Hear poet Kitty Donnelly read poems for wave 10 of literary poetry journal iamb. Kitty Donnelly wave 10 summer 2022 back next the poet Kitty Donnelly's first collection, The Impact of Limited Time , was joint-winner of Indigo Dreams Publishing's Collection Competition. Her second book, In Dangerous Hours , was published by the same house. Kitty won a Creative Future Award in 2019, and was nominated for a Jerwood Compton Fellowship in 2021. Her background is Irish, she lives in Yorkshire, and when she's not writing, Kitty works as an NHS Psychiatric Nurse. She cares for several rescued cats and dogs, and has just completed her first novel. the poems High 00:00 / 00:50 An arctic tern will fly 10,000 miles to flourish in two summers worth of light; so I was high after he died, chasing sun on the wing, though directionless. I swallowed three green capsules every night, peristalsis pulsing them through my scorched oesophagus. I took what I could get to alter consciousness, testing my fragmented sense of time against the wall clock’s competence till dawn was salmon red & gutted on the banks of the horizon. I was not or even near myself. Kingfisher 00:00 / 01:18 It was a sign: pure lapis on the post plunged into canal sediment. It surveyed its territory, paused & darted under Lock 9, a featherweight jewel flicked on the wind. Returning fishless, its head revolved towards the glass where I stood, museum-frigid: my first live kingfisher. I should have tailed its poem through the frosted dawn’s distemper. It was tempting me to follow it by pen, to know it vivid & separate from ossified kin: that feathered gift of indurated velvet with scratched black beads for eyes, whose twiggy box I switched for football cards, unable to stand the cloy of mould, too old to poke my finger in the rag-hole. Now it had risen: fallen constellations etched across each wing, it was urging me to drown my work bag, unlace my boots, and flit with it through the waterlogged morning. Test Results 00:00 / 00:38 You’re writing for your life, there’s no mistaking it. Your fingers move in window-light, ears closed to all but music. Coffee's heat evaporates, a shaft of sun bisects the page, the Biro quivers in your fingers. Everything you strived to say is translating itself. Previous verse: untrained lightening. Illness has earthed you, conducting your tongue. Publishing credits High: Ink Sweat & Tears Kingfisher / Test Results: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Kerry Darbishire read poems for wave 19 of literary poetry journal iamb. Kerry Darbishire wave 19 autumn 2024 back next the poet Living in the English Lake District and writing most days, Kerry Darbishire is inspired by her wild surroundings. Her poems have won – and been placed in – many competitions, and her work has appeared widely in anthologies and magazines. Kerry's three poetry collections are A Lift of Wings , Distance Sweet on my Tongue and Jardiniѐre . There are also her pamphlets A Window of Passing Light , Glory Days (in collaboration with Kelly Davis) and River Talk . the poems River Talk After Raymond Carver 00:00 / 01:21 I’d slip across mossy rocks to catch your intonations clear as glass splintering morning air, accents you taught me before the scent of pine lifted from your tongue, before blackbirds and traffic spilled over the bridge. Come autumn you’d growl open-mouthed through the woods towards me louder than a stream, faster than a beck, bold as a heron, I’d wait on the brim. Sometimes a rush of hungry dippers murmured through marigold edges like angels, but I didn’t need saving. I learned to measure the highs and lows of your voice even in winter when your lips barely moved, and you held me like a mother in a perfume of breathy lullabies sinking deep into my pillow and I clung as if I was your child to every word you whispered, like fog shifting from your skin. All night I’d lie awake listening to the sound the water made until I was fluent. Jardinière 00:00 / 01:43 When I lift the lid, I let go the ghosts of kings and queens tombed in their paper-dry beds – buds and petals still clothed in the palest dawn, bonfire-grey, evening-sky-pink, thunder-cloud-yellow, honesty’s sheen like rainstorms that often sent us back inside with the smell of drenched earth in our hair. When I lift the lid, I could turn a field into a garden, work all day, become Vita Sackville-West or Gertrude Jekyll using her painterly approach to colour. Season after planted season I grew, cut and gathered aquiligea, rosa rugosa, alchemilla, poppies, larkspur; honoured their brief blooms in vases until they threw themselves down like confetti. When I lift the lid, forty summers rise and wake