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Hear poet Andy Nuttall read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Andy Nuttall wave 6 summer 2021 back next the poet Andy Nuttall hails from Lancashire and is now settled in the North East of England where he's a social worker. A late bloomer (his first published poem appeared in Acumen in September 2020), he lives with Susan and pup Fraser. Andy intends to use all the remaining ink in his pen to write many more poems around diverse themes. the poems The Baker of Idlib 00:00 / 00:40 In Idlib Province a small knot of dough Has risen slowly to its oven spring, Delicately chambered and crusted gold. This day they will again have bread to break Together in the village and the children Who are left to play in the rubble Of their lives will savour a morsel of comfort. What will we give them next to dream of, I wonder? Perhaps the spot where blood smears stone And a man – a baker – lies dying, still proving himself. Cartimandua 00:00 / 01:21 Down the long colonnade of limes The plumed galea of centuries Swept by in martial lines, Forty miles south of Arbeia The great fort of the Arabs Where the wall meets the sea and sky. At Pons Teys , or the crossing ford, The Asturian cavalry paused, Surveyed the coursing water and led Their sandalled ponies through the shallows. Stood by the weathered soldiers Clasped their woollen cloaks a little closer, Unknowing why like loosened stones They had been flung so hard and far Into this northern frigidarium . In the northlands of Brigantes; Old realm of Cartimandua: Regina, loyal subject of Rome; Cunning vixen; self-indulgent snake And, just for good measure, That treacherous Celtic bitch. Tacitus spat her name through curled, Orator’s lips two millennia ago. To the victor echo the spoils; To the literate, as always, the last word. Iron 00:00 / 01:48 She makes her daily rounds for daily bread As the turning world takes up us all In its vast and intricate continuance. Labour has become for her the beginning And the end of all that is worth doing. Life after all is habit forming. She might be otherwise were it not. Were it not for the iron of her control Creasing back some semblance of order And form her determination might falter. Enter a bright, long-limbed, precocious boy, Flooding her world with effervescent joy, His treasure grows as he does notching Up the door frame, his worth accumulating. Lost to time the years work free of her raw hands Like a child’s spinning-top set loose. Gone the glee of that colour and movement, Of the youthful race run rapid to white water And where it slows to a stop in a still pool Much is undone. His milky adolescence Has thickened, curdled and gone sour. Doors open and close. Yard leaves scurry. She is stooped now in the galley kitchen, Sifting through a pile of strangers’ washing, Wishing for the weight of something nameless In her head to shift, to be set right: His appearing quite unexpectedly In time for supper, smiling down on her As fresh as the daffodils in her cut-glass vase, Each yellowing heart wrung out for him. Publishing credits The Baker of Idlib: Acumen (Issue 98) Cartimandua / Iron: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Jan Harris read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jan Harris wave 11 autumn 2022 back next the poet Jan Harris lives in Nottinghamshire, and was awarded a place on Writing East Midlands’ mentoring scheme in 2018. Her first collection, Mute Swans on the Cam , was published in 2020. Jan has had poems in various print and online journals, including Acumen , Atrium and Poetry Wales , as well as in many poetry anthologies. In 2019, Jan scooped third place in the Wales Poetry Award. the poems Summerlands 00:00 / 00:55 Willow man farms the summerlands, tends black maul in its bed of clay. At leaf fall he harvests young stems by machine. His father’s billhook rusts away. At home his wife dusts the crib great-grandmother wove from withies, stripped white as tight sinews, proud on her hand when she twined the pliant wands to shape. Their willow lines Old Yeo’s banks where whimbrel-song springs and water voles burrow deep in osier-cradled earth. And there they sleep, close to the river’s lap and lull. The glove her mother left unfinished 00:00 / 01:04 It would mean so much to me , my friend says, if you could finish it . She hands me the needles: two neat rows of knitting in soft black yarn, a single strand of silver shimmering through. The finished one hugs her wrist, fits each finger with comfort. The pattern is fragile with age, held together with yellowed tape, adjusted many times to fit her growing hand, the workings written in pencil on the back. I follow it with care, fall into the rhythm of her mother’s making. To finish the glove takes little from the skein, enough left over for a hat and scarf to keep a daughter warm on the coldest winter day. Urban sheepdog 00:00 / 01:28 He’s your uber-cool streetwise sidekick, hyper- connected through the wavelength of his lead, but unleash him and he flows like a brook through the park, gathers you in the oxbows of his meanders. No city nine-to-five for him – he keeps a farmer’s time. Wet nose in your face at dawn and instant-coffee eyes that perk you up for work – no time to play. The sticks you throw are sheep to stalk in stealth mode, belly low to dew-damp grass, his gaze unflinching before the fetch! He’s partial to the urban life. A taste of pilau rice from late-night takeaways goes down a doggy treat. He works out weekly at the canine gym, and though he’ll sleep on a rug, he always prefers to snore amid the snowdrift of your crisp and clean Egyptian cotton sheets. But see, his muzzle’s flecked with moorland brown. He dreams, and his paws shake like a new-born lamb. Publishing credits Summerlands: Ink Sweat & Tears The glove her mother left unfinished: Acumen (Issue 101) Urban sheepdog: winner of The Writer Highway Dog Poetry Competition 2020

Hear poet Colin Dardis read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Colin Dardis wave 3 summer 2020 back next the poet Colin Dardis is a poet, editor and sound artist based in Belfast. He's been listed in the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing, Over The Edge New Writer of the Year Award and Best Reviewer of Literature, Saboteur Awards 2018, and published widely in Ireland, the UK and the US. Colin co-runs Poetry NI , a multimedia poetry platform, co-edits FourXFour Poetry Journal , and co-hosts the monthly open mic night, Purely Poetry . His latest collection is The Dogs of Humanity . the poems 00:00 / 02:05 00:00 / 01:27 00:00 / 01:23 Publishing credits

Hear poet Sascha Akhtar read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Sascha Akhtar wave 3 summer 2020 back next the poet Sascha Aurora Akhtar is a poet of the liminal – someone for whom all is magic. She considers herself a 'Pakistani-British-American: something reflected in the linguistic registers in her work. Her six poetry collections have been published by Salt, Shearsman, Contraband, The Emma Press, Knives, Forks & Spoons Press and ZimZalla. Her first short story collection, Of Necessity And Wanting, is due out from The 87 Press in October 2020, while Oxford University Press (India) will publish her first book of translations in 2021. Sascha's Poems For Eliot , from the book #LoveLikeBlood , was named number one poem of the past five years by Poetry Wales in the summer of 2019. the poems 00:00 / 01:43 00:00 / 02:03 00:00 / 01:45 Publishing credits

Hear poet Bill Sutton read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Bill Sutton wave 10 summer 2022 back next the poet London-based Cumbrian poet Bill Sutton (he/him) creates visceral, abstract reflections of nature in his work. His poetry has appeared in Anthropocene and new zine Overgrowth . In 2015, Bill and his brother formed music project Slabtoe, which has released several albums and EPs. Bill's recently lent his poetry/song-writing abilities to the BFI-funded short film The Leerie , and his debut screenplay Corpse Road will be produced later in 2022. the poems Helton 00:00 / 00:22 to see stars, the hulk of barn, the rise behind and silent. to see rain, smoke wrapped, the valleys slope and dreaming. to all orbits, a ripple, and the quiet fields sleeping. Lend The River Rain 00:00 / 00:32 The lights on the hillside are a constellation, scattered. A half-remembered conversation; a friend lost, a family gathered under a winter sky, whose clouds are torn and tattered. 'It’s just a shadow cast from a different day, but none of that now matters … ' I lend the river rain. It lends it back again. Black Barn Rise 00:00 / 00:23 shadows in the mist, an echo where a wood once was. moon cold mist, settled on the river's twist. above and behind, black barn rise, there, where an echo of a wood once was. Publishing credits Helton / Lend The River Rain: exclusive first publication by iamb Black Barn Rise: Overgrowth (Issue No. 1)

Hear poet Rebecca Goss read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Rebecca Goss wave 16 winter 2023 back next the poet A poet, tutor and mentor who lives in Suffolk, Rebecca Goss is the author of four full-length poetry collections and two pamphlets. Her second collection, Her Birth , was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2013 – while in 2015, she was shortlisted for both the Warwick Prize for Writing and the Portico Prize for Literature. Rebecca is the 2022 winner of the Sylvia Plath Prize, and her newest collection, Latch , was published by Carcanet in 2023. the poems The Hounds 00:00 / 00:48 It’s as if something calamitous is coming. Their lament rising across fields, its claim on the dawn keeping all the birds silent. I want to know what stirs them, the force of this pack. What causes them to stand, muscled frames trembling, throats full of baleful song. I am wakeful, rapt and disrupted, their bays sonorous against glass. Should I slide the thin pane, push my upper body into emerging light let them scent out my sex, and tell them we are all afraid. O this night, this bidding, claws at the latch, pure thunder of them running, my mouth opening to the cool and agitated air. At the Party I Shadowed Susie 00:00 / 01:02 who was happy to slip away walk with me into the back field where I drank her 17-year-old wisdom could look at her hair the opposite colour of mine her blue jeans convincing myself my twelve years were not an issue both of us plucking at grasses when we got almost to the oak we ventured back to the adults neither of us missed I lost Susie in the drunken stir of my parents’ garden until night got ready to flood the party I thought I might go in search of her or the cats so went to the furthest barn and in the black that had rolled inside I saw Susie being held by Richard the boy I’d ignored because his punky clothes confused me now his left hand inside Susie’s back pocket as they sought each other’s mouths air urgent unfamiliar standing there considering myself betrayed waiting until breakfast to utter it the sudden turn of my parents’ heads curious to know what I saw my mother sensing something flicker staring at her daughter so full of heat and blood and questions Gate 00:00 / 00:27 Here she comes, hair a stream, path home, dog’s ears pricked to the latch, and I’m in the garden, pear tree spilling, day of poems behind me, hiding my stored dark, thinking I must look old and not extraordinary, her skin the truest surface wanting to kiss her as she drops her bag, turns, every atom of her near me, and I make my slight gesture, feel the quickening. Publishing credits All poems: Latch (reproduced with gratitude to Carcanet Press for its kind permission) Author photo: © Natalie J Watts

Hear poet Thomas March read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Thomas March wave 12 winter 2022 back next the poet Essayist, performer and poet Thomas March is the author of Aftermath . His work has featured in The Account , The Adroit Journal , The Good Men Project , Evergreen Review , OUT , RHINO and Verse Daily . Thomas hosts and curates bi-monthly 'variety salon' Poetry/Cabaret – a performance series that unites and invites poets, comedians and cabaret performers to share responses to a common theme. A contributing editor to GRAND , he's called New York City home for more than 25 years, and teaches at both The Brearley School, and in Barnard College’s Pre-College Program. the poems Connected 00:00 / 00:39 Absence can’t be absent until the waiting stops and every holiday or date that celebrates something of ours can pass without my noticing when I get into bed that I’ve been expecting to hear from you, maybe an accidental call— maybe no accident. Until then, we remain at the opposite ends of widening silence, nothing between us but an unseen wire, pulled taut— a trip wire, a guard wire held by a ghost, a string vibrating soundlessly between two Dixie cups. Separate Now 00:00 / 01:12 Most of the stemware has shattered, and the plates have chipped, of living together, never replacing anything we still had two of. Whatever is broken or worn I guess we kept for the having of only one of us, one day— so now that you’re leaving, you leave whatever is replaceable. Our suitcase is yours now, and mine you can have, too—now that I have your closet space, and all these drawers. (I’m keeping one drawer just for you— with bracelets from a Pride parade, our hotel soaps and small shampoos, a key to your old apartment, the corks from two bottles of Veuve, some ticket stubs, a metrocard, your extra checkbook. All of it remains, as if the heart were not a reliquary of its own.) But what will we do with the shoes? We were sharing our shoes before we settled our sides of the bed. So who’s to say whose shoes are left behind this door that has to stay unlocked, with one of us per side? Hello, Future Crossing the Pont des Arts, Paris, 2019 00:00 / 01:30 'Hello, future,' I say. 'Just say, "Hello, future."' We don’t stop, but you wave to the camera and sing, 'Hey, future!' in that way you sing 'Merry Christmas!' or 'Hey, you!' if it’s me when you open the door. I imagined that day we would watch this, after everything we could be had already happened. We’d look at each other in a comfortable room at the quieter end of our well-traveled life and reassure ourselves by telling your fortune— that everything to come would be worth all the rest of everything to come. It wasn’t innocent, asking you to mark this point from which we’d measure whatever time was left. I knew it might be sad for at least one of us to watch someday—sometimes I watch it on behalf of the future we planned, sometimes one we might have escaped. What if I had stopped you there to confess my fear—that we’d never be happier? We could have parted on that bridge and never said a thing we never should have said. But as long as we live in this future you greet, there might be so much more to say—when we’re ready no longer to be two idiots on a bridge, assuming it will hold. Publishing credits Connected: exclusive first publication by iamb Separate Now: Out Hello, Future: Evergreen Review Author photo: © Matte O'Brien

Hear poet T S S Fulk read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. T S S Fulk wave 20 winter 2024 back next the poet T S S Fulk, a neurodivergent author and poet who lives with his neurodiverse family in Sweden, holds an MA in English literature from the University of Toronto, and has had his work published by numerous presses and journals. He edits Sublimation: a Magazine of Speculative Poetry and Art , and is an active musician who plays bass trombone, the mountain dulcimer, and the Swedish bumblebee dulcimer. His first collection, Metamodern Morning Angst and Other Horrors , appeared in 2024. the poems The Unquiet Grave 00:00 / 01:14 I awaken midst caresses of the westerly wind my sweet spectral lover their touch light forgotten kisses I arch my neck, face beaming up toward gently falling rain darkening cleansing blotch by blotch the polished marble stone A lone silhouette approaches Soon Greenwood shall I leave His name is buried deep below under piles of rubble the detritus and floss of time yet by the moon he comes bearing blossoms to wilt for me brushing stray leaves aside With trembling lips he stand o’r me a lamb to the slaughter Spiked tendrils of my mind extend Soon Greenwood shall I leave He is still in the peak of life so dearly that I miss I swell grateful for each visit another hook attached I know not why he comes to me a blessing from the gods For he shall be my salvation his sacrifice my boon As the vessel fully opens now Greenwood shall I leave Morse Code 00:00 / 00:35 Soundwaves came up through the walls the dull barely perceivable rhythm patterns from our son’s feet tapping to K-pop videos These were not seismographic waves and yet they drilled into my brain whose neurons sought to organize into the semblance of a song And that is all it takes to ruin my routine to keep sleep well at bay Yes, that is all it takes to enshroud the next day in a fog of tiredness What message was crypted therein? Simple fragility A Sonnet in a Time of War 00:00 / 00:42 When the new gods arrived with their train of monsters we stood still mouths agape with disquiet and awe as they toppled buildings slaughtering us like sheep The dead outnumber the living our homes turned to tombs of rubble Rising above the smoke and dust the wailing of the survivors fails to reach the old gods’ ears Our pleads unheard thus unanswered The new gods dance upon the dead We fall down and kneel in despair For we have called them here to make our world a great boneyard Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Charles G Lauder Jr read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Charles G Lauder Jr wave 11 autumn 2022 back next the poet Charles G Lauder Jr was born and raised in San Antonio, Texas. Having lived on both coasts of America and graduated from Boston University, he moved to Leicestershire in the UK where he lives with his wife and two children. His poems have been published widely – in print, and online. From 2014 to 2018, he was Assistant Editor for The Interpreter’s House; and for over twenty years, he's copyedited academic books on literature, history, medicine and science. Charles' two pamphlets are Bleeds and Camouflaged Beasts . His debut collection is The Aesthetics of Breath . the poems The Color of Mourning 00:00 / 01:21 The colour of morning in a San Diego autumn: you displaced here twelve years note sunlight’s silent taint and fade trees stained not with the blood of a slain midsummer god but with the knick of his finger. Dressed in the hues of fallen leaves you fill kitchen corners with apples and acorns corn husks and pine cones brew cauldrons of thick chowder and beer dropping hints that August has outstayed its welcome. This is the time of spiders gossamer-veiled doorways thresholds scorched by the shadow of scarred tattooed pumpkins eyes spooned out in grief over summer’s supposed passing. From here you scry distant clouds of smoke: seasonal wildfires fuelled by desert sage and dried brush that will touch many hands before put out like the sparklers once waved around a bonfire as if casting a spell lights danced off your fingers before extinguishing. The Pissing Contest 00:00 / 02:24 Little boys with their penises in hand gathered about a porcelain trough, the drain a silver dome, when all they know of politics is what they overhear their parents declare, so though they know nothing of Watergate and eighteen minutes of missing tape, nor of Ehrlichman and Hunt, Mitchell and Dean, they know ‘Nixon’, with its hard ‘ks’ lump, and Congressional hearings, the long, droning table of men in a dark wooden-panelled room and the high smack of a gavel, broadcast on all three TV channels, stealing away afternoon cartoons and Mother’s soaps for weeks on end, they stand there, penises grasped in little hands, following the biggest boy’s lead and aim their streams at the silver dome drain: Look at me! I’m peeing on the Capitol! Only a few of the arched golden flows have the strength to splatter against the dome, burst through its holes like a water cannon against windows, offices and corridors flood with desks and sofas floating away in the foam, interns and PAs swim to get clear. It doesn’t matter if they really meant the White House, or Congress, or Washington in general, this is for Bugs Bunny and Daffy Duck, and, if their mothers were here, The Guiding Light and As the World Turns , little boys peeing until penises run dry and the pee drains away, leaving a stink and a stain, the little boys are proud of their new game, as penises are waved and shook, then tucked away. This before the days of separate urinals, like older brothers and fathers already use, where they’ll stand, distracted by size, and brag to one another that the water is cold , and the biggest boy will reply, And deep too . The Guest 00:00 / 01:25 Bellying up to the night in neighborhoods as dark as the street corners of my mind I meet him fully for the first time, lucid, bug-eyed manic but not ugly, his frightened grasp handcuffed to my wrist as he circles, circles about me like wagons on the open, empty plains. What folk birthed and nurtured him, caged him, then set him free with few words in the ear as guidance? Like a cousin, or brother, last seen as a child —he’s not a stranger, but he is. Back home, thieves have broken in and he breathes their air, the money they stole, the television they broke, the window they crawled through, the colorful oxygen of their skin. Like a dead grandfather or drunk uncle at Christmas he collapses on the sofa mumbling like a ventriloquist, lending me his tremulous voice, his pinched nose and clouded sight. Rubbish spilling from his pockets is quickly brushed under the carpet. Publishing credits The Color of Mourning: The Aesthetics of Breath (V. Press) The Pissing Contest: Atrium The Guest: Dreich (Season 4, No. 2) Author photo: © Julian Lauder-Mander

Hear poet Maggie Mackay read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Maggie Mackay wave 21 spring 2025 back next the poet After retiring as a support teacher for young people with additional needs, Maggie Mackay took up writing again in 2009. A Masters degree from Manchester Metropolitan University followed – as did her pamphlet The Heart of the Run , and debut collection A West Coast Psalter . Maggie's second collection, The Babel of Human Travel , appeared in 2022. Her poem How to Distil a Guid Scotch Malt was awarded a place in the Poetry Archive’s inaugural WordView 2020 permanent collection, and one of her poems was a runner-up in The Liverpool Prize, judged by Roger McGough. Maggie is a regular reviewer of poetry collections and pamphlets at The Friday Poem . the poems Reasons for Time Travelling to Byres Farm Cottages 00:00 / 00:53 To witness the birth of my father one hundred and four years ago on that sunny November day To meet my grandmother humming a baloo to her new son To hear the milk cows low beyond the limewashed buildings To walk the fields towards the White Cart, Crookston Castle within sight To feel the oak barley breeze in my hair To watch the Clydesdale’s hooves sink as the plough carves into the soil To smell pure country air To play with my toddler uncle on the stone floor with his home-made wooden train which I have to this day To run it down the hallway and hear the wheels clatter as they have for three generations The Babel of Human Travel 00:00 / 01:37 The day comes when she hears the pasture murmur for the last time, and so/her trunk and her soul head for the/Broomielaw where the ship waits for her coming and the Lord/keeps faith while all manner of Scots are scattered/with all manner of dialects and accents, treasuring them/in this fine, vessel-stranger towards new lives abroad/She waits for a roll call, goes from deck to berth from/dining table thence/to fall upon/her lonely spot and weep the/salt from her pale face/dream of/the final lament her brother played, all/the longing pouring through the/Atlantic waters, that handful of earth/deep in her pocket and/the treasured Christening robe folded where they/packed it with the promise of babies to come. Those too aged waving off and miles away, left/behind. The worn spurtle, flat irons, darning mushroom, cradled too in the hold, as the ship casts off/towards the land of caribou and snowshoes through struggles to/understand othery Baltic tongues which yearn to build/homesteads along riverbanks, seek to befriend the Cree nation, preserve the/songs and stories of home, create new histories of their Manitoba city. Void 00:00 / 00:26 Father hanged himself perhaps above the washhouse mangle, or in the orchard maybe, dead weight dressed in apple blossom. You’re wondering if I miss him, if I miss his hand on my arm, if his voice is fading. It’s in the sparrow’s call, ten chisel clangs, a bicycle bell. Publishing credits Reasons for Time Travelling to Byres Farm Cottages: exclusive first publication by iamb The Babel of Human Travel: The Babel of Human Travel (Impspired Press) Void: A West Coast Psalter (Kelsay Books)

Hear poet Eric T Racher read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Eric T Racher wave 23 autumn 2025 back next the poet Eric T Racher lives in Riga, Latvia. His poetry, essays and fiction have appeared in Socrates on the Beach , minor literature[s] , Exacting Clam , Your Impossible Voice , Literary Imagination , Keep Planning , ballast and elsewhere. the poems On the vanity and inevitability of the prefatory gesture or On the arche-sonnet as the always-ready of the sonnet 00:00 / 01:01 And this (therefore) will not have been a son- net. Parentage must name its apparitions (Desire as lex ferenda ’s lexicon.), attentive to their boundary conditions: the artifact as fact, the pharmakon as con (A figment of our propositions.), though preface, plough and pharynx feed upon the flesh of definitions and finitions. And thus for truth, truth-likeness, verse, verse-likeness: I, longing for horizon’s ‘no’, a vale of tears embalmed into mere Werkverzeichnis , rough-hew an end I cannot know, a veil descending on a valley of unlikeness. Perhaps the sonnet ends to no avail. On memory and the sonnet as a sanctum, or laboratory, of self and other 00:00 / 01:20 I could, I thought, I could just step right out onto the frozen surface of the sea in Vecaki, but something—urgency or doubt or love—metastasized throughout my body, held me still, it seems. Without an intimation of the sea, précis the flesh provides itself, a wave asea in these ascendencies, the breath will out. But here we are. So much, alas, is read into these sighs and silences that lance the air’s malignancies. The ear is ever the suppliant; the sky is ever dread. The sea is everything. The glint and glance of light on ice or wave revives. However, the sea remains a shadow, not unsought; shadow, or she, gave shape to something wrought. On rhetoric as constitutive of the body of the lover 00:00 / 00:55 If Love, from this unmetered mess, give rise to dwelling, ledgers, traces of exchange, th’inscribing of a line, harp-string, reprise of unkempt interludes in strange arrangements; if Love, replete with pleasaunce, living breast of marble arcing into night, should bind us on this threshold, us divest of vestments, or dithyramb the reason, heart the mind; if Love unvessel us, pianissimo our public burls, or us memento-mori and alm the threadbare self, all touch-and-go; then we translated are, transfigured so— anthimeria, anastrophe are more than figures, says chi ben amando more . Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Thomas Zimmerman read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Thomas Zimmerman wave 18 summer 2024 back next the poet At Washtenaw Community College, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Thomas Zimmerman teaches English, directs the Writing Center , and edits The Big Windows Review . He's been active in small press publishing since the 1980s, and his latest poetry book is Dead Man's Quintet . Thomas' poetry can be found in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal , Pulp Poets Press , Green Ink Poetry , A Thin Slice of Anxiety , Grand Little Things and elsewhere. the poems Few Good Things 00:00 / 01:00 A sluggish walk in dewy woods with Ann and Trey, who nearly snagged a fresh-dead bird. The sun burned off some brain fog, thoughts began to breach, and then submerged without a word. Unshowered, stubble-chinned, I had a bad night’s sleep: Trey licking, barking in his dreams. Or maybe it was me, poor poet sad enough to nurse his ironies and memes. And now black coffee’s coursing through my wan and tepid blood, spring-gleam in glacial shade. Yet ennui clings like moss, chill hanging on. Not hard to see how few good things get made. How long this search for beauty, truth, gods’ signs? Ad infinitum? No, just fourteen lines. How Slowly 00:00 / 00:54 Some days, how slowly flows the river: that of consciousness, and I a crumbling cork in it. Oh rudderless. I think of all the swimmers in my streams, some surfers too. All hunted down: white sharks. My screen glows whiter than potential, clean blank canvas stretched, which I, most days, mistake for nothingness. Last night, twice, thunder shook the house. An inch of rain. So muggier than hell today. But after work, I saw a fawn, curled cool in backyard spruce shade, looking at me with intent, or so it seemed. But I admit I often think that you are looking at me that way too. You like to say you’re not. Dispatch 00:00 / 01:10 My dad would have been 94 today, and I’ll be 63 next Saturday. Regardless of which Zimmerman’s alive or dead, years fall like rain to swell the river, same mad god still counting drops. Now, drowned gold sun, dry champagne in your glass, strong ale in mine. I slept in late this morning, haven’t showered. Mind’s a dark pavilion, fairness in the shadow turning blue, and temples gray. I write because I want to feel alive: the poet in the book I’m reading says the same. New moon: late birdsong, whine of tires on the interstate, the bedroom window cracked to let the night air in, death floating lonely and austere. I feel it pass but know that it and I will cycle back. This dispatch from the planet, time, my molecules: so slightly all coheres. Publishing credits Few Good Things: Beakful (November 28th 2023) How Slowly: Disturb the Universe (February 13th 2024) Dispatch: Litmora (No. 0, August 2023)

Hear poet Georgia Hilton read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Georgia Hilton wave 2 spring 2020 back next the poet Georgia Hilton is a poet and fiction writer originally from Ireland who lives now in Winchester, England. In 2018, her poem Dark-Haired Hilda Replies to Patrick Kavanagh was joint winner of the Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize – her debut pamphlet, I went up the lane quite cheerful , being published by Dempsey & Windle that same year. Georgia’s first collection, Swing , is also published by Dempsey & Windle. the poems 00:00 / 01:26 00:00 / 01:19 00:00 / 00:45 Publishing credits

Hear poet Lloyd Schwartz read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Lloyd Schwartz wave 4 autumn 2020 back next the poet Lloyd Schwartz is the author of five collections, including the forthcoming Who’s on First? New and Selected Poems. His work has been chosen for a Pushcart Prize, The Best American Poetry, and The Best of the Best American Poetry. His other publications include Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose & Letters , and the centennial edition of Bishop’s Prose . Lloyd is the Frederick S. Troy Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, and Somerville Massachusetts' Poet Laureate. He was awarded the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, and a 2019 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in poetry. the poems 00:00 / 03:10 00:00 / 00:49 00:00 / 01:18 Publishing credits

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