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Hear poet Bob Perkins read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Bob Perkins back next the poet Bob Perkins is 81 and married, with two 40-ish kids. Once a boxboy, submariner, handyman, typist, lawyer and teacher, he's none of these professions now. Bob reads and writes with the Manhattan Beach Poetry Circle, and has had poems published in The Los Angeles Review , Consequence and Delta Poetry Review . the poems Drafting 00:00 / 02:02 Coasting down this California coast, we’re twenty or forty pelicans in a loose line, riding each other’s coattails, taking turns as leader till, spying a friend or careless fish, each goes its own way. This is co-operation, not discipline: no goosestep, no chorus line. You flap when you want to, I’ll station keep for lift, my flap lifts the next guy. We see, we use, vortices, whorls, forces invisible to the grounded. Is this survival of the fit? Sort of. We practice prosperity of the team, but it’s understood: anyone can dive any time. Till then, you stir the air for me, I for you. It’s not quite communism, but it isn’t capitalism, either. Call it community. It worked for eons until a different thought, call it DDT, call it domination, call it human, dealt death to us last century. They thought, 'Let’s control the fields, let’s exterminate the bugs, let’s make more profits.' It worked, too. But turns out it isn’t the economy, stupid, it’s the ecology. You start killing, bugs will die. So will bees and birds and boys and girls. They got smarter that time, banned DDT. Did it again with the ozone layer. But now, they’re flying high with carbon, greenhouse gases, global warming. We we can’t tell how this will end, but you might see us as birds of good omen, soaring since the eocene, never ruling, always getting by, sharing the work and the world. Trigger Finger 00:00 / 01:32 My middle finger, dominant hand, pauses when I open a fist, then springs into place. It’s a caution: that finger has done my bidding for a long time, but now is considering rebellion. 'What,' it asks, 'is in this for me?' It’s not alone. Eyebrows are restyling themselves, peeing is a sometime thing, my hair left town a decade ago. But somehow this gesture – my own body giving me the bird – speaks to me. It reminds me this will end, will not end well, will end soon. I won’t get the last laugh; I will write my last poem. This might be it. And yet, it’s kind of fun – a new trick to do with my body, stepping from the gliding analog world of youth to the binary future I don’t understand. I, starting with this digit, am becoming digital, robotic, reducing to two states. Open or closed. Up or down. Alive or dead. I’m glad it’s happening slowly enough that I can watch the show. You can, too: here, look – it’s open. Shut. Open. Shut. Hey, presto! The Archimedes Palimpsest 00:00 / 02:37 1 They killed the lamb for dinner and for profit, flayed it, split and stretched its hide, sold the parchment to men who rewrote Archimedes there. Someone scrawled an Aristotle critique over the parchment. Later, medieval Christian tastes cut, folded, scrubbed it clean (almost clean) and twisted the sheep’s skin for a prayer book. Just last century, some Frenchman faked illuminations to increase its market price. Now, sheepskins upholster sports cars and the digital palimpsest is on the net, a Google book. Oh, lamb. 2 Above Tom’s Place, off 395, I sit beside Rock Creek and watch the flow. Holy, hypnotic, the motion distracts from displays of standing waves and eddies, leaf and sky reflections flashing on the stream’s stretched surface. If I look at them I cannot focus on the creek bed’s rocks or shadows, and whichever avatar I choose, the clear water itself slips by unseen, almost absent unless some trout swims there. 3 First I sought your pink, your so-white skin beside my brown, your unpainted lips, eyes, breasts, hips-- tried to know you in sex. The fluid years drift by, draw tighter. The mass of your kindness leaves its mark. So do our quarrels and congruences. Sometimes I see flickers deep within, sometimes I hear our humdrum babble; sometimes your body grips me once again. Sometimes I am distant. Lives are too large for telling. I say, 'Ink. Fish. Love. Skin,' one word at a time. I should shout all my words at once like a creek, like a bleating beast. Publishing credits Drafting / Trigger Finger: exclusive first publication by iamb The Archimedes Palimpsest:The Los Angeles Review (Vol. 8)

Hear poet Niki Strange read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Niki Strange back next the poet Brighton-based poet, workshop facilitator and academic Niki Strange is the author of two pamphlets: Flight of the Dragonfly Press' Body Talk , and The Hedgehog Poetry Press' Stickleback XXXI . She was longlisted for the 2022 Palette Poetry Sappho Prize , and placed second in both the 2019 Sussex Poetry competition and 2021 Second Light Network competition. A passionate believer in poetry’s power to support health and wellbeing, Niki rediscovered poetry while undergoing cancer treatment. She went on to secure Arts Council Funding as Poet-in-Residence for Macmillan’s Horizon Centre , where she delivered 16 poetry workshops for people affected by cancer. the poems ‘Broken In’ (Sidcup 1985) 00:00 / 02:42 We savoured stolen hours on the steps outside Lamorbey pool exercising nothing more than freedom. It was there that two older boys curtain-haired, reeking of Aramis and the horn, pulled us away to snog at The Glade. I’d been tadpoling there with Mum carrying home a trophy globe of darting promises to becoming more. Soon after I found the jar full of drifting remnants; the strongest had turned on their own. Broken In – Definition 1: Comfortable through habitual use or familiarity. Like a pair of well-worn shoes. Not like party sandals stiffly box-fresh beneath torn tissue or pumps danced supple from lessons in the local hall. Peggy’s ringed fingers clattered on the keys as we whirled through tendrils of her fag smoke and Harmony hairspray. Not like finding my feet in those white stilettos a tottering dressage of lengthened legs and raised arse, trotting not running. Broken In – Definition 2: Tamed or trained to obey like a horse broken to the saddle. Ridden. Bidden. Broken In – Definition 3: To force entry into something. Closed legs, underwear, no. Barriers breached by such brief and banal brutality. I never told anyone. I didn’t know how to speak it. Broken In – Definition 4: To cause a disruption in a conversation or discussion. We learn not to do this. We learn that when we do this we will not be heard. We learn that when we do this we will be heard and not believed. We learn that when we do this we will be heard and believed but they will likely go unpunished. The first time I heard the term 'broken in' I was 14 by The Glade, with its cupped tadpoles, its slippery sticklebacks, as I was told this was becoming a woman. Longlisted for the Palette Poetry Sappho Prize 2022 First one gone 00:00 / 00:47 One December our grief took us out in search of a barren landscape. Our car slid on ice into deep snow and came to rest. Swaddled. Still. Then engine coughing, straining. Seeking traction against futile revolutions. Fruitless cycles. Finally we were shifted by the forward momentum gifted from others passing by. Their shoulders pressed to the cold metal as if armoured for battle. This takes more than the two of us. This takes more than the two of us. Second prize in the BHAC Sussex Poetry Competition 2019 I can write myself 00:00 / 01:03 into an open top car, careering on corniche roads in the Cote d’Azur’s brûlée noon. No factor 50, for the facts of my melanoma are of little consequence. All is shadowless velocity. I am heliotropic to the blazing sun, lit up, let loose. Letter by letter, I am matter transported. Written reckless. I can write myself sprung from a high board, suspended in defiance of Earth’s pull, my balance restored. Lost nodes, radiated breast, sleeved right arm parts of this new entirety that tucks, revolves then plunges as steel into the quenching water. Written stronger. Second prize in the Second Light Network Competition 2021 Publishing credits 'Broken In' (Sidcup 1985): Stickleback XXXI (The Hedgehog Poetry Press) First one gone: Body Talk (Flight of the Dragonfly Press) I can write myself: Flights (Issue No. 1)

Hear poet Marie Marchand read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Marie Marchand back next the poet Inaugural Poet Laureate of Ellensburg, Washington State, from 2022 to 2024, Marie Marchand was nominated by iamb for The Pushcart Prize in 2024. Her poetry has appeared in Crannóg Magazine , Catamaran Literary Reader , California Quarterly and elsewhere. Marie is the author of three poetry collections – most recently Gifts to the Attentive – with her fourth, Mostly Sweet, Lovely, Human Things , due out in 2025. Marie is a graduate of Naropa University and The Iliff School of Theology, where she studied psychology, religion and peacemaking. the poems As Necessary As 00:00 / 01:05 I want to write a poem where every line counts as much as breathing. Where every word is as necessary as oxygen. Where if one stanza was removed, the whole architecture of the poem would crumble because every part needs the others that damn much. It would be a poem about what I have lost because how can I know anything else as intimately, as desperately, as that which is no longer under my fingertips yet is always on my mind—dancing like persistent ghosts, utterly vivid and concrete? These apparitions are more alive for me than this kitchen table, this paper and pen. I want to write a poem where every line counts as much as breathing. Then maybe these ghosts will feel seen and heard and I can lay what I’ve lost to rest. Dinner Party in Boston 00:00 / 00:51 Wave-remnants lap the edges of my memory. It was 30 years ago when we kissed in the ocean house on silts. The Atlantic’s wintry breaker spanked the salted wood beneath our feet like a metronome. Surrounded by water yet haunted by thirst I kissed you in the hallway and your cheeks turned to pure fire pomegranate-red the juicy tide of your body rising. Cool mist from the surf seeped in through the old home’s joints dampening the flames. We resumed mingling, talking small knowing that soon we would fall into each other’s ocean and be quenched. In Defense of Poetry as Therapeutic From the Greek therapeuein : to minister to 00:00 / 01:20 It’s true, when I’m having an asthma attack, I don’t reach for Keats or Kinnell— I take my inhaler and within minutes steadfast science rescues me. But when my heart is filled with grief, I write. When my life is shuttered by loss I go to the ancient poets to hear what they have to say. They are my lifeline. Their words get me through prod me towards something. Towards going on. Towards going on. The only thing that matters in the moment. The only thing that matters ever. Why read and write poetry if not for its curative powers inviting us to wholeness? Yes, poetry is craft. Poetry is community. But, above all, poetry is therapeutic: it ministers to. It divines understanding of the fledgling self and by showing us to ourselves, saves us from our own extinctions. Publishing credits As Necessary As / In Defense of Poetry as Therapeutic*: exclusive first publication by iamb Dinner Party in Boston: POETICS: Water – Life & Death (Bainbridge Island Press) *Nominated for The Pushcart Prize

Hear poet Zannah Kearns read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Zannah Kearns back next the poet Freelance writer Zannah Kearns has had her poems featured in Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal , The Dark Horse , Finished Creatures , Under the Radar , Ink, Sweat & Tears and Atrium . A members’ winner in a summer 2021 competition run by The Poetry Society, Zannah co-runs the Poets’ Café – a monthly open mic in Reading, Berkshire. the poems High Tide in the Morning 00:00 / 01:13 It strikes me the moon controls more than our tides just as these children surge into my room, my bed crash into my heart, flood me with chatter, their energies zingy as sea spray. Lockdown: the house is awash with unfinished projects, dirty socks scrunched-up sheets of abandoned drawings. I’m scrolling news that’s rolling in story upon story too many names, too many splashes. I can lose hours gazing at friends’ pictures their perfect reflections mirrored in lakes but we’ve all of us blown far out to sea, swung on each wave at the whim of the moon. Under sunlit windswept skies we cast off into this day its dip and swell into its lull helming as best as we can. Love as a Mutt 00:00 / 01:25 We run — our laughter bouncing against bricks and the fence we threw mud at last Wednesday. We run with faces turned for a moment to the sun, feeling its glow as a kiss on our skin, held for all memory. The Earth has halted her turning to say our names. Then, coats flapping with busted zips we’re away again — hair unbrushed, fingers raw, some nails bitten to bloody quicks, but none of it matters because now snow falls! Gentle flakes spiral through air stilled. Skin bright, breath visible, our small hearts are as hot as baked potatoes. We spread our hands while the sky pegs out her grimy sheets. Near some dustbins, a mangy dog cowers, all ribs and bald patches. Some throw stones, but Jamie tosses her coat, scoops the mutt — ears cut off, bones a collection of loose rods she can hardly keep in her arms. I’ll call him Princess. Bet you can’t keep him. But Jamie, smiling, doesn’t hear. On Holding On and Being Held 00:00 / 01:31 In Aviemore, I climbed a wall of ice glittering in the winter sun — an edifice of glass. I led the route, kicking crampons to make shelves, reaching up with yellow-handled axes, chipping holds; scaling a ladder, right then left like Jack climbing his beanstalk through the cloud, snowflakes falling so thick they looked furred. And my heart full. It’s the first time I’d ever winter-climbed. Everywhere, white was all I saw so, even though I was several storeys high with nothing much to hold me if I fell, something about the surrounding cloud, the mountain’s bowl like a cupped hand, felt substantial. I, who am often consumed by fear, had none. Sometimes now, far out on one of life’s edges, I like to remember that day on the mountain when the tips of my toes were hooked in its snow, how the flat of each boot rested on air. Publishing credits High Tide in the Morning: Locked Down | Poems, Diaries and Art from the 2020 Pandemic (Poetry Space) Love as a Mutt: Under the Radar (Issue 25) On Holding On and Being Held: The Dark Horse (Issue 43)

Hear poet J L M Morton read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. J L M Morton back next the poet Winner of the inaugural Laurie Lee Prize for Writing in 2022, J L M Morton is a writer and poet whose work has been published internationally in journals including The Poetry Review , The Rialto and most recently in the multidisciplinary ethnography Living With Water: Everyday encounters and liquid connections . Her latest book is Glos Mythos – a collaboration with satirist Emma Kernahan and illustrator Bill Jones. Her first full collection, Red Handed , will be published by Broken Sleep Books in 2024. the poems An Inheritance of Water 00:00 / 01:15 When I die the chemical signature in my bones will tell of Thames and Severn, Churn and Frome, marrow of upland pastures, mill race and outflow. An ancestral line of dockers loading and unloading cargo. A spring-fed apple tree that transpires deep in a valley sheds fruits that only wasps will feed on. And I want to close my ears to the endless sound of buckets emptying and refilling on the wheel. Is this what we call beauty? Is this a place my hand can hold, still reaching for the world? None of this is clean but it connects. Big enough and continuous to contain all of our lives, our deaths are carried in my blood and breath is carried by water. Rain is another name for love. Life Cycle of the Cochineal Beetle (c.1788) ‘ … it is worthwhile recalling that from the medieval era, one of the colours most prized by the crown, church and nobility in Europe for their finest fabrics was that of carmine or deep crimson.’ ~ Carlos Marichal Salinas ~ 00:00 / 01:51 An egg breaks on the pad of a prickly pear somewhere in Oaxaca where the scale insects’ livid bodies mass and crackle in the sun. Emerging, a crawler nymph clusters with the softness of her siblings to feed in the downy blanket – explorers edging to the brink of the known world. Nymph throws out a long wisp of wax, a thread to catch a ride on the wind, lifting and landing on the terra incognita of a new cactus pad. Her claim is staked with a stab of her beak. Cochineal sups the juices, sees off predators – lacewings, ladybirds, ants – with the bright surprise of her body. Fat, fierce and full of poison. She has detached her wings. Has no need of legs. Holding her colour quietly in trust – she waits for the male to eat his fill, to mate and die. Scraped away at ninety days, her body is laid out and dried, then pulverised. Destined for dominion. On Doubt / A Pair of Blue Eyes After Thomas Hardy and Emma Gifford 00:00 / 01:16 Meeting changed our strata, the way only a storm at the edge of an ocean can do. The way a slump of salt water in a black cliff hole is a wet metronome for desire and regret. Blue milk sea and yellow gorse – it is possible to be ambivalent and beautiful at the same time. Everything becomes an image of our disharmonic foldings. You hanging from the clifftop in search of my jewels. I should have guessed the houses were crappy behind the waterfront where the old lanes run deep, away from the wind, under the pines. Stacked tyres, fly-tipped white goods. We are here for this moment and we fuck it up. Instead of making like gregarious worms in a world of Sabelleria reefs, honeycombed in our detritus. Publishing credits An Inheritance of Water: Raceme (Issue 13) Life Cycle of the Cochineal Beetle (c.1788): Poetry Review (Vol. 112, Issue 4) On Doubt / A Pair of Blue Eyes: Dust Poetry Magazine (Issue 9)

Hear poet Rishika Williams read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Rishika Williams back next the poet Rishika Williams started writing poetry after COVID-19 lockdowns eased in London in 2021. She writes trauma-based, long-form narrative poetry centred on gender-based violence, Partition, and activism in Sindh – both her families having left Hyderabad around Partition. She was shortlisted for the 2022/23 Malorie Blackman Scholarship, and longlisted for the UK's National Poetry Competition in 2023. Her work appears in Third Space , Between the Lines , Form Lab and Hyderabad & Beyond . Rishika performs regularly at open mics, online, and at events, including at the World Sindhi Congress’ 36th Annual Conference in 2024. the poems on the bald hill 00:00 / 02:46 I press my palm to brick touch a familial laugh with the metre of forgive I press my ear to stone listen to the river walk I recall the game thurra with small flecks of flint with the rhythm of return I recall that havaa, that wind a tourist on the bald hill I tell the windcatchers my got~ra is Kashyap with the Haridwar scrolls I tell the land grabbers nukhs D~umba and T~evek I find your initials in my mehendi Khudāwadī script on my hands with the search for sat~a suhagan~ I find my hair is wet with oil a red thread wraps my wrist I count seven fruits on my lap nine planets, a swastik, a betel nut with the invite to the departed I count two pieces of misree conjoined a red line in my parting I throw the clothes from my old life ghari pots laden with water with the many shapes of fire I throw ghee and spice in the flames the mandap is one umbrella  I walk in front for moksha mangal sutra chains my neck with the priest facing north I walk east for liberty dancing girl is there to protect me I let you step on my foot a dholee brought me here with the camels and the horses I let you step on my land my parents wash your feet I give salt for loyalty exchange datar with the slope with the tilak from the incline I give salt for peace and unity the grains sigh in my blood I fast for your long-life in search for the T~eejr^ee moon with the light I catch in my thali I fast to remain your wife there are seven widows’ shrines I look straight in the eyes of a crow the kawa know my face with the directions of the caw I look straight at my front door you take a knife to water Indus, 00:00 / 00:48 there is already bhukha amongst the hari in Bukhari droughts in my home in Mehrghar and so many whistle blows in Manjidak the farmers need your emeralds from the ruby red of Lal Qalander and Guru Nanak must ride the Phuleli on a fish send the white horse to warn of floods so families do not sell their daughters and in the brackish waters of the triangle at your mouth if the salinity increases you will need to swallow it as the yogis’ cleanse of Vamana Kriya but the lobsters netted off the costal stretch of Clifton Beach might get too salty for the chi-chi my parents come from a place that no longer exists 00:00 / 03:50 and in the ‘o’ of exodus I hear my father as a boy, ‘just take your hands’ I hear him say and I had not heard that he had said that before but I know him so well he does still tell me things things that had no language before, as his memories get younger, the further Dad goes, he ages closer my Dad is always closer than ever before and my families left Sindh as the British penned a long line of a couplet their lawyer came to strip off our linens to unmake our beds to make us leave without a pot or a pen, to turn our backs on Lalibai’s garden, leave the walks we had taken, our books and our businesses, as they gave away our river, the very one that named our land: aj raat the navy separates, the fabric rips, I spill some of my indigo as that part of India went am I supposed to feel better Cyril that you said ‘I nearly gave you Lahore’ the largest mass migration of human beings as animals scrambling to cross a line for survival, over the amputated shoulder of Mother India, her pallu cross-stitched wet red as her border embroidered millions in massacres of threads un-woven warp of the Indus with the stench of departure lingering as Yardley’s English Lavender in torn cashmere is rape not enough: bullets still land in cargo trains my five-year old mother sleeps clutching a biscuit tin gold coins are inedible the new scars indelible invisible ink of my genes smudged in the parting sindoor in a hair line is to consecrate a wedding, to live in sin is to live together as if married, yet Sindh has been ashed in vermillion, dakoon at Marwar Junction bang on the carriages my Uma starts bleeding; she must change trains to a hospital fugitive paints run in ajrak, must they or must they not be rescinded, my twelve-year-old father has been left to fend for himself; he cuts logs for a torn piece of bread, to break with his siblings, an unbroken promise to his mother right up to no end Dad, I don’t understand what I’m writing: how can I hear the sitar's lyrics caterwauling, the tabla beats reverberating as history migrates our tanpura I hear now as violins, as I tiptoe amongst the neem, golden shower, peepul and moringa trees what is this strange tense that we find ourselves in I sit with you to listen to the ghazals of Anup Jalota I watch you in the garden, I see you talking with Dada I deal us a hand of rummy, time to play cards with Uma I reach for a mango near the rose bush, I choose you a flower I will feed you your breakfast, yes I know you’d like some seyun patata I do hold your hands Dad and rewhisper ‘we are all safe as we re-member’ Publishing credits on the bald hill / Indus,: exclusive first publication by iamb my parents come from a place that no longer exists: Third Space (Renard Press)

Hear poet Helen Kay read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Helen Kay back next the poet Helen Kay has poems in The Rialto , Stand and Butcher’s Dog , as well as in her pamphlet, This Lexia & Other Languages . She curates Poetry Dyslexia and Imagination : a creative platform for people with dyslexia and other forms of neurodiversity. A finalist for the 2022 Brotherton Anthology, Helen won both the Repton and the Ironbridge poetry competitions in 2023. On social media, she's known for her hen puppet sidekick, Nigella. the poems Bitter (from OE Biter) 00:00 / 01:37 The fox took away my old hens last night to feed its starving cubs. Its vampire teeth parted feathers, pierced the oesophagus and windpipe below the sinewy neck and severed the spinal cord, quick as birds that snatch worms or pluck a butterfly off a shelf of air. No waste; no signs, bar sequins of spilt corn on moulted feathers. Wearing his wife’s kimono, a QC beat to death a fox caught in the wire fence round his hen coop, blooded his baseball bat. I am not bitter, Foxy. The cruellest bite is the empty plate of death. I would bequeath you my thighs, breast and legs to plump up your bony kin. Worse things lurk darkly: two million hens gassed and eaten daily. We will chainsaw the coop, splintering tears of plywood on the earth. We will plant egg-smooth bean seeds in our hen manure and watch the sparrows steal red cherries. I will stir my tears in a glass of wine or let them fall to dry on a page of words. I will wear my fox socks, post #fox pics cross my fingers, bolt my door at dusk. Scrabble 00:00 / 01:08 Every night Dad and I clicked the tiles slick as casino chips. A whiskey soda lit his petrol-coupon glass to a sparkling chandelier. An ashtray snake-charmed a Silk Cut while he positioned the tiles, turned misspellings into jokes. Winning did not matter; it was our way of talking. We were both dictionary-dependent, lifting its cover like the lid of a Milk Tray box. We fished letters from a yellow wash bag, sliced them into so many meanings. Slotted in our chairs, we made order: ashtray, coaster, fag packet. My pen knitted lines of scores, filled the evening’s blank page, and always, upstairs, Mum, out cold, a burnt stub, empty tumbler, blank tile, jumbled-up bag of letters we could never put into words. My Brother’s Widow 00:00 / 01:05 Not wanting to waste things, she sows your tomato seeds, too late. The seedlings sprout in May, vulnerable and hairy, moving forward imperceptibly, as she is. Soon she has too many plants and gives me two. Neither of us knows which bits to snip, what to feed them, only that we are growing gently together, reaching out. Green leaves unfurl their fingered symmetry towards me. Constellations of yellow flowers hold tomorrows. I can catch your flamboyance in the way they crowd my yard. Sal has planted marigolds with hers, calls it companion planting. In a way, I won’t mind a lack of tomatoes. The absence of them, lurking round and red beneath the leaves, seems fitting. Publishing credits Bitter (from 𝑂𝐸 Biter): Live Canon Anthology 2022 (Live Canon) Scrabble: won first prize at the Iron Bridge Poetry Festival 2023 My Brother's Widow: longlisted for the Cheltenham Poetry Competition 2023

Hear poet Lydia Kennaway read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Lydia Kennaway 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 Barney Ashton-Bullock read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Barney Ashton-Bullock back next the poet Barney Ashton-Bullock is the poet and librettist in the Andy Bell is Torsten music/theatre collective, as well as the narrator of his own verse on Downes Braide Association albums. Barney's poetry has been published in a wide range of cult poetry journals, the Avalanches In Poetry tribute anthology to Leonard Cohen, Broken Sleep Books' poetry tribute to Aphex Twin, and Pilot Press' Queer Anthology Of Healing and Soho Nights . His most recent books are Café Kaput! , F**kpig Zeitgeist! and Bucolicism . the poems apoplex-perplex-complexities 00:00 / 01:56 bicarbonate frenetics; the genesis? multi-generational, tape-to-tape deck dubs, their foamy flumes of playback hiss as rattly, miscued mixtapes mis-struck in bonkerz flanged brushstroke percussives of amp-max gated smash o’snare – metronomic melismatic wonk, polychromatic sub-glottal alien sprechgesang aligned to time signatures noodled in varispeed; in fraying flays o’dubsy drubbin’ vectored beatz. nu-alt clubbin’ zeroed in on decorous glitchin’ and ad hoc, thereof, repeatings as if spiked reportage to mux a retro cha-cha stomp distort to crunching churns irradiate; to arcing, vaulting interference compacting in a vice of abstruse its apotheosis to gungey grunge – maced in such displace, an aura; billowed streaks astray in strobics, we all, thrift of light limb, aflail in apoplex-perplex-complexities. Aphex et al in the cans, sofa-slothing in Glaxo infused confuse of veiled glissando drippage, arrhythmic mallow sonics of opaque, oracular, aural twistesse; irregular polygons transduced to audible, to choriambic vassals in vibrato sensoria, splice-spruced micro-loops, re-up sampled to peak infinities flippering as fractals in mid-air … Village 00:00 / 02:12 These dew dashed Ballard Downs at dusk, Their flannelette filtered translucency, Their ethereally gust thwacked sparsity, Their muted refractions of wheatsheaves asway, Grainy as y’like in the drawn light; We, mere pinpoints a-prance, Free-styling in the flashlights ‘Midst their giddy levity … Our scruff of signature left in the stomped crops trample. We vortices of loneliness Eschew the coital co-substantiates Of a GPS iPhone app engineering freelove Betwixt such brittle strangers … Who melt for lust and pour for sex. The top road through which we, as e’er, shuffling exeunt To the 09.07 market day bus; The rusting hoops of stanchions of the withered Wreck of shelter in which ‘first time’ memories were made … Cigs, ket, stout, cide, hash, snog, blow, laid, vom, chuck. On that trusty bus immemorial, now, only e’er on a Thursday, Sometimes, silently, without word or intimation, Through the wanding wonk of cattle pong that sands the breeze, A youngster won’t return And an aged farmer’s wife in well-versed, mock concern Will glintily gliss ‘er tamps o’goss … 'Dreckly, all spuddlins hath ped off thru d’dimpsey of a yoretide eve Dey’ll match an’ hatch as t’were e’er thus; ’cordin’ t’dis eye, ’tis ne’er a goodbye!' As, in absentia, all flaxen fledglings were wont t’do As, in perpetu, all sylvan nestlings e’er ‘av and must … 'Afore the byre’s been tromped to mere dander dust.' inferno al forno (impact +3 days) 00:00 / 01:55 Cobalting cinders in soot-storms A blanketing-dust graphite Dead-black clinker spun Back into nightfall With no morn, nor star You said I was ‘ telegenic’ Until my taste for ash Until the bankrupt shop units Were hulled to make befilthed Lino lain concourses For various novelty vending machines Purveying massprod sundries of a sexual nature With a comedic saucy bent Until the rebellion, until the bootstomp Until the hefty cruciforms borne by looters Had wireless CCTV nailed to each axis Arcing each orifice Our wan limbs shackled by bracelet and anklet tags Our movement shadowed by weaponised tannoy drones I have no coins to spend or insert All long since smelt or dealt All pockets full of oxides … I’d rather have been pilloried and cook-pot quartered Than be in this scourge of rootless, retroid reminisce Recalling when urinals and not welted legs Were lacquered in perma-drip masticity of piss And your soul, and my soul, Miles adrift, miles apart, Cankered in a centrifuge of dead, dead sparks … Publishing credits Apoplex-Perplex-Complexities: You’ve got so many machines, Richard! – An anthology of Aphex Twin poetry (Broken Sleep Books) Village: Bucolicism: Alt-lite verse for a post-pastoral England (Cherry Red Records) Inferno Al Forno (Impact +3 days) : Response (Dreich)

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

Hear poet Thomas McColl read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Thomas McColl back next the poet Thomas McColl lives in London and has published two collections of poetry – Being With Me Will Help You Learn and Grenade Genie . He's read as a featured poet at many events in London and elsewhere, including Hearing Eye , Paper Tiger Poetry , Celine's Salon and The Quiet Compere . Thomas has also been featured on East London Radio, BBC Radio Kent, BBC Radio WM and TV's London Live. the poems Susan Sharp 00:00 / 00:59 Susan Sharp was what my first employer, the local butcher, called the knife he’d use to slice the meat. By way of explanation, he said he spent more time with Susan than he ever did with his wife. ‘Tis pity she’s a knife,' he’d joke, but most of the time he was simply singing Susan’s praises – saying how much he loved her serrated, lop-sided smile, her blood-red lipstick, her lust for naked carcasses, and the ease with which she’d split a heart in two, yet always give in to his demands. On my first day, he threatened to slice off my hands when I went to touch her. ‘There’s only one commandment in a butcher’s shop,’ he scowled. ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s knife.’ Working at that butcher’s shop was my first job, and I didn’t even manage to last a week with that paranoid psycho freak, and Susan Sharp, his knife, who he’d fallen in love with and spent more time with than he ever did with his wife. Look at That! 00:00 / 01:01 'Daddy – look at that! a top hat on a tea pot,' you shout, as we stop just a little too close to a china display in the shop and, with a swipe of your hand, you make a fat pot-headed Victorian gentleman involuntarily doff his hat, and a second later, you realise why he doesn't do that – even though he's Victorian and you're a lady (albeit a little madam) – when his hat (which, foolishly, he'd had made out of posh china rather than plush silk) smashes into pieces on the floor. And while you sob and sulk at the realisation, I pay the bill for the damage, while keeping an eye out, as I'm carrying you, that you don't knock any of the many ornate objects crowded round the till, but instead your damned dinky destructive digit starts prodding the top