from slumber: lapsang souchong and cake, birdsong, afternoons fading in deck chairs, slow-scented evenings folded in the wings of moths; my daughter’s tenth birthday, the spring she broke her arm, the autumn she left home and my mother fell ill. It is a thing to leave your soil. When I go I’ll take my garden with me. Song of the Fell 00:00 / 01:40 When you say fellside a woodpecker drums spring into the ghyll, curlews turn their tune inland on salt clouds scudding west to east fast as a fox crossing high slopes where runnels of earth slip from lairs and whins begin to yellow the air. When you say fellside an evening in summer swims out of my children’s eyes as they race to the beck where lizards soak up warmth from boulders, foxgloves guard sheep trods, firm as stone, where reeds lean in like old friends and distance spreads a blue cloth. When you say fellside owls haunt low light, the first frost snaps at hedges of hazel and thorn, snow steals boundaries without a second thought from high intakes at rest, hollow nests, berries shrivel and all evidence of life before is squirrelled under white. When you say fellside celandines must be opening, a half-moon floating in a lake-blue sky lifting sun, swallows and flights of geese over Whinfell; our bright steps climbing a new path to find water-mint, frog spawn, primroses waiting for rain. Publishing credits River Talk: Flights (Issue Five) Jardiniere: Jardiniere (The Hedgehog Poetry Press) Song of the Fell: Finished Creatures (Issue 5, 'Surface')

Hear poet Dale Booton read poems for wave 13 of literary poetry journal iamb. Dale Booton wave 13 spring 2023 back next the poet Dale Booton (he/him) is a queer poet from Birmingham whose poetry has been published variously by Verve Poetry Press, Young Poets Network, Queerlings , The North and Muswell Press. He has work forthcoming with Magma , and recently hosted the Young Poets Takeover at Verve Poetry Festival. Dale's debut poetry pamphlet, Walking Contagions , is available to pre-order from Polari Press. the poems Church 00:00 / 01:05 when told that God is not meant to be understood I crumbled felt the weight of expectation as it dragged my body below the floor and held it there if knowledge is power then why can I not know why I am so powerful is it that my voice can be used as a weapon that my thoughts can soar beyond these four walls I’ve heard it said captivity is a state of mind I’ve been told theologists are the wisest of all well I beat Pastor at chess at pool broke out of the cage he put me in little child the Lord moves in mysterious ways but is never wrong so you tell me why you tried to darken my heart denied my being why the spirit of someone can only be what you say it is Classroom 00:00 / 00:54 how strange that want to preserve what is so obvious I have heard parents speak how they don’t want their children to know of people like me just like I don’t want my classes and colleagues to know how alone I feel we erase what we fear what we cannot understand drive it into the shadows in the hope it will never make it to light again here my voice is foreign this place where sexuality is a question-and-answer session each one a stone’s throw further from purpose no room for growth no stature that can define a willingness to teach those whose kin would want you dead Nightclub 00:00 / 00:52 I have heard the music speak to me it was the bodies of friends and strangers that introduced us kindred arms wrapped around the uncomfortable relax we move as one there is strength in physicality there is softness in letting go that not-so-sober shove onto the dancefloor that not-so-innocent rush to be close to some other proximity is breath a closely guarded secret here my breath is not foreign this place where love and lust are two words that begin with l like living Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Francesca Leader read poems for wave 26 of literary poetry journal iamb. Francesca Leader wave 26 summer 2026 back next the poet Francesca Leader’s poetry has been featured in Stone Circle , Abyss & Apex , The Broadkill Review , Pinhole Poetry and elsewhere. Named the winner of the Southeast Review’s World’s Best Short-Short Story Contest in 2023, she was a runner-up in Cutbank’s 2020 Big Sky, Small Prose Contest, and had her work included in Best Small Fictions 2025 . Francesca's first poetry chapbook, Like Wine or Like Pain , appeared in April 2024. the poems Our First Bed Was a Riverbank 00:00 / 01:28 and I think that’s wonderful. No one, for centuries longer than graves are guaranteed, will wash the sheets, change the mattress, tamper with passion’s sacred traces, because the first place you fucked me is fixed as a boulder in the deep-bedded waters that breathed cool light, our bodies sand-skinned upon its lips; fixed as the spring return of bluebells that bloomed our path to that shivering tryst; fixed as anything can be, which is to say more fixed than any non-river kind of bed, or bedroom, or any kind of room, but less than the universe, but not by much, because the fact of where we were when we did what we did is part of nature, a thing in nature not soon or ever to be trammelled by man’s transience. The place is our bodies, the why we have bodies – so as to hold, not just behold, the one we love; to know we exist, and the universe in us. River banks and beds will shift, but not as human beds shift. I believe soil, like water, has memory, and we left our salt and metallic secretions, and the earth took them back and said yes, these were always – will always – be mine. Weights & Measures 00:00 / 01:33 I still don’t know how You can compliment a girl Without infecting her, Say she’s perfect Without seeding worry Of when she won’t be Anymore, span her Waist with hands Amarvel at its minuteness Without encoding Lovability as the ability To fit inside something Else, submit to Subsumption. I still don’t Know how you can Expect a girl’s soul Not to snag on BMI charts, Measurements, body fat Ratios, celebrity weight Loss and Half My Size stories, Because they’re Everywhere – number-shaped Briars ensnarling all Paths to self-acceptance – Or tell her to inure, Ignore, be tough but soft, A paradox, like vanity sizing That makes her crave The labels that anoint her A 2 and damn the brands That brand her a 12, As if she could be 'S' And 'L' at once, Survive the truth Of weighing and measuring how Much she matters in inverse Proportion to how much (Always too much) matter She comprises, for bodies Most loved are the Bodies that least exist. I still don’t know how You can call a girl Beautiful because she’s thin Or ugly because she isn’t Without engendering Pathology, a fixation sickness On what is visible Instead of what is whole. I Am Duck Phillips in Mad Men Season 3, Episode 12 00:00 / 00:37 Peggy’s at the door of Duck’s hotel room when they announce that JFK’s been shot, and Duck unplugs the TV, pulls Peggy inside and kisses her, and they have their nooner before either of them must face what’s happened, because I think Duck knows that the world has always been burning – that it was sabretooth tigers and gum-rot before it was plague and famine and war. I think Duck, like me, is long past stopping for any flame not fed on bliss. Publishing credits Our First Bed Was a Riverbank: Meat for Tea (Vol. 18, Issue 3) Weights & Measures: One Art (October 2025) I Am Duck Phillips in Mad Men Season 3, Episode 12: Trampoline Poetry (Issue 31)

Hear poet Paul Connolly read poems for wave 27 of literary poetry journal iamb. Paul Connolly wave 27 autumn 2026 back next the poet Paul Connolly has had more than 100 of his poems published in literary journals worldwide. These include Ink, Sweat & Tears , Poetry Salzburg Review , Stand , Chiron Review , Scintilla , The Manchester Review and The Honest Ulsterman . He's been nominated for the Forward Prizes for Poetry and Best of the Net, and shortlisted once for the Charles Causley Prize and twice for the Bridport Prize for Poetry. He was also a finalist in Walk, Listen, Create's Write About Walking – In the Dark . Paul's debut collection will appear in 2027 from Broken Sleep Books. the poems In the Time of the Ice Saints 00:00 / 02:56 May morning. Servatius lurks inside windscreen frost, wiper-slushed. Between squelches of sun a rose erupts with luridness. Arterial thoroughfares hold a breve-to-breve pause at the dominant, traffic tutti a nearby engine joins with a permanent now of ticking over. Then at a when unsensed, above and across the drone day’s out-of-control firework-spark- and-blast excreta burst, in clang, exhaust and words announcing the random diurnal drift. His kettle chunters at him amid cup chimes through the arson of lunchtime toast. Quiet. Then properly theatrical thunder outside, vast metal sheet flap-unfurled, huge sideboard’s thud-shatter staircase fall, bomb report, cardiac sudden grab-and-release. Dried peas in a rainstick, hailstones helix in wind-predated shoals. His spirit or something exults in horrible pleasure, meetings of three. Then it’s gone, the angry omen spent, slumbering after swift dissipation. Skies interchange Ming whites and blue. Someone laughs gently along to a mellow serenading pigeon, leaves glow artichoke, chartreuse, celadon in calm’s renewal of unending present tense, only their sopping glaze a vestige of chaos. Ha ha! grins pantomime-villain storm in a jump-scare return, in clatter-silence lurk. Clouds contract dark, suck light through the windows, roll it around, fumble it in flashes then hurl it in slanting cataracts, dinning to exhaustion. Petals of ice mourn themselves on the ground. He prays to Sophia for a merciful end, dreams a heart unfrozen, a-flow like sunbeams, warmest rain. Metronome Vienna, 1822 00:00 / 01:57 He sets the mechanism, points at the page, but the lad is faltering and can’t keep up. He looks from the rod, its back and forth, to clumsy hands and a flushed face and cuffs the lad on the back of the head. The lad stops. He roars. The lad fingers the keys in spurts, hesitates, then pulls away from the keyboard, staggers upright, upsets the stool, mouths an unmistakable oath at him and flees. He stares at the rod – it sways and sways and conjures the discarded piece in time – then turns to the window’s pipe-smoke light, glowers down and spies the runaway who, legato now, shambles along the highway and doesn’t look back. He stumbles to his desk, sits and winces, grabs a scrunch of sheets, a quill, and scrawls. We knock, the device knocks, but the lad isn’t there and he isn’t there. The door opens on leftovers and stale coffee, bedpans and wine dregs. We watch. He doesn’t look up. We wait. The tocking slips from sameness to sameness. He scratches and mutters, ‘Cuius regni non erit finis ... non. Non. Non.’ Late Snow 00:00 / 02:28 Daffodils are serf-submissive, dungeoned in February, freed in a March summer largesse, they’re bleached and broken now, long cigarettes stubbed after a savourless drag in the white-ash gyre of April’s Boreas. A pink sledge, exultant in crystal January, sputters alone on the hillside and is dragged away cutting brown ruts of failure. Days stretch. The skies are freight-dark, but sometimes slashed across by a swinging lightbulb, and the cloud-cover ceiling and antiseptic floors are glared with the manmade whiteout of places scrubbed for health and scrubbed for torture, where drones sicken for the sunshine, and something, a something common to cranial drumming and calf ache, hums from a blueness glimpsed under the darkening, hums in the dark itself, flares above and below, flares behind the eyelids, and rumbles through our dislocation saying this is no denaturing, it is then beats us, serious goddess, with flowers in freeze and imponderable incense from unsourced smoke and a refuse gas-stench off woodlands wet but dying in abrupt springtime sere, murderous cutting salt on August gales, who’s gone, forgotten, then grabs us again, wrenches us down to our knees till we abandon categoric fixation, symmetrical fantasies, and concede her limitless gravity of whim, the mystery of blighted harvesting, a beauty that commands our sacrifice. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Sean Burke read poems for wave 25 of literary poetry journal iamb. Sean Burke wave 25 spring 2026 back next the poet Born in Banff, Scotland, Sean Burke now lives and works in Italy as a music, drama and philosophy teacher. His poems have appeared in Orbis , Squawk Back , Cake and Poetry Worth Hearing , and been shortlisted in international competitions. Sean has also had work in anthologies from The Wee Sparrow , Write Out Loud , and Poetry on the Lake . He's currently working towards his debut collection. the poems from The Cups The King 00:00 / 00:43 I woke to find myself adrift on a silent sea, as still as glass, and though my shoes are wrought in scales I kicked against the currents in vain. Deaf and blind, a boat with red sails balanced on the horizon, a tightrope poised to betray all hands to the emptiness over the edge of the world. This was days ago, and one thought only clings to me, and I to it: what will become of my kingdom now that I am to be swallowed, as in the dream that possessed me first when I was just a child? Five Fields 00:00 / 02:18 I A child will draw hands somewhere between spider and sun, a marriage of circle and line, each a Euclid abstracting to bare bones. To each strip of blue its quarter-sun, each strip of green its house, a chimney weaving spirals of smoke. DNA. Double-helix. There’s nothing here that won’t be fixed by a little erasure, a little smudge or smear. II The smudge of lipstick inside this facemask marks it as yours; I wear your kiss as an open secret in the supermarket queue. Social distance; prophylaxis; the crown’s radials looking to hook up with a bronchial cell, it too seeking a home, a jumping-off point from where its electron-microscope selfie can go viral III just as I strive to have my emissaries sow divisions in your queendom. While we might ascribe the last to shoddy materials, I like to conceive her bursting through as pure will. The sperm that goes the distance severs its own tail, as Apollo jettisons its fuel cells after the atmosphere has been breached and Earth shrinks to the size of a mushroom spore. IV A mushroom spore will negotiate the rigours of space with aplomb, ensconce itself in a cloud that wanders from galaxy to galaxy until it falls on fertile ground. Figs and thorns. Mustard seed. Christ the great room-reader drawing quiddity from the quotidian, even as the temple-keepers dead-bolt the sanctum sanctorum against all possible incursions. V Hard to guard, though, against the inside job – just ask Samson or, better yet, Delilah; hard to guard against a bee swarm’s wiki-up in a lion’s ribcage, so recently home to its vitals. Sea-change. Full fathom five. All the walls in the world vanity against the will to live. from I Don’t Want To Die 00:00 / 00:46 I don’t want to die, so I study a score for strings and voice stencilled in a black pentacle. Water-shadows dance on a whitewashed wall; the closer you get to the speaker, the more your body knows; the closer you get to your body, the more shadow is not shadow but thing-in-itself. So you’ve escaped the cave: Plato salutes you! That doesn’t mean the music has broken free of its black disc, the pentacle from its own geometry, but who would lift the needle for all that? Who would prefer silence? Whoever they are, I’m different to them, since I don’t want to die. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb Five Fields won the 2025 Molecules Unlimited Poetry Competition

Hear poet Roy Marshall read poems for wave 3 of literary poetry journal iamb. Roy Marshall wave 3 summer 2020 back next the poet Roy Marshall's publications are Gopagilla , The Sun Bathers (shortlisted for Michael Murphy Award), The Great Animator and After Montale – these most recent three all published by Shoestring Press. Roy is a former coronary care and research nurse now working in education. the poems The Weight 00:00 / 00:46 My friend, Christine the beekeeper, tells me that honey is heavy. How heavy? I ask, and Chris says arm-achingly so. Later, I Google the heaviness of honey, find that a gallon weighs one and a half times as much as the same volume of water. And so, I think about the curation of sweetness; how it requires so much more strength than the nurture of its opposite. Trace 00:00 / 00:51 My fingers walked to the fourth intercostal space. This is where I placed the first gel-backed tab. The next went opposite, across the sternum, on the nipple line. Easy then to make a descending arc, attach the leads until a trace appeared; the heart. Unlike in films when it stopped for good the line was never completely flat, but wavering like the slap of water against the dock long after a boat has passed. Relic 00:00 / 00:45 I’d rather take this road to that chapel of larch on the hill but my boy insists, so we step into a nave of pines screened by webs where sound falls dead, except for the rattle of cones. Each breath is sealed with resin: he finds a long bone, lifts it from the needles: fox or maybe badger, I tell him taking his hand suddenly aware of our temporary skins. Publishing credits The Weight: Finished Creatures (Issue 3) Trace: The Great Animator (Shoestring Press) Relic: The Sun Bathers (Shoestring Press)

Hear poet Sadie Maskery read poems for wave 12 of literary poetry journal iamb. Sadie Maskery wave 12 winter 2022 back next the poet Sadie Maskery lives in Scotland by the sea. She's had her poetry published in numerous journals – among them, Fevers of the Mind , The Selkie , Green Ink Poetry , Crow and Cross Keys , Lothlorien Poetry Journal and Burnt Breakfast Magazine . Her chapbook Push was published by Erbacce Press, while her debut collection, Shouting at Crows was published in 2022 by Alien Buddha Press. the poems Beginnings 00:00 / 02:42 The first time we meet the shock is there but small, a pause in the celestial clock; a tick of time suspended, potentiality acknowledged. My heart refinds its beat. Life moves on. In quiet moments I find myself replaying the curve of shadows under your eyes and I wonder at your weariness. Another day, a touch of fingers on my shoulder and the heat flows, how can you caress so intimately? I walk away yet feel you across the room. When our eyes meet I know from the way our cheeks flush, we are magnets, an exquisite tug dilating pupils, veins, souls, it is more than imaginary, this pain, this want. We meet by chance, friends of a friend, and I want to say, if you were to take my hand right now, lead me to an empty room, press your leg between my thighs as I pull your face towards me, the wall cold against my back and the warmth of you so overwhelming I almost faint from hunger quenched, ferocity and joy, terror and delight, your tongue in my mouth, my fingers entangled in your hair, your hands caressing beneath the black soft cotton, belly, breast, my sighs, your breath gasping, diffident explorer, urgent devourer and all this Oh my God my dear did you not know? if you were to take my hand it would be beyond words, beautiful, defiled in ecstacy ... and inevitable – it has happened – it – will – happen – remember – the universe played this moment to infinity before we were born but yes, hi, no I don't think we've actually been introduced, although we've met. We've met. We've met. A Nice Cup of Tea 00:00 / 01:02 I knew he had died Because every day he woke first To bring a nice cup of tea in bed. And that morning the kettle Didn't wake me and he lay Still beside me. I eased into my slippers Padded to the kitchen. Made two teas, put them on tray. The nice cups, with saucers, Fine china that needed a wash Because of the dust, for show Usually, we could see our hands Through the glaze. Nice cups. With fresh milk, not yesterday's. Watched the kettle boil. The steam curled Across the worktop And disappeared. Where does it go I wondered. The sugar shook From the spoon a little. A nice cup of tea. Ruth 00:00 / 01:47 When we were young we played at the beach on a blustery day. The waves snapped against our legs. We bellysurfed through spume, not knowing if the wet on our cheeks was foam or rain or tears of laughter. Then you were tumbled by breakers against the groyne, the length of it, up with the wave and then sucked back by its retreat, and I still laughed because you were a rag doll flailing, sand and weed in your hair, mouth wide. You crawled back to me, stood, and from every inch of you blood welled, a thousand striations of intricate symmetry, delicate etchings, red rubies, mingling on skin marbled with the salt water but shock kept you numb, at first. I don't remember how you reached hospital, maybe someone from the pier phoned. I was confused, you went away, your parents came with white-edged lips and no words. I never saw you again. You were safer away from me and the sea. I went to the beach that winter to watch waves surge and ebb. There was no newly realised aura of doom. I ran fingertips along my body at night, wondered if your scars were raised or flat, if they held in their patterns the beauty of those first beads of blood through the pale, that surprise, and the wonder in your eyes. Publishing credits Beginnings: Push (Erbacce Press) A Nice Cup of Tea: Anser Journal (Dec 2020) Ruth: exclusive first publication by iamb

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

Hear poet Lynn Valentine read poems for wave 15 of literary poetry journal iamb. Lynn Valentine wave 15 autumn 2023 back next the poet Black Isle-based poet Lynn Valentine remains attached to both her hometown of Arbroath and her adopted city of Glasgow. After winning The Hedgehog Poetry Press' Local People – Dialect Pamphlet Competition, Lynn's Scots language pamphlet A Glimmer o Stars appeared in 2021. Her debut poetry collection, Life’s Stink and Honey , which had won the Cinnamon Press Literature Award in 2020, was published two years later. Lynn's poetry has been featured widely in journals ranging from Gutter and Under the Radar to Northwords Now and New Writing Scotland . She's currently at work on her second full-length collection, which she'll be publishing with Cinnamon Press in 2026. the poems Thi Leid o Hame (The Language of Home) After Roger Robinson 00:00 / 00:56 A hae cairriet this hansel withoot kennin, (I have carried this gift without knowing,) this thrapple that thraws oot thi rrrs. (this throat that throws out the rrrs.) Fir years a thocht tae smoor it doon, (For years I thought to smother it,) as teachers wid, eyewis thi correktions, (as teachers would, always the corrections,) thi head instead o heid, thi dead instead (the head instead of heid, the dead instead) o deid. Ma faither gied it tae me, (o deid, My father gave it to me,) ma granny tae—aa those who draggit (my granny too—all those who dragged) oan tae land at ma hame toon—fish (on to land at my home town—fish) who grew hurdies an settilt there. (who grew haunches and settled there.) A unpack thi bag—it sings sangs o hame (I unpack the bag—it sings songs of home) an faimily an athin o thi sea—thi reek (and family and everything of the sea—the smell) o Smokies that still maks ma veggie moo (of smoked haddock that still makes my veggie mouth) slabber, thi lang cauld wind wheechin in (slaver, the long cold wind driving in) fae thi Flairs, thi reid o thi cliffs bricht (from Carlingheugh Bay, the red of the cliffs bright) at ony time o year. A will tak this hansel (at any time of year. I will take this gift) an pass it oan, scrieve ma wurds, sing ma sangs. (and pass it on, write my words, sing my songs.) A Flourish of Sun 00:00 / 01:04 Midsummer a surprise to those who have handled the weight of winter, they flop in shorts sold at The Factory Shop for a fiver, milk-pretty legs thin in this world of burning and cups of pale rum. Heat peels roofs back, shifts into rooms where snow used to drift. Dogs circle unsatisfactory trees, mongrels mad with lack of shade, long grass pulped to dust. All night, light syrups in at the windows. Bees can’t hold a waggle dance, are confused, too slow. Blue roses swoon, futile in remembrance of rain. You ask – Did you forget to take your pills again? I am awake every hour, the bright orange fizz in my brain. I am light as a wren. I wonder if I’ll return to winter – to a seam of frost, to the half-shut moon, fat lap of dark. All That is Needed 00:00 / 01:17 When I am alone I will turn eastwards to live in a brown house at the edge of the sea. I will inherit storm-cracked apple trees and the wild goats that crop their meals close to the shore where the green boat sleeps. I will eat cheese as fat as the cheeks of the moon and pare the good red apples as thin as fingernails with no one to complain. I will drink sour wine saved from a communion years ago, and wash it down with water drawn from somewhere secret. I will not cook and no one will ask me to. I will buy bread from the grocer’s van once a week along with tins that open easily. I will leave the fish alone, unbothered by a hook, and if someone visits accidentally I will ask that intruder to go. I will watch my face grow pursed and thin in the mirror of the stream while my hair grows thick as brambles. I will turn pebbles to find precious little. I will stuff my mouth with sun when it’s hot, and on cold mornings I will ask the tide for answers. Publishing credits Thi Leid o Hame: A Glimmer o Stars (The Hedgehog Poetry Press) A Flourish of Sun / All That is Needed: Life’s Stink and Honey (Cinnamon Press)

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 Jorie Graham read poems for wave 3 of literary poetry journal iamb. Jorie Graham wave 3 summer 2020 back next the poet Jorie Graham is among America's most celebrated poets of the post-war generation. She's the author of numerous collections, including Hybrids of Plants and Ghosts, The End of Beauty, Region of Unlikeness and The Dream of the Unified Field: Selected Poems 1974-1992 , for which she won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry . Later came Place – winner of the 2012 Forward Prize for Best Collection – From the New World, and in September 2020, new collection Runaway . Jorie has taught for many years at Harvard University as the Boylston Professor of Rhetoric and Oratory – the first woman to hold this position. the poems Employment 00:00 / 02:34 Listen the voice is American it would reach you it has wiring in its swan’s neck where it is always turning round to see behind itself as it has no past to speak of except some nocturnal journals written in woods where the fight has just taken place or is about to take place for place the pupils have firelight in them where the man a surveyor or a tracker still has no idea what is coming the wall-to-wall cars on the 405 for the ride home from the cubicle or the corner office—how big the difference—or the waiting all day again in line till your number is called it will be called which means exactly nothing as no one will say to you as was promised by all eternity “ah son, do you know where you came from, tell me, tell me your story as you have come to this Station”—no, they did away with the stations and the jobs the way of life and your number, how you hold it, its promise on its paper, if numbers could breathe each one of these would be an exhalation, the last breath of something and then there you have it: stilled: the exactness: the number: your number. That is why they can use it. Because it was living and now is stilled. The transition from one state to the other—they give, you receive—provides its shape. A number is always hovering over something beneath it. It is invisible, but you can feel it. To make a sum you summon a crowd. A large number is a form of mob. The larger the number the more terrifying. They are getting very large now. The thing to do right away is to start counting, to say it is my turn, mine to step into the stream of blood for the interview, to say I can do it, to say I am not one, and then say two, three, four and feel the blood take you in from above, a legion single file heading out in formation across a desert that will not count. Runaway 00:00 / 03:58 You wanted to have vision but the gods changed. You wanted to feel the fraction of the degree of temperature enter the water, feel the minute leave the minutes behind. Why not be happy. What are they doing to the minutes. Each one takes that minute of you away. Takes away hope. We stand around, we have the sensation we dreamed the whole thing up, we didn’t, & all around us how alive rot is, & damp that never ceases kissing everything in- discriminately—yr hands, yr skin fixed to fit everywhere tight, yr lids holding yr gaze, the rubble, the anti-microbial skins, the layers of cello- phane, the rare & treasured paper sack, everything delivered up to us as if spectacular, as if an emergency of the spectacular, & new data-sets showing more new hours days debt melt faster rising than ever anticipated, also those fleeing told no no, not you, you are not allowed, where are yr papers—oh those—we know we gave them to u but here u see we change our mind—look, here is a changed mind, a mind whose house burned, here is melted chromium & ash where yr life was—stay calm, listen to authorities, re- build, imitate, believe, wait, b/c it will come again, over the ridge, the licking flare, as if pure hunger, or curling all over u now the fire of the flashlight, don't move, I beg u, never move, figure out what the they is, what the they wants— pretend it's laughter, it's a refrain—pay up—as for the recent past it's got too much history a mind can set the match to—but see, the fire prefers not to die, no, & we oblige, we feed it, we keep it unpayable. The Hiding Place 00:00 / 05:21 The last time I saw it was 1968. Paris France. The time of the disturbances. We had claims. Schools shut down. A million workers and students on strike. Marches, sit-ins, helicopters, gas. They stopped you at gunpoint asking for papers. I spent 11 nights sleeping in the halls. Arguments. Negotiations. Hurrying in the dawn looking for a certain leader I found his face above an open streetfire. No he said, tell them no concessions. His voice above the fire as if there were no fire— language floating everywhere above the sleeping bodies; and crates of fruit donated in secret; and torn sheets (for tear gas) tossed down from shuttered windows; and bread; and blankets; stolen from the firehouse. The CRS (the government police) would swarm in around dawn in small blue vans and round us up. Once I watched the searchlights play on some flames. The flames push up into the corridor of light. In the cell we were so crowded no one could sit or lean. People peed on each other. I felt a girl vomiting gently onto my back. I found two Americans rounded up by chance, their charter left that morning they screamed, what were they going do? Later a man in a uniform came in with a stick. Started beating here and there, found the girl in her eighth month. He beat her frantically over and over. He pummeled her belly. Screaming aren’t you ashamed? I remember the cell vividly but is it from a photograph? I think the shadows as I see them still—the slatted brilliant bits against the wall—I think they’re true—but are they from a photograph? Do I see it from inside now—his hands, her face—or is it from the news account? The strangest part of getting out again was streets. The light running down them. Everything spilling whenever the wall breaks. And the air—thick with dwellings—the air filled—doubled— as if the open had been made to render— The open squeezed for space until the hollows spill out, story upon story of them starting to light up as I walked out. How thick was the empty meant to be? What were we finding in the air? What were we meant to find? I went home slowly sat in my rented room. Sat for a long time the window open, watched the white gauze curtain sluff this way then that a bit— watched the air suck it out, push it back in. Lung of the room with streetcries in it. Watched until the lights outside made it gold, pumping gently. Was I meant to get up again? I was inside. The century clicked by. The woman below called down not to forget the loaf. Crackle of helicopters. Voice on a loudspeaker issuing warnings. They made agreements we all returned to work. The government fell then it was all right again. The man above the fire, listening to my question, the red wool shirt he wore: where is it? who has it? He looked straight back into the century: no concessions. I took the message back. The look in his eye—shoving out—into the open— expressionless with thought: no—tell them no— Publishing credits All poems: From the New World: Poems 1976-2014 (HarperCollins)