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Hear poet Deborah Harvey read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Deborah Harvey back next the poet Deborah Harvey lives in Bristol, UK, where she's co-director of The Leaping Word : a poetry consultancy providing creative and editorial advice for writers, plus qualified counselling support for artists exploring the personal in their work. Her poem Oystercatchers scooped first prize in The Plough Arts Centre's 2018 Short Poetry Competition , while her Conversations with Silence was runner-up in the 2022 Buzzwords Poetry Competition. Deborah's work has been published widely, as well as broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please . Her sixth book, Love the Albatross – out in autumn 2024 – is a collection on the theme of estrangement. the poems When an albatross crash-lands in a dream 00:00 / 00:43 Long ago I saw an albatross fly head-first into a dream so fast so hard it penetrated half a mile deep. Inside the crater a wreckage of feather and bone remains which over millennia became this fossilised skull you’ve found and which slicing open my right forearm you press into the wound holding the edges until they knit. We’ll keep this for later, you tell me we’ll talk about it then. Just when you get yourself out of one labyrinth 00:00 / 01:46 you find you’re in another, in fact, you’re not only in it, you’re accidentally helping to build it & trapping your children inside with you where you can’t keep them safe, I know, what a ridiculous promise that was. It’s the exits that are entrances that are the problem, they’re so difficult to spot & since the story starts with you already inside, you’ll have to think backwards. Maybe it’s that stone staircase that tunnels down, getting narrower with each step, till you squeeze into a room with walls the colour of smokers’ lungs, bare lightbulbs & abandoned fridges, where the glass in the portholes is reinforced with grids of wire. Or perhaps it’s that chute you saw in the museum of a coastal town, or maybe it was London, anyhow, it’s the same neighbourhood where a serial killer’s operating by means of secret passages through cellars & the guide says of course we’re not going down there & gives you a shove & you find yourself wedged between brick walls, dangling over a long drop into nothing. Or perhaps it’s the aperture of a shell that's the whorl of your newborn’s ear & you’re clattering round & round its spiral steps, desperate to find them & bring them out & you run through rooms to get to rooms to get to the one room in the house you’d forgotten about, where the creature who was there all along steps from the darkness & turns to face you, a shape in the mirror. Highly commended in the Slipstream Poets 2024 Poetry Competition, and shortlisted for The Plough Poetry Prize 2023 Your silence is all I have left After Rumi (1207-1273) ‘Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing there is a field. I'll meet you there.’ 00:00 / 01:17 so I’ll take it, make of it a field tucked in the gap between factory buildings and the railway embankment with views over the floodplain to the river, the hills, the high cloud mountains of another, older country. The shouting of jackdaws and rooks in the rookery the endless drill of motorway traffic won’t break its surface nor the bulldozers grazing empty farmland, digging foundations for a future town beyond wood and common. One day a sparrowhawk will come followed by rain that will wash the silence clean of hope and when I straighten up, stretch my arms and back I’ll find I’ve become its hollowing oak, its fox- trodden paths, the ditch, these stands of towering hogweed. By autumn I’ll be mist on its distant horizon in winter I’ll lie down and turn to mud looking up at the shapes the night birds make against the dark. Shortlisted for the 2023 Bridport Poetry Prize, and runner-up in the 2023 Frosted Fire Single Poem Competition Publishing credits When an albatross crash-lands in a dream: Ink Sweat and Tears Just when you get yourself out of one labyrinth: exclusive first publication by iamb Your silence is all I have left: Ticking Clock Anthology (Frosted Fire)

