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Hear poet Lydia Kennaway read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Lydia Kennaway wave 11 autumn 2022 back next the poet Lydia Kennaway's debut pamphlet, A History of Walking , was published in 2019. Her poems have appeared in a variety of anthologies and magazines, including The Rialto , Raceme and Poetry & Audience . Lydia won the Flambard Prize in 2017, and is Walk Listen Create’s Poet-in-Residence for 2021-22. A New Yorker living in Yorkshire, Lydia gained her MA in Writing Poetry from Newcastle University. the poems A New and Accurat Map of the World Drawne according to ye truest Descriptions, latest Discoveries & best observations y.t have beene made by English or Strangers 00:00 / 01:11 I have made landfall with a mouth full of sand, tossed from the sea with splintered fingers and a barnacled belly. I will eat nameless fruits and hope against poison. I will watch the moon rise while the turtles hatch and make their flappy way to water. I will scrimshaw a comb for a sweetheart I never had and sing to longfeathered birds shanties of blood-red roses. I will find passage on a passing caravel. I will return to the town I once called home. I will draw maps but make no claim that they are true, only that these are the things I have seen and the places I believe I have been. Inuit Anger Walk 00:00 / 00:54 I am a furnace in the snow. I have been given my anger-stick and told to go plant it where and when my flames have turned to embers and so I walk past my people who know to look away. I walk past the Place of Drying Fish, past the Place of Catching Fish, past the Place of the Seals who do not know to look away. I walk beyond the place called The End of Places until the heat spills from my eyes. Here I drive the stick into the yielding snow and turn to face the cold walk home. The Invention of Walking 00:00 / 01:32 Feathers, tails, claws, fins and fur, antlers, paws and scales: these are your creations. Now you take a lump of clay in your big tired hands to make another. You are weary but roll and pinch and pinch and roll the clay and start again. Out of habit you make four limbs, stick them to a blob of body, add a head. Oh hell, not that again. But then you lift the forelimbs, set the head so it doesn’t hang but balances, tricky, on a slender neck-stem. For locomotion it will stagger, shifting the weight from one hind leg to another, a constant fall and recover. With its forward-looking eyes it can want. With spare limbs it can carry, possess, and – being upright – it displays its sex but doesn’t know this yet. You make it to crave the having and dread the losing. You will teach it shame and blame Eve and a serpent and a tree while its fate is to fall always fall and recover, fall Publishing credits A New and Accurat Map of the World Drawne according to ye truest Descriptions, latest Discoveries & best observations y.t have beene made by English or Strangers: Any Change? Poetry in a Hostile Environment (Forward Arts Foundation) Inuit Anger Walk / The Invention of Walking: A History of Walking (HappenStance Press) Author photo: © Simon Wiffen Photography

Hear poet Sue Spiers read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Sue Spiers wave 17 spring 2024 back next the poet Sue Spiers was born in Cyprus and lives in Hampshire. She works with the Winchester Poetry Festival and spoken word group Winchester Muse , and edits the Open University Poetry Society ’s annual anthology. Sue has self-published three collections: Jiggle Sac , Plague – A Season of Senryu and De Do Do Do, De Da Da Da . Her chapbook More Than a Late-Night Drink was shortlisted in 2023 for the Dreich Classics Chapbook Competition. the poems Christ the Redeemer as a Flamengo F C Supporter 00:00 / 01:37 Look at that span, spreading arms wider than two articulated trucks, never raised above parallel to the horizon, as if to question the referee’s rule: that off-side pass was far too close to call or, poised to raise his hands and start a chant. Straight and tall on top of Corcovado with his Art Deco pleated underskirt, the gauzy drape of tunic past his knees, proudly wrapped in a scarf of red and black overlaid grey by soapstone and concrete. Can you find its logo of a vulture? Too stiff to bend his knees come Ash Wednesday, dance the Bota Fogo to samba drums when carnival erupts along the streets. A downturned mouth reminds us of the score when Papa pulled him off before half-time and team mates didn’t want to take his place. A hundred years since construction started, some ninety since the bishops blessed his toes, all that time watching over Flamengo and catching, from the corner of his eyes, the Maracanã pitch and glory goals. No doubt he’s inch for inch their biggest fan. Borgan Borgan 00:00 / 02:19 Wem come up from the country, north on the barges, show the ankle-biters the gurt city with its biggity-bigness, show um how suited folk make their daily kerching. First wem go to the nob-house with its grandioso fountain like coal bins leaking drench from a heighty-high pole. Wem hear the fakish gorstering from posho bints. In the whiny hovver wem sits toppity-top with hair rush past perilous lifts sliding up plastic-white office blockers, (self-spickandspan!), where the Pillpop factory makity-makes. Outside the shoutyloud theatre its bungaroush walls peep flint and pea beach like it needs a good overdo. Playfolk bodyshape in the streets with groundhats, canny-craicing. There’s a greenspace in the East by the trickity-trickle, birdhouses naility-nailed back-to-back like branch growers, caterwise over irontwissets there’s a wapple way beastride. Soon mother-wife’s purse opens for the gimcrack arcade, with tossitathome scraddle for her nosybitch bestie, son-elder wants a dolphin swoosh-ride and daughter-mid wheedles a dosset. Wem footsore of stepping and thinkity-think it’s bapmunch. Um call it a slum but Frumsted has the worldy-know eateries. Wem skittish by flitterfolk, um shun countrykins like wem. Mostity-most come from worldy-spread places like wem, A snooty-toity foodserve gets us an eatplace and a seegrub. Soon wem tuckity-scoff in to a tankbowl of snag-slub. Yum! Son-toddle eyedroops, wem juggered as wilty-wilts in dunes. Wem eyeball Borganners guzzle poppy-lite, ogle teleoptics, stridety-stride gormless and roofless. Wem skedaddle latty. Wheatfield with Cypresses (1889) After the painting by Vincent Van Gogh 00:00 / 01:28 The paint is alive with harvest Mistral; lines and curves of emerald cypress, the swirl of lemon-tipped wheat, mustard stalks, a suggestion of poppies low in the frame. One dark hill, out of kilter, as mountains pale towards turbulent cloud which sweeps eastwards, but where is the sun? Sky reflects water not wheatfield and there are no humans, no animals, nothing manmade, except the wheat; elsewhere a farmer, a scythe, a miller, bread from an oven. He visits the cypresses many times, sits at a distance, up close, working their shades on canvas trying to imitate what they give. He goes over and over his own imperfection; why no one wants what he offers. Who would buy anguish? Who would want these thoughts wrought in oil? Publishing credits Christ the Redeemer as a Flamengo F. C. Supporter: commended in the Ware Poets Open Poetry Competition 2022 Borgan Borgan: South (Issue 65) Wheatfield with Cypresses (1889): placed third in the 2019 Battered Moons Poetry Competition

Hear poet Ankh Spice read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Ankh Spice wave 1 winter 2020 back next the poet Ankh Spice is a sea-obsessed poet from Aotearoa (New Zealand). His poetry has appeared in a number of online and printed publications internationally. He often uses natural imagery, myth and strong derealisation to explore the personal and shared traumas that keep us unsettled, environmental issues, and the drive to persist against our odds. Two of his poems were nominated for the 2020 Pushcart Prize courtesy of Rhythm & Bones and Black Bough Poetry. the poems Have mercy Written following Hurricane Dorian, September 2019 00:00 / 01:44 This island opens the iris of her day, calm curve of bay all visioning glass deepsight clear to the seabed stones, each a distinct sharp note, becalmed in unstirring kelps oh yes here the huge animal of the world is all lull but I turn where the trail ends in a groan the road inhaled by her winter heaving and on your side of her body that same skin murmuring wet nothings down there where the road was is tearing holes in itself right this second and if we are any kind of people we know what to do with an animal struggling just to breathe when did we close our eyes so tightly we forgot that desperate creatures fight hard and close more eyes as they go down gasping So from me running caught between breaths to you caught in her throat I can’t say anything except oh god you know you know she never wanted this New cloth 00:00 / 01:27 Your pattern pinned itself to the fray of me the first day. Not yet stitched, aligning fragile tissue, judging bias – the wounded cut carefully always holding their breath. When they remade you, I slept on a hospital couch with your dress, bundled like a woollen heart, to my nose. Five hours inhaling-exhaling bargains a short time to outfit a whole woman into her own dear self. We tied knots with every colour we could find. Understand, love always gets down to the wisp beyond fabric, to stroke the finest thread of a person – our making looms us legacies of holes – you fear cutting yourself short, me born running with scissors, and all of us rippling fast towards the great unravelling Yet the great thumping treadle of a heart can still say now you’re mending – billow with the wind. This poem did not stand a chance 00:00 / 02:03 Begotten, I failed to thrive, all at once and for years after, perhaps this poem will be rejected before it can speak from spite. I learned young that every strand and bead of us is base, self- interested only in making more of itself this poem will know it can never be good enough Here is a sore-tooth socket of a truth for a tongue to test – we persist by errors in our replication, success for this whole bolt of shivering animal fabric is in the dropped stitches, in failing to be perfect this poem will blame itself for signalling predators this also describes a number of fathers selfish patterns unstrung, then unshuttled, without any binding, so this poem will unravel red threads into the sea this poem will fail to finish even that I have stopped you going on. I did not beget, I have not made anything at all of myself this poem was stillborn I pick up this small body of work, headed for the coffin-drawer, and it is still warm and so blameless a great rack-and-rattle shakes the mistake of it from my hands, even despite resurrecting you, it begins to speak: This poem was still born Publishing credits Have mercy: Kissing Dynamite (Issue 10) New cloth: Rhythm & Bones (Issue 6) This poem did not stand a chance: The Failure Baler (Issue 1)

Hear poet Emma Kemp read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Emma Kemp wave 10 summer 2022 back next the poet Emma Kemp is from Coventry, where she runs the local Stanza of the Poetry Society. Her work has been published in journals including Transpositions , Ekstasis and The Rialto , as well as in anthologies such as the forthcoming Looking Out, Peering In from The Hedgehog Poetry Press. the poems A warning to myself not to entertain your preliminary advances 00:00 / 02:13 I buckle on the edge of myself, my virtue, your passenger seat. Some unholy unknown, taut between us. Your skin is ash. The thin blue off the instrument panel. My cheeks flushed in the dark, keyed up. You tell me that you are hard as regards rejection, given to press on in the face of defeat. I can believe that. I can believe you would impress yourself upon me. I can believe you leave a mark. Think back: you smothered your self in plastic irony. Admit you are untrue as Coventry blue. Admit inside that plastic shell you are spring loaded, a nichrome coil pressed hard to a twelve-volt socket. On charge, not blue but blaze red. You must know by now I am bone dry as summer brush, as tinder. Would you like me to tear you out of yourself so you can enjoy us destroy each other? I wonder. How much fire it would take to separate you into your fractions. Not a lot, my dear, not while I am feeling all prodigal. I could insist upon you, light you up, draw down bitumen from your contempt and naphtha from your audacity. Perhaps we would get high on what was left. I imagine that I can distil you and live happily alongside some residual fragile goodness. You say I want better . I say you want to forget yourself. I suspect you already have. I cannot take part in your remembering. Know this: you do not want me the way you think you do. See here. I can unbuckle. I can exit. I can take my dry bones elsewhere. I can wish you very well. A nichrome coil/twelve-volt socket was used as a cigarette lighter in older cars. Rovings 00:00 / 00:47 Tell me, love, why we addle ourselves in our search for truth, when we know that all there is is a heap of hastily shorn fleece from which all the time we are spinning? Fumble in the wool and pull some out, rove between your hands to form loose strands. I will do the same. We will spin from these rovings, at times alone, at times together. And then we knit. See how what takes form is neither yours nor mine but defines us? Forgive my dropped stitches; you may have dropped a few, too. Please do not hide yourself away and try to knit from your own pattern. I am in it. Render 00:00 / 01:27 You have seen that image of Thích Quảng Đức burning to death at a crossroads in Saigon and wondered at it. A mixture of knowing and incomprehension. That the human spirit can achieve self-mastery to the point of self-destruction. You have longed to sit cross-legged by the vast ocean, have it lick at you and carry you away; you have longed to become a symbol. A soup of sorrow and raging self-pity. That the human spirit can flare and burn out is a given, but you must pour water on the altar. You have stationed yourself on shingle and felt the insistent pain of every stone. You have waited for the tide to come in, and the tide has come. Every tide refusing to send you to the sea floor. The sea buoys you, dismisses you, light as flotsam returns you to the shore. You have felt the pang of the anticlimax. There is no one here watching; nothing has gathered around you. Your clothes are heavy with salt shame, streaming from you as you walk on, chilled, not shivering. To find what is next. You are rendered to yourself. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

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

Hear poet Ewan Mackinnon read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Ewan Mackinnon wave 24 winter 2025 back next the poet Poet Ewan Mackinnon lives in Denmark, where he's artistic director of a charity that brings artists, clowns and musicians to children’s hospital wards. His poems have appeared in Under the Radar , The Rialto , Dear Reader , Jarfly , Obsessed with pipework and Prole . In 2021, and again in 2023, Ewan's work made it onto the longlist of The Poetry Society's National Poetry Competition. He's a big fan of the Arvon Foundation's writing workshops, and his favourite poet is Caroline Bird . the poems After two evening classes in silversmithing 00:00 / 02:13 Finally, The Micro Motor arrived not that the little weak-assed-orange-battery-drill couldn’t do the job, well it couldn’t, but that's not the point. It was a step into professionalism, to taking myself seriously, to feeling the part. It is a pendant drill, I wanted the Balkan Venus but Mickey swears I’d regret it if I didn’t go for the Fordom SR pro with the quick release kit, so, I got that. I screwed a white-enamel shelf bracket into the wall to hold it (I had some left over from the extension that I’d picked up from the bargain bucket at Jewson’s three years back) which was awkward because it’s plasterboard so I had to find the beam and my beam scanner is crap, should have got the Makita, Mickey’s had one for years and he swears by them so anyway, I guessed, and that always means loads of regularly spaced holes in a little line that look like a, very industrious termite has been burrowing for a home(ha) I did try screwing it to the ceiling cause I can see where the joist is by the paint cracking cause of me walking on it when I was fixing the roof earlier this year, but that turned out to be too high for the table, then I considered lifting the table, but I just finished that, its split levelled and bolted to the floor so that seems stupid, it’s heavy, the motor, so when you squeeze the foot pedal, however gently, it jolts and rotates, something to do with momentum or centrifugal force, I’ll have to ask Mickey, but it doesn't really matter, it's not the point, it came with an ash block with a hundred holes in it for the accessories I’d bought; the diamond drills and busch burrs and stone router bits and sanding discs and pendant wheels and frosting brushes and polishing pads and finishers, oh! and a few spare mandrels. Its brilliant. The Streets are Stained with Sorrow 00:00 / 01:07 Walk for miles, find my house but have no keys. Sit on the step, teary, wait for anyone who knows me. A streetlight flickers and dies. Table for one. Dance with strangers, soaked in sweat and tears. Get lost in the museum districts towering ancient blocks, tear-stained cafes fill with early evening aperitif guests. Sharply dressed teary waiters serve huge Negronis and snacks. Join the line at the soup kitchen for leek and teardrop stew. Every head down. Find the river by a wide paved boulevard full of bullish carpenters setting up market stalls, their laughter cuts. I’m sobbing. A crowd gathers to watch the tears melting my face. Collapse to the pavement with a splash, the crowd whoop as they jump back, no one wants my tears on their shoes. James Peddle and Sons 00:00 / 01:03 Tea seems inappropriate. Dark well pressed suits even on a Sunday. A simple solid battered stretcher on wheels and a body bag. I offer to help. They politely decline. Their office is on the parade next to that nice Turkish place. Red sun-bleached drapes block any chance of a glimpse inside. The door has no bell. On the wall is a painting of a horse drawn hearse. Maybe that’s James holding the whip. Mum signs the forms. At the funeral, they stand straight-armed, unmoved. Thousands of souls have taken their last journey on these round shoulders, their breath like shire horses in the frosty sunlight. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Kitty Donnelly read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Kitty Donnelly wave 10 summer 2022 back next the poet Kitty Donnelly's first collection, The Impact of Limited Time , was joint-winner of Indigo Dreams Publishing's Collection Competition. Her second book, In Dangerous Hours , was published by the same house. Kitty won a Creative Future Award in 2019, and was nominated for a Jerwood Compton Fellowship in 2021. Her background is Irish, she lives in Yorkshire, and when she's not writing, Kitty works as an NHS Psychiatric Nurse. She cares for several rescued cats and dogs, and has just completed her first novel. the poems High 00:00 / 00:50 An arctic tern will fly 10,000 miles to flourish in two summers worth of light; so I was high after he died, chasing sun on the wing, though directionless. I swallowed three green capsules every night, peristalsis pulsing them through my scorched oesophagus. I took what I could get to alter consciousness, testing my fragmented sense of time against the wall clock’s competence till dawn was salmon red & gutted on the banks of the horizon. I was not or even near myself. Kingfisher 00:00 / 01:18 It was a sign: pure lapis on the post plunged into canal sediment. It surveyed its territory, paused & darted under Lock 9, a featherweight jewel flicked on the wind. Returning fishless, its head revolved towards the glass where I stood, museum-frigid: my first live kingfisher. I should have tailed its poem through the frosted dawn’s distemper. It was tempting me to follow it by pen, to know it vivid & separate from ossified kin: that feathered gift of indurated velvet with scratched black beads for eyes, whose twiggy box I switched for football cards, unable to stand the cloy of mould, too old to poke my finger in the rag-hole. Now it had risen: fallen constellations etched across each wing, it was urging me to drown my work bag, unlace my boots, and flit with it through the waterlogged morning. Test Results 00:00 / 00:38 You’re writing for your life, there’s no mistaking it. Your fingers move in window-light, ears closed to all but music. Coffee's heat evaporates, a shaft of sun bisects the page, the Biro quivers in your fingers. Everything you strived to say is translating itself. Previous verse: untrained lightening. Illness has earthed you, conducting your tongue. Publishing credits High: Ink Sweat & Tears Kingfisher / Test Results: exclusive first publication by iamb

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

Hear poet Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig wave 23 autumn 2025 back next the poet Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig (MIMS) is a freelance translator, editor and author. Her poetry publications include her pamphlet kinscapes and the anthology The Joy of Living , which she edited to support the Maggie’s Centres . MIMS' work has been published by Dust Poetry Magazine , Dreich , Nine Pens Press and Visual Verse . She lives in Dunfermline, Scotland. the poems Breathe through my roots 00:00 / 01:20 nights of waking amid coal-smoked absence of air gasping dark horror mother’s voice guiding me back to surface where corals of plastic lungs grow on the desks of pulmonologists afternoons spent before metal dragons that spit healing vapours or in a body plethysmography diving bell connected by mic to the outside of effortless intake of nitrogen oxygen carbon dioxide a thing of course unless dad tears up when he leaves me in the Alps for expert strangers to reset my faulty pulmonary system close to the Eagle’s Nest where Hitler owned the mountain skies while Special Children’s Wards dealt those considered weak sedatives depressing respiration or let them starve a slow deliberate death meant to appear natural while German physicians in the 1960s still opposed ventilating neonates & the GDR let wee preemies suffocate or drown – at which point in this poem the girl in my womb kicks hard & hesitates to no madeleine 00:00 / 00:33 walking the dog down a window-lit street the wind delivers a familiar heady fragrance it draws my gaze to the back of a woman grey bob, dark jacket wide skirt swishing red brown white she unlocks a door and the thought this could be my mother now cuts right through my middle Tobi’s tales 00:00 / 02:26 Each morning we uncurl, you from your safe corner, I from bed, into this, our togetherness. Garden patrol, maybe a morsel of toast, buttered. Then we put on armours: harness, shoes, a coat. The lead, two-ended cord umbilical between us, we stroll: always expectant, in any weather. You rarely aim for straights but zigzags, backs and forths. The hour strays along. Each patch of grass, each leaf and stem hold so much information. They’re endless message boards, smells stacked on smells, scattered by strangers, not quite randomly. We walk, discovering: you stop, I stop, and vice versa. We dance, wait for each other. Sometimes you put your paws up on a wall and raise your nose, take note. Then you plop down onto all fours, stride on. You seldom share what secrets you’ve uncovered. Though we have some fixed routes – around the golf course, into the deep sea of the woods, down the old country lane filled with with feathered life and the occasional deer, each time we step out, it remakes us, we never walk the same path twice. The world is wondrous, frightful sometimes: feet, disembodied, stick out under hedges, canines off-lead bounce towards us fast, humans are nervous, or calm, open-hearted. You’ll be outside some more during the day with A., and then at sunset, we three go around the pond together, feed ducks and swans, play hide and seek before the great Forth amphitheatre, the bridges red, grey, white, the harbour’s crane, blue, Pentland wonders. At nightfall then, we tuck you in, cuddle, maybe hum a lullaby, until you’re quite relaxed. And soon, with twitching legs, huffing and puffing, a growl, a little whine, you tell us stories of your old home back in Bosnia, and with a deep intake of breath, just like a sigh, you bind yourself to us and us to you. Publishing credits Breathe through my roots: Visual Verse (Vol. 10, Ch. 4) no madeleine: exclusive first publication by iamb Tobi’s tales: kinscapes (Dreich)

Hear poet Corinna Board read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Corinna Board wave 19 autumn 2024 back next the poet Corinna Board teaches English as an additional language in an Oxford secondary school. She grew up on a farm, and her writing is often inspired by the rural environment. Her work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in And Other Poems , Anthropocene , berlin lit , Propel Magazine , Spelt Magazine , Atrium , Ink Sweat & Tears , Magma and elsewhere. Corinna won the Gloucestershire Wildlife category of the 2023 Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust poetry competition, and was commended in the 2024 Verve Poetry Festival Eco-Poetry competition. She published her debut pamphlet, Arboreal , in January 2024. the poems Picking up my prescription ‘Sometimes as an antidote to fear of death, I eat the stars.’ ~ Rebecca Elson ~ 00:00 / 01:00 There are no stars in this city. I nibble on concrete, sip cocktails of NO₂. I’m dying for a decent constellation. Would some of those neons do? Or the flashing red lights on a high-rise? I FaceTime Olivier in the Pyrenees. He points his camera at Ursa Major, Cassiopeia, Orion’s Belt … Star after star devoured through my screen. I whisper Merci , then sleep like a baby. When the woman in Boots tells me I’m glowing, I say it must be the new meds. I keep quiet about the stars. On the tube ride home, they twinkle in my stomach like a Tiffany’s heist. My uncle brings back a fox tail from the fields 00:00 / 01:09 He is carrying his rifle, brandishing the tail like a trophy. A week ago, the fox (was it this one?) got into the coop and slaughtered all the hens. My uncle is grinning. The tail is cleanly cut, bloodied at the end. It hangs from a nail in the big barn, swinging like a corpse on the gallows. For days, I'm scared to touch it. The fur is coarser than I expected. I comb it with my fingers, breathe in its musk, close my eyes and pretend it's whole. Later, I run wild with my cousins. We are foxes — and I, the eldest, am the mother, the vixen. Driven by hunger, I burn through the fields, my cubs left hiding in the ripening wheat. The wind ruffles my coat the wrong way. Too late, I pick up his scent. Field notes 00:00 / 02:02 1. field noun : an area of land, used for growing crops or keeping animals, usually surrounded by a fence. 2. Green as far as the eye can see, then the brook. Water-mint, pebbles bedraggled in weed. 3. A six-year-old girl with a net, a bucket full of bullheads. Friesian cows bellowing, tick of the fence. Where did the years go? 4. Before he died, my uncle planted a rowan tree – there in the tall grass. 5. When we first saw the barn owl, it could have been a ghost. It flew low over the field, wings whispering. 6. If I buried my heart, what would grow? Perhaps a sapling. 7. Today, I have counted three kinds of butterfly: marbled white, common blue, speckled wood. 8. Dear Field, Do you ever dream of picking yourself up and striding off over the horizon? Be honest now. 9. I don’t know what I’d do if you left. I love you, field. Please stay. 10. Are you crying or is that rain? 11. In the field, I’m a child again. All this green, all this sky. I could disappear. 12. Meadow foxtail, yellow oat, timothy. I am the field, and the field is me. I am , the field is . Publishing credits Picking up my prescription: Anthropocene (July 2024) My uncle brings back a fox tail from the fields: Modron Magazine (Issue Four) Field notes: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Nicola Heaney read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Nicola Heaney wave 5 spring 2021 back next the poet Nicola Heaney is from Derry, and has poems in a number of journals across the UK and Ireland – including The North , The Cormorant , Crannóg , Skylight47 and Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal . Her poetry has also been shortlisted twice for the Bridport Prize (in 2019 and 2020). Nicola recently published Ulster Fairytales & Legends with The O'Brien Press, and is now working on her first collection. the poems Aviatrix 00:00 / 01:52 I Amelia Earhart popped in for tea on a hot afternoon in 1932. Destined for Paris, she landed instead on Gallagher’s field in Ireland’s North West. As out of place as her Lockheed plane amongst the grazing sheep and cattle, she stood in her trousers and leather coat, calm as a Sunday stroll in the country. 'Have you come far?' a farmhand asked. She grinned, wide eyes the colour of sky. 'America.' II Years later, on another island, in a different ocean miles across the world, she was found by another Gallagher, an Irishman conquering the Empire’s last colony on a rocky outcrop. He identified her by her bones, a bottle of Benedictine and a tube of hand lotion – a broken rouge compact, a woman’s shoe and the remnants of a pot of freckle ointment all pointed to her. But the scientists disagreed. 'It’s a man', they said. She stayed missing, despite Gallagher’s protests. 'It can’t be her – the bones are too long … Plus, this person survived for weeks, distilling drinking water in flames, living off turtles, fish and birds. It can’t be her.' The authorities closed the case, lost her bones. Gallagher died on the island. She’s still missing. III In an estate on the city fringes, a museum marks where she landed, its entrance bricked up against trespassers, windows long gone to teenage vandals. In the carpark, half-naked children play among caravans, weeds and burnt-out cars, running around with arms outstretched, trying to build enough speed to fly. Beachcombing 00:00 / 01:17 I Burrowed in black blistered seaweed that splits the beach in two a whelk shell lies empty. I don’t know why I notice it, rough bran mottled with cream, nothing like the shining white ones we used to collect. You taught me how to select the best. I’d bring them to you and you’d turn them over with long hands so similar to mine, red fingernails tapping for blemishes. At home, you’d coat them in nail polish until they shimmered like nebula, placed on the kitchen windowsill where I’d gaze up at them, forbidden from touching. II I pick the shell up, trace the ridges, turn it to expose iridescent white and pink within, like the innards of a fresh cut. Placing it to my ear, I listen to the churn of waves calling it back out into grey seas. I could take it with me, place it on the windowsill next to the sprig of shrivelled heather picked on a Donegal hill, add it to the cairn I’m building in my English kitchen – instead, I replace it gently between tidemarks in wet sand. False Monument 00:00 / 00:56 In Plaza Mayor, a bronze horse stamps on air, his belly filled with sparrow corpses. For centuries, they sought the promise of shade within, hopped onto his tongue, went deeper, fluttered down his throat, found themselves trapped, unable to fly back up into light. Hundreds died in his belly, suffocated by fiery darkness. Cardboard shelters fill the porticoes around the square, the city’s homeless hiding from the searing heat. At café tables, people sip coffee under shade of frescoed buildings, eyes hidden by sunglasses reflecting sky. During the war, someone threw a bomb into the horse’s mouth which opened its guts and belched out the corpses entombed inside sending them skywards, back into air. Publishing credits Aviatrix: Riggwelter (Issue 25) Beachcombing: Crannóg (Issue 52) False Monument: The Cormorant (Issue 4)

Hear poet Katrina Moinet read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Katrina Moinet wave 24 winter 2025 back next the poet Katrina Moinet is published in Raw Lit , Black Iris , Poetry X Hunger , Poetry Wales , Ffosfforws and Barddas . Their debut pamphlet, Portrait of a Young Girl Falling , was shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year. She followed this with her award-winning pamphlet The Art of Silence . Longlisted in The Poetry Society's National Poetry Competition 2024, Katrina's also been nominated for Best of the Net and The Pushcart Prize. She got her creative writing MA from Bangor University, hosts monthly poetry open mic Versify , and enjoys surfing. Katrina's latest pamphlet is State of the Nations . the poems Elemental | Elémentaire 00:00 / 00:52 Tell me all the ways you’ll conquer me a gentle chuchotement à l’oreille a ramrod battement between my enjambe- ment sweet châtiment ça chatouille bare skin fingertip frissons tiptoe to seduce la nuque , misuse your langue civilisée to recite a malaise of easy beats to slipknot bind me à l’horizontale I’ll tell you the way I’ll conquer you as hawthorn borne over by prevailing winds as loosened dune concedes to groundswell flood as a flame-scorched page disintegrates to nothing but love, relentless love Kuss mit der Faust After Klimt 00:00 / 01:15 There’s something quite unheimlich about your tightened lids & tilted moon face, toes curled to grip dear ground; your solid bound to his expression – glued, in semi-serene dream. Something gefährlich about his stiffened finger clasp, fists grasping at oval bone no shimmer space between your split shapes your swirls boldly blocked by black, silver, gold. That etwas unnatürlich which endures: a portrait posture held in clutched embrace disguised trace facial clues, a light signal surface tripwires – never step out of frame. This century’s sinnliche Masse adores a brow of smooth acquiescence, gentle wilting gesture conceals tender splendour knelt low, as nature’s gift slips to the abyss. An ekphrastic response to Gustav Klimt’s painting ‘Der Kuss’; title references Florence + The Machine’s ‘Kiss with a Fist’ from the 2009 album Lungs. The cost of living 00:00 / 01:32 I suffered a panic attack today: my shopping bag felt light-headed my milk turned my eggs shrank back from the sides of their cardboard nests and had a wobble I've tried to never watch the news, never keep abreast of what government think-tanks think or whose stroke of genius is making headlines spin and yet I couldn't help but notice the cost of living-breathing-eating-heating rise I couldn't help but notice the pound slip between the stitched seam of my pocket A lady over the phone checks my state of consciousness asks me if I'm having difficulty breathing? I'd hardly noticed lately I've been breathing less (more shallowly) living less (more shallowly) loving less (more shallowly) And yes I'm having difficulties yes it's left me breathless The lady on the phone advises me: 'Take deeper breaths' but I can't find my words to explain I can't afford to take deeper breaths I can't afford to phone a friend I can't afford to use a lifeline can't afford to survive so I breathe less & less & less & less & less Publishing credits Elemental | Elémentaire: Firmament (Vol. 2, No. 4) – appearing originally as Sonnet | un sonnet in a trio of poems titled Growing Pains Kuss mit der Faust: Poems for Gustav Klimt (The Hedgehog Poetry Press) The cost of living: Mslexia (Issue 98)

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

Hear poet Polly Atkin read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Polly Atkin wave 3 summer 2020 back next the poet Polly Akin lives in Cumbria. Her first poetry collection, Basic Nest Architecture , was followed by her third pamphlet, With Invisible Rain, which draws on Dorothy Wordsworth’s late journals to express pain. Polly's first pamphlet, bone song , was shortlisted for the 2009 Michael Marks Pamphlet Award, while her second, Shadow Dispatches , won the 2012 Mslexia Pamphlet Prize. Her second poetry collection, Much With Body, will be published by Seren in October 2021. Polly is also working on a non-fiction book that reflects on place, belonging and chronic illness. the poems 00:00 / 01:39 00:00 / 02:11 00:00 / 01:38 Publishing credits

Hear poet Helen Calcutt read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Helen Calcutt wave 2 spring 2020 back next the poet Helen Calcutt is the author of two volumes of poetry. Her first, Sudden rainfall (2014), was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. Helen's second work, Unable Mother , described by Robert Peake as ‘a violent and tender grapple with our cosy notions of motherhood’, appeared in 2018. Helen's poetry, journalism and critical writing have been published widely, and she is the creator and editor of acclaimed poetry anthology Eighty-Four – published in aid of leading suicide prevention charity CALM. Her newest pamphlet will be published in 2020. the poems 00:00 / 01:33 00:00 / 01:02 00:00 / 01:12 Publishing credits