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Hear poet Sharon Philips read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Sharon Philips wave 20 winter 2024 back next the poet Bristolian by birth and upbringing, now living in Otley, West Yorkshire, Sharon Phillips began writing poetry when she retired from a career in education. Her poems have since been published, online and in print, in anthologies and journals ranging from The Bridport Prize Anthology 2019 , Under the Radar and The Dawn Treader to Ink Sweat & Tears and The High Window . Her first pamphlet, Liven Yourself Up , appeared in 2024. the poems Prelapsarian 00:00 / 00:44 He is at his most beautiful. Motown is behind him, he’s too strong to be beaten, his cheekbones are sharp, acne scars all healed. At last he feels good about his face. He looks up with a grin, snaps his fingers to the bass line, pushes off the wall with his foot, leaps, moonwalks, spins, slides. He sings, easy, unforced, the songs that mark a decade. There’s no stopping him now, you’d like to think. The hardest thing about hospital 00:00 / 00:45 it’s not the obs trolley rattling me awake not the overhead light blink-blinking not the bleep of stalled infusion pumps not Rachel in the next bed howling whenever she pisses herself not the weary nurse who tells me these ladies are all quite confused not the maggot in my mind worrying why they’ve put me on this ward not cannulas dreadlocking my arms not the steroids prowling my nerves not my mouth gaping for words not the blotches on my brain scan it’s wanting my mum. Consider After Kim Moore 00:00 / 00:59 the early morning cleaners, who rise at five, who dress in the dark for fear of waking their children, who eat cold toast at the bus stop, who lug buckets and hoovers through empty offices, who wipe fingerprints from photos and neaten toys and mascots, who scrub piss and shit from toilet seats and floors, who fear their hours will be cut, who are desperate for money for food and rent and the gas bill, who wonder what it would be like to have a cushy office job, who sweat under sky blue polyester tabards, whose backs ache, feet throb, whose ankles are swollen, who worry they won’t be home when the kids wake up, who'll do it all again tomorrow. Publishing credits Prelapsarian: exclusive first publication by iamb The Hardest Thing About Hospital: Liven Yourself Up (Yaffle’s Nest)  Consider: Black Nore Review (August 26th 2024)

Hear poet Courtenay Schembri Gray read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Courtenay Schembri Gray wave 13 spring 2023 back next the poet Born and raised in the North of England, Courtenay Schembri Gray reared her head as a budding poet with a penchant for the macabre. Since finding kinship in the rich verse of Sylvia Plath, Courtenay has amassed a large amount of publishing credits. Her poetry collection, The Maggot on Maple Street , was published in 2023. the poems Charlie 00:00 / 01:18 His stubby fingers grope me, and I scream only air. I am a huntress, yet I despise the taste of flesh and blood. With his half-dead slant, the man buries my despair. Muddy waters slough the sin off my back while I violate my pear. Daddy’s belt loops around schoolboy errors, threatening to flood. His stubby fingers grope me, and I scream only air. Upon the eve of moonstruck men, I open my cervical lair. You heave rare meat onto the table, harder than you should. I am a huntress, yet I despise the taste of flesh and blood. You swaddle her like a baby, leaving only shoes for her to wear. When we first met, I don’t think you understood. His fingers grope me, and I scream only air. We stand on porcelain cracks, silent, with nothing to declare Somehow, despite it all, you found me like an earring stud. I am a huntress, yet I despise the taste of flesh and blood. You have turned me into a woman, but I will not share. Let’s leave the world with a gift, richer than others would. His fingers grope me, and I scream only air. I am a huntress, yet I despise the taste of flesh and blood. June Bug 00:00 / 01:19 With Bambi eyes all aflutter, I drink from the well of men. A paper lantern hangs from every bloody coat hanger. Under the cloak of 6 am, I am to be born again. Lost in a June bug cocktail, I fall for a Parisienne. He bought me roses, and I threw them in anger. With Bambi eyes all aflutter, I drink from the well of men. You know, I think about you every now and then. For a red-blooded man, you were placid in manner. Under the cloak of 6 am, I am to be born again. To my dirty photographs, you would say très bien . Rubbing coconut rum into skin, I would yammer. With Bambi eyes all aflutter, I drink from the well of men. Darling, I need you like I need goddamn medicine. Inside a chrysalis, I preach grief-stricken slander. Under the cloak of 6 am, I am to be born again. You left me with echoes of Non, je ne regrette rien . With starry thighs and coal miner skies, I languor. With Bambi eyes all aflutter, I drink from the well of men. Under the cloak of 6 am, I am to be born again. The Maggot on Maple Street 00:00 / 00:55 Shaken from my sleep by yellow taxi dreams; toothpaste is my cork, stopping the wine from sloshing around the great caboose that is I, way off the wagon, face down in the sludge. Moontime butter shoots me in the eye, hot syrup; that sticky pudding, fat with guilt and irony. O’ how I fabricate the lowest despair, the deadliest joy, finer than lace, as impure as rendition. Swear me a fishwife, an earwig, a flotsam woodlouse with but a cube of cheese to stay afloat. I must get back to the desk, to the coffee rings and grassy knolls. To the looking glass, without delay. Publishing credits Charlie: The Book of Korinethians (Pink Plastic Press) June Bug: Idle Ink (March 2022) The Maggot on Maple Street: Roi Fainéant Press (Oct 2022)

Hear poet James Nixon read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. James Nixon wave 11 autumn 2022 back next the poet James Nixon, who teaches at Arden University, is completing his doctoral research into the legacy of Arthur Rimbaud and hauntological poetics at Goldsmiths, University of London. He's a former Royal Holloway Emerging Writer Fellow, a Writer-in-Residence at Cove Park, and a Writer-in-Residence at Phytology, Bethnal Green. the poems Pillowtalk 00:00 / 00:50 The night is a cul-de-sac we’ve been chased into – the houses have foreign coin for eyes. The innocent quiet is not what it seems. Clerical figures carrying taxidermy for comparison roam the undercrofts of sleep slips into place like a contraption round my head. I have been alive today and not done much about it. I have drifted complacent I'm in crisis. Why your arm, slung across my chest, feels so real, I squeeze its meat to send myself some signal, clamp my body to yours. Cashier 00:00 / 01:42 ‘M A T T’. Rhymes with flat, as in deflated, as in a kept birthday balloon shrivelling & bleeding air, as in smoker’s lung. ‘M A T T’, as in not shiny, unremarkable. I don’t think you’re that, ‘M A T T’, but I can tell this shift has you feeling tragic, as in self-esteem, as in the future’s lost collateral. That I should not kiss you, ‘M A T T’, makes me want to smother you lovingly, but always with the idea of quietus in mind. ‘M A T T’ named in air quotes as if you’re hypothetical. Do people feel WELCOME wiping their feet on you ‘M A T T’? Do you wish to leave? Not just this store but this this life. Sea levels are multiplying ‘M A T T’. The planet is ready to belch all over us. Now is not the time to be passing avocados from your right hand to your left hand & mixing greys on your palette of sighs, but slinking from bed while your wife sleeps in & driving undramatic to some port town. As in lobbing your smartphone, ditching your car. As in deciding on an outgoing ferry that colour & thrill are still possible, while the sun is delivered and opened. As in an invitation. As in come away with me ‘M A T T’. The Weather 00:00 / 01:21 When my appendix was removed it was incinerated. There is nothing extra about me. The sun feathers through the blinds – my hip-scar shines like a hieroglyph. The house is climate. I test the acoustics with subtle applause and swan about the patio paved a healthy pink – hit the pool occasionally – – my heart small and hard. Alligators doze in the middle of roads beneath detergent skies. Palm trees droop like exclamations propped against the horizon. The tennis courts – A darker reflection in sliding doors at dusk looks like fire taking off its nightgown. Moths inhaled into the hurricanes of wheel arches are likely screaming on the interstate. And there are widespread riots in urban areas. But I hear blue whales have returned with calves to the Sea of Cortez. I drove through a storm at night but not recently. Sedate is the word – the weather is sedate. Publishing credits Pillowtalk: exclusive first publication by iamb Cashier: earlier draft was shortlisted for the Bristol Poetry Prize The Weather: earlier draft appeared in Ambit (Issue 234)

Hear poet Conor Kelly read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Conor Kelly wave 16 winter 2023 back next the poet Conor Kelly was born in Dublin where he spent his working life teaching in a school. He now lives in Nova Scotia's Western Shore, Canada, from where he runs his Twitter (now X) site, @poemtoday , which is dedicated to short-form poetry. Conor has had poems published in literary magazines in Ireland, Britain, America, Canada and Mexico. the poems The Immaculate Conception 00:00 / 00:53 (Mary speaks) It happened at a feast in Palestine. When the meal was over and the remains were being cleared, somebody slipped on grains and spilled onto my lap enough red wine to make a patch of dress incarnadine. I’ve cleaned it often since, but it retains the faintest shadow of those crimson stains picked up some years ago in Palestine. And when my earthy father sent his seed surging with love into my mother’s womb to match and merge and predispose my fate, why should it, then, from Adam’s stain be freed and not from Eve’s distress at Abel’s tomb? Sometimes it’s hard to understand my faith. Through The Medium 00:00 / 01:27 It is quieter than I had supposed. Often I hear what may be a river, the sound of water infiltrating stone, but I can see nothing at all clearly. It is, if you will pardon the irony, like looking through a glass darkly. Perhaps there is nothing to see. I do not know any more than what I can discover in what is not quite darkness, nor yet light, but a kind of fog in which the dispersed vapours flow past me, continually. There is a faint sweet odour in the air, one which I find hard to identify although it reminds me of aniseed. But there is nothing there to taste, nor any object that feels tangible. I doubt this is either Heaven or Hell. It is far too cold, and there is no one with whom I can share happiness or pain. Not that either emotion excites me. Sometimes I can feel the mild dejection, a kind of post-flu depression. Occasionally, the desolation of unrequited conversation grates. And there are times, times I used to call night, when I crave the consolation of sleep. Most of the time, though, I just want to die. The Writing Spider Argiope aurantia 00:00 / 01:44 They left the poet's desk the way it was the night before he slept and never woke, the night before his final heart attack left one last sheet of paper on that desk half-filled with spider-like and scribbled words with some encircled and with zigzag lines leading to changes in the margins where his latest words were fatally ensnared. There are no spiders in the poet's house. A woman cleans and dusts it every day before it opens to the few who come to visit, for a modest entrance fee, and see the poet's desk the way it was the night before he slept and never woke; and see, also, the view from where he wrote of sunflowers wilting in the summer sun. There is, for those who wander round the back, behind the trash cans, near the café door, between a freshly painted metal bench and the next door garden's large camellia bush, a writing spider busily at work, its stabilimenta (those zigzag lines) catching the sunlight as it shines beneath the black and muted yellow banded legs. Desolation and determination: the poet and the writing spider both weave and unweave their patterns day by day. While every evanescent word evokes the emendation of essential loss, the ritual rebuilding of the web affirms a zest for life. Nevertheless, we all zigzag our way to certain death. Publishing credits The Immaculate Conception: The Irish Times (December 1992) Through the Medium: exclusive first publication by iamb The Writing Spider: The Rotary Dial (August 2016)

Hear poet Yvonne Marjot read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Yvonne Marjot wave 18 summer 2024 back next the poet Yvonne Marjot washed up on the Isle of Mull in 2001 after a varied career that took her round the world. Her poetry, inspired by her surroundings, often links mythology with the natural world. She's been published online as well as in anthologies – the most recent of which being In Flight . Her debut collection, The Knitted Curiosity Cabinet , won Yvonne the 2012 Brit Writers Prize for Poetry. the poems Workshop Inspired by the exhibition at An Tobar, Tobermory, Isle of Mull (August 2021) 00:00 / 00:54 How small a space is a mind, to track and trace our place in this landscape. Old stories retold, folded and pressed; pieces sliced and plotted, conjured in gold or barely guessed. Fabric as palimpsest: stone set on stone, dense with ink, tense with meaning. Complexity bounded, a nexus of time and intent. Tree shadows, courtyards, a village traced and lined, a vision confined, a vestige, a moment: a world unfurled. A tight-woven fastness – a limitless vastness: this place, so small a space to hold a mind. Artist Eve Campbell spent lockdown creating textile art arising from memories of the landscapes and places that inspired her – unfurling the world within the walls of her home. The Smith 00:00 / 01:44 In his hands the smith is holding light, his face caught in its glow, thought bent on his creation. Focused, calm, intent, with all his skill he brings it into life. His grasp is confident, fingers deft and sure. Fluent in his clasp, the tongs coax a fine, subtle spiral from the glowing rod of iron. He wipes his brow on his arm, bends to endure the flare of the forge: hungry, its red mouth roars as air wakes the coals. The living metal twists and writhes, vivid in the shimmering heat. His wrist transmits the impulse. He hefts the weight, pours his strength into the stroke, one with the force of each blow; the hammer knows its task. His neck is a molten column, his face a mask marked by the heat, lit from within like the forge. The anvil is rooted deep in the earth, the coals are the world’s furnace, igniting the heat that hides in the planet’s core. Sinews tighten as he shifts his grip, seeing the work whole. The hot iron smells like blood, like sex. Like life. He straightens, observes, moves it gently into water. Steam tempered, the lucent surface, beaded with droplets, gleams in the light. Outlined in crimson, his hammer lies still. He stands, annealed in the fires of his own skill. Harespell 00:00 / 00:16 The hare lies so calm in her form of grass, but she trembles still in the wind from the hill. For the wind is a spell, and the spell is a word, and the word is the weight of a world. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Michael McGill read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Michael McGill wave 10 summer 2022 back next the poet Michael McGill is a writer from Edinburgh whose work has recently appeared in The Interpreter’s House , Lunate , The Haiku Quarterly and elsewhere. Michael also has work in the Scottish Poetry Library’s Poems by and for Social Workers anthology. As well as performing for Big Word Performance Poetry in Edinburgh, Glasgow and London, Michael has appeared in several episodes of BBC Radio 3’s The Verb. His work has also been featured on the Micro podcast . the poems Puppy Dog Man 00:00 / 02:01 I thought I saw a puppy dog. I did! I did! I saw the Puppy Dog Man! Baroompta-doo-da. Walk tall, Puppy Dog, Puppy Dog, walk tall – Hey there, Puppy Dog Man – Puppy Dog Man never understand; never understand, little Puppy Dog Man, never understand – Let's talk man to man, acrobat to magician, Devil to Christian, honest man to politician on the street, drowning in a sea of integrity, of humanity; 'Such things as these don't please His Majesty!' Baroompta – do do do. Hello? Oliver Speaking speaking. I was talking to the dog, Maury. Please, you're annoying me. Baroompta-doo-da. Lie low, Puppy Dog, Puppy Dog, lie low – Hey there, Puppy Dog Man – Puppy Dog Man take me underground; take me underground, little Puppy Dog Man, take me underground – New street! New street! I wanna live in a new street. I wanna live in your face. I wanna live in the warm puppy dog folds of your skin. Yeah, I wanna live there, man. Woof! Woof! Baroompta-doo-da – walkin' hand in hand with Puppy Dog Man … Pyjamas in the Snow 00:00 / 02:07 Free postcards were scattered all over New York then, filed in metal displays on the walls of clubs and coffee shops, and I’d collect them and tuck them away in my journal, stumbling around like a 1996 Hansel and Gretel reject, and it was January and everywhere was lit like a still from a Blondie video, and sometimes I’d order a Hazelnut Latte and a Sour Cream Mini Bundt Cake, and I’d write home using one of these postcards, back when home-whilst-travelling was a strange place, an exotic village elsewhere, a solipsist’s mirage, a narcissist’s daydream, and then I’d go to the Post Office on East 34th Street and watch these postcards take flight, because I was living life in Technicolor then, but, oh, that boy back at the hostel was a strange one, and he slept in the bed opposite mine in the dorm, and he’d talk about how much he missed ‘The Bay’ and I’d look puzzled, and he asked me why I’d never been to Ireland, and he laughed when I replied, 'Because it’s so far away,' and he seemed homesick and lost, and very sad, so I showed him my postcards, and one was RuPaul’s face in close-up, and he said, 'She’s gorgeous!' – but he’d turn shifty most evenings when a note was stuck to the door because he was late paying for his bed, and the word REMINDER would sit at the top of the page in cold black font, and then he’d disappear for a time and come back later looking dishevelled and used, and then the note on the door would disappear, and one day it was time to pack and head to JFK, and he wasn’t there so I left the RuPaul postcard on his pillow, and I never said goodbye – and back then Jackie 60 nightclub had a hotline you’d call, yeah, it was listed in Time Out , and one night I stood in a phone booth in the lobby of the hostel, and a recorded voice said the theme that week was Scotland and the dress code was ‘tartan tartan tartan’ and, oh, how I wish I’d gone to Jackie 60 in my tartan pyjamas, walking through Manhattan in the snow, but I never did. Celluloid Clown 00:00 / 01:11 'Your poem isn’t a fit for us,' the email read. I recall him emerging; black biro, yellow Post-it. I recall the usual questions: 'To and or to ampersand ?' etc., etc. What is to become of him, I wonder? He doesn’t fit anywhere, it seems. Still, he remains my three-line darling; long-lost relative of that scrawled first draft. 'Your poem isn’t a fit for us,' the email read. Yes, I know he ended up like a circus clown from some campy old film. You know the type of character: always a criminal in hiding (for what are celluloid clowns really, but painted criminals?). 'Your poem isn’t a fit for us,' the email read. In his final scene, he is led to the jailhouse. He hands over his dog (a Boston Terrier) to a young girl and says, 'Take care of him, Cheryl, he’s a good ‘un.' Then he walks away – fade to black. Publishing credits Puppy Dog Man / Celluloid Clown: exclusive first publication by iamb Pyjamas in the Snow: Anser Journal

Hear poet Warrick Wynne read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Warrick Wynne wave 18 summer 2024 back next the poet With three published books to his name, Australian poet Warrick Wynne has had his poetry featured in various Australian and international magazines and journals, including Walleah Press and Varuna, The Writers House Blog . Warrick lives and writes on the Mornington Peninsula, south of Melbourne. His most recent collection is The State of the Rivers and Streams . the poems Hands 00:00 / 00:39 Level 3 is 'Hands': the swathed palm, the unhinged fist, the fingers fractured black or twisted, suspended in slings wrapped in gauze. We all face each other mute as moons. This is what happens when pressure is applied against the grain, this is the flaw in the great architecture what a piece of work ... how easy it is to break this hold we have on things, we can hardly grasp it. Spider Crab 00:00 / 01:08 Above the Victorian Fish poster, (vivid illustrations of the edible denizens of the deep) a white spider crab mounted on a wooden board pinned to the wall as it was in my childhood. I mean, this exact crab, legs now blackening with age was in a (different) fish and chip shop of my youth, brought here, no doubt, with the goods and chattels from some former enterprise, and I recognise it: one giant claw open wide to snap, the other retracted shy, evasive punch and counter-punch. At Hector's Seafood now, the staff wear light blue tops emblazoned with a yellow marlin rising from a vividly tropical sea. I wait for my flake below fading ivory claws, one outrageously enlarged, one curled inward gently like an invitation, or an imploring gesture to the past. At the edge For Harriet 00:00 / 00:27 We walk to the edge of the bay drawn, it seems, to this great dish where you played and swam and now, stand here, with your own baby strapped to you. Could anything be stranger? the three of us beside the sea, the submerged beach where you played a stone wall, the city in the distance whatever next? Publishing credits Hands: The Best Australian Poems 2013 (Black Inc.) Spider Crab: exclusive first publication by iamb At the edge: Love the Words Anthology 2022 (Infinity Books)

Hear poet Pascale Petit read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Pascale Petit wave 6 summer 2021 back next the poet Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in France and Wales, and now lives in Cornwall. She is of French/Welsh/Indian heritage. Her eighth collection, Tiger Girl , was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and won an RSL Literature Matters award while in progress. A poem from this book won the Keats-Shelley Prize. Pascale's seventh collection, Mama Amazonica , won the inaugural Laurel Prize and the RSL’s Ondaatje Prize. Four of her previous collections were also shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize. Petit is widely translated and travelled, particularly in the Amazon rainforest and in India. the poems Walking Fire 00:00 / 04:10 It’s high summer and the grass hisses where the tigress treads, her pads soundless on the tinder track. Her flanks sway, the cubs cool in their amniotic sacs. She is a walking fire her glance a flare that singes my lashes. I seem to be watching her through a veil of snow or ash – the sky as I know it falling falling and when her face comes into focus it’s like the membrane between us tears. She brushes against the jeep as she saunters past on the long patrol of her realm, her fur dripping after a soak in the stream. Can you see me, Gran ? I ask, I’m as close to a tiger as you once were, but I won’t touch. A baby wouldn’t alarm her, but I would. You’re sitting opposite, saying, It was like staring at a frozen sun . Your eyes grow coal-black as you think of the day you were left alone in a tent. I’m staring at the fire in your living room, anthracite glowing with forests of our Coal Age, flickers of fern horsetail clubmoss embers spitting onto the mat like sabre tooths springing from a cave – that split second when we startle and everyone is still alive even my first cat not yet given stripes by the combine harvester as he lay curled in corn. I’d walk over hot coals to get back to you, just to ask one more question about your tiger. But you were only a baby and probably you only remembered remembering not the thing itself. Just as now, I’m only half- remembering the ghost of your fire where we sit like two Ice Age queens worshipping the heat while underneath us the compressed beds of trees buckle under mountain-building. The tigress has passed by now, and is ahead on the path, rolling over the sand, belly-up, revelling in her power. Already she’s spawned three sets of cubs and they’ve forged their own empires. When she leaps onto a stag the whole world slows to hear the grass speak from inside the deer. Slows enough to listen to what trees have to say with the mouths of storms through their leaves. When I’ve firewalked through the dawn of your death my feet scorched on the cinder path to your house, when I’ve opened the gate of your garden – like opening the gate to Tala Zone where wildlife is almost safe – I will land in your armchair in the deepest cave. And then Gran we will talk again about the forests that once reigned on earth the mysteries of beasts who passed through them, the flames of their spirits surging under fur, not one spark escaping. How even their roars are relics of when the great woods blazed. How it was we who discovered fire and with our knowledge lit the fuse. Jungle Owlet 00:00 / 01:54 What you didn’t tell me is how poachers cut off their claws and break bones in one wing so they can’t perch or fly, that their eyes are sold as pujas, boiled in broth, so herdsmen can see in the dark. You didn’t say how sorcerers keep their skulls, their barred feathers, their livers and hearts, or how they drink their blood and tears. You didn’t mention how a tortured owl will speak like a young girl to reveal where treasure is buried. My kind granny who took me in when I was homeless, who sat down this very evening after I had gone to bed and wrote Mother a stern letter, telling her that she must take me back, it doesn’t matter where – Paris, Wales, Timbuktu. No more excuses, you are tired. And here, your slanted writing is almost illegible, but what I think it says is that you cannot look after a teenage owlet. You use your favourite pet name. I’ve never spoken of this before. I call it up my gullet from the pit at the bottom of my thirteenth year, along with my crushed bones, my stolen blood, and I spit it out through my torn-off beak, in language that passes for human. Green Bee-eater 00:00 / 01:03 More precious than all the gems of Jaipur – the green bee-eater. If you see one singing tree-tree-tree with his space-black bill and rufous cap, his robes all shades of emerald like treetops glimpsed from a plane, his blue cheeks, black eye-mask and the delicate tail streamer like a plume of smoke – you might dream of the forests that once clothed our flying planet. And perhaps his singing is a spell to call our forests back – tree by tree by tree . Publishing credits All poems: Tiger Girl (reproduced with gratitude to Bloodaxe Books for its kind permission) Author photo: © Brian Fraser

Hear poet Charlotte Gann read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Charlotte Gann wave 22 summer 2025 back next the poet Charlotte Gann is a writer and editor from Sussex who enjoys walking the South Downs in her spare time. Her first pamphlet was The Long Woman , which saw her shortlisted for the Michael Marks Award in 2012. Two full collections followed: Noir and The Girl Who Cried , as well as another pamphlet, Cargo . Charlotte also founded and runs online hub The Understory Conversation : a space for fellow writers to meet, talk and share in small groups and one to one. the poems The house with no door 00:00 / 00:38 The house with no door looks welcoming, with its wisteria and robins. I can see, through the kitchen window, a bowl of cherries. They’re the brightest, darkest, shiniest cherries. But that window’s shut and bolted. I move on round. I know I shouldn’t walk on flowerbeds. I keep thinking the door must be around the next corner. I’ve lost count now how many times I’ve circumnavigated. In the Classroom of Touch 00:00 / 01:36 This is how you hold a person , Mr Farnham says demonstrating. Your touch needs to be light but firm. Felt in the skin like a weight, a squeeze. No sudden movements, please. Still is best. The pupil he’s performing on closes her eyes, head slightly folded like a bird’s. She’s collapsed into his woollen front. See how my arms arc? the teacher asks his class. Hold each other like precious cargo. Never be rough. Don’t shove into the person you love. Don’t steal touch. Be clear about this: we give a hug. Thanks Lydia, back to your seat now. Giles–? The boy stares down at his feet, face pink. His worst subject. Mr Farnham waits quietly, bends his head, smiles. C’mon Giles , he says gently. The boy staggers down the ragged aisle between assorted classmates. Waits while this man opens his arms. Falls forward, hiding his face, his sobs. The teacher enfolds him carefully, whispers, You’re doing well, Giles . Calling Time 00:00 / 02:09 So I’d sit at my desk waiting and hoping and trembling before someone would say it – maybe me – A quick drink after work – and we’d go night after night, pint after pint after pint. We’d smoke sixty cigarettes, drink drink after drink starting at six when seven thirty seemed another, safe country but suddenly was upon us, then long gone and it’s more like half nine and our table a landscape of pint glasses and overflowing ashtrays after trip upon trip to the cigarette machine in the hallway and turn after turn to the bar for another round, another tray of toppling filled glasses and laughter and it still only Tuesday, say, and then the bar staff flashing the lights on and off and it must be after eleven and they’re calling a warning and stacking chairs at the other end of the narrow room and we’re the only table left and still we stay drinking and shouting until they call ‘Time’ and yank the noisy chain grille down over the bar and padlock it and turn the lights off and we grope our way blindly foghorning back up the stairs and even then not out into the night, contrite, rushing for last Tubes but into the hotel bar for residents only where the drinks are even more expensive and it’s just us two now usually and we order ‘A night cap’ then ‘One for the road’ lighting cold fags and slumping on that black-leather slidey sofa in this pot-planted environment with piano muzac playing softly and it’s hard now to keep my spirits up with you falling silent beside me so near and far away. Publishing credits The house with no door: The Lyrical Aye: Richie McCaffery Calling Time: London Grip (Summer 2022) In The Classroom of Touch: The Rialto (No. 81)

Hear poet Ben Ray read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Ben Ray wave 6 summer 2021 back next the poet Poet, reviewer and workshopper Ben Ray is a patron of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival, and a winner of the 2019 New Poets Prize. His most recent collection is The Kindness of the Eel , and his writing has appeared in a wide range of publications including Poetry Wales and The Oxford Review of Books . the poems Epska pjesma for a new millennium 00:00 / 01:19 You wanted to be an epic poem in the drafting to sit with Marko, Branković, Crnojević but our palimpsest homeland had forgotten poetry gifting us only hoarse voices, bloody footprints. We stayed at your house, frustrated we could not make history: but you had inherited from a vanished world distant stories, new borders that tightened round the neck and a rusted can of tear gas from some atrocity. Like good citizens we shut the doors, pierced the cap and inflicted our country upon ourselves pushing / staring / turning / running / choking / children vaulting over chintz sofas in desperation then outside, gasping laughing – you tore your chest open found three hearts: around the third, the snake was still sleeping In October 2000 huge protests broke out in Serbia's capital, Belgrade, against the perceived authoritarianism of the Serbian government, resulting in the overthrow of President Slobodan Milošević. The protests saw a high level of youth engagement. Sinning with Captain Birdseye 00:00 / 01:04 It really wasn’t necessary. They were just two fish fingers left sulking in soggy packaging. But that was the point. An act of Antoinette extravagance, a hubristic vote of confidence in modern society. Was there ever a better expression of disaster capitalism than turning on a whole fridge freezer just for them? No shame: only God can judge their private fishy palace for two, heated with North Sea oil to help them feel at home (Even Anthropocene bad boys have a heart). Then, of course, the breathless question on the crowd’s lips: to eat one and leave the other alone in that icy void? The act of a maniac the act of a daredevil. But look at them now. So settled. So happy. Do you not believe in redemption? Joke’s on you I have a tiramisu in my chest freezer I am a market square after everyone has left 00:00 / 01:16 I am a market square after everyone has left all made of loose veg and plastic wrapping, that pervasive pioneer of untouched spaces. My breath invigorates paper bags across slabs rustles drain-locked receipts into chorus: I am the one who pulls up the cobbles to trip the cyclists. The heart of a lettuce has never looked so lonely nor the leaves of an artichoke so fragile than when I wear them, dressing down in casual wear that would melt your heart. If carrots had eyes, they would be Disney-round and doleful as they roll down the orphanages of roadsides fulfilling tragic character arcs as they’re pulped underfoot. I am a market square after everyone has left grand words like desolation and loss are too big for my ordinary leftover onion-skin self, this paper-bag floor-level life – where dashed organic-grown hopes are swept up by street cleaners and next Sunday always seems so far away Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Jen Feroze read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jen Feroze wave 16 winter 2023 back next the poet Former Foyle Young Poet Jen Feroze has had her poetry featured in a wide range of publications – from Magma , Poetry Wales , Spelt , Ink, Sweat & Tears and Stanchion to One Hand Clapping , Dust Poetry Magazine , Atrium and OneArt . She's also edited anthologies for Black Bough Poetry and The Mum Poem Press. Jen was a winner of the 2022-23 Magma Editors’ Prize, and her debut pamphlet is forthcoming from Nine Pens. Jen likes chunky knitwear, turquoise things, and cheese you can eat with a spoon. the poems Gorge 00:00 / 02:46 Whenever there’s an icebreaker about where we come from, my answer always elicits the same smile: ‘Oh yeah, that’s where the cheese is made! I’m pretty sure I went there with my school once.’ So many kids bussed in to stare through cloudy glass at curds, nonplussed, craning their necks upwards at the cliffs. It’s funny the way hormones can flatten even the highest cliffs, can make centuries of river-worn limestone a stage, from which we played out our teenage dramas. Raise a glass to the breathtaking arrogance of middle school. Smile at the fact that we never stopped to take stock, not once, we assumed these caves, these dripping stalactites, came ready made. There was the time our history teacher made the front pages, connected by strands of DNA to the cliffs, to the ancient bones found there, to the man that once inhabited their skin. 10,000 years, and he’d not moved a mile from the dig site, was drilling us on The Iron Curtain, smiling at the sudden smallness of his concept of history, polishing his glasses. Some summer nights we’d smuggle blankets and cider and glasses over the stile and onto Black Rock. Fires were lit, pacts were made breath was snatched. Some things were lost, others found. The sky split in a smile, loosing meteors like teeth. We lay on our backs, knees mimicking the cliffs, until the shadows of our friends became indistinguishable from one another. I felt drunk and happy and sad and too old and too young, all at once. Then limestone stained siren blue brought us up short, for once. We hugged our own ribs close, carried our bones like glass. He was the brother of a friend’s friend. There were painful verbs to choose from: To fall? To jump? Was it worse if a decision had been made? For a short while, we looked with reverential gaze and sweaty palms at the cliffs, then the flowers died, Christmas came, and he was buried again under forgetful smiles. After school we scattered to the winds, city-bound, throwing smiles over our shoulders. So sure of our futures, and never once pausing to give thanks or even glance back to those cliffs. So desperate were we to be grown, to be skyscrapered behind glass, to be able to say we got out, we did it, we made something of ourselves, away from that shadowed small town we came from. And as they have always done, the cliffs stand silent, a knowing smile carved from water and rock into the landscape of so many childhoods. Only once we left, did I see how we’d been shaped, hot as freshly blown glass; forged, gorge-made. Self-portrait at 35 Weeks 00:00 / 00:36 Not the moon, but her reflection caught in a pond. My tenderly planted bed, latticed by slugs – a seemingly overnight silvering of this pungent earth. Something you’d find glazed on the bottom shelf of a bakery. A bag thrashing with fairground fish. An upturned bowl of porridge. Oh, you slow-punctured water bed. Oh! You magnetic globe for strangers’ hands, the unwelcome and the minuscule, pushing as if against a curved pane of glass. Moving Day 00:00 / 01:44 For weeks now, the house has been haunted by the suits and shoes of zealous estate agents. The dark hush of the trees – excellent allies, excellent secret-keepers – was felled a long time ago in the name of the city’s loud expansion. Now there is nowhere to hide. Hard candy smiles pass through each room, looking out through sugar-glass panes they convince themselves are dusky and bubbled with age alone; running their hands over mantels and recoiling at the layer of dust on their fingertips. The house holds its breath, waiting for someone to touch their lips, to taste its sweetness. Then this afternoon, a truck yellow as sherbet lemons arrived and spilled four bright, warm lives out and inside. So much noise and so many running feet after so much gnawing emptiness, so much guilt. The boxes smell like hope. They make the house ache. There are two children – a boy and a girl, curls soft as candyfloss. They delight in choosing their new bedroom; they fall asleep without a story, without a nightlight. Downstairs, their parents clink glasses of cheap wine as night arrives at the windows. They discuss where to hang the family photographs, who they should call to look at the old oven that didn’t want to light this evening. If the house could talk, it would tell them to buy a new one, shamed by the wicked pile of ash that still covers the grill. If the house could talk, it would press upon them the wisdom of keeping breadcrumbs close at hand, even in the absence of trees. It would feel a slow tide of sugar rising unstoppably in its walls at the sound of young laughter, at the thought of those little, darting tongues. Publishing credits Gorge: Spelt Magazine Poetry Competition 2021 (Highly commended) Self-portrait at 35 weeks: Poetry Wales (58.2, Winter 2022) Moving Day: exclusive first publication by iamb Author photo: © Ami Robertson

Hear poet Richard Jeffrey Newman read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Richard Jeffrey Newman wave 10 summer 2022 back next the poet Richard Jeffrey Newman is the author of Words for What Those Men Have Done and The Silence of Men , as well as the translation, The Teller of Tales: Stories from Ferdowsi's Shahameh . Richard curates the First Tuesdays reading series in Jackson Heights, New York, and is on the Board of Newtown Literary . He's also Professor of English at Nassau Community College, where he recently stepped down to focus on his writing after a decade of service to his faculty union. the poems Just Beyond Your Reach 00:00 / 00:54 The prayer you say is neither seed nor plow, nor is it rain to quench your soul’s old thirst. The parched and blistered field your tongue is now bespeaks the long neglect about to burst, like rotten fruit thrown to chase from the stage a comic leaving dead words at your feet; and she, or maybe he, responds with rage, shrinking the room until the single seat that’s left is where you’re planted. Confront your god, shimmering and luscious, there, his skin— or is it hers?—a proffered gift, a prod to every hunger you have called a sin. Welcome each new taste; spread wide; bow low. Lose yourself till loss is all you know. This Sentence Is A Metaphor For Bridge #20 00:00 / 00:55 Imagine hell unfenced, yourself the unburned center of all that burning, every prayer you’ve ever said undone line by line, until the empty page is all you have. Enter there the path in you that is only a path, gather its shadows into a dance, a movement that ends with love, that keeps on moving till love becomes the rhythm, and you the fire, and the dance, the life you’ve chosen to make your loving possible. You thought you had to be the clench you’ve held where none but you could feel it. Give yourself instead to all that rises. Fill that cloudless sky with laughter. After Drought 00:00 / 00:58 Knees rooted in the bed on either side of your belly, my body’s a stalk of wheat bent in summer wind, a bamboo shoot rising, an orchid, and then all at once a cloud swelling, a swallow sculpting air, a freed white dove. You pull me down, but you are hot beneath me, and the gust that is my own heat lifts me away: I’m not ready. Outside, footsteps, voices. Two men. Giggling, we pull the sheet around us till they pass, but if someone does see, what will they have seen? A couple making love. No. More than that: they will have seen the coming of the rain; they will have seen us bathe in it, and they will say Amen. Publishing credits Just Beyond Your Reach / This Sentence Is A Metaphor for Bridge #20: exclusive first publication by iamb After Drought: The Silence of Men (CavanKerry Press)

Hear poet Samuel Tongue read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Samuel Tongue wave 7 autumn 2021 back next the poet Winner of a New Writers Award from the Scottish Book Trust, and former poetry editor at The Glasgow Review of Books, Samuel Tongue is a widely published poet with a debut collection, Sacrifice Zones , and two pamphlets – Stitch and Hauling-Out (Eyewear Aviator, 2016). His recent work has appeared in Finished Creatures, Butcher’s Dog, The Scores, and One Hand Clapping. A selection of Samuel's poems is to be published in Ukrainian translation by KROK in 2021. the poems Emergent Properties 00:00 / 02:01 a church is enveloped by a forest and the forest is the creator and redeemer of the church. the hermits who can disappear into the trees, are trees. every time a tree moves it is a brustling prayer. susurration as supplication. the habit of the tree is its dwelling in the world. yes, Heidegger was wrong. no, the stone is not worldless; no, the animal is not poor-in-the-world; no, man is not only world-forming. the stone can be ground and underground – a negative capability – and the animals are adept at dwelling. neahgebur – they who dwell nearby. try not to think that clearing the forest is a clearing for thought. leave it dark for all the neighbours who are essential. My life and death are in my neighbour and a church is enveloped by a city and the city is the creator and redeemer of the church. the anchorites who can disappear into their cells, are cells. every time the bus doors hiss open, it is a shushed prayer. pneumatic pneuma. the habit of a tower-block is its dwelling in the world. yes, Le Corbusier was wrong. no, the house is not a machine for living in; no, the streets do not belong to the automobile; no, ornamentation is not a religion of beautiful materials. the tower-block can be forest and bewilderment – a negative capability – and the streets can be recovered. différance – that iterative, unrepeatable stranger. try not to think that deciding on anything will stop more emergence. leave it dark for all the strangers who are essential. My life and death are in each stranger and Fish Counter Fish that have a pebble in their heads; fish that hide in winter; fish that feel the influence of stars; extraordinary prices paid for certain fish. The Natural History Pliny 00:00 / 01:08 Cod that have been skinned. Cod that have a pebble of dill butter in their heads. Cod breaded. Cod battered: tempura or traditional. Smoked haddock. Dyed haddock. Wise lumps of raw tuna. Scaled, pin-boned pollock, de-scented: There are olfactory limits. Bake in the bag; no mess. 'This piece of halibut is good enough for Jehovah'. Fishsticks pink as lads’ mags. Skirts and wet fillets of sole. Fish fingers mashed from fragments of once-fish. Hake three-ways. Extraordinary prices paid for certain fish. Monkfish defrocked , gurnards gurning, fish so ugly you must eat them blindfold. Choose before the ice melts. Farm Boy 00:00 / 01:01 We rattle through the lanes in his ancient Austin Metro, footwells filled with welly boots and dried mud, clutches of sparrows bouncing around the high hedges. We pull off-road into gateways, warm dens of hawthorn; with a wink, he tightens his dog collar, disappears into a field, then returns with cauliflowers cradled baptismal under his arm, or broccoli blooms green as heaven. The Lord giveth and I taketh away , he laughs. One farmer gives us a brace of rabbits, still warm, leg-lashed with pink bailer-twine, and I hold them like newborns in my lap, soft as gloves. His theology is rich stews and a full belly before the Lord, Bible verses broadcast like seedcake on dry ground. I love him without understanding. In the evening, he holds me close and his prayers buzz sweetly in my ear. My pillow is a honeyed God. Publishing credits Emergent Properties: Finished Creatures (Issue 4) Fish Counter: Gutter (No. 17) Farm Boy: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Faye Alexandra Rose read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Faye Alexandra Rose wave 16 winter 2023 back next the poet Faye Alexandra Rose is the author of four chapbooks: When Memory Fades , Incognito , Mortal Beings and Pneuma – the last of these shortlisted for the 2022 Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet. Faye's forthcoming release, Wild Women , is due out with Sunday Mornings at the River. the poems A Force of Nature 00:00 / 00:28 We are Earth’s daughters, hips like rolling hills, moss-laced breasts quench your eternal thirst. We contain the ocean, unpredictable beauty, one pull of the moon creates a ruinous storm. We weaponize life’s sting like the blazing sun —even wildflowers can survive barren lands. We grow lungs like the roots of a birch tree, and nest fragility out the reach of beasts. Womb of the State TW: SA 00:00 / 00:33 Humanity is no longer human when people dig out their souls with coat hangers. Fearful of others with needles for hands waiting to thread their bodies to a backward piece of legislation. Two lines on plastic equate to a cross, righteousness woven with power like thorns in the skull. Wombs are crime scenes wrapped in yellow tape, for conceiving from brutality and not from being raped. Whilst stained white flags sway in limp hands, cursed tongues pray for their bodies to be cut free. My estranged father was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease 00:00 / 01:12 Dad, if I can still call you that, I’m not sure I’ve ever felt entitled enough, for your silhouette has always stood empty within photographs but your presence has always lingered, like a punch in the gut, as I’ve lived my life mourning a man who has never been and never will be. For I heard whispers through grapevines that your brain is a ball of yarn, your memory unravelling, forgiving you for all past sins. And I’ve spat bile at empty pages since I read that news, but each time it only ever seems to poison me as I pull at my skin to prove to myself that I’m real, trying to fathom that you no longer remember I exist. And I clung on for dear life Dad, I did, I never lost hope that I could hear your voice for the first time, an apology. But I must continue living with the pain of being forgotten, You don’t know I exist; I didn’t exist; I don’t exist. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Gerry Stewart read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. 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)