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Hear poet Heidi Beck read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Heidi Beck back next the poet Heidi Beck grew up in a small New Hampshire town – emigrating to the UK in 1998, where she now lives in Bristol. She holds an MA in English Literature from the University of Chicago, and an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University. Her poems have been published in The Rialto , Magma , Poetry Ireland Review, The North, Butcher's Dog , Finished Creatures , Under the Radar and The Alchemy Spoon . Heidi also has poems with The Friday Poem and And Other Poems . She was longlisted in the 2020 UK National Poetry Competition. the poems Hunting Season 00:00 / 02:35 A girl steps from a yellow bus at Loon Pond Road, anticipating a long walk home—down the hill, around the pond, past the swamp with the beaver dam, the final stretch just woods—with her heavy bag of books. It’s hunting season, and the men are out in pick-up trucks, stalking through the woods with ammo, scopes and shotguns, dressed in their camo, carrying coolers stuffed with cans of Budweiser, Coors, Tuborg Gold. The girl puts on a safety vest, flimsy fabric in fluorescent orange, begins to sing—Supertramp, Fleetwood Mac, all the lyrics to Evita —loud and long, so they hear she is not a deer, so loud she does not hear the pick-up truck slow behind her. It pulls ahead, stops, just past the swamp. Hello, Honey, where you heading to? She smells the beer as they corral her. Let us help, all smiles and hands. The book bag drops, the vest falls off, she’s on her knees, white rump to the air, trying to keep her tail down. She shakes her head, now fuzzy and furred, nose dark as dirt, everything narrowed. Her ears stretch, eyes widen, gaze becomes fixed, the world slows. She remains still, their laughter like an echo, then lifts herself on spindly legs, fragile bones at risk as she attempts to kick, hooves flailing. She tries to buck and punch, awkward in these limbs. Flanks damp, she spins, all panting ribs, spins again, falls. A girl steps out of the forest, arriving for dinner, late. They glare at her clothes, her hair, her wet, evasive face. She tries to describe how she was a deer. Stop! they cry, stop with your lies, your make- believe tales. Don’t bring this trouble here. All the Things Flying are Overwhelming 00:00 / 01:34 Even here, which feels like home, I need to be ready for the planes, the sucking sound and roar, the possible explosion— I’m mapping the trajectory of falling and flame while trying to track the flamingos, their splayed-out necks, the pink under wings as they jockey and speed, then they’ve gone too far and a flash of godwits whistling past, turning white turning black left white right black white black and he shouts You’re missing the spoonbill, just over your head! Didn’t you get it? and I swing my lens and there’s only an egret flapping to splash too late but then storks, Shit , my settings are all wrong, wheeling higher and higher, keep calm, find the pattern, pull them into the frame and keep on walking past the mountain of salt to Iberian magpies in the pine tree shade and don’t startle the hoopoe on the manicured grass, then the bright yellow spot of a weaver bird calling from the reeds by the lake, but look up, maybe an osprey or eagle, how the gulls squawk and lift in a tangle and a pintail duck crash-lands by an ibis, startling a grebe and everything’s flying and the crack of a golf ball and I flinch, remembering that man and the blood pouring out from under his hands. Family Bible 00:00 / 03:00 GENESIS On the first day I watched The Flintstones , The Jetsons , Sylvester and Tweety. I created sculptures from slices of American Cheese. I climbed up my slide and saw that it was good. EXODUS And so 2.6 million men were sent to Vietnam; another 40,000 fled to Canada. LOTTERY The Law said birthdates should be placed in capsules, mixed in a shoebox, transferred to a glass jar. NUMBERS The birthdates of three of my uncles were chosen. GEORGE He raised his hand when they asked who could type, and stayed behind the lines, tapping out words like defoliation. He didn’t know about the truce between Agent Orange and his chromosomes until he was nearly sixty, when we learned how acute lymphocytic leukaemia could kill you, and how quickly. HARRY He remained in combat, first with ‘the Gooks,’ who took out part of his intestine, and then with Benedictine and brandy and blackouts, with nicotine and nightmares. The hemochromatosis turned his skin grey, the liver cancer waited for the lung cancer to get him first. He died on the bathroom floor, haemorrhaging from a shot of chemotherapy. 1 PETER He once kept a pet duck and ordered a crocodile by mail. He could recite the statistics of every attack by a Great White Shark. He met the love of his life over there, Heroin. He married her, became a panhandler, settled down to a lifetime’s free access to methadone. 2 PETER He sits in a classroom of medical students at Yale, Exhibit A, a shrunken, shivery gnome in a beanie, insisting that everyone would be happier with Heroin. WIDOWS Katheryn and Antoinette. REVELATION On Christmas Day my father is on his seventh mission, flying cargo out of Okinawa, with seven Vietcong shooting at his tail. I visit Santa on his Throne in the belly of a Lockheed C-130 Hercules, the seventh child to sit on his knee. I beg him please could he bring me a Barbie. He gives me this Bible, full of Good News, instead. Publishing credits Hunting Season: Live Canon Anthology 2020 (Live Canon) All the Things Flying are Overwhelming: Finished Creatures (Issue 6) Family Bible: The North (Issue 63)

Hear poet Ed Garvey Long read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Ed Garvey Long back next the poet Life coach Ed Garvey-Long is a queer poet from North London. He has an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, and published his first pamphlet, The Living Museum , in 2019. Ed's poems have featured in Under the Radar , Perverse , clavmag and harana poetry . His hobbies include hand-sewing quilts, and long walks with his husband. the poems Visitor 00:00 / 01:06 I look up from my muesli and Jane Austen’s in my kitchen, red-cheeked from dancing and tiny like a museum mannequin. She comes to join me at the table, doesn’t say a word, smiling warmly like we share a funny truth. I don’t say a word either – what would she make of my accent? She looks around bewildered but taking it all in her stride. Maybe she often falls out of time to join gay men eating their muesli? We look at each other awkwardly again with beaming smiles and a sense of when is this going to end? She goes to speak, looking at me directly, but she fades out, and then she's gone. Sunday in the Woods 00:00 / 01:10 All the dogs follow us home. At first we pretend it’s an inconvenience, but then we start dancing and skipping with a conga line of cavapoos and dachshunds, labradors and cockers, huskies, newfoundlanders and chihuahuas gambolling and prancing behind us. Once home, we thrive drenched in dog slobber, swimming in kibble and poo bags – our flat’s a Pets At Home warehouse. But we love them all endlessly, yes. We love them all more than the bored middle-class families did. We love the chaos of it, we love the glory and the noise. And the love: we love the love of having them with us, falling over each other in an abundant pile, a glorious fur phantasmagoria. Borrowed Light 00:00 / 00:43 Friday and I pick off the moss of this week and let myself stand in brightness streaming through our modest windows yellowing my books the snake plant likes to be crowded and the song thrush is back to nest if we have anything it is borrowed light warm on our faces large and powerful and second-hand Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Ken Cockburn read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Ken Cockburn back next the poet Poet and translator Ken Cockburn spent several years at the Scottish Poetry Library before going freelance to work in education, care and community settings – often in collaboration with visual artists. His most recent collection is Floating the Woods . Ken's also the man behind the pamphlet Edinburgh: poems and translations , which features work written for the guided walks he leads in the city’s Old Town. He also translated from the German Christine Marendon's Heroines from Abroad . the poems Hands 00:00 / 01:37 These hands have buckled belts and fastened buttons These hands have howked the tatties from the ground These hands have handled cutlery and weapons These hands have picked the apples from the bough Hands to hold a pen or blade Hands to strike and cup a match Hands to give the eyes some shade Hands to take another catch These hands have spooned out medicines and teas These hands have painted watercolour scenes These hands have tinkled old piano keys These hands have worked industrial machines Hands to turn another page Hands to hoist and set the sails Hands applaud those on the stage Hands with dirty fingernails These hands in tearooms picked up cakes and fancies These hands have sharpened pencils with a knife These hands held partners at the weekend dances These hands have mapped the progress of a life Hands to scrub and peel potatoes Hands to cup a baby’s head Hands to knit a balaclava Hands to smooth the unmade bed Hands to give a proper measure Hands to stitch the binding thread Hands up when you know the answer Hands to shush what’s best unsaid Ward 00:00 / 00:48 I keep my diaries in a large bookcase my mother told me crossly, years ago, she was now giving to my sister. Fine, fine. I left with what did belong to me, returning sooner than expected when, days before the move, my father collapsed. I went to visit him in hospital as he convalesced and took my daughter who, at eighteen months, was still innocent of past and future, caveats, grudges, grip and slow release. Let property wait. The ward dispenses all we need for now. Rodney 00:00 / 00:58 At that school at that time there was no choice: rugby. Skinny, tall and slow I was put in the second row, scrummed and pushed on cue. Asthmatic, on cold days I wheezed until my lungs gave in. I was keen. I wanted to be good enough for the first fifteen unlike Rodney, disinclined to bother. Played at full-back to avoid set pieces, on the whole, he was left untroubled. Once we were on the same team; a breakaway left only Rodney between the runner and our line. 'Tackle him!' I shouted, but he stood his ground and the ball was touched down. At that moment I could only admire his simple refusal to play the game. Publishing credits Hands: part of Lapidus Scotland's Working with ‘Hands’ and Living Voices Ward: exclusive first publication by iamb Rodney: Poetry Scotland (No. 101)

Hear poet Hannah Linden read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Hannah Linden © Jeanette Mullins back next the poet Hailing from a northern working-class background but living now in ramshackle social housing in Devon, Hannah Linden has had her poetry published in Acumen , Lighthouse , Magma , New Welsh Review , Tears in the Fence , Under the Radar and elsewhere. She won the Cafe Writers Poetry Competition in 2021, and was highly commended in the Wales Poetry Award 2021. Hannah's debut pamphlet is The Beautiful Open Sky , and she's currently working towards her first full poetry collection. the poems What the Wind Said 00:00 / 01:48 There’s no doubt I was already buried. I was prone and silent so it’s no surprise people talked about me in the third person. I was the family problem—the musty smell from a corner, the already gone but lingering. I did everything underground. Even my thinking was hidden from me. Up would come an idea— a fruit that was perhaps poisonous. I didn’t know how to trust anything. I felt the rooms of me become caves half full of water, somewhere, somewhere. My body was a disconnect. I was blind and deaf. Threads of me stretched thin, deep below the family carpet. I wanted to be gone, threw spores to the wind— tiny pieces of conversation seeking release, some lichen-yearn escape from a spent flower burst. There was no romance in it, no fairytale quest. I was turning myself into nothing, drifting on thin air. I don’t know who whispered onto a breeze the direction to a crack in the pavement. It was a small thing, small kindness, like I was alive—like I should be alive. The Fight 00:00 / 01:33 She said HE had packed my things, boxes stacked under the stairs, ready for the off. I tasted nothing of the reconciliation supper, the too- light chatter of my brothers, my sister's over-long hug as we whispered goodbye. But I felt Mum's silence in the car, the negative pull until I was a black hole sucking everything into my void, except her. She sat on the edge of Nan's spare bed. You will never come home again. I am a half-circle. I am an apple falling from the tree. When she left, I slit open the boxes to search for my overall: my dead dad's shirt, the hold of his undying smell. My step-father had thrown away this rag of him—the remnant Dad gave me for when there’s dirty work to do. How he'd kept me clean. I roll up my sleeves, remember bare arms, tattoos he'd regretted— it's my skin being bloodied now. Light 00:00 / 01:35 When I first climbed out it was simply the absence of him. Then the absence of pain in the shoulders that I hadn’t known was connected to him, like shadows are. Then a ladder started to form, simple steps like noticing I enjoyed the sound of a ticking clock. Or being able to turn over in bed, turn on a lamp to read, or open the curtains to the moon. Ladders of light are not a form of magic. Sometimes they are silence in a room that is not always aware of the sounds in another. I wasn’t used to climbing, the muscles in my legs weary from lack of use. Resting on a ladder of light takes practice. I made some of the rungs into ledges. Rested with my children. Sometimes it’s best not to look back or try to calculate how far there is left to climb. In the hollows at the back of the rock face, pressed hard into the surface, the imprint of women’s fingers, more felt than visible, waiting to be found. Publishing credits What the Wind Said / Light: exclusive first publication by iamb The Fight: The Beautiful Open Sky (V. Press)

Hear poet Jinny Fisher read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jinny Fisher back next the poet Before writing poetry, Jinny Fisher was a classical violinist, a teacher, and a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Her poems have since appeared in Lighthouse, Against the Grain , The Interpreter’s House , Under the Radar , Tears in the Fence , Prole , Ink, Sweat & Tears and Osmosis . Jinny's writing has been commended and placed in national and international competitions. She was first runner-up in The Interpreter’s House Open House Competition in 2016, as well as in Prole Laureate in 2020. Jinny also runs the Poetry Pram: taking poetry to audiences at festivals for random one-to-one readings. Her pamphlet, The Escapologist , was out in 2019. the poems Privilege 00:00 / 01:25 Aged eight, my brother walks through the cathedral school’s stone doorway. He is assigned a number, to mark with indelible ink inside his shoes. He is taught only by men who have been taught only by men. Big boys creep to the beds of shaking small boys, who wake in cold, damp sheets. Masters walk pretty boys upstairs, for personal attention, special education. * But my brother can pitch a note, so is chosen to be an apprentice chorister, learning melody and polyphony from the boys around him. Cantoris and Decani , the Cathedral choir stalls become his refuge; his friends are animal misericords under ancient polished seats. He floats to the rhythm of versicle and response, to refrains of psalms and canticles that swirl up to the fan vaulted Sanctuary ceiling. Praetorius, Tallis, Purcell—their anthems shall cradle and comfort him always. And in peace he shall both lie down and sleep. Retrofocus 00:00 / 01:32 Brownie 127: The Beach. As we skimmed the deeps, his freckled back was my boat. I felt the rise and fall of shoulder blades under my thumbs, his mouth swivelling into view as he gasped for breath. Look: a squinty grin, a cartwheel, a sandcastle – fortified against the tide. Asahi Pentax: The Shed. Dust-coated cobwebs, thick as tea towels, draped the windows. I dangled my legs from the workbench, viced the battens while he sawed, and there were so many splinters to be gouged. Look: a table – sanded and glossed, a captain’s chair, three splay-backs. Nikon F: The Studio. A windowless shed at the end of the garden. Only my friend was with him. We all knew there were cameras on tripods, banks of flash-guns, umbrellas to diffuse the glare. I imagine his camouflaged murmurs as her blouse falls to the floor. Listen: Lovely – peep from under your lids. Now – a little smile? Little Brother, Big Sister 00:00 / 00:38 At the back of Deb’s wardrobe, Dan finds the frock: pink satin frills, unicorns, fairies— soon to be sent to the charity shop. Grandma’s beads from the dressing-up box set off the shine in his wavy blond hair. His unisex trainers match Deb’s rainbow socks. Dan poses and pouts to the full-length mirror, catwalks into the kitchen with a shrill ta-da! Father’s eyes roll. He storms out, slams the door. Publishing credits Privilege / Little Brother, Big Sister: exclusive first publication by iamb Retrofocus: The Escapologist (V. Press)

Hear poet Rachael Clyne read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Rachael Clyne © Jinny Fisher back next the poet Rachael Clyne (she/her) has been published in journals including Tears in the Fence , Shearsman , The Rialto , Lighthouse and Ink Sweat & Tears . She's also had work anthologised in #MeToo: A Women's Poetry Anthology , Queer Writing for a Brave New World and Rebel Talk: Poems from the Climate Emergency . Her prize-winning collection, Singing at the Bone Tree , addresses our broken connection with nature – while her pamphlet, Girl Golem , explores her Jewish migrant heritage and sense of otherness. the poems Girl Golem 00:00 / 01:27 The night they blew life into her, she clung bat-like to the womb-wall. A girl golem, a late bonus, before the final egg dropped. She divided, multiplied, her hand-buds bloomed; her tail vanished into its coccyx and the lub-dub of her existence was bigger than her nascent head. She was made as a keep-watch, in case new nasties tried to take them away. The family called her chotchkele , their little cnadle , said she helped to make up for lost numbers – as if she could compensate for millions. With X-ray eyes, she saw she was trapped in a home for the deaf and blind, watched them blunder into each other’s neuroses. Her task, to hold up their world, be their assimilation ticket, find a nice boy and mazel tov – grandchildren! But she was a hotchpotch golem, a schmutter garment that would never fit, trying to find answers without a handbook. When she turned eighteen, she walked away, went in search of her own kind, tore their god from her mouth. The golem legend is of a man made from clay and Kabbalistic spells to protect Jews from persecution. Rewilding the Body Based on Isobella Tree’s account of rewilding Knepp House Farm 00:00 / 01:06 The ribs of my country jut, its dreams gutted, hopes tilled to exhaustion. Fault lines exposed by monoculture expectation, by intensively farmed ambition. Let thistle stitch my wounds, as painted-lady caterpillars feast on the prickles. Let pigs unzip my paths with cracks for bastard toadflax and meadow-clary. Let ragwort flourish as one hundred and seventy-seven insect species thrive on its bad reputation. Let longhorn cattle tramp hoof-print pools for fairy shrimp, water crowfoot, stonewort. And one moonlit night – nightingales will return to fill my country with their song. Plague Times 00:00 / 03:35 At Passover, we dipped a finger into our wine. We splashed a drop, for each plague named. We did not rejoice. I BLOOD On hands, in every breath, in gullet and gizzard, in belly of whale, from every littered shore, we the seas incarnadine. II FROGS After ice-melt, I pulled three frogs, bloated and stinking, from the pond. Can we afford to lose them? Slugs will flourish in this unlikely spring. III FLIES Feast on our flesh, they wriggle their fatted way, before winging to offshore havens, leaving us a humanless world. IV WILD BEASTS In Chernobyl, wolf-law rules empty dachas, factories. Bears refill forests. Here, Adonis Blue butterflies will thrive on Salisbury Plain. Rats and dogs will shelter in car shells. V CATTLE PLAGUE Play-barns with swings and muzak, and no place for chickens. Carousel feed-troughs rotate past cattle. Pigs gaze through gratings at a crack of sky. VI BOILS This winter virus has no end. The people cough their way into summer. Vaccinations, rumoured to be toxic, do not help. An unreliable source blames chemtrails. VII HAIL First, snow, so deep. That night, rain. By morning the window – solid ice. On the ground, black ice, invisible. We could not step outside. Next day, hail thuds onto the roof. Hail, snow, a sound like falling corpses– these are surely plague times. VIII LOCUSTS Gobbling hoards turn Friday black, as they swarm through shopping malls, stampede for their white gods, trample one another for plasma screens. IX DARKNESS A firmament of LED glare and twinkle of red and white lights thread highways through the undarkened night. The only visible stars are on the ground. X DEATH OF FIRSTBORN Floods destroy the power station. Fish without scales, tumour-ridden, cover the ocean to its farthest coast. There will be no offspring. XI PARTING OF WAVES Red the ocean, gone the ice, gone coastline. No more trips to the seaside. No sandcastles. No fish to fry. No bargains to buy. No creatures to catch. No trees. No insects to bite. No birds to shoot. No property to buy. No planes to fly. No God to part the waves. Just burning bushes. Publishing credits Plague Times: Shearsman (Issue 121/122) Girl Golem: Tears in the Fence (No. 67) Rewilding the Body: Riggwelter (Issue 18)

Poet directory and quarterly journal iamb is inspired by The Poetry Archive. Hear contemporary poets read three of their own poems. about poets Remembering Ivor Daniel © 2025

Hear poet Kathryn Bevis read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Kathryn Bevis back next the poet Hampshire Poet 2020-21 and founder of The Writing School , Kathryn Bevis won several awards, including first prizes in poetry competitions run by Poets & Players and Against the Grain Press. Shortlisted for the Nine Arches Press Primers scheme, Kathryn was longlisted for the National Poetry Competition. Her poems appeared in print and online, and were broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Kathryn also designed and delivered ACE and county council-funded Poetry for Wellbeing projects for adults in mental health and substance misuse recovery settings, as well as in prisons. Her debut collection was The Butterfly House . the poems starlings 00:00 / 01:50 in the beginning is the skydeep and the skydeep is shapeless and hollow and blankness dwells there and the bodyus broods over the belly of the horizon clinging to skeletons of trees and we say let there be wavetrail and there is wavetrail and we divide the wavetrail from the skydeep and the outpour from the inshrink and we call the wavetrail WE ARE and we call the skydeep IT IS and we say let there be curlsmoke in the midst of the skyswim and let it divide the WE ARE from the IT IS and we fashion the curlsmoke from the skyswim and it is so and we call the curlsmoke ONE and the skyswim we call MANY and we say let the breakwave be heard among the MANY and the pebblerush also and we call the breakwave FLESH and the pebblerush we call SPIRIT and thus it is then we say let the SPIRIT be divided into the skybright we will call LIGHT and the outsnuff we will call DARKNESS and let DARKNESS bring about a great shitting upon the earth and we say let DARKNESS herald the downpull and the stenchsweet, the dirtroost and the clutchheart and so it goes glory be to the skydeep and the bodyus the curlsmoke and the skyswim glory be to the breakwave and the pebblerush the dirtroost and the outsnuff for we are the MANY we are the ONE Tidal Race For Ollie 00:00 / 01:29 This morning found you capsized and sinking in the campsite kitchen, bloodless, clammy, haunted by the world and all its doubles. They hauled you off in their blue-light bus and I rode beside, squeezed your shoulder tight, willed you back to yesterday. Drowning here, the reflected twin of everything swims in your eyes, pulls you far from reach. They wheel you out and in, from scan to scan, pump dye around your veins and brain to find the chink that let the shadows seep inside. Hours slide behind this green curtain and still you get your sums wrong, still believe in clones of fingers, faces, clocks that press at the corners of your eyes, maintaining they exist, insisting on their right to be here. Come back. We’ll grip the cliff edge while the seal’s sleek head lifts above the water’s surface, melts to gloss again. Gannets will plunge, gold-hooded, into the tidal race and splash to scoop out cloud-marked mackerel, flaring silver in the sun. Matryoshka 00:00 / 01:20 We’re all in the family way. Full of ourselves. In the pudding club, my dear. On our shelf, we gather dust like dandruff and listen to the sound of human children growing. Their girls – once born – are great squishy, smelly things that pule and puke and shit the sodding bed. Not ours. We are a nest with all our pretty chicks inside. We are the hatchling and the egg. Each of us is mother to a daughter who is pregnant with the next in line. Our bodies rhyme, like the faces of the moon. All except our smallest. We don’t talk about it but let me say it softly: she was born with no space inside. That’s right. She’s wood all the way through. It’s not that we judge her, understand, but we know (as only mothers can) she’ll never get to split herself in two, she’ll never have to bear the others as we do. Publishing credits starlings: winner of the 2019 Against the Grain Press Poem Competition / Fenland Poetry Journal (Issue 4) Tidal Race: shortlisted in the 2020 Live Canon Single Poem Competition / Live Canon Anthology 2020 (Live Canon) Matryoshka: commended in the 2021 International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine / 2021 Hippocrates Prize Anthology (Hippocrates Initiative)

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

Hear poet Rachel Smith read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Rachel Smith back next the poet New Zealander Rachel Smith, a chef and Open Floor Movement Teacher, has made London her home. She's had work published in various journals and anthologies, including The North , Magma and The Book of Love & Loss . Her recordings of her text Bed Unbound toured Scotland on a bus as part of the Day of Access . Rachel's poems for iamb are part of her ongoing project, A Manual for Dying . the poems We die in stages 00:00 / 00:55 Claire wakes us at 6am. She’s already called Mike, so we all go to your room. You are still curled up, could be asleep, except your rattling breath is absent. We toast you with whiskey as the sun rises. You are soft dead, still warm. The undertaker comes after breakfast, takes you away. You are back early afternoon, laid out on your bed in your town clothes – moleskin trousers and Guernsey jersey. Ben and Penny come in to say goodnight. Penny says Antone is really dead now, eh . I know what she means. You were soft dead before, now you are dead dead. Firewood 00:00 / 01:03 We all knew Dad wouldn’t want a shiny coffin. But the pine ones are expensive and there’s not much money. So Matt and Mike turn Dad's woodshed into a workshop, get macrocarpa planks from the local sawmill, debate the design. Matt spends three days sawing, planing, sanding, worrying it’ll be too heavy, that Dad won’t fit, that the bottom will fall out. He fusses over the strips along the top: Dad was so good at lines. The morning of the funeral we test it out. Matt gets in and my cousins and uncles lift, shaking it slightly, laughing in the way you do when life and death are close. Matt gets out relieved, shakes himself, speaks at the funeral about Dad’s love of fire, says I’ve built you a coffin of the finest macrocarpa. Provisions 00:00 / 01:12 Six men – sons, brother, nephews, old friend – lift Dad from his bed in a blanket sling, swearing as they carry this body that does not bend around corners. There is relief when he’s in, that he fits. We put in earth from farms he loved. Roses, seashells, fern fronds. A bridle and dog collar. His radio. Rosary beads. Niall Fergusson’s 'Empire': That’ll give him something to argue with. Jamie makes him his cheese and onion sandwich. His teapot that drove us all crazy with its constant dribble but which we miss as soon as it’s gone. The half bottle of Jura from the night before. Tui sing. Father Joe says a prayer and the lid goes on. The men lift Dad into the hearse, silently. We are bound in this ancient rite, where carrying a coffin is still one of the most sacred things. Publishing credits We die in stages / Provisions: exclusive first publication by iamb Firewood: Magma 75

Poet Clarissa Aykroyd reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Clarissa Aykroyd back next the poet Clarissa Aykroyd grew up in Victoria, Canada and now lives in London, where she works as a publisher. Her poetry has appeared in UK and international journals such as Black Bough Poetry, The Interpreter's House, The Island Review, Lighthouse, The Missing Slate, The Ofi Press Magazine and Shot Glass Journal. Her pamphlet, Island of Towers , was published by Broken Sleep Books in 2019. the poems I dream the perfect ride 00:00 / 00:36 It was raining and the cheap black gloves chafed my hands. The reins and curved neck’s crest, a wave. I blinked the rain, I was horse and river – we flowed the jump but my clumsy mouth-jag scared the horse and I had to dream sunlight to calm him. He listened with his mind, breathed, so black and sleek and slicker than a seal in the patience of the rain, the white noise of the rain, his cantering a mountain beneath me, breaking the earth, living-deep. Amrum 00:00 / 00:22 Cloud spiral. Here – pale bone of the light. Sand riddles hissing – at my feet, my neck. Rising now the rosehip moon. The sky, bitten. All flags torn. Watson on Dartmoor 00:00 / 00:53 I first saw it in sun, edged with yellow like the dragged note of a violin: and yet, and yet something just out of tune like the faintest rot beneath the sweetness. It’s not of the earth, the moor. You drive as though ascending – to hell; mist rolled in, the wet air choked me. The light walked backwards and vanished. The grey tors grinned down on us. Holmes would love this, I thought. The touch of drama. And then came the gates of Baskerville Hall. Well, you know the rest. But the moor, that space, that’s what I can’t explain. How it was not of this world. How its clouds were close enough to touch, and yet its skies were high enough to elude my faltering translation. Publishing credits I dream the perfect ride: exclusive first publication by iamb Amrum: Island of Towers (Broken Sleep Books) Watson on Dartmoor: Ink, Sweat & Tears Share

Hear poet Ozge Lena read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Ozge Lena 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 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 Rachel Deering read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Rachel Deering back next the poet Poet Rachel Deering lives in Bath, England, with her cat, and works in the field of mental health supporting those who are homeless. She has a love of the natural world and what it can tell us about ourselves. Rachel is a director of writing website ABC Tales – where she also shares her own new poetry under username onemorething . She supports Signe Maene with Book Worm Saturday on Twitter, and can also be found tweeting poetry, art, nature, myth, folklore plus photos of her cat from her own account. Her first poetry collection is Crown of Eggshells . the poems Crow 00:00 / 01:07 My heart is a crow, its wingbeats, a pulse; the doctor declared it a medical impossibility, but these pills are seeds, I said, and this hospital bed, the black earth. Krähe, I called it – its name, the bark of its sound, ‘yes,’ I lie, ‘yes, every morning now seems to be a bright welcome to life.’ I am used to saying yes. In laboratories, crows have demonstrated their magic – this is how I wield stone to make water, this is how I bend metal to make food. A doctor diagnoses, and I try to hush the night sung inside my chest, of battles and their fields of dead, I do not tell anyone ‘no’, I understand cras, I understand how to endure today for the liberty of tomorrow. The Dead Want Their Moon Back 00:00 / 00:55 The toad winked an eye into the side of his head, unrolled his tongue and snatchgulped slippery the lozenge of a slug. The darkness said – do not steal the moon or the dead will find you and fetch it back, their pearly stone, their lifeless rock. Dew settled upon the toad’s cratered back, the seas no longer ebbed and flowed, owls were struck dumb. I weighed the night on the scales of absence until nothing was or ever could be marvellous anymore, I cut the moon into new quarters, I buried the light. Salamander 00:00 / 01:32 When it rained, you blamed me, and when your cattle died or the well gave up bad water – it was all my doing. So much so, that now you do not speak my name, fearing its mustard breath will flame a pouched poison and released, will fire and hiss if uttered. But I have never been that mysterious. Still, I speak in little clicks, undaunted, mutter the meaning of each star upon my back, upon the worm of my body. And I swim in the murk of aquatic dreams, sinewy, watered beneath the smell of pinewood warmed in the sun. Here, you ask me to put out the blaze I started and yet, I only know the cool of wet and stone. I think of the soft, round of my eggs, sticky as creamy mistletoe berries, and what if I could change my skin, regenerate the broken parts, so that when, scales falling away, I can reveal the white dove of my virtue, and how then, maybe then, you might again see the truth of me. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb