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Hear poet Damien B Donnelly read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Damien B Donnelly wave 24 winter 2025 back next the poet After 25 years as a pattern maker in the fashion industry, Damien B Donnelly is now Head of Programming at the Irish Writers Centre. His poetry and short stories have appeared in numerous journals, and he's the author of two pamphlets and two collections – most recent of which is Back from Away . Genial host of popular long-running poetry podcast Eat the Storms , he's also editor-in-chief of its sister title, The Storms : a printed journal of poetry, prose and visual art . the poems The Retreat, Early On 00:00 / 01:26 First day of school, first glimpse of what it’s like to be eaten, slowly. There is no room for insecurity in the playground. You must learn this quickly but no one will tell you this until it is too late. There are beasts in the jungle of the yard, hungry to swallow up all the others haven’t learned has value. By lunchtime, you will have taught yourself to remove pieces in order to preserve. As poet, I start with the mouth, in order to hone words. By the second day, wear only one eyebrow, drop the left eye below the right, remove both ears – anything that can be a hook or can hear. Paint yourself with the yoke of a stale egg, banish any hint of perfection, too young to know you’ll never be able to reclaim this upon release. Hook After Sun in an Empty Room by Edward Hopper (1963) 00:00 / 01:24 He locked the door, after she left, after that time she never spoke of but the disappearance of her scent from the sheets in the days that followed, twisted itself around the truth of her no return. He locked the bedroom door, hoping to catch her shadow, particles of skin that had fallen, a droplet or two of sweat cycle saliva or one of the many tears he knew she’d expelled in the dark behind his back after he’d cum & she, while in situ, appeared to depart. He spied, at times, through the keyhole, how the outside light slipped in, how it cast a door upon solid wall from the shut window and he imagined her frame, unfading into focus, coming back for things she’d left behind like the ring that he hoped would hook. In the End, Light Filters Down 00:00 / 01:54 to a point beyond projection and on the side lines; all we sidelined mother father friend, the things we took and the time that was taken from us that we could never take back. There were tracks but this desert had no desire to be soiled, swept away all we had scuffed. We prayed but for Gods’ sake nothing was permanent. We were building blocks in others' hands we didn’t see growing tired whose tongues never knew the taste of our own thoughts which, like flames, were only bound to ash. When the light fell it was sand, not sky, we are corroded from birth like the coast not destined to the constellations – not plough nor star. We formed words fucked words flung words but the language was never ours to comprehend. We were bits, in boxes yokes – scrambling to be something other for someone else. In the end, all we leave is a howl a haunting to rattle through a space that never really held us in place. Publishing credits The Retreat, Early On / In the End, Light Filters Down: exclusive first publication by iamb Hook: Fevers of the Mind (Apr 13th 2022)

Hear poet Alan Kissane read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Alan Kissane wave 5 spring 2021 back next the poet Alan Kissane is an English teacher in the Midlands, UK, whose poems have appeared in Allegro , Dissonance Magazine , Dust Poetry , Emerge Literary Journal, Epoch, Fahmidan, Kindling and Neologism. He contributed to Acid Bath Publishing’s printed volume, Wage Slaves , and is currently finishing an as-yet-unnamed collection of poems on politics and the self. the poems Bonfire of Inanities 00:00 / 01:17 I want to build the walls of a house I don’t intend to live in, just to use my hands. I want to breathe free and easy, all of the time. It’s not much of a dream but it’s mine. I want time to guide me forward, again. I’ve had enough of circles, curves. I don’t understand geometry. I want to see what’s in front of me. To have a ‘no surprises here’ sign tattooed on my eyelid door, in my clear light vision, like a worthwhile political slogan. I don’t want to be alone. I’m afraid of being given time to think, to feel. I want to read and consume words grown in fields of azure light. But I’m jealous of words; the way they connect and spark like I can’t, with people, resonating within. I don’t want to be crooked anymore, hunched over the weight of my own life. I just want to burn the unnecessary in me, like Savaronola. In a Glass Case 00:00 / 00:37 Footsteps, like fingertips, trace lines across this worn face, back and forth, sometimes lost, sometimes not, always crisscrossing, back and forth, like moments or thoughts, sometimes lost, sometimes not, like butterflies pinned to a board in a glass case in a museum, beautiful yet lonely, untouched, unfree, and gazed upon in awe before being forgotten. Up Here With the Rooks and Ravens 00:00 / 00:48 She sits in fury, her eyes torn from blindness, her robe rotten, a reminder of the so-called glorious resolution. Here the scales have truly fallen from her hands, the sword heavy, bowed, rusted and bitten by the querulous blood of backs slain in the name of something below, a war over numbers and paper: nothing and everything. This is this land now, a stain on a vast leaf of aged parchment floating on a lake of unbelief, with no way off. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Sue Butler read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Sue Butler wave 12 winter 2022 back next the poet Reflecting, towards the end of her career as a General Practitioner, on the gift and the burden of intimate connection with so many lives, Sue Butler took up walking and creative writing, considering these unpredictable forms of meditation on life in all its grace, pain and peculiarity. Sue's poems have appeared in One Hand Clapping , Spelt Magazine , Poetry and Covid , the Hippocrates Prize Anthology, and the Whirlagust series from Yaffle Press – publisher of her pamphlet, Learning from the Body . the poems Equality for Boys 00:00 / 01:25 Did his mother make him up, brush and pinch his cheeks and lips, paint him, rosy, healthy, hearty as the other boys at parties? Did they ask him if he knew his underwear was on display to girls with hormones all askew, did his armpits need a shave? Did they tell him if he tried he might just get in to medicine. Men needed to be qualified to study beside the women. Did his patients call him nurse and his seniors call him dear? Did they say 'What a waste' when he married and then, when he carried on, suggest a nice little job – family planning or child health – should suffice Obstetrics wasn’t for men. Did they check who would take his calls at night? Did school phone him to say his child was sick? Or they were looking for an extra for the history trip? When he came home in time to lift his bath-warm son to drip on his knee, discuss how yellow ducks floated and real ones flew, and heard the work phone ring, did he begin to see their point of view? After cataract surgery 00:00 / 01:24 Daily she wakes to the infinite variations clouds play on the sun, the sliver of light between blind and wall no longer a slur of soft pastel but sharp as a quartz vein through a cobble, bright as the bowl of the half scallop she picked from the beach in Clachtoll. She sees the jut of the light switch, its small hooked shadow, the unblinking screws on either side, how it has the look of an owl, how when someone crosses the landing, the door flaps, briefly supplies wings. She tests the bad eye, the nicotine sheen that persists, remembers their first home, smoke-stained cupboards that even three scrubbings could not make clean, closes that eye to make all bright again. A three millimetre incision, narrow as a baby tooth. Her vision become falls of sari silk, surf breaking turquoise in the sun, light splintered, gathering, soft and precise as hoar frost. The work of women 00:00 / 01:54 The doctor keeps the stitches small and even as she was taught in school by the sisters, working by hand down the long length of a skirt, and back to make the French seam. A single lamp lights her work. The cone of starch white light picks up the smallest pucker, every crooked stitch, standing at her shoulder as Sister did, pushing her wire rimmed glasses down her nose. She stitches the slow completion of the birth, the return of the mother from the inundation that swept through her. Beyond the light, mother and baby begin to learn their separation – the breathy warmth and chill of mouth rooting for nipple, clutching, letting fall; the cushiony curves of cheek and breast; the astonishing, instant fit of fist and finger. Voices spill from the corridor, calm the havoc of other births, transform parents into grandparents, fade unnoticed beneath the absorbing catch on skin of needle, lips, fingers. Nearly done. The doctor thinks of the nuns as she cuts the last stitch, how they prayed together for each other. Beneath her gown, too small yet to tent the flesh, her baby stretches, rolls, settles back into dreams. Publishing credits Equality for Boys: Learning from the Body (Yaffle Press) After cataract surgery: One Hand Clapping The work of women: 2020 Hippocrates Prize Anthology (The Hippocrates Press)

Hear poet Kittie Belltree read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Kittie Belltree wave 11 autumn 2022 back next the poet Kittie Belltree is a Specialist Tutor for neurodivergent students at Aberystwyth University. She received a Literature Wales bursary for her debut collection, Sliced Tongue and Pearl Cufflinks . Her short stories and poems have appeared in Cut on the Bias , Heartland , The Brown Envelope Book and Cast a Long Shadow . Kittie was recently selected for the Representing Wales Writer Development Programme, supporting writers from low income backgrounds. She's hard at work on a novel, and writing her second poetry collection. the poems The Magician’s Daughter In the fairy stories, the daughters love their fathers because they are mighty princes, great rulers, and because such absolute power seduces. ~ Carolyn Steedman ~ Landscape for a Good Woman 00:00 / 02:36 He draws a silk scarf from a secret pocket in his trousers – snakes it around wrists, splits in two, twists it taut, like her vocal cords, places it over her eggshell eyelids, then offers his hand – white-gloved bowing low, he lets loose the stolen jewels lining his jacket. She accepts – blindly – curtseying into the citrine shaft of spotlight that slices the stage in half, then footsteps into the dead-flat chest, arranges herself – doll-like – inside before he lays the wooden lid to rest. Until now he has kept her for himself, fed on a diet of sliced tongue and pearl cufflinks. The ritual begins before the stage door, before the audience, the dressing room – where he inserts the knife into her velvet and feathers, plucks her hair into tucks and tresses, places a glass slipper on her pillow. Thus, he enters without breaking and she slips seamlessly into the space conjured by his third wife who broke all his spells while he snored by the stove after Saturday matinée , stole the key to his best hat box for her whale-bone combs and peacock frocks and vanished with a ventriloquist from Vladivostok. He feels the thickness of the blade like honey inside her and the strength of his heaving old magic. Why, his wand can cut her in two – separate her bones from her meat like halving a peach. She is ripe, now, for his next trick – Now he has her undone, he will make her disappear. Now – Austerity 00:00 / 01:16 Dirty rat. You’re a fat duck in the House of Lords, fiddling expenses, pinching, farting. You insinuate intemperance, an excess of back-bedrooms, a debauched dissipation in disability benefits, washed down by a superfluity of free school dinners and social care. You point parsimonious fingers into porky pies. You lie with the fishes, the figures. You’re a tight-fisted wrecking ball, punch drunk on stuffing filthy wads into greasy palms and off-shore pension pots. You’re out to lunch, insatiable, voraciously force-feeding families into food banks, mincemeat, rent arrears, debt. You’re a champagne Charlie Chancellor of The Exchequer who neglects to check. You’re specks of white powder smirching naughty nostrils. You’re a glut of gluttony gutting kitchen cupboards, a rip-roaring rusty tin opener doing dentistry on the NHS; an overweight authority on obsessive abscission-making; on cutting things cuttingly; thinking yeah, what the fuck . Bond In 1945, August DeMont drove to the Golden Gate Bridge with his five-year-old daughter, Marilyn; told her to climb over the rail and jump. She did so without hesitation. Seconds later, he dived 'gracefully' after her. A note left in the car stated: 'I and my daughter have committed suicide.' 00:00 / 01:59 i For that was the fact of the matter. The fact of the matter in a sentence. A punishment. The blunt force of its grammar. Pragmatic punctuation precise enough to slice through time like a seam. That night, the rain fell in short, pattering clusters. Your clothes moaned in the closet. A dog slipped out into the dark. The quiet fact of the matter. Seven words for sadness. Words like stones. ii She never spoke. Someone said the car seat was still warm when they found the note. The matter-of-fact fumbling at the rubble of my heart. A cigarette butt tossed into space. iii How to smother a black hole revoke the last wordless slam of doors annul the unspoken bond deeper than any drop leaving me done with life. A sentence followed by a full stop. Publishing credits The Magician’s Daughter: The Lampeter Review (No. 11) Austerity: The Morning Star (May 21st 2020) Bond: Poetry Wales (Vol. 54, No. 1)

Hear poet Fred Schmalz read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Fred Schmalz wave 21 spring 2025 back next the poet Artist and poet Fred Schmalz is the author of collection Action in the Orchards , which explores intimacy and loss via encounters with contemporary art. His writing has appeared in Puerto del Sol , Zocalo Public Square , Places Journal , Diagram , Poetry and Oversound . Collaborating with Susy Bielak, the two mine social histories, texts and archives to create installations and actions that reflect the gravity and strangeness of contemporary cities. The duo's recent work has been presented at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago and Grand Central Art Center. the poems Spring Triptych 00:00 / 02:27 on the concrete jetty a piping plover twice darts across the path first off the breakwater then alighting from a perch on the seawall curl where fishermen idle a group of kids flits and dunks they compare arm scars histories of love and neglect industry for the day’s first hours shared loose affiliation with the eddies’ swirl all of it behind them now cut loose from a flotilla they drift past the wreck away with them a wallet a phone a bag of clothes sinks as they lift with the tide gulls dive into the cove covered in algae staring into the surf stones tumble toward the mouth of the inlet * miles of hatched mosquito cloud columns fold and surge over the fields so thick they crowd the light wave on the hill’s crest pelt passing bodies the injured crawl through my hair to witness to warn teeth and mouth water poured into vessels the narrows of breath cover me in carcasses and with them flower petals flute down from the northern border * I hadn’t seen the woman who sings the sun up on the berm by the beach since before the park closed for months years ago though one morning in winter as I approached was disillusioned by another figure this morning she paces just north of her old haunt along the trail tiny frame and one leg hitch my heart rush at seeing her and nobody around to tell the lengths our bodies age around us muscles tender sag the lax of years mirrors a deep wildness beyond her a seagull beats a sunfish on a rock Basic Training, 1991 00:00 / 01:37 every morgue in Chicago anticipates influxes today a backhoe opens the meadow I climb down into the trench lay prone there a moment its fetid walls its worms recoil while the dead’s names go out in response I eat a vitamin a thyroid pill oatmeal my last orange my odds of dying drop in the night I can’t say what good crawling into a hole serves though I recall twenty-nine years earlier waiting for my brother in a recess at Fort Knox an absolute silence overcame me the trench anechoic save its peat leaching new light formed flat pale branches in relief against the sky beneath the tree I saw through the deaths to the persistence of the living lately I’m less sure than ever my brother rises and waits for me we may reach détente eventually this century will claim us both forever overnight men in blue coveralls begin laying to rest the dead never out of work I will be there after all what have I got to sleep for New Year's Eve 00:00 / 00:58 leaning over a balcony railing to shake the circular rug of breadcrumbs and seeds gathered and shed I've been thinking again of how a year closes and another sets out from home in the lightest perceptible rain nightfall comes slowly the foxes that play in the roadway trot off between houses soon the shops will shutter your daughters take spoons to devour the cakes we brought propped on round white plates they remind me of the palm-sized paving stones we pocketed last night on our walk home they are everywhere around us working loose in the freeze the thaw the freeze Publishing credits Spring triptych: Oversound (Issue Nine) Basic training, 1991: The Canary (Issue 7) New Year’s Eve: Oversound (Issue Six)

Hear poet Natalie Crick read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Natalie Crick wave 8 winter 2021 back next the poet Studying for an MPhil in Creative Writing at Newcastle University, Natalie Crick has had poems in Stand , The Moth , Banshee , The Dark Horse , The Poetry Review and elsewhere. One of her poems was commended in the Verve Poetry Festival Competition 2020, and awarded second prize in the Newcastle Poetry Competition that same year. Another of Natalie's poems received a special mention by judge Ilya Kaminsky in the Poetry London Prize 2020. In 2021, Natalie was highly commended in the Wales Poetry Award, and nominated for The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. She is co-founder and poetry editor of small literary press Fragmented Voices , which is based in both Newcastle and Prague. the poems Cut 00:00 / 01:17 the lovely fairies in Sister’s room have blades on their backs and lately Lee sucks lemons for their sharps looks for wounds in snow on his morning walk with Mam fantasizes he is sliced like a pear but today the blood smells real he wipes his hands on his trackies dizzy tries to walk not run because he doesn’t want to scare and blooming like a cherry tree stumbles out there is a metallic grinding scream when Next Door ignites the hedge trimmer the winter sun pierces Lee’s eyes blue sky sawn open in that moment the sky is too big for Lee far too big and empty he wants to find the stars wants a knock on his bedroom door wants to be red for somebody Doctors and Nurses 00:00 / 01:10 Lee’s Sister is upstairs Septembering in the back bedroom where Lee sometimes eats old bread. After long days of waiting, Lee moves like an infection up stairs that smell of cigarette smoke. Sister’s shadow is a boy of five in the right light. Lee lights her smile with a tickle, breaks the pill onto the spoon’s curve and tells his patient to suck on it. She coos. This is what doves do, excited through open lips. Lee tends to Sister’s most-hurts, examines the cut on her toe and kisses it. Allows her to undress to rub salve into her cattle state. Sombre Doctor Lee, grave in gloves, checks her pulse: Miss, there’s something you should know. Girlfriend-Watch 00:00 / 01:55 Poorly Girlfriend sleeps like a parched stone. Boyfriend watches her instead of television. Boyfriend watches when light slats dangerously expose her black eyes to him. His hand is a quill; the crow feather a flutter to ease out her bad, the nib a point stroking her cheeks. Boyfriend makes up Girlfriend’s face with motes of ash from his fingers. Her face is lengthening, looking up. To Boyfriend she seems Unsafe. Undelicate. He plays love with her, plays fetch, plays harm. He likes her to suck his fingers, He likes her to smile, always. Boyfriend likes to use the biggest knife to slice Girlfriend’s strawberries, likes to see the red of them against the lap of white at her throat. Boyfriend confesses how much he loves Girlfriend to the mirror. He whispers the names of the others he loves, but can never change the channel on the remote. Boyfriend watches Girlfriend instead of television. He turns the ceiling light on and off to see just what she will do, lights up the room bright to check she is still breathing. Off and On. Publishing credits Cut: The Manchester Review (Issue 23) Doctors and Nurses: The Interpreter's House (Issue 76) Girlfriend-Watch: placed second in the Newcastle Poetry Competition 2020

Hear poet Steve Smart read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Steve Smart wave 17 spring 2024 back next the poet Poet and poetry filmmaker Steve Smart is based in Angus, Scotland. His poems have appeared in Atrium , Firth , The Poetry Shed , The Writer's Café , Ink, Sweat & Tears , Poetry Scotland , Gallus , Consilience and elsewhere. Recent collaborations have meant Steve's poetry has featured in anthologies published in New Zealand, Canada and Scotland – while his poetry films have been screened at various international festivals and exhibitions. In 2023, funding from Creative Scotland helped Steve and Irish poetry filmmaker Colm Scully deliver a new poetry film workshop for the Scottish Poetry Library. the poems luminous without being fierce 'Light in Scotland has a quality I have not met elsewhere. It is luminous without being fierce, penetrating to immense distances with an effortless intensity.' Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain 00:00 / 01:20 We meet were ridge meets sky – your kin are only here, above a rising contour of warmth, an unrequested flood shrinking your island tundras, stranding you upward, a feathered bellwether. You switch from being, to being unseeable – lichen-hill-skin you’ll speckle-wait me away, hunker into arctic whites – if the high corrie snows hesitate, else doubtful greys for spring. I forget so much, but remember each of all our meeting places. The map knows their names – I recall stones and land and the rise and fall, where you were, were not, and were again. I saw your presence shimmer, while I gazed breathless – while you waited, while I was not too much, while you were still. entrenched 00:00 / 24:07:02 Mine hunters with doll-sized trowels, flense the russet soils with caution. Is that slight discolouration the circumference of a wooden post? That line a distant season's burning? Stratigraphy layers the plot, yields the story. Circumstantial evidence – is that scrape a street number, a mason’s strike, or just more tumbledown sandstone subtext? The palm gifted a stone tool finds an easy accommodation, caresses as if to cup a cheek – to retouch, re-dress familiar bodies, in more than a change of clothes. How much for ten minutes chat? Of different days and other treasures – of how children always fight, of what the sky says in the dark, of one mind horde to another. sidelong From the United States Library of Congress details of the first photographic portrait image of a human produced in America: Robert Cornelius, head-and-shoulders self-portrait, facing front, with arms crossed. (Daguerreotype, 1839.) 00:00 / 00:59 Robert Cornelius remains sceptical. He does not trust that it will work, or that a specific future develops when this image will be visible. He does not pause to comb his hair or consider us, but guards himself against the possible exposure, against the theft, of unmarshalled spirit. Slow counting silent hesitation, he glances sidelong from 1839, doubtful of our existence, his focus on what he next intends. Publishing credits luminous without being fierce: Alchemy and Miracles (Gilbert and Hall Press) entrenched / sidelong: exclusive first publication by iamb , though sidelong was previously blogged by the author

Hear poet C Daventry read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. C Daventry wave 15 autumn 2023 back next the poet A linguist, writer and poet living in Scotland, C Daventry has won several awards for her work. These include first place in the Bridport Prize for Poetry (her work appearing in its annual anthologies several times), winner of the 2019 Hippocrates Open Awards for Poetry and Medicine , and The John Ruskin Prize in its inaugural year. A finalist in the 2019 Moth Poetry Prize , she's also chalked up multiple shortlistings and nominations elsewhere. Her work has been published throughout the UK and beyond, and her solo poetry chapbook is titled, The Oligarch Loses His Patience . the poems Mother’s Ruin 00:00 / 01:38 She comes home and takes gin gin deadbeat, gin strayed-from-the-fold takes its own back again, robs families of fathers, rips the roof off terraces, shows off mould and wallpaper in flapping strips gets inside the cistern, the milk bottle, the baby’s bottle, filled up with gripe and mither to the neck with Dutch courage, gin-Jenever; make baby silver make her gold liquid witch, my juice of the juniper take with you my lumbago my gallstones my gout take with you his droop and ague gin swills in our gutters, our runnels, swirls down the drains and out through the grilles, up to the gunwales mammy’s boots go out slap-slap on slimy cobbles. Gin is the colour of her moon-clout her eyes her rouged knees her grey lips gin with lemon gin with lime gin will be damned gin laced with turpentine will take oranges to Scotland and pish on England gin will fackin rhyme if and when it likes gin and whey out of the teats of her into the mouths of babes stiff after three days in winding sheets gin from the ankles up, bad as brown apples in the bottom of the barrel soft ribs teeth like cheese maggots in the brain in every port be mine in the estuarine brine croons the seaman biting her tongue I’ll give you gin up your skirt for your pains dump the bairn come away to Mandalay to the East Indies to the straits so she gave him a dose of gin to take away for my Valentine in an fMRI scanner 00:00 / 00:57 Beloved, it’s because of the way your parahippocampal gyrus glows green under pressure. The way your parietal lobe (which, try as I might, I can’t see as inferior) shows hyperactivity when I whisper sweet nothings. For this alone I want to sail away to your bilateral insula in a precuneus coracle, drag it high on white sand, dance the cingulate cortex breathless and wild, then pull you close and do the fusiform gyrus as the fiery plate of the sun drops below the horizon. You are my frontal and limbic regions of interest. You alone are my dorsal hypoactive cluster. You have declared cerebellum on my own amygdala, o, stroll with me under the globus pallidus of the moon. I do not appear in photos 00:00 / 00:53 anymore. There was a time my face was green hills covered in buttercups, I walked with bees hovering above the clover of my hair which was perpetually ruffled by the light breeze of your breath, of anyone’s breath, of the breath of a man standing over me on the bus, his feet planted too near the saplings of my legs, the hive in my belly, the bird of heart in my feathery breast, us swaying a little; everything I owned slung over the waterfall of my shoulders. My bangles had the clink of pebbles in a burn, and me, averting my eyes – changing direction quick as a shoal of silver fish – from my own aristocracy, my neck a stalk of willow under the heavy crown none of us ever knew we wore. Publishing credits Mother's Ruin: MAGMA (No. 67) for my Valentine in an fMRI scanner: 2019 Hippocrates Prize Anthology (The Hippocrates Press) I do not appear in photos: shortlisted for the Moth Poetry Prize 2019

Hear poet Laura Warner read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Laura Warner wave 24 winter 2025 back next the poet Laura Warner (she/her) is a poet, teacher and researcher. She grew up in Luton but lives now in Devon, where she's a PhD student at the University of Exeter. Her creative writing thesis, Menstrual Poetics , looks at the impact of menstrual culture and politics on unwell menstrual bodies. Her poetry has appeared in Dear Reader , Poetry Wales , The Moth , Acropolis Journal , and Lucy Writers Platform . the poems After Watching The Craft 00:00 / 01:53 We are a teenage coven, cross-legged around our brown bottled brew, that we, with our spells, our bewitchment, our camisole tops, charmed a man into buying from the Happy Shopper. Nice man. We are going-on fourteen, we are going out tonight, we are tasting beer for the very first time. I am the dark-haired witch. I have the biggest pentagram and the thickest rings of eyeliner. I am the one they will blame when our bottles are found slung behind the period bins; I am the one Zoe’s mum will corner, saying, you’ve ruined her 13th birthday. That’s what they say: you are the ring-leader – you are the one who needs reining in – you are the liability, the wildchild, the total fucking nightmare. We are a teenage coven in lace tights, black boots, and pink fluffy pigtails, wearing each other’s clothes – hot-pants, tie-tops, we are thrown out, bringing the party to the carpark. I am the one who downs the whole beer, though it tastes like gone-off pop from grandma’s coal barn, because I want to say, yes, I drank the whole fucking thing. Watch me hold the empty glass above my head, the warm foam curdling in my hair mascara, dripping down the front of my crop top – watch me single-out a friend to push my body against – spreading knees wide, thrusting hips low, working the beat, the strap of my cami slipping off my shoulder as I loll on the bonnet of Zoe’s dad’s car – Zoe’s dad’s eyes glued to the tarmac as he fumbles for his keys – I said watch me. Just watch me. First Full Day of Bleeding 00:00 / 02:10 Change your knickers within thirty minutes of putting them on. Answer your daughter’s questions. Let her see the brown blood in the cup. Point out the lumps. Make an insufficient amount of porridge. Leave it to clot in the pan. Cut the bread poorly. Talk into the wrong phone. Put on clothes that resemble pyjamas, dark at the crotch. Let a friend pick you up and take you for coffee in a café she can park right outside. Cry because they’re out of their vegan chocolate spread. Stare into space. Feel your legs fizz as you climb the stairs to the exit. Lean against a doorframe on the main road. This is you, typical you, imagining yourself exhausted. Lay your head down on the passenger seat. Follow your friend around M&S clutching a pot of coconut yoghurt that is too expensive, readying yourself for the feeling of blood spilling. Buy the yoghurt. Eat it in bed with a heat pack in your knickers. Another pair of knickers. Wipe blood from the toilet seat/lino/sink. Call yourself a lazy prick because you know you should write this but don’t know how to make yourself start. Read instead. Call yourself a stupid lazy prick because you can’t follow the words in the book you are trying to read about menstrual cycles. Look at the pictures instead. Call yourself a self-obsessed stupid lazy prick because you keep thinking about how bad you feel when you’re meant to be studying the diagrams. Wish your heat pack was still hot. Get teary. Text your partner that you miss him. Find an episode of Escape to the Country hosted by Alistair Appleton. Enjoy his woollen waistcoat. His beard. The way he has aged and rounded with you. Fall asleep before he reveals the mystery property. How to Fish 00:00 / 01:36 It’s not my job to teach you how to fish. You can’t keep splashing around in rockpools with a cane-handled net declaring yourself a fisherman, sitting in your beach hut, boasting state-of-the-art binoculars. Oh, you’ve identified a buoy? Bobbing far out? You've photographed it, considered it, and can report the outlook to be ‘as benign as dimpled buttocks’? This is not fishing! ‘Boning up,’ you call it: online tutorials, squeezing ships into bottles, boasting your dexterity tugging those tiny strings. Slow. Hand. Clap. Just saying, I hate your personalized logbook: You’re a reel catch isn’t funny, and what do you have to record? You spend days admiring your arse in your yellow bib and brace. Where are your bait fish? Where is your tackle? You’ve no pots, no spear, not even a sharpened stick. Meanwhile, here I am, night after night, paddling in the shallows, feet all snared up in your ghost nets. Imagine: they’ve never caught as much as a crab, but somehow, I’m entangled. Now, the tide’s coming in, it’s as dark as an ultrasound, and where the hell are you? Occupied reciting the shipping forecast, grilling fishfingers, combing your beard. Dock-talker! Cock-walker! Aye-aye, Captain Bird’s-Eye View – pedlar of bycatch and discard. Publishing credits After Watching The Craft / How to Fish: exclusive first publication by iamb First Full Day of Bleeding: The Moth (Issue 51, Winter 2022)

Hear poet Róisín Ní Neachtain read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Róisín Ní Neachtain wave 6 summer 2021 back next the poet Róisín Ní Neachtain is an autistic Irish-Scottish poet and artist now based in County Kildare, Ireland. Though mainly self-taught, she was briefly educated at NCAD and Trinity College Dublin, before studying for two years under Irish artist Gill Berry. Róisín is creator and editor of online literary and art journal Crow of Minerva , and has had her poetry featured in a number of digital publications. She's currently at work on her first collection. the poems Memory 00:00 / 01:12 I held my dreams in my palms Though they were bleeding A soft tremor against my skin Some were shallow Some like a cave Some pricked my conscience Their threads tethered to my flesh And I chewed their weights to set them free My teeth wore down I fell in a haze through our memories When a hollow sound echoed in my mouth And fell past my lips You bit my tongue and hummed The ebb of nameless laughter A cadence of sorrows Spinning a steep melody Now I am unfearful of pain A slow praise of closeness Breathing blue In midnight songs Tightening my pulse Fingers twisting in a frenzied dance To unworded lyrics My last need stilled Remembering Without Believing 00:00 / 01:21 Remembering without believing The stars appeasing Against their obsidian abyss Heat and light unseamed from dust Remembering without believing Questions pressed in psychosis And promises which feel no shame Illegible hypergraphic promises Of love and empty rooms and symbiotic existence And undivided sounds and realities And reproached pain and laughter And dissonant dreams Which lead to my repossession A petty heresy of Silence Look at this earth embedded beneath our nails Our language measured by prayers And lumen a measure of their glare Look at this skin scored by hate Their unfamiliar eye Rooted in fear All truths unchanged in time The Edge of Reason 00:00 / 01:22 A room Like a trite cage Between these four walls Where prodigal sons and daughters return And are rejoiced and bound once more A spiel read like a dead poet A bastard pain The object of such a conclusion Perhaps an accidental gale? Swept and tendering our bones Archaic songs of sorrow That lull us in their readiness Black on white Black on black White on white Letters made barely visible And nonsensical A few steps closer to the edge of reason A past and future arrested in a photograph What will happen if we awake again To see these passings going beyond that edge? To the beginnings of someplace? Someplace more of a sedentary mind A hollowed space in each Man’s chest Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Hilary Sallick read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Hilary Sallick wave 23 autumn 2025 back next the poet Vice-president of the New England Poetry Club from 2016 to 2024, Hilary Sallick is a teacher with a long-time focus on adult literacy. She's the author of Love is a Shore – long-listed for the 2024 Massachusetts Book Awards – and Asking the Form . Her poems have appeared in Action , Spectacle , Halfway Down the Stairs , Permafrost , Potomac Review , Notre Dame Review and elsewhere. Hilary lives in Somerville, MA. the poems rough edges 00:00 / 02:34 rainy I got up and went outside before my coffee before this long work in which time vanishes I walked in the drizzle not far down Elm and back along the park crossing the field the ground soft beneath my feet and remembering the little kids the games of catch with Will and pushing Verna on the swing then I hurried home poured my coffee and came to sit by these windows I don’t like to let go of old efforts because I feel those same desires unfinished passing me and I think about that a lot there are pearls of rain on the mulberry beads of light in the rain there’s the murmur and tapping of droplets on the house I opened an old document scrolled slowly through its digital pages remembering how bit by bit I made edits and changes now the version before me seems stripped of grace or whatever meaning the original once hoped for as if an essence has been polished away I think I’m going about this all wrong and here I am still doing it a squirrel in the mulberry is climbing nosing seeking nutritious bits to gnaw on those long awkward and winding branches how good the rough bark must feel to its feet reliable interesting I still want everything a hundred per cent as Eileen Myles says in a poem by that name a crack of light a step an ocean and the day is about to disappear I have my students’ notebooks too beside me hand-scrawled urgent or tidy they like me to read their works and write back to them how would it be if someone wrote back to me I sort of do that for myself to the extent possible and there is no risk involved no danger of being intruded upon or hurt but what’s the point then So soft our hearts 00:00 / 00:31 So soft our hearts— how to keep the softness the give the resilience when to be hard-hearted seems solution or result what one should do what one cannot help doing (then pain when the hardness cuts) The body’s made of softness with gentleness carries us Parting 00:00 / 03:59 Because of my heavy suitcase and my tote bag loaded with poetry we decide as we walk through the dark-red door of her apartment to take the elevator down; wafts of feeling like air through a window surging through me as my daughter closes her door behind us locks secure her world its views that look without and within meaning a few bright windows that orange wall beneath a stripe of sky and those paintings she’s made and is making Too feminine she worries because of palette and curve that draw the eye showing how things fold into themselves making new pathways in secret there in the studio where nothing is ever exactly as dreamed yet continues so a dream too is behind the door now the dream I imagine and carry in memory as we push the button for the elevator wait for the sound of its rising or descending as every day through decades bearing families with children in strollers tenants with laundry with groceries with musical instruments furniture languages; clanking softly it nears we hear its door shuffle open pull the landing door to enter and there’s a man before us bent motionless over his walker and for the briefest moment his implacable eye meets ours until he inches back politely we slip past him into the elevator’s box feel the downward motion the machine’s joints creaking four floors to the bottom where the landing door won’t budge my daughter pushes hard but we’re enclosed a long instant then rising again to the second floor where the doors open freely so down we go once more oh quiet man oh gentle lovely daughter oh self of each of us contained within silence curtained by courtesy; no luck we go back up we’ll have to take the stairs do you need help she asks him as we emerge to the second floor almost a murmur her tone and at his barely vocalized assent she lifts the walker carries it lightly down the fifteen steps then returns and offers her arm; they’re not quite strangers they’ve nodded in passing before now they’re descending each worn tiled stair in slowest motion I follow the pair of them Take your time she says in a low voice when he needs to rest and eventually here we are on the first floor we part from him step out to cool spring the few small trees beginning to leaf a softness of color against the brick and concrete and how will I do us justice in memory in poetry; it’s late much later than I’d meant to leave I’ve seen him waiting before she tells me someone is coming and we walk up the hill together she’s giving me directions for the subway we’re hurrying hurrying though my train will turn out to be delayed Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

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

Hear poet Hilary Menos read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Hilary Menos wave 18 summer 2024 back next the poet Hilary Menos won The 2010 Forward Prize for Best First Collection with Berg , and was a winner in The Poetry Business International Book & Pamphlet Competition 2019/20 with her pamphlet Human Tissue . Her second collection is Red Devon , while her most recent pamphlet is Fear of Forks . After reading Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford, Hilary took an MA in poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. She's worked as a student organiser, journalist, food reviewer, organic farmer, dramaturge and builder’s mate, is married with four sons, and now lives in France. Hilary is the editor of weekly online poetry journal, The Friday Poem . the poems Ivory Viking Queen The Lewis chessmen are a group of medieval chess pieces carved from walrus ivory and whale teeth, discovered in 1831 in the Outer Hebrides. There is some debate over their origin. 00:00 / 01:11 What has she seen, what has she seen, this sombre little Viking queen, hunched and brooding on her ivory throne, one hand to her cheek, one clutching a drinking horn. Is she mourning the battle-dead, the lost pawns, the cost of revenge, the endless cycle of harm? Beside her, the king is implacable, bearded. Her berserker is biting his shield. There is mystery, too, in her making — was she carved in the workshops of Trondheim or Jelling, or by Margret the Adroit, the best in Iceland with tusk and tooth and bone? From the cast resin face of this British Museum fridge magnet her maker winks at me. My money’s on Margret. Queen Esther’s Makeover ' ... Esther was brought also unto the king’s house, to the custody of Hegai, keeper of the women.' ~ Esther, 2:8 ~ 00:00 / 01:14 The verb form used is passive: they were gathered, they were prepared, they were made ready, and after a twelve-month beauty treatment — six months with oil of myrrh, six months with sweet perfumes (of all the Biblical oils, myrrh is top of the list) — each one was taken in to the bachelor king and would not be taken in again, unless he delighted in her and summoned her again by name. The words for ‘beauty treatment’ translate as ‘scour, polish’ (read more here about skin care in the Bible, Psalms, 104:15. Oil makes a person’s face shine. Vigorous scrubbing with ash imparts a natural glow.) But no mention of what happened to the other queen, the one who refused, who spoke back, using the active voice. Ruby Woo 00:00 / 01:43 All I ever needed to know about lipstick I learned from Emily Fox. Influencer, queen of the haul and swatch, she has fifty shades of MAC and she’s applying them, now, on her YouTube channel, working her way through the nudes, the pinks, the corals like a pedagogue, like a pro, as if she’d been gifted a Girl’s World Styling Head at birth. She slicks on Daddy’s Girl, then Sin, then Ruby Woo and I can’t stop watching, transfixed by her technique (two notches on her top lip, then four elegant strokes) and by the way she turns to camera when she’s done and smiles, and pauses. Smiles wider. Main beam! Emily taught me the power of a wet, red mouth. Now crowds of men in pubs part like the Red Sea and a dozen barmen fall over each other to serve me. O Emily, what goes on when the camera goes off? Do your cheek muscles ache? Does your fridge magnet say: ‘Lipstick is the red badge of courage’ — Man Ray? I’m more of a John Keats fan. Beauty is truth, truth, beauty. That’s all you know on earth, all you need to know. Don’t ask me what I know. I’m coming to a bar near you, coming for you. Me and Daddy’s Girl and Sin and Ruby Woo. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Samantha Terrell read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Samantha Terrell wave 22 summer 2025 back next the poet Nominated for The Forward Prizes and The Pushcart Prize, Samantha Terrell is the curator of international poetry series SHINE . She lives with her family in Upstate New York, and has had her poetry anthologised in Door=Jar , Eunoia Review , Green Ink Poetry , In Parentheses , The Orchards Poetry Journal and elsewhere. Samantha's many collections – most recently, Delta Function – have consistently garnered five-star reviews. the poems AI and the Animal Kingdom 00:00 / 00:59 Fabricatus intellĭgos , a man-made being with the capacity for intelligent processing and output It’s been said what separates Homo sapiens from the rest of the Animal Kingdom is intelligence – Reasoning Skills, Speech, Forethought. Turns out we’re not very good at Forethought, since we’ve created a being that renders the use of Reason and Speech as obsolete. All those crunching numbers, tabulating potential outcomes, answering queries, researching options – who needs ‘em? But what about relationships made around the water cooler? The client who becomes a family friend? Apparently creating Fabricatus intellĭgos has proven something else, too: Homo sapiens aren’t unique because of a boundless capacity for intelligence, but our boundless capacity for love. Fluidity 00:00 / 00:32 It’s not always easy to know what’s been taken from us, or what we have taken from others. Dignity is a fluid thing – one in the moment, and another in hindsight. We put words in each others’ mouths, then take them out again to suit us. We are wet clothes hanging on the line, in the rain, beginning to sag with the weight of double-saturation – not knowing how long we must hold on. Social Psychology 00:00 / 00:34 Another ink-blot test, this time for society, is sure to reveal our perception of reality. Forget the shapes for a moment. We can’t even agree on the parameters. The blur of lines one would only characterize as grey, another sees as black and white. Should the paper be held up, or laid down? Never mind, time to look. What do we see? To one, a ballot box; to another, a crown. Publishing credits AI and the Animal Kingdom / Social Psychology: exclusive first publication by iamb Fluidity: Fulcrum Review (Issue 2)

Hear poet Adam Cairns read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Adam Cairns wave 15 autumn 2023 back next the poet Based in South Wales, Adam Cairns is a poet and a photographer whose poems have appeared in various journals and anthologies including Green Ink Poetry , Poetry Wales and The Ekphrastic Review . He's currently studying for an MA in Poetry Writing with the Poetry School and Newcastle University, and runs poetry workshops for the RSPB at the Newport Wetlands Centre. the poems Archaic 00:00 / 01:31 My sister calls, says there's something she's found I need to see— can a wound be buried in the blood could a faint trace of the trench he died in linger, ramped into an impression— a patch of green barley the farmer leaves— she shows me the album, the whole brown and white of him— dark eyes boring through the century between us, that ridge above his nose, familiar—I take the photo to a mirror, hold it up looking back at myself. I tuck the photo in my pocket, climb up Gray Hill to find where the forest crouches, my home hidden in the play of hills and there, beyond the frown lines of spruce, the moraine of stumps, a first go at bracken, I see they have planted trees, row after row of plastic-wrapped saplings shining in cold air, white as graves at Neuve-Chapelle each casting a small shadow—and looking back, the path ducks inside the shelter of archaic trees, the last of the sky going out my visible breath, the ghost of everyone there. Last year the apple tree smouldered 00:00 / 00:52 hidden wires from its roots charging limbs with sparks of blossom. All summer bees droned in sheaths of nectar and we leant together in deckchairs dozing. But this year came a cold spring and though frail blossoms opened a promise of coupling and sap within the flex of boughs surged in traceries of twigs the flowering failed. After you left ice sugared every petal with a touch of death so there are few fruit this autumn the tree alone with its leaves stalling. Only last summer there was still time for everything Balloon 00:00 / 00:46 sadness sweeps the boundary clear— lines of impeccable spruce a touch of sharpness in beech and ash— an old man I saw fifteen years ahead all this loneliness shadowing me the clatter of family I gave away easily a balloon wind-snatched from my five-year-old hand floating off and unable to trace a route back to my hand letting go the crumpled gaudy tin-foil of what we had collapses all the air inside long since voided Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb