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Hear poet Colin Bancroft read poems for wave 25 of literary poetry journal iamb. Colin Bancroft wave 25 spring 2026 back next the poet Editor-in-Chief of Nine Pens Press, Colin Bancroft lives in County Durham. He's published a full collection, Vanishing Point , as well as the pamphlets Impermanence and Knife Edge . Colin also has a micro-pamphlet of wrestling poems, Kayfabe , which appeared in 2021. the poems Hermes gives a statement about why he agreed to abandon Dionysus 00:00 / 01:56 Well I’d seen what had happened to Semele/ burnt to a cinder/ like the bits you get in the tray at the bottom of a toaster/ so I knew he wasn’t messing about/ he had me scrape her up off the kitchen floor/ who was I to argue/ he spent the next hour sat at the table letting her dust fall through his fingers/ this is how I made the stars he said/ looking at particular specks/ wondering aloud what part of her body it had been/ put it on his tongue and shivered/ of course he said it wasn’t his fault/ that she had asked for it/ that he had got overexcited and had revealed himself too quickly/ I don’t know/ then he collapsed on the sofa/ blood everywhere/ the mad bastard had only gone and gouged a hole in his leg/ if you can you believe it/ there was a baby in there/ I could see its face pressed up against his skin/ you know how Ben Kingsley died in Slevin/ he hobbled around for weeks/ football injury he muttered when anyone asked/ he had me check on it every night/ disgusting/ his thigh blown up like a bee hive/ the baby squirming about like larvae/ Hera knew of course/ she was seething/ didn’t speak more than two words to him for months/ sat at the dinner table picking her teeth with a fork/ just staring at him/ the night he gave birth it just popped right out of his leg/ like when you get a mogwai wet/ he went down like a Brazilian centre forward/ howling/ I scooped it up just before Hera got there/ get rid of it he hissed/ I jumped out of the window/ walked around for ages/ ended up by the river/ I had no idea what to do/ I mean where do you dump the baby of a God on a Tuesday night. How a Guide to Winning the Royal Rumble is a Guide for Life 00:00 / 01:15 The first thing you need is a good slice of luck as to when you enter. Nothing good ever came from being the first one in. More people have walked on the moon than have won from the number one position, remember that. You have no friends, not here. They will boot you in the face and toss you out like yesterday’s trash. Skulking helps as does hiding under the ring. A bag of thumbtacks or a barbed wire bat are not illegal. Never run towards the ropes because someone will send you over them. Likewise never climb too high because there is always someone ready to push you off. If Kane arrives then you have already lost. Always walk down the ramp. Enthusiasm will only get you killed & playing to the crowd is usually a big mistake. Perhaps the best piece of advice I can give you is that if you do go over the top rope, hold on for dear life, fight and claw as you dangle over the precipice, because no one has ever been victorious when both their feet have touched the ground. Poem explains the mechanics of dry drowning 00:00 / 02:33 Someone sits next to me on the bus. I turn to look. She has long red hair and her eyes are wider than radar dishes. She rolls a sweet around her mouth like a roulette ball. A radiation blast of cherryade and Mademoiselle. It is Poem. Her arm presses tightly to mine. She is uncomfortably warm, as though she has run here quickly but she isn’t out of breath. She’s never cared about personal space and as she leans across to wipe the condensation from the window her hair covers my face like a spider’s web, like when Indiana Jones entered that cave in Raiders of the Lost Ark. She bangs on the window and swears at someone down on the street. As she moves back, she runs her hand across my cheeks, her fingers moist and cold. What are you writing about now saddo? She asks reaching for the notebook I have tried to fold into my lap. I push it down the side of the seat. She cackles loudly, like a magpie. I bet it’s the rain again, isn’t it? You and the fucking rain. It’s only water you know. Tell me how many poems have you written about car washes or sponge baths? She gobs on the window and we watch it run down. Why don’t you write about that? Did you know that 73% of the brain and heart are made of water? Now she is wearing glasses. Her hair tied tightly in a bun. She does this often. That’s about the same as the water/land ratio on this planet. I wonder what part of my body is planet and what part is rain she says holding her hand up to the strip light on the roof like an X-ray. Suddenly she stands up, presses the bell. I watch her sway down the aisle, her movements fluid in the shudder jerk motion of the bus. The rain comes down harder, maybe because we have stopped, and I think for a moment we are in a life boat far out at sea. Just a word to the wise, she says, as she turns at the top of the stairs, her mascara streaking down her face like corpse paint: you can drown in just a millilitre of fluid for every pound that you weigh, so you better make sure that the tears you cry don’t kill you. Publishing credits Hermes gives a statement about why he agreed to abandon Dionysus / Poem explains the mechanics of dry drowning: exclusive first publication by iamb How a Guide to winning the Royal Rumble is a Guide for Life: Kayfabe (Broken Sleep Books)

Hear poet Matthew M C Smith read poems for wave 2 of literary poetry journal iamb. Matthew M C Smith wave 2 spring 2020 back next the poet Matthew M C Smith, a Welsh poet from Swansea, is editor and founder of Black Bough Poetry . His poems have been in Anti-Heroin Chic, Barren Magazine, Icefloe Press, Wellington Street Review, Other Terrain and Fly on the Wall Press. Matthew is writing his second collection after his debut, Origin: 21 Poems . the poems Cool Oblivion ‘ ... llithro i’r llonyddwch mawr yn ôl.’ from T H Parry Williams’Dychwelyd 00:00 / 01:23 Choose life; extract yourself from systems, circuits, voices, spies in ether. Crawl as servant, slave from your masters, take freedom in roadless deserts. Leave gasfields burning. Echoes in canyons, drift of caverns, find your channel in rock, seeking nothing, nothing at all. Close your mind in cool oblivion, hide inside your silent shadow, where blood slows to deep time’s pulse. Dying King 00:00 / 01:51 I am with you. I am always with you. You pulse with a click of the drive. The dying king. I press your paper-thin shroud of skin, as thumbs curl over balsa bones, ridges royal. My eyes probe famine’s fault lines, scan this lucent husk, your twilight mask. Under your arm, now thin, translucent, I once slept, sheltered from terrors in the night. Now, I keep watch. How did it come to this? Morphine dulls your silent ward. It keeps you from fires in the fields, from the sibilant hiss of the underworld, the gaping maw of night. We are skin, my dark follows your dark. * Above tides, I feel winds of unconquerable spirit. I stand at the edge, choking with loss. Cosmology 00:00 / 00:50 from static we make our slow Rosetta linger lone in void of dark no one can hear us in these rooms of silence this is our language of stars fingers of intricate play & movement there are lights faint and far as moths we are drawn & dance Publishing credits Cool Oblivion / Cosmology: IceFloe Press (February 29th 2020) Dying King: Anti-Heroin Chic

Hear poet Pam Thompson read poems for wave 20 of literary poetry journal iamb. Pam Thompson wave 20 winter 2024 back next the poet A Hawthornden Fellow in 2019, Pam Thompson is a writer, educator and reviewer. She's been widely published in magazines including Atrium , Butcher’s Dog , Finished Creatures , The Alchemy Spoon , The High Window , Ink, Sweat & Tears , The North , The Rialto , Magma and Mslexia . Pam is the author of three poetry pamphlets – Spin , Parting the Ghosts of Salt and Show Date and Time – as well as full collections The Japan Quiz and Strange Fashion . Her fourth pamphlet, Sub/urban Legends , won the Paper Swans Press Poetry Pamphlet Prize in 2023. the poems Shoes for Departure After Marina Abramović 00:00 / 01:21 You are about to set off on your journey. What will you need? Map and compass? Or if you’re at sea – telescope, sextant – to track angles between you and the stars. Tonight Polaris is brighter. You are no stranger to True North. No one is awake to wave you off. Suitable clothing is taken for granted – the hood of your parka, fur-lined, detachable or your blue raincoat, as light as the song of itself, is groundsheet and sail, folds into the size of your hand, the hand which feels under the bed for the shoes for departure, hands which find shoes of pale carved amethyst. Putting them on is like stepping inside the Earth, and as you do, the room, your city, the galaxies, spin away and you are the fixed point, each foot, re-making gravity, hardly moving at all, travelling far away. Reading my mother’s diaries 00:00 / 00:59 admiring again her sloping handwriting. I have been trying to fill in the gaps in my memory. No that’s a lie. I have been trying to bring her back, to unspool her words and sentences until they loop themselves into her own true form. Mum, where have you been? All evening I've watched for the blur of your shape in the stained-glass panel of our front door. I have been a watcher at the gate. What kind of mother would stay out for so long, stay out this late? I have been reading my mother backwards, standing on the slope of my own life, looking down to that squiggly, tangled path. She is so far ahead, the sun’s bright, I’m shielding my eyes. In Whitby 00:00 / 00:53 on a January morning my heart climbs the 199 steps turns, takes a breath, and for seconds is terraces, the swelling North Sea, Inside St. Mary’s Church, my heart reads a notice, Do not ask the staff where the grave of Dracula is because there isn’t one and my heart smiles, moving very slowly between pews looking for, but not finding, a carved effigy of itself. Instead, is an offering and a candle that stays lit even in the day’s sudden gusts which blow inside and outside my heart in the abbey where it settles at last, in front of a statue of St Hild. Publishing credits Shoes for Departure: The High Window (Autumn 2023) Reading my mother's diaries: Sub/Urban Legends (Paper Swans Press) / winner in the Paper Swans Pamphlet Prize 2023 In Whitby: Mary Evans Picture Library

Hear poet Dominic Weston read poems for wave 15 of literary poetry journal iamb. Dominic Weston wave 15 autumn 2023 back next the poet Dominic Weston makes wildlife programmes for television, runs over the Mendip hills, and writes poetry. His work has appeared in numerous print and online magazines, journals and anthologies, including Ink, Sweat & Tears and Green Ink Poetry . Once, he even slipped off the page into poetry film . Dominic's work veers into the natural world – often with a healthy undercurrent of darkness. Adopted as a baby, and having lost both parents to prolonged illness in recent years, Dominic treasures most the poems he writes about his family. the poems November 00:00 / 01:35 Scissoring volleys snip across the dripping field call and counter-call sewing lines of reassurance between fleets of long-tailed tits as they slip westwards from the cider orchard through the beeches to infiltrate a long thorn hedge Half the front leg of a roe deer is sheathed in mud-washed fur, a finger of matt bone protruding at one end, a black flinty hoof at the other – rejected by the nose of a curious hound articulated by the shunt of a cautious boot Ghost memories of deer appear along the Fosseway in the dun flanks of fallen field stone greenish with algae half-light fashioning their features Pale flashes on the path, peroxide husks look like Bambi tails not the fallen maize wraps from a squirrel’s overhanging store Thwud! Strikingly rigid and damp-dense Millie claps my knee backs with an over-long branch Labrador trots her pride in the mimic trophy – her own piece of Jane Doe Beneath our feet limestone knucklebones push up through the blackspots of let down sycamore palms yellowing gloves smooth the naked crevices November is the time when the ground is made. The Daedalus I Knew Inspired by the bronze statue Daedalus Equipping Icarus by Francis Derwent Wood 00:00 / 01:28 The father of Icarus is on his knees, left hand deftly lacing a leather cuff around his son’s bicep, while the right carries the weight of the wings It was not my father but my mother who knelt before her own boy wonder to tie the laces on my new school shoes and launch me into the world Daedalus’ rapt attention to his son as unimaginable to me as flight itself, a pantomime played out on a mythical isle, nothing I could know My mother sprang my father from the loveless island his parents confined him to determined that her own children would never see its brittle shores My father’s skills earned the salary that paid for tan sandals in the summer and black lace-ups in winter, that put food on the table year round So no, he never did kneel before me to tie my laces or straighten my wings, but he lent me his place in my mother’s heart and that selfless act let me fly And The Third Wish 00:00 / 02:41 It would be an unseasonably warm afternoon when I would turn myself inside out start to roll the skin back from my crown unrooted hair flopping down onto my chest the skin slinking over shoulders to the ground An unexpected easterly wind would rise making it a very good day for laundry so into the tub with it, and half a box of soda to scrub, scrub, scrub with the old bristle brush and then three times through the mangle The hottest part of the day would see me sitting in the shade on that stool from St David’s with its three clawing rhododendron legs me thinking about nothing in particular until my freed skin flapped bone dry in the wind Once the steam from pressing had dissipated I’d take out my reglazed glasses and look for the first time into every crevice and wrinkle survey the landscape supported by my fingers and audit my own hide for scars Out of the long-crushed grey shoebox I’d lift the gold leaf embosser I’d liberated from Reading Grammar’s library stores retired from inscribing Dewey’s digits on leather spines in favour of cold hard print Plugged in the mains and finally hot to its tip I’d parsimoniously press through foiled tape to fill in the full extent of every scar I’d found with a thin shield of gold, soon gone cold the chink in my cheek where it kissed the steel-lined typewriter case in the hall the dent in my forehead where it struck the brake lever of my Raleigh Tomahawk the grave accent over my right eyebrow inscribed by an open can of baked beans Then my hands, oh my hands! my pride, my strength, my means the scenes of countless crimes and remedies so many nicks, so many cuts, so many gouges painstakingly gilded into delicate koi scale gloves At the end of this burnished afternoon I’d slowly pack my tools away for the last time then burn my clothes in that rusting rubbish bin carefully step back into my newly sequinned skin and shimmer my way to Gomorrah. Publishing credits November: exclusive first publication by iamb The Daedalus I Knew: The Language of Salt (Fragmented Voices) And The Third Wish: Gallus supplement of Poetry Scotland (Issue 101)

Hear poet Elizabeth Langemak read poems for wave 6 of literary poetry journal iamb. Elizabeth Langemak wave 6 summer 2021 back next the poet Elizabeth Langemak’s poetry has appeared in AGNI Online, Shenandoah , Pleiades, The Colorado Review, Literary Imagination , Sugar House Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal and elsewhere. Her work has twice appeared in Best New Poets: 50 Poems by Emerging Writers , and been featured on Verse Daily . Elizabeth lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and is the recipient of fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center and Breadloaf. the poems What Everyone Has Done vs What Everyone Would Do 00:00 / 01:36 Even taught hard and so long the truth is we have and would always back out again. I think. Really, who has not, is not still ready to erase their own name, to flip and come up new. Not unsing the Song, precisely, just stop singing. Like seeming stopover or changing clothes, like promised return but stepped or stepping out for good, into Gray: how simple it was and would be again. Each wolfthought behind us reappears fresh, everyone did and keeps flicking back hoods, revealing our faces changed and still changing. So many faces behind and beyond us. With lap-hands, with crossed legs, an upright spine of baked bricks and stiff, Virtue forgot us and never remembered. Unfooled and refooled by gnawing and guilt, each breath and Choice was and still would be lastingly fixed, decisions made wholly from cinders, from shadows and sparks hopped free of our fists. So here’s what we did, what we would still do despite having done: eyes shut and necks turned we reached and keep reaching shoulder-deep and our hands fell still falling on something blind but Beating O Beating and warm. We are pulling it into the Light. All My Questions Become Their Own Answers 00:00 / 01:23 When her legs struck out shuddering like fat lightning bolts. When my breasts turned to stones within stones on my chest. When I couldn’t tell hindmilk from foremilk, and my collapsed tent of gut held no guess. When she wouldn’t sleep and so no one would sleep, or vomit flew like a fist on the end of a long, gloved arm from her throat. When I knew better, but still. When over a phone, when in fever, when in the puce doctor’s office with my list and all I’d forgotten to write there. When I held her up to the mirror I looked like a person holding her question like it could be her answer if only she could coax it to speak. Is she sick. Should the doctor. What should I. Who should you. When I finally nippled a finger into her mouth would you believe I felt first punctuation squatting under her tongue full stop like a fat bud of cartilage, an unfused bone of statements from which all questions understand how to grow. I asked then, I keep asking: who planted this pea an inch under soil, who waits for that pea to lift its hand into the light, who knows what it will want to know. Conspiracy Theory 00:00 / 01:48 In Arkansas, the red-wings go down, nearly two thousand slapped out of the night. Beaks pointed, wings drawn to their sides as men shot from cannons, they land unseen, on their sides, like pepper shook out on a small Southern snow. They fall in a scene now cut from the movie. They fall together with a noise mistaken for gunfire, or soundless as dust falls, one to the ground at a time. One burrows up from the earth. Like a stone from a sling, one kills a deer with a crack to the head. When they’re poisoned or struck or sucked whole through the props of a low-flying plane, when they cramp, when wind ices their sails or God licks them with lightning, they fall. They fall from great heights, not as Icarus fell, flailing, but they duck into the dive and go down as though grateful, or, some say, they fell upright like jumpers whose chutes wouldn’t open, feet first toward accordion crush. Not every faller makes for the grass, but some plunge into the false skies of blue cars, some are delivered to doorsteps like badly thrown papers. Before you wake up, some are dog-gotten or swept downstream like small ships, one lands in a nest, one is not dead but crawls into the hand of a man dressed in orange. While you sip coffee and news of air travels over the ground, an enemy folds one into your bed. Most are gone by noon. Some were never there. Wherever they go to, they stay. Publishing credits What Everyone Has Done vs What Everyone Would Do: earlier version appeared as The Be Good in Yew All My Questions Become Their Own Answers: originally appeared as The Answer to Everything in Storyscape (Issue 19) Conspiracy Theory: Shenandoah (Vol. 63, No. 1)

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

Hear poet Isabelle Kenyon read poems for wave 18 of literary poetry journal iamb. Isabelle Kenyon wave 18 summer 2024 back next the poet Manchester poet and novelist Isabelle Kenyon is managing director of Fly on the Wall Press . She's had four poetry chapbooks published – most recently, Growing Pains and Potential . Isabelle has also published debut thriller, The Dark Within Them . Her poetry appears in IceFloe Press , Ink, Sweat & Tears and elsewhere. the poems Afternoon Tea with Self 00:00 / 00:54 We are in Ali’s café at the end of the world – it must be for I am sharing scones with myself at sixteen our legs gangly under table and much the same, though one pair is wrapped in electric blue, and I find there is always an Ali’s café to be found somewhere. She says she is ready to understand, dabbing lip-gloss curves with napkin. I say she never will, sorry, some things, people, you pass on from, like wraiths, better to shrug the last five years off like glitter. She says I am lying, of course, and I smile for I knew she would say it and we finish our tea like a stubborn, married couple. Gestures which are really about inadequacy and absent fathers 00:00 / 00:41 I like you experimental hair strands traversing the colour spectrum, sheep-shorn at base, wild deep, like your laugh. Lately, you've tamed nature to Mouse for a man who requires bread pre-chewed into starch. You mother-bird hop; I text silent space bars of an argument which is really about growing up and out as two separate shoots of grass one nestled in the same compost, one fidgeting for further fields. Wonder 00:00 / 00:30 She gives him hair on his chest downy like the otter, playful and familiar. He gives her her lips from the pit of a plum, all spring and juice she finds herself delicious. She has found answers: why his spine is sculpted just so why his hands are warm bowls of milk. Publishing credits Afternoon Tea with Self / Gestures which are really about inadequacy and absent fathers: exclusive first publication by iamb Wonder: Sarasvati Magazine (Indigo Dreams Publishing)

Hear poet Michael Burton read poems for wave 23 of literary poetry journal iamb. Michael Burton wave 23 autumn 2025 back next the poet Michael Burton is a poet based in Todmorden in the Calder Valley, West Yorkshire. His poems have appeared in, among other places, The Interpreter’s House , The Honest Ulsterman , Ink, Sweat & Tears and London Grip , He's also read his work on BBC Radio Manchester, Chapel FM and various podcasts. Michael co-hosts monthly spoken word open mic event Gobsh!te at the iconic Golden Lion in Todmorden, and writes and performs as NotAnotherPoet. He's also one half of the band New Age of Decay , whose debut album can be found on various online streaming platforms. the poems Thanks to My Lower-intermediate Mandarin Chinese 00:00 / 02:15 I know that the girl sat across from me on the tram is unhappy with the boy next to her. I know that something has happened sometime before, after (or possibly during) their dinner but can’t quite make out the parts in between. I know the boy thinks what’s upset the girl is not serious. He does not say sorry or that he’ll make it up to her somehow (though, in truth, I may not have understood it if he did). I know there is something said about her mother. She was there with them earlier today or, if not, will be with them soon. The girl or her mother (or both of them?) have or had to wait a long time. There’s a coat, hat and pair of gloves also somehow involved in this and a phone call which somebody needs to make. The boy, arms now crossed, is insistent. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes. Yes what? I can’t be sure. The boy is or has been busy recently. The job. Her mother. The coat. The hat. The gloves. The phone call. The boy asks the girl how long something will be needed and how many times must something be said and then four characters, emotionally toned, one of those situational set phrases you can only learn when mastering the language. The boy then tells the girl he loves her. He reaches for her hand. She looks down. The boy kisses her firmly on the forehead and as the carriage doors open I picture the girl’s mother waiting. No coat. No hat. No gloves. Checking her phone and waiting outside in the cold. A Childhood Friend’s Critique of My Lifestyle Choices After Raymond Antrobus 00:00 / 00:54 you all changed / all strange tastes / new age / highbrow / holier than thou / you all head down / shy-faced round town / all flat cap / all man bag you all dressed up / all plaid / all sandals / soft lad / smelling all tea tree / Versace / you quit the smokes? / gone all woke? / all lame- arse jokes / all posh speak / all prim / all proper geek / you all scrawny / weak / arty chic / all desk job / all snob / away too long pal one of them now / all big city flat / think you’re all that but where’re your mates now? / what’s brought you back? On the Third Thursday of Every Month 00:00 / 01:43 Me and every man to ever have fallen in love with her meet to discuss how we are coping with her absence. For some it has been years. Many, now happily married, talk only of flashes in their wingmirrors or windows. For others their visions are a much more regular occurrence. Some of the group claim they only know they are truly alone once all the lights in their houses are out. One man confesses he carries her hair clip in his pocket, squeezing it tight as he walks. Another describes a recurring dream where she and him in full embrace fall from a cliff face to a city of red and amber lights. There is even a man she has never met who attends, dressed each time in the same misfitting raincoat, his fists pressed against his scalp as he speaks of her standing in the crowd, of running through town, up long narrow streets, only to lose sight of her right at the last. And then there is me and the curve of men beside me in the circle who sit and listen, sit and listen, red faced, dazed in a frown, as so often she said was the problem. So often, she said, the worst of all our problems. Publishing credits Thanks to My Lower-intermediate Mandarin Chinese: Cerasus Magazine (Issue 9) A Childhood Friend’s Critique of My Lifestyle Choices: exclusive first publication by iamb On the Third Thursday of Every Month: The Interpreter’s House (No. 78)

Hear poet Shaw Worth read poems for wave 6 of literary poetry journal iamb. Shaw Worth wave 6 summer 2021 back next the poet Shaw Worth is a student living in London. His work has received three commendations in the Foyle Young Poet of the Year competition, appeared in the Waltham Forest Poetry Competition anthology close , and is forthcoming in World-dream. Shaw also co-edits Meanwhile Magazine . the poems Breaktime on the Toddlers and Tiaras Set 00:00 / 01:24 Today my two-year-old is Regional Beauty Supreme. She will be Princess Kansas. She will devour the world. Her two main hobbies are broad daylight and temporary teeth called flippers; we throw them in the summer river, we watch them dance like mayflies. Before she goes on stage they play Wichita Lineman for me and the soft string whine comes to get me, and these all-time winner women and the local bowling alley recede. I go back to my father, who hated me; he said our name was Resaca for fighting but I stayed here in the county to listen through the wire for the future, which is my champion daughter. At home I marry the mirror and try her lipstick on at dinner. I am the quality controller. She knows we need the money and she brings it back each Monday. I wash the dresses. We sing together every weekend. We storm like thunder through the waxed music halls, then I pass her the mic, and her glitter in their golf ball eyes makes the world see more clearly and the cinched March sun walk out to greet the judges and these endless plains, where we are unloading a pickup of trophies and rejoicing in endless victory. Dharma Talk 00:00 / 01:31 Ani Pema says we would prefer to remain asleep in the West. Just like that: quietly. And she laughs loud and jokes since her wisdom overflows. But distraction is freehand and creative, I think; while I walk in the shop I listen— I should be bolder at adding new people on Facebook, whose images I glide over nightly a fish through a reef, or a bored mountain goat, tripping on the space between crags. It’s so important, she says, to get out of this pool of steamy slash fictional nothing, of thoughts that crawl like sci-fi animals, of unwatched films & love poems— you are not who you think you are. You never were . But before I get discursive and freehand about dinner, I remember again that still I can breathe, and adopt a posture of repose in the air, like a fly on a thousand-petalled lotus. I twist my left hip & it hurts for a week; I bruise my calves on the flow of time, I get dinner, again. There are road stops on the path. On the four hundredth petal of my long trashy thriller, the gang climb the glacier in search of the body; the killer impersonates below. They find her, filled with love and righteous action, dig her out from the hard-set snow. Landscape as Guided Meditation 00:00 / 01:24 No, I’m serious. Imagine you’re fifty one hundred fathoms tall, big head up with blue generous Neptune, and your feet down in the Cape Cod lake where there were eels and you met your teacher. You have no pain and high dexterity. You think aloud with your shoulder blade the size of the province: it says don’t trust the work, do it again, you might just find that something in all this boundless space, these foamy bits of lake that lodge beyond the breath. Look, there’s Jupiter. I guess breath is the end of be all. You’re so massive you can’t float by. Uncombing your hair the length of Cape Cod will send a theta wave to Earth with the power to make the highways curl up on themselves then heal all beings of hope and fear. So do it. Go do the dishes and strike the bowl till it becomes a portal. Crawl through to a large non-conceptual room, the first of ten final perfections. We don’t need to list them here quite yet. The lake has dried up with waiting for you the wallpaper is Neptune imagined. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Stephanie Clare Smith read poems for wave 13 of literary poetry journal iamb. Stephanie Clare Smith wave 13 spring 2023 back next the poet Stephanie Clare Smith is a native of New Orleans, Louisiana, whose forthcoming lyric memoir, Everywhere the Undrowned , will be published in spring 2024 by the University of North Carolina Press. Stephanie's poetry and essays have been published in various journals including Bellevue Literary Review and Xavier Review . She currently lives in North Carolina where she's a social worker and mediator for families in crisis. the poems Small 00:00 / 01:18 Sleep is my friend, I tell myself. I don’t believe myself. I need more friends. What I have is Joni Mitchell songs stuck in my head. I really don’t know love at all. I make shapes with my body under the covers as though I am falling from a plane in the sky – a fetus, a windmill, a steak knife. Which shape survives a long-distance drop? The Times said a fetus – survivors fall small. In the morning, I wake like a clock. A chopper’s overhead beating the air. But this is not Nam or Afghanistan. The radio reports cops up above. A man dumped a woman out of his truck onto the avenue that feeds the heart of the city. Or else she jumped to escape the not-Nam/Afghanistan war in that truck. He fled on foot when the chopper hovered over. All day he’s at large like a storm in the sky. All day she’s out cold in a hospital wing. I feel all small; how she jumped or was dumped in the shape of log that rolled across the road that feeds the heart of the city. When a Horse Smells the End is Near 00:00 / 00:28 nostrils flare fist wide eyes shoot sideways halfway white a bad blows up bigger there nothing left to blind the view a storm stares through a round black sky a moon cut up a crack across the back of night and gallop gone to the edge foul the way it’s over Whereabouts 00:00 / 01:14 I dream I’ve gone missing. Wake up still here in this adopted state, out of place, nothing new. I throw back the comforter, count ten friends from home, lost or gone. Mostly gone. Mostly dope. They follow me to the sink like prayers. I cup my hands underwater. Wash my face, dress up my past, miss ten laughs. I drive to work, clip on my name. Be here for now. If I didn’t stay, if I’d kept on driving, someone here would call the cops, at least by Thursday. But it’s not a crime to just get gone. All I’d take with me is mine, low-key in my little car. I’d drive to other towns, all gone grey. Adopt every state. Take on new names. Hope, Mercy, maybe Shame. Maybe Eleven. The ten gone missing ride along with me and sing our songs. I stay put for now, feed feral cats, work overtime, eat out on Fridays. My little not-disappearing acts. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Elisabeth Kelly read poems for wave 10 of literary poetry journal iamb. Elisabeth Kelly wave 10 summer 2022 back next the poet Elisabeth Kelly lives on a hill farm with her family and too many animals. She's been published in numerous anthologies and journals both online and in print, and she's authored three poetry pamphlets: Carbon , Mind Mathematics and Wild Chamomile . Her first children's book is due out in 2022 from Stairwell Books. Among Elisabeth's favourite things are puddings, and the changing of the seasons. the poems Otzi and the Giant’s Eye 00:00 / 00:31 Sometimes, I feel I am curled up in the eye of a giant, light glints makes an iris out of sunbeams that wink from the depths of this ice sea. I forget for a moment, that suffocating pressure keeps me still as bonded molecules suspend me in a sphere of solid fluid. And I wonder, if I tap a finger against this lens would my world fracture into crystal tears and cry me out from the depths of this ice sea. Tiny Bird Heart 00:00 / 00:15 Light whispers at the window, blue burrows through nudges the dark away. Quietly I uncurl, the nest gives way, as your tiny bird heart beats through the sound of your feet dabbling across the floor. Wild Chamomile 00:00 / 00:40 It smells of pineapple when your crush it, I didn’t know that was the smell, until later. It is the smell of summer, concrete cracks where engine oil pooled, rainbows on slurry puddles, afternoon trips across fields to find an old milking carriage eroding in dens of nettles, the corrugated roof calling like Sleeping Beauty’s turrets full of promise, drizzling reality across the rotting wooden floors. It is scars created by rusted metal treasure, submerged in bogs, or broken bottles used on flat stones to cut berries, it is long days alone. Publishing credits Otzi and the Giant's Eye: Dodging The Rain (This Ice Sea) Tiny Bird Heart: Green Ink Poetry (Discovery Part 2) Wild Chamomile: Wild Chamomile (Selcouth Station)

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

Hear poet Gerry Stewart read poems for wave 10 of literary poetry journal iamb. Gerry Stewart wave 10 summer 2022 back next the poet Gerry Stewart is a poet, creative writing tutor and editor based in Finland. Her collection Totems is to be published by The Hedgehog Poetry Press. the poems Barnhill, Jura 00:00 / 01:10 My backpack saws against my jacket highlighting each stride, 198 4 miles signposted to Orwell’s haunt, the distance doubled to my sore knees. My friend offers scout-leader patience at my toddler concerns of ‘Are we even halfway there yet?’ For her, this is a mere warm-up for tomorrow’s trek of all three Paps. I’m not here just for the mountains, the smack of island blue or long-lost friends, but to reconnect with my first self who stepped blindly on her own path and discovered those things had meaning. Lunch among the thistles, ferns and cow pies below the house, blue seas and sailboats, I relish each aching moment. Back down The Long Road, words on snapped tiles, embedded in mud, read like the poetry of sore feet and bumbling boots. Turned Page 00:00 / 00:44 if I start with soil and the random pull of the sun the hours lost would have a root a truth the glisten of rain solemnity potential in my weight behind the spade’s edge promise in the lilt of a cabbage white from the dark corners of the compost heap if I could start with soil till the hours clean open there would be poetry The Kick Sledge 00:00 / 01:23 I want to take the potkukelkka across a frozen lake on a sinivalkoinen* day. With its mitten-worn grips, wooden seat smoothed by generations, it voices a squeaking, scraping language I can lean into. Trees bow to me under the weight of a fine dry snow. My boots pound, setting up that perfect glide over the singing dark ice. Wind-bitten cheeks, lungs burning, I kick a last fleeting contact with the earth and then fly into silence, uncapturable. When I tire, a fire pit waits with a hand-carved kuksa of tea and a fresh korvapuusti. I pretend to be Finnish. Then I remember: I hate winter, its piercing, truthful glare. Finland and I are barely on speaking terms. I crawl under my duvet until spring. *Blue and white: another name for the flag inspired by Finnish lakes, sky and snow. Publishing credits Barnhill, Jura: StAnza's Poetry Map of Scotland (Poem No. 351) Turned Page: Ten Writers Writing (Lochwinnoch Writers) The Kick Sledge: Spelt Magazine (Issue 1)

Hear poet Anna Saunders read poems for wave 2 of literary poetry journal iamb. Anna Saunders wave 2 spring 2020 back next the poet CEO and founder of Cheltenham Poetry Festival , Anna Saunders has been described as a poet 'of quite remarkable gifts' (Bernard O’Donoghue) and 'a modern myth maker' (Paul Stephenson) who 'surely can do anything' (The North ). She's the author of five collections – including Communion, Kissing the She Bear and Ghosting for Beginners – with her sixth, Feverfew, due out later in 2020. the poems In the Flooded Woods 00:00 / 01:23 It's not as if we were together long, I tell my heart, but it isn’t listening. In the flooded woods long blades of garlic have been crushed by the storm and water lilies float like white crowns knocked from sunken kings. A bough drips ivy, clings to another tree, like a drowning man grasping his rescuer’s arm. The pine tree is full of goldfinches, their metallic chatter a teasing squabble. There is a dove, fluttering to a settle. A male bird flies down and lands on its back. There's a fury of pearl and platinum, a flourish of wings like skirts billowing up. The coupling is brief, but beautiful, and in the spring light, the birds resemble angels. I have all the symptoms of grief. I am wide eyed at night, and my heart races. But oh – the memory of two creatures colliding, that airborne heat, before they both flew off into separate skies. I am pedigree I am snow fox I am Siamese 00:00 / 01:36 In the asylum they shave off my fur so they can electric me. When I mew they show me a clump of blond in a flat palm and I say I am pedigree I am snow fox I am Siamese. At night the janitor creeps into the ward where I sleep without blankets – tells me I should be on all fours. I used to lie in a man’s lap, my belly rising and falling like a swelling tide, my pink tips like tiny gems. I’d try to sew myself on him – my claws, glinting stitches. When my warmth sent him under I’d creep back out into the dusk, bring back bloodied gifts that I ripped down from the sky. I brought a rat once, its entrails ribboning. They say I have a severed self – as if to love the warmth of a soft cushioned room and the spiky and musky dark equally were an aberration. In the asylum we are given cold meats. I do not hunt because I am hungry. He hit me when I brought the first mouse, kicked me for the blackbird. It’s not out of love that I lay these trophies at his feet, but I let him think so. What I Learnt from the Owl 00:00 / 01:05 What I learnt from the owl how to hunt in silken plumage tooled up with talons and hooks how to split the seam of the night with saw-tooth wings how to consume all I kill yet stay hungry. What I learnt from the owl how to haunt sleep my head – a phantom full moon how to be outcast and avenger spectre and seraphim, winged god and ghoul 　 bladed angel dropping from the sky. What I learnt from the owl 　 how to voice my darkness in hisses, in shrieks 　 how to drop from the heights, heart-shaped face falling to earth 　 as if love itself were plummeting. Publishing credits In the Flooded Woods: As it Ought to Be (August 26th 2019) – originally appearing as In the Drowned Woods I am pedigree I am snow fox I am Siamese: IceFloe Press (January 17th 2020) What I Learnt from the Owl: Dear Reader (June 5th 2019)

Hear poet Caleb Parkin read poems for wave 3 of literary poetry journal iamb. Caleb Parkin wave 3 summer 2020 back next the poet Caleb Parkin is a day-glo queero techno eco poet and facilitator based in Bristol. He won second prize in the National Poetry Competition 2016, came first in the Winchester Poetry Prize 2017 and has placed in various other competition shortlists. Caleb's poetry has appeared in The Rialto, Poetry Review, Butcher’s Dog, Under the Radar, Magma, Envoi and elsewhere. He tutors for the Poetry Society, Poetry School, First Story and others, and holds an MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes. He’s now at work on his first collection, with ACE Developing Your Creative Practice support – and from October 2020-2022, Caleb will be the Bristol City Poet . the poems Minotaur at the Soft Play Centre 00:00 / 01:30 While the calves play, the other children-children huddle by the counter of the snack bar (beef burger and chips £3.99). Minotaur sits on a chrome chair, latte in his vast hand, watching the calves tumble and snort through padded rollers or down spiral slides. He rests a hulking elbow on the holographic tabletop and issues a bestial sigh. Every time the calves go out of sight, the timpani of his bull’s heart reverberates. Each time they vanish behind some painted frieze of children-children jumping, screeching, and reappear with their bovine ears atwitch with overexcitement, he hears echoes of thoughts he hoped he’d shut away. Hooved thoughts, from years within those corridors, his meaty leaf-shaped ears rotating like radars, shifting sharply to the sounds of those frantic human-human feet. Soles like his endless and disposable; heads like his endless and disposable. Chromatophores ‘ … organs that are present in the skin of many cephalopods, such as squids, cuttlefish and octopuses, which contain pigment sacs that become more visible as small radial muscles pull the sac open making the pigment expand under the skin.’ from nature.com 00:00 / 01:53 Across the Despatch Box they make their bodies into proclamations, pigment their limbs into Pollocks that abstract speech. They lie but their skin is mainlined to their cerebella, spots untruth and scatters it like fireworks, displays it boldly across the mobile billboards of their foreheads. Every vigorous declamation and witty riposte rings only as true as their minds permit: intentions expand in stripes over hands, fear makes their cheeks as worn- red and cracked as leather benches. The Opposition’s voices force them to blush in torrid technicolour. These new palettes of their flat- screen selves broadcast every doubt or whim on patterned limbs. The electorate watches these screens on screens, peers down to check what we believe, merging with Hadean settees, camouflaged and craving ink. Kind Words About Darkness 00:00 / 01:30 To the bafflement of the swaying faces, we say we are happy to walk. Into this living night, we stride, fly on a day of sipping smiles, shining eyes, the few curving miles of hedge- meshed lanes, reliant at first on sight. But then, in the secret spectral cinema of purple-black-grey three am, away from the orange juice deluge of streetlights – we attune to touch, become alert to the crunch or slop of each step, awake to each other, the low-headed stoop of the dog. There is space in this darkness. A brightness. Between us and the softly backlit branches. No traffic to face down. No public to display to. Not a single tree jabs at us with censuring eyes. Just us: our hands meshing beneath this starlight. These hands, scattered otherwise, beneath the gazing windows of a city skyline. Publishing credits Minotaur at the Soft Play Centre: exclusive first publication by iamb Chromatophores: Envoi (No. 184) Kind Words About Darkness: The Rialto (Issue 88)

Hear poet Nathan Dennis read poems for wave 6 of literary poetry journal iamb. Nathan Dennis wave 6 summer 2021 back next the poet Nathan Dennis is a playwright and poet of Floridian extraction. He is the Vintner-in-Chief of Wine Cellar Press, a poetry press dedicated to free and formal verse in equal measure. Nathan's work has appeared in The Knight's Library , Anti-Heroin Chic , The Cabinet of Heed and Serotonin. His upcoming chapbook, I Am Hades , is forthcoming from Exeter Publishing. the poems Waltz on the Adriatic 00:00 / 01:03 I’m running out of money. And the money I have, I’m burning on twelve euro Turkish Coffee. Sacking Constantinople, cup by cup, as a Deadbeat Doge seated outside myself in a composite memory of marrying The Sea, in the Drawing Room of Old Europe – where we turn our sins to museums, and make most serene our palaces of failure. My dwindling euro pays for more dwindling daylight, golden dusk that smudges off the cruelties of cold accounts: bank or historical. A sunset censor. A fuzzy shadow blanket. A halo of streetlights off the Basilica that washes our decay into the Adriatic. Venice: I weep the beauty of atonement as the stars tinker down a soft waltz on Piazza San Marco that I shuffle to in a twisting trinity of errors repeated, that somehow becomes more beautiful with each misstep. Blood Orange 00:00 / 01:23 I met a blood orange at the grocery store. I wore gloves when I picked up the blood orange. I wore gloves when I brought the blood orange home. I wore gloves when I took off my gloves. I asked the blood orange to get a test, But the blood orange said that tests were hard to come by And to trust her, because oranges are organic And I can trust organic. And the orange asked me if I had been tested, And I said no, but I wore gloves when I picked her up. So the orange said she wasn’t worried, so I shouldn’t be worried, But if I was worried, she would just peel herself. But I was very hungry. And her peel looked very clean. So I ran the blood orange under some water. And I lathered her peel until her peel relaxed. And I peeled her peel with nails clipped clean, Until the scent of citrus was screaming in my nostrils And the hemoglobin in the pith strained into my hands As rivulets, flooding the channels of my palm lines. And the death god that loomed so large in my mind Shrank so microscopic when looking at an orange unfurled, Asking me so kindly to eat. And vitamin C does a body good. Leviathan America 00:00 / 01:44 Danger! Danger! Harpoons are upon her – Us! Us! Leviathan America: Sperm whale, punctured and moored by her own spur, Bartered without care to any stranger. Danger! Leviathan America! At sea: Cannibal of Democracy. See how she grows fat: guzzling her krill Past her fill. Terror on the open sea: A fifty-foot blubber-laden danger. Stranger! Leviathan America! She: ravenous for ivory and oil, She: sells her calf to Ahab for a helm, She: stalks the seas for leaky heads of spoil. Have you seen that? A whale captain a ship? Watch the leviathan spear her own kin, Overladen with sin, she grows greater. Traitor! Leviathan America! Mutiny! Mutiny on the high sea! No barter left! She sold her sweet plunder. She sold all her oil for all her blubber. She sold her blubber for her ivory. She sold her ivory for her harpoons. She sold her harpoons for her ambergris. She sold her ambergris for drops of oil. And her ship rattles as the tempest howls, And her crew flees as the storm cleaves her bow. And all the sharks and orcas and krakens Circle the overladen cetacean With harpoons of her own perverse making. Lashing, lancing her till the chop foams red From her leaky head: weeping blood and dread Rancid failure: curdled over us – her! Hunted and drowned at our hand, our mother. Mother! Leviathan America! Publishing credits Waltz on the Adriatic: Neologism Poetry Journal (Issue 28) Blood Orange: Anti-Heroin Chic Leviathan America: Wine Cellar Press (Issue One)

Hear poet Emma Page read poems for wave 2 of literary poetry journal iamb. Emma Page wave 2 spring 2020 back next the poet Emma Page was born in Yorkshire and has lived in south-east London for the past eighteen years. She's a former English teacher who now works as a writer, tutor and coach – and as a mother to two boys. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry London, The Best British Poetry 2011 and the online journal Berfrois. She's currently working on a novel for children, and towards her first pamphlet of poetry. the poems I Draw a Map of Where We’re Going 00:00 / 02:06 I draw a map of where we’re going. It seems that all our pens have come from hotel chains or medical reps. This one is called chlamydia. We stop to buy flowers – sea-holly and tulips – and a coffee. Good luck with your move we’ll say – then we wait too far along the platform and are forced to make a run for it again. (We’d been naming the trains, and I’d been checking out the latest deeds of the guerrilla gardeners.) Some lines have newer rolling stock, and a more reticent smell, unlike this carriage with its warm, worn fibres. The train is packed and no one travels light: a briefcase, rucksacks, violin case, nappy bags. We’re not the only buggy. I am reading you facts about hagfish: eel-like, jawless, squirt slime when they’re scared, and an old man is swearing at this couple. What a slime eel I think, sipping my coffee so I try to catch the woman’s eye and smile. Just then the old man takes from his beaten-up duffel-bag a kitchen knife. Someone – I wonder who – pulls the emergency cord, and the armed man’s sincerity when the train stops as he mutters about why we’re being held up is almost touching. Two days later from a café, I look out at a metal-grey sea. Above me portraits acting louche while another shuts her eyes, and a customer pronounces on a poem, how it gets to him on every read right between the ribs. Cutlery ripples on mismatched china like applause. He smiles and says to his companion I’ve been threatening to give them a recital for I don’t know how long. Poem in Which the Ink Runs Out 00:00 / 01:00 Halfway through printing, magenta and black run low. This transfusion is easy. So much is apt for these dark times. Stepping over the post on the doormat – your vote today matters – I saw more than you’d allow: the good-as-useless stairs, the state of the kitchen, and in that kitchen, for the last time in eighty years, you: blown glass ribcage, goldfinch-light, bloodless. There’s no such thing as a peaceful transfer of power, but the ghosts of all your cats and dogs were there; your unloved garden’s birds, the uneaten in their thousands, and the pint-glass spiders, and the flies you would not swat, the fleas in the fur, every stray, and all their offspring lined up as a mark of respect, and their eulogies did not stop when the builders came. The Tapers 00:00 / 00:35 He entered the hallway in needles, touched up paintwork with strokes, darned the holes in my skin. Even the under-the-floorboard spaces basked in his rays, misers for a hoard that won’t be kept. The street’s fanlights and keyholes drank him in and when he left they thirsted for him. Now shadows come. I shut the blinds. The dust motes lose their spotlight. I put away the tapers. Publishing credits I Draw a Map of Where We’re Going: Berfrois Poem in Which the Ink Runs Out / The Tapers: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Radka Thea Otípková read poems for wave 9 of literary poetry journal iamb. Radka Thea Otípková wave 9 spring 2022 back next the poet Though her first language is Czech, Radka Thea Otípková fell in love with English as a young adult. Her poetry has been featured in B O D Y , The North , Moria and Tears in the Fence . In 2017, her pamphlet The Edge of Anything was shortlisted in the Poetry Business International Book and Pamphlet Competition. Her poem Coup de grâce was shortlisted in the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition that same year. Thea won the Waltham Forest Poetry Competition in 2019, and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. the poems Tut’s Tomb Talks 00:00 / 01:17 I am waiting for you. Part of my wall will need to go to get you in. It will never heal, this is how they'll find me, small, perfunctory, unfit for a king, but I'll hold it all: chariots, thrones, trumpets, perfumes, precious oils, lapis and gold, and apricots, oh, apricots, I'll often imagine them perishing in the dark long after they have gone, I'll recall the odour of lamb changing in strength, from a mere waft to a putrid punch – who'd ever think in cessation there is so much life – no, no eternity's resins and balms can stop the bustle of dying in the jars housing your liver and lungs, or in the muffled echo of your anatomy's final sarcophagus. I'll never miss you. You will never not be with me and when even the deaths have died and there's nothing left but desiccated time, I shall still keep the breathing riddle of you inside your missing heart. Marble 00:00 / 00:45 Trace its veins and swirls. Speak of impurities. Say clay, silt, sand. Say chert. Say guilt. Forgive me. Send the light unstonily deep, let it spill onto its ashen wax. Mramor, marmor, marmo, marmori, go, look for it, find it in any language, any it, any us, any you, any torpor, any suspended hope, close its cold graceful finger in your warm, wet, mortal mouth and wait for it to prune. Coup de grâce 00:00 / 01:08 In the end his body puked him out as if it were only a stomach and a mouth. It didn't let him just slip away. But maybe it matters less than we think. Look at his mother. There she is. No longer tearing at the meat of what remains, but opening the window. The night is there. What can you do but make a simple gesture that might mean anything. Hand on chest. Fingertips on lips. Or just stand however gravity wants you to. The night is launching a skin boat. No prayers are heard. If you lean out a little, you’ll see it too. The night. The moon. The overflowing eye of a fish cooking. Publishing credits Tut's Tomb Talks / Coup de grâce: B O D Y Marble: Tears in the Fence

Hear poet Di Slaney read poems for wave 13 of literary poetry journal iamb. Di Slaney wave 13 spring 2023 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 David Butler read poems for wave 11 of literary poetry journal iamb. David Butler wave 11 autumn 2022 back next the poet David Butler's third poetry collection, Liffey Sequence , was published in 2021 – the same year as his second short story collection, Fugitive . His novel, City of Dis , was shortlisted for Irish Novel of the Year 2015. the poems Distancing 00:00 / 00:53 Now we are wintering – the whole hive stupefied to silence, each in their cell who isn’t soldiering, an inmate of a new Shalott – the cities, simulacra: drone-shot piazzas; enchanted palaces; empty trainset trains; vistas dreamed by de Chirico; traffic lights sequencing the memory of traffic – confined while, ineluctably, somewhere else, the toll, the toll, until we’re numbed by the scale of it; each week, the heat and bustle more distant, more unlikely; nothing to feed but waxing apprehension: what will eclose this long cocooning, and on what tentative wings? And then the sun broke through 00:00 / 00:46 A sea of jade and muscatel; the sky, gun-metal. Landward, the storm-portending birds, white-lit, Riding wild contours of wind, uplift To tilt at the raucous crows. This Is how it is to live, the ticker tells, Looping the floor of the newsfeed. Somewhere, an outrage; an airstrike; Somewhere, a politic withdrawal. This Is how it is to live: the wind blowing The charcoal of crows’ feathers; The rent in the clouds; oblique tines beating Sudden ochre out of a sullen ocean. These Are Not Days 00:00 / 00:46 These are not days, they are shadows flitting over the too-familiar ground, dry and rubble strewn, where our choices are buried. These are not days, these shades, tremulous, mere changes of light. Quiet as thieves, as witnesses, they slip past in silent legion. Count them up, and they come to years, but years empty of substance. They are the dry husks of our lives, the whisper inside the hourglass. Days are not the coinage of will, as once we imagined. One day they rise like locusts, to devour us. Publishing credits Distancing / These Are Not Days: Liffey Sequence (Doire Press) And then the sun broke through: All the Barbaric Glass (Doire Press)