Hear poet Sam Henley Smith read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Sam Henley Smith back next the poet A Person Centred Therapist with a special interest in bibliotherapy, Sam Henley Smith found writing poetry helped her process the death of her parents from COVID-19. Sam’s had work published in a variety of journals, including Anthropocene , Green Ink Poetry and One Hand Clapping . She was longlisted in 2021 for the Plough Poetry Prize, and commended by Jacqueline Saphra in the Winchester Poetry Prize. the poems Requiem Delphinus Delphis For Dad 00:00 / 01:02 I find you again, in the body washed in. You sailed out of this city single and sailed back betrothed, exchanged the brine in your bloodstream for love, found land legs and made family your amphibian home. Now, boat-teeth line the mouth of the muddy creek where the sea spat the creature out. Face up, fixed grin, unable to swim with or agin the tide. Time swallowed the whole whale of it and retching, the sea returns you to me in case I hadn't understood that you were gone. I have come to the wall to pray 00:00 / 00:55 to be with you. The stone is peppered with scars, an executioner’s wall – rows of hearts obliterated. You wouldn’t approve, I can hear you dismissing such display of affection as sentimental memorialisation. Hand-painted in pretty pink FUCK COVID on a heart is not your style. Yet in the insistent overwriting of a name, scribed again and again, I see your pain – determined to be etched forever as if you had held that husband’s hand and together had shouted your loves. A familiar route 00:00 / 01:31 I’ve researched it on the internet, how to brace my back between wall and chair right leg slightly forward, knees pinioned fondly around your together-knees. It’s my turn to raise you now Dad. British Red Cross has lent us the commode but Covid-style, we are alone. I struggle, ease you to sitting, gently ease, gently please , then a pause for breath. Another breath. And if the Tamar Bridge could swing it would look just like your legs as its long carefully engineered limbs manoeuvre in parallel, perfectly paced, another journey across a Devon river bed. The crooks of my arms are hooks now, nestled in your pits. And lift. And pivot. And lower. Gently ease. Gently please. And breathe. And breathe. Publishing credits Requiem Delphinus Delphis: Green Ink Poetry I have come to the wall to pray: exclusive first publication by iamb A familiar route: So we go about our days: Winchester Poetry Prize Anthology 2021 (Winchester Poetry Prize)

Hear poet Deborah Finding read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Deborah Finding back next the poet Originally from North-East England and now living in London, Deborah Finding is a queer feminist writer with a background in academia and activism. Her poetry has featured in fourteen poems , The Alchemy Spoon , The Friday Poem and anthologies from Live Canon, Renard Press, Victorina and Fly on the Wall Press. She came first in the poetry category of the Write By The Sea Literary Festival Writing Competition 2022, and was commended in the Troubadour International Poetry Prize 2022. Her debut pamphlet vigils for dead and dying girls is forthcoming from Nine Pens. the poems amortisation 00:00 / 01:34 you explained to me that amortisation is the depreciation of non-tangible assets which are things like goodwill and loyalty and relationships you can depend on it’s a complex calculation to figure out what these things are worth, the factors that add to or detract from their value and how quickly they can be lost but I want to try, I always did I can show my workings out, in your spread sheets, under which we did, to an advanced level, excel … I write this as addictive additive, also when you said you would love me all of the days. like infinity plus one but plus one was the problem which leads us to the minus column your creative accounting of her to me, to her of me, every evasion a reduction of your credit score and now we disagree on the answer I show you a number in the red you tell me of future investments and paint me a unicorn valuation but it turns out amortisation is just the process of slowly writing off a debt on paper at least. so consider it done, books balanced, no net gain loving you was a zero-sum game dear ______ 00:00 / 03:24 My therapist told me to picture you as a scorpion in a guided meditation, in which she had me imagine – in a very visceral way – crushing you to death with my foot, till you were nothing but shit and dust. Now, I know what you are thinking: surely a real therapist would never suggest such a thing! but to be totally honest with you she is somewhat unconventional in her methods and only the week before this she had asked me to imagine finding a grave and looking down to see your lifeless body in the deep and open dirt – the knowledge of your death giving me back my own breath which I'd been holding all these months terrified that I could see you on every corner your dark hair swinging behind you in front of me a kind of ponytail PTSD. I wish I was joking. Anyway, back to you as a scorpion, did you know it’s said they're viciously venomous for no reason? Have you heard that fable about the frog and the scorpion, that ends with the scorpion saying, it’s in my nature ? Well, I don’t believe that shit. I don’t believe you were born like that to sting for the sake of it. But it doesn’t matter because you are that now and you should be approached with extreme caution and protective clothing, if at all and I learned the hard way that anyone who would keep a scorpion for a pet is a fool. There’s an urban myth that if you light a circle of fire around a scorpion it will sting itself to death horribly … for a long time I thought about how I could set your world on fire: trap you in a prison with only your own poison for company, and glass walls and spotlights for all to see who you really are. I texted your name so often that my phone still wants to gift it to me in autocorrect whenever I type the first three letters but this is progress, because for a while just the E would do it. One day I hope I can look at your name in black and white or even meet someone else with it, and not hate them on sight and though today is not that day I know it must be coming. I don’t think of you so much now and I wear a scorpion earring. Not every day but on those mornings where I wake up shaking or when the offence of an injustice is simply overwhelming. It helps remind me that it’s ok if a battle is too bloody to fight, that self-care sometimes means you don’t get to win even when you’re right and the day I grew up is the day I understood that the sun shines just the same on evil and good. Ah, scorpion … despite all I learned about you it’s not in my nature to claim you have no path to salvation but it does bring me comfort to know that at any moment any enemy can be crushed if only in imagination. distracted 00:00 / 00:42 today I did not want to write about desire I had loftier plans for worthier topics some notes about injustices and a page already half-baked with an idea about a town but you walked me home last night after dinner and before you took a cab so now my hands are your hands thinking dextrously of the five delicious minutes spent kissing you in the rain, our cold wet faces in refreshing contrast to our hot wet mouths tongues tasting intoxicatingly of our desserts and of not having kissed each other for a week Publishing credits amortisation: Live Canon Anthology 2022 (Live Canon) dear ______: exclusive first publication by iamb distracted: Hearth & Coffin Literary Journal (Vol. 2, Issue 1)

Hear poet James McConachie read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. James McConachie back next the poet James McConachie was born in the UK but has lived for the past 17 years in a remote farmhouse in Spain’s coldest, emptiest inland province. He's turned his hand to more jobs than he feels are worthy of mention, and is never happier than when finding himself lost at high altitude on horseback with only the wind, vultures and music of Hildegard Von Bingen for company. Aside from poetry, James has written prose for the Dark Mountain project , and has more in the pipeline. the poems first post 00:00 / 01:03 dry heave, I ball my fists or bang my head off the table, I might weep into the dark corner of our stupored soul for knowing and forgetting all those moments of nothing grace a mother wets a tissue, wipes a streak of blood from her child’s face yet swept into the fire the eternal touch of honeyed hand Iskander scores the sky to the east and for what? small fears the language or the naming of the land, or some fucking flags always the same shit reasons, always forgotten but sorrow filths up the crescent beneath the nails forever and it will be written we should. have done. better. dry heave, I ball my fists bang my head off the table, and weep again, this morning it seems there’s always time for another cold horror, another mother’s letter liebre 00:00 / 01:00 three days of gales and I’m meshed into a tousled briar, clearing the corral, all thorns the handstain fruit long wintered away oil can chimes giving it the full four clangs slices and scratches of maybes and should’ves the blood the wind and the want give life, their constant brutal diligence, the letters laid in winter’s bright book of hours the garden, knee deep in my dereliction, sees the sun as it lands but doesn’t stick somehow the sky, a haze of headaches and icy hostilities bustling up over the tops and away out on the campo, a hare flickers under the cloud shadow, shrieking across the field, almost dark I gather logs, the stars show again so heaven’s veil is torn just a little, at the hem longings 00:00 / 01:30 oneday, imma dance like a dervish out of the dark scoop gold pennies from the sky scatter quinces at your feet, found at last your cool hand in the bright bower, oneday oneday, imma song the things I shoulda said to the silence of the windless glade and if unheard, it will only hope to summon the breeze, to the daylong quiet shade, oneday oneday, imma shine the nightingale’s silver lyre pluck such tunes as only a god might whisper to a bird, all sighs and secrets, to leaven the unhurried word, oneday oneday, imma speak the mark and measure of this time the sneaking sand, the simple sorrows, the the supermarket savagery of war’s fire and lime, oneday oneday, imma swim all the way over the ocean to the very rim of the world, the paper cowl will shrink and shrivel, just as it should the forgotten face, the skin uncurled, that was my own, oneday oneday, imma find the boy who startled the stars, who shares my smile then inks together these battered bars drinks deep the rushing sap, beneath the ragged bark oneday, imma dance like a dervish, out of the dark Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Jenny Byrne read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jenny Byrne back next the poet A newcomer to writing, Dublin-based Jenny Byrne had her first poem published in 2020. Her poems have appeared in The Galway Review , Impspired , Dust Poetry Magazine , Drawn to the Light Press and The Madrigal – though Jenny still thinks her biggest achievement is being a mum to two lovely people. the poems Danseuse 00:00 / 01:25 I do not want to lament the day you died, each year, purging up the aisle of expectation to kneel and prostrate I am ready for the day to come and know there is no must, no proper, no should I may trace a fingertip across your scarf of orchid silk, allow jewels to glisten in my palm, scatter photos, hold linen to my face and breathe you in — less of you with time; but still, a tiger knows her cubs, animal instinct reciprocates This pace, once chaotic, stumbling, shape-shifting to satisfy others has slowed, is gentle; with desire to gratify fading I move, a rising relevé in satin slippers to my tentative, delicate rhythm I may look back from time to time as I lead myself forward towards my skyline I think you would raise a celestial hand, urging me onward. Love (Classified) 00:00 / 00:45 I don't write about love it's ours, it's private. Where we are queen and king passions force bloody battles some won many lost We grieve poultice womb wounds with salt purging the demented Orchid roots reach toward light and air epiphytes survive supported freely I don't write about love, it's ours, it's private. Sapere aude 00:00 / 00:59 The wise child omniscient, sensing, absorbing full up, engorged, overflowing No reprieve, corridors closed, dam bulging, deluge certain walks within the gilded mausoleum, sham, chaos mire Instinct knows what can and cannot be said perception is reality they say a ten-year-old cannot play with perception Sensitivity has no place in dysfunction systems are not made to be broken wise children, bearing all weights, eventually crumble. Publishing credits Danseuse: The Madrigal (Vol. 2) Love (Classified): Impspired (Issue 11) Sapere aude: The Galway Review

Hear poet Jim Newcombe read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jim Newcombe 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 Jamie Woods read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jamie Woods back next the poet Jamie Woods, a writer from Swansea, has poetry in Poetry Wales , Ink Sweat & Tears , Lucent Dreaming and elsewhere. With his work centring on experiences of disabilities and cancer, Jamie has been commended in the Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine 2021, and is now poet-in-residence at the charity Leukaemia Care. His debut pamphlet, Rebel Blood Cells , is available from Punk Dust Poetry . the poems The Silence of the Hospital Ward 00:00 / 01:49 Silence is elusive, is illusive. When your head is on the pillow and you think that it’s close you complacently relax and it scurries. Clocks ticking. The mundane drip of the tap, the one with handles for elbows that you’re too far away from to give a nudge off. The low-level buzz of electric light. The slow wheeze heart and lung churn of the IV pump and the siren when it’s nearly run out or you just bump the tube. Other people’s ringtones, message chimes, other people’s phone calls. Other people’s conversations. The excitement of family, the desperate anger. The admin of auxiliaries and nurses and doctors, the gossip of auxiliaries and nurses and doctors. The driving mechanics, the alarms, the beeps; blood pressure, oxygen count, your still-beating heart. Painkillers wearing off. The screams fly as wraiths through walls and curtains biting and snatching away dying hope. At night, at day – no time here, just numbers – the ward whispers sting with invasiveness, the rumbles of breathlessness and nasal congestion, the snores, the moans, hurt like needles. The shock, the pain, the begging. The trundle of the drug trolley, and the screams at night, my God, the screams at night terrify, terrorise. Clarion calls for carrion attacks. Not me, not this time. Clocks ticking. Headphones on, I sleep with the spoken word, smooth voices, TED talks and shipping forecasts, waking throughout, until Thought for the Day: unrested, unblessed, undead. Johnson’s Baby Shampoo 00:00 / 00:46 I get flashbacks now months later when I step out of the shower and bury my face in the towel I’m back in the showers at Singleton the water blasting furiously, too hot, with a precious locked door refuge from the dormitories let myself go, unheard, unashamed, the raging water and baby shampoo blanch away the fatigue from my dying broken skin cry into the towel until I’m ready to go back to a freshly made bed hospital corners, military precision, fake smiles distracting from coal-blackened eyes and I know I’m not there anymore, but it’s scalded into my brain and I can’t find the right type of soap I need to wash it all away. Wolf Alice & Camper Van Beethoven Live at the Adam Smith Institute 00:00 / 01:08 Had a dream last night and everyone was coughing In therapy today she forgets why we’re here Tell me about a recent social situation that made you anxious? I’ve not been in a social situation for the last two years Everybody’s going out for lunch these days So jealous of your new-found laissez-faire I buy tickets for a concert that I’m aching for But in my scared heart, I know I won’t go. Resell them at face value in a free-market economy The Adam Smith Institute must think that I’m ill. DOORS AT SEVEN. MASKS OPTIONAL. ADMISSION RIGHTS RESERVED. OVER 18s, WITH WORKING IMMUNE SYSTEMS ONLY. Last night there were two hundred people in the room. Walls sweat-shimmered, shoulders condensed, screaming tears, You’re a Germ , kinetic hormones released. Words now airborne, choruses viral. I stay at home in my germ-free convalescence Playing scratched old records for the left-behind. Publishing credits The Silence of the Hospital Ward / Johnson’s Baby Shampoo: Rebel Blood Cells (Punk Dust Poetry) Wolf Alice & Camper Van Beethoven Live at the Adam Smith Institute: Poetry Wales (Vol. 58, Issue 1)

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hear poet Judith Kingston read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Judith Kingston back next the poet Judith Kingston is a Dutch poet living in the UK. A teacher, translator and expert procrastinator, Judith writes best when she's meant to be doing something else. Her work has appeared in Barren Magazine , Fevers of the Mind , Twist in Time , Kissing Dynamite and Sledgehammer Lit . She's also had poems featutred in Persona Non Grata and Crossing Lines: An Anthology of Immigrant Poetry . Judith's micro-chap Mother is the Name for God appeared in summer 2020. the poems Holocaust Memorial Day 00:00 / 01:16 I'm asked to take off all my clothes in a cubicle and put on a thin robe. I awkwardly shed my layers, elbows knocking the walls, stuff everything in a locker. The door won’t shut. I push it shut – it opens – I push it shut. I give the tiny key and my glasses to the radiologist and walk blind to the trolley lined with foam. Mostly naked, they slide me into the machine. I am not sick – I feel sick – I am not sick. I am in this small chamber. It is just me here with this genetic timebomb, this potential for destruction, this uncertainty. Without a Jewish mother you are not a Jew. We escaped Auschwitz but carry this, we carry so much potential. I am alive – I am dead – I am alive. I am rolled back out, unplugged, re-robed, my glasses, I can see, the key, the locker, my clothes, a tiny plaster– A letter: everything is fine for now. I am fine – I am not fine – I am fine. Anne Frank House In which I discover many years later that I never did read my great-grandparents' names in the book of Jews killed in concentration camps 00:00 / 01:01 I came to put my hand on the book. I paid my entry fee and walked around, mainly to turn to that page and look at my name in a long list of names of Jews that Hitler put in the ground. Memory betrays you though, and later I found that no one had said that they were dead – they went but did not rot in that mound of nameless corpses; they returned on the train, shedding 'victim' and becoming survivors instead. I don't know what went wrong in my head: was the book about those deported, not killed, or did my eyes read things that were not really there? Whatever that book says: they were not spared. Their Theresienstadt graves were never filled, but there is more than one way of ending up dead. Sostenuto 00:00 / 01:15 At the end of the war he did not look good, I have to tell you. People gave him the side eye on the train – the regular train now, with seats and suits and luggage racks. No meat on his bones, no papers, no passport, no stories, no tears, everything wrung out of him, desiccated, condensed, he had nothing but the will to live, to make it back to where he was known. Commuters hugged their bags and children closer, looking at the way his skeleton peered through translucent skin, worried they might catch his wasting, or his fleas, worried he might want things that were theirs. He was my father’s uncle dressed in the skin of a ghost, his wit muffled under the layers of horror, dulled by the headstones that were never placed on graves. Later, he would tell stories, but not now. Whenever I saw him he wore a suit – his own, but under his clothes lurked the bleached bones that rattled in time with the train he was still on, which could not take him from that place he never left. Publishing credits Holocaust Memorial Day: exclusive first publication by iamb Anne Frank House: Twist in Time Magazine Sostenuto: Persona non Grata (Fly on the Wall Press)

Hear poet Charlotte Knight read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Charlotte Knight back next the poet British-Ukrainian poet Charlotte Knight is a 2021 New Poets Prize winner , and was commended in the UK National Poetry Competition in 2019. Her work has featured variously in Magma, SPAM, Lighthouse Journal , Perverse and elsewhere. Charlotte is studying for a Masters at Goldsmiths College. Her pamphlet, Ways of Healing , will be published by Smith|Doorstop in June 2022. the poems [Insert Sappho Reference] 00:00 / 01:03 pour wine over this white goat or like hunt me for sport oh baby love a long fusillade of mistakes burning holes in my new purple furs love a frenetic chasing why do i have four legs or love a fecund horn sounding and me and my pheromones so very tangible you can smell them in the cheese like the things you awoke in me your head a bunch of violets my lap a goat’s lap can i collect this as a sadness can i carry this hurt in a basket specifically woven for the occasion can i be exiled is there an island for heartbroken goats why am i bleating when i say [insert sappho reference] i mean i get it we have all loved somebody with the knowledge that they won’t love us back i mean i don’t get it i am a goat why am i crying Hell is Real 00:00 / 01:02 Travelling southbound on Interstate 71, motorists pass a sign which reads HELL IS REAL . It stands in a plowed field and serves as a reminder to all God-fearing farmhands that they must indeed fear God. I am not so easily influenced, I could never be a farmhand for the Lord. In fact, I frequently shoplift and have thoughts about holding hands with you in public spaces. The HELL IS REAL sign is one of many roadside prophecies erected in the midwest. Amongst others, there is Jesus Saves , Jesus save My Soul , I Need u Jesus . I do not believe in Jesus, but I do believe in believing. And though I could never be a farmhand for the Lord, I have to love Him. Look at all the signs He gave us. Singing Before I Drown in a River in Denmark 00:00 / 01:03 mermaid-like and incapable of my own distress i collect flora from the riverbank looting a natural ecosystem hoping to one day be framed in gold i carry my losses with me every flower a symbol how foxgloves are death how cattails innocence how pansies are love in vain how you you held me always obscured in dark corners like with nature how easy to say we are separated tall grass wildflowers no waves no waves a tributary husband we were subject to bursting banks breaking boughs overseas mad with grief singing for you till my muddy death how easy to say gone Publishing credits [Insert Sappho Reference]: runner-up in the Outspoken Prize for Poetry (Page category) Hell is Real: Ink Sweat & Tears Singing Before I Drown in a River in Denmark: Neutral Spaces (Issue 2)

Hear poet Hilary Menos read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Hilary Menos back next the poet Deborah Harvey lives in Bristol, UK, where she's co-director of The Leaping Word : a poetry consultancy providing creative and editorial advice for writers, plus qualified counselling support for artists exploring the personal in their work. Her poem Oystercatchers scooped first prize in The Plough Arts Centre's 2018 Short Poetry Competition , while her Conversations with Silence was runner-up in the 2022 Buzzwords Poetry Competition. Deborah's work has been published widely, as well as broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s Poetry Please . Her sixth book, Love the Albatross – out in autumn 2024 – is a collection on the theme of estrangement. the poems Ivory Viking Queen The Lewis chessmen are a group of medieval chess pieces carved from walrus ivory and whale teeth, discovered in 1831 in the Outer Hebrides. There is some debate over their origin. 00:00 / 01:11 Long ago I saw an albatross fly head-first into a dream so fast so hard it penetrated half a mile deep. Inside the crater a wreckage of feather and bone remains which over millennia became this fossilised skull you’ve found and which slicing open my right forearm you press into the wound holding the edges until they knit. We’ll keep this for later, you tell me we’ll talk about it then. Queen Esther’s Makeover ' ... Esther was brought also unto the king’s house, to the custody of Hegai, keeper of the women.' ~ Esther, 2:8 ~ 00:00 / 01:14 you find you’re in another, in fact, you’re not only in it, you’re accidentally helping to build it & trapping your children inside with you where you can’t keep them safe, I know, what a ridiculous promise that was. It’s the exits that are entrances that are the problem, they’re so difficult to spot & since the story starts with you already inside, you’ll have to think backwards. Maybe it’s that stone staircase that tunnels down, getting narrower with each step, till you squeeze into a room with walls the colour of smokers’ lungs, bare lightbulbs & abandoned fridges, where the glass in the portholes is reinforced with grids of wire. Or perhaps it’s that chute you saw in the museum of a coastal town, or maybe it was London, anyhow, it’s the same neighbourhood where a serial killer’s operating by means of secret passages through cellars & the guide says of course we’re not going down there & gives you a shove & you find yourself wedged between brick walls, dangling over a long drop into nothing. Or perhaps it’s the aperture of a shell that's the whorl of your newborn’s ear & you’re clattering round & round its spiral steps, desperate to find them & bring them out & you run through rooms to get to rooms to get to the one room in the house you’d forgotten about, where the creature who was there all along steps from the darkness & turns to face you, a shape in the mirror. Ruby Woo 00:00 / 01:43 so I’ll take it, make of it a field tucked in the gap between factory buildings and the railway embankment with views over the floodplain to the river, the hills, the high cloud mountains of another, older country. The shouting of jackdaws and rooks in the rookery the endless drill of motorway traffic won’t break its surface nor the bulldozers grazing empty farmland, digging foundations for a future town beyond wood and common. One day a sparrowhawk will come followed by rain that will wash the silence clean of hope and when I straighten up, stretch my arms and back I’ll find I’ve become its hollowing oak, its fox- trodden paths, the ditch, these stands of towering hogweed. By autumn I’ll be mist on its distant horizon in winter I’ll lie down and turn to mud looking up at the shapes the night birds make against the dark. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Liam Bates read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Liam Bates back next the poet Originally from the Black Country and now living in Lancashire, Liam Bates is a poet whose work has appeared in Ambit , Bath Magg , Magma and elsewhere. His poems have been translated into Spanish and Latvian, and in 2023 he won a Northern Writers’ Award for ongoing work. Liam's first two pamphlets, Monomaniac and Working Animals , are available from Broken Sleep Books , as is his debut collection, Human Townsperson . the poems The Agency 00:00 / 01:20 I ate the mushroom growing on the wall of the downstairs toilet in the house we rent. I folded a thick slice of brown bread around it and gobbled the lot raw. They might try charging us extra at the end of our tenancy because the mushroom wasn’t meant for us. But in their assessment, what is? See what I have in my hands. It’s nothing. See it moving. Like devotees bowing round a colourful altar. They forbid us painting over the white but I painted anyway on the white of the sink with the rainbow of my vomit. I am thirteen again. I am hovering a foot above the ground like a god. They don’t want us skating on their office block steps as if the concrete isn’t there for us. Smooth as a dream of endless falling. Shouting watchmen emerging to shoo us off the premises. What are they thinking, that they can contain this? It’s only my folded arms holding me together. If I raise my hands towards the sky, so bright and boundless I ache, a thousand canaries will take flight. Understudy 00:00 / 00:37 This again—my student has crammed his pockets with gravel and cannonballed into the reservoir. Sopping, and cold as a milestone on the bank, I take his word this isn’t about suicidal thoughts, he saw the tell-tale green and gold of treasure blinking on the bed and isn’t that what we’re doing here? Sure, but wouldn’t growing gills be covered during induction if that was all it took? Tomorrow, I’ll pull him from a different waterbody. We’ll sit in the sun getting warmer. Open Wide, a Little Wider 00:00 / 01:09 We were misled by a sat nav quirk, the circle sun at an unexpected inclination. The country’s vestigial tail, you dubbed this snaking A road. Still inevitably a wealth of luxury cars on hand ready to elbow by, tinted window undertakers, cutting us up and getting a mouthful: cunt, do your indicators not work or are we invisible? The final word flashing in their rear-view. And then we turned a corner and on the hill opposite was a line of houses, a familiar-seeming close in a town we’d never been. You said, Who do you think lives there? and I knew then someone must, a street of someones, each with their own purposeful face. I had to chew on it in a lay-by: the abundance, it won’t all fit in my head. But that’s the thing, you said, it doesn’t have to. Publishing credits All poems: Human Townsperson (Broken Sleep Books)