2017 Saboteur Awards Best Pamphlet winner Glass , and the editor of the Fenland Poetry Journal . Her debut collection Sightings won her the Michael Schmidt Award, while At or Below Sea Level was a 2019 Poetry Book Society Spring Recommendation . Elisabeth has also written The Cold Store and My Name is Abilene , which is shortlisted for The Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023. Elisabeth's poems have appeared in Poem , The Rialto , Mslexia , Wasafiri , Magma , The Cannon’s Mouth , Ambit and Stand among others. the poems There was a door & then a door Poem beginning with a line by Ocean Vuong 00:00 / 00:54 The second door was oak, brawny with a heavy-duty handle & latch, the sort that could mutilate a child’s hand if pushed too much. This is how thresholds are reinforced in farming country. Give your prayers to the sky. The neighbours are out of earshot. What could a flappy city girl know about the ebb of backwaters? People here read shotgun holes like exegesis. Old mail piles up. All letterboxes are sealed shut. Some days even the windows shudder. Everyone’s forgotten the first door. Histerid 00:00 / 01:22 In a hardbacked book with charcoal-grey covers in an attic, above a small bedroom, next to an illustration, the error of a typeface places a hole in a word, His terid , so that it becomes owned. You are mine says the pronoun to the beetle. But the neglectful parent had let his terid go, its skinny legs toddling beneath its round belly in-between legs in crowded market places, through garden fences to the edge-of-town industrial estate and beyond – the place where all lost things end up – the Gymnasium of the Forgotten. There his terid crouches on a varnished floor at the end of a long wooden bench, next to Arthur, who’s sat next to Tom, willing someone to sight him, make a call from the black telephone: Hello, Mr England, we have located your terid, reported missing and suspected extinct in 1936. Please come and collect. The Arse-end of Summer 00:00 / 01:01 Like warlords, the neighbour’s firs cast darkness across my lawn. So much in my garden promised to blossom but never did. A section of wasp nest dangles from a tree like a slice of dried meat. The splatter of an heirloom tomato still decorates next door’s patio beneath a sign: trespassers will be composted . A wood pigeon repeats itself four times. I mimic it twice. Sunday afternoon alone in a rose-less garden, still in my nightie – maybe I’m no longer alive, but don’t realise? A motorbike engine growls out the miles over cracked asphalt, past wheelie bins stinking of yesterday’s burnt ends. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Amelia Loulli read poems for wave 4 of literary poetry journal iamb. Amelia Loulli wave 4 autumn 2020 back next the poet Amelia Loulli is a poet living in Cumbria. A pamphlet of her poetry was published by Nine Arches Press in Primers Volume Four . Her work has twice been shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize, and longlisted in 2020 for the Rebecca Swift Foundation's Women Poets' Prize. Amelia is an MA Writing Poetry student at Newcastle University, and was recently selected by New Writing North to deliver creative writing workshops to young writers as part of their Inkubator scheme. She's currently working on a pamphlet of new poems, as well as a verse novel. the poems Teenage Mother 00:00 / 01:18 they talk to me, the day you were born, as though another me stepped out and never returned, my very own double image, retreating, and for years I only know knees of the dirty kind, hands which would struggle to pick up a small stone, a halo fastened at the neck. There is a world in which I never had you, the handle to my parent’s bedroom door was missing, leaving behind a small square eye hole, just above bed height. I carried love around with me like milk in a shallow bowl, watching it lapping the sides, each drop bleaching my skin, there were days I broke our home with only a few words, I am not your mother. Mother has gotten itself stuck in my throat, grown like a tumour or a foetus but faster, from poppy seed to broad bean until it’s swollen so hard I can’t say anything more. In your bunk bed, behind your back, I lie, holding on to your plaited hair like a rope. First Blood 00:00 / 01:11 The dolls are bleeding, all of them leaking, red and black from their forever open mouths, what can we fill them with? I don’t like the way they look at me like they expect something more. Since you’ve been gone, they’ve started touching themselves, running their plastic fingers up their own shiny thighs. I don’t know how to stop them, so I wait for you to come home, whilst they slide their tongues around their lips and look at each other, eyes growing big. Last night I filled an egg cup with baking soda and vinegar, and tried to clean their faces, you were still gone, they wouldn’t let me near, until I promised to pour the vinegar away and bleed with them, so I did, legs touching, my bled fingerprints forming like wax seals upon our skin. Broken Waters 00:00 / 01:22 Most people drown without making a noise or splashing. See me here Baby, watch me lying out plank, below the surface, all that stillness, all that peace, see how long I can breathe down here alone. You must trust me, I am your mother after all, don’t think about the firefighter who lies to the woman on the phone inside the burning building, says he’s on his way up to save her, then hands her brother back the phone, tell her you love her, knowing all his tears won’t be enough to quiet the flames, I am your mother after all, I am made to do this. When the mother harp seal leaves its cub, nobody calls it a mistake, I have been at this much longer than twelve days – just let me float here a while, Baby you will still remember my face. It will be the same one you wear every time life cuts in such a way – the serration drags the exact formation of ripples upon its shape. Publishing credits Teenage Mother / First Blood: Primers: Volume Four (Nine Arches Press) Broken Waters: Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre Weekly Poem (July 25th 20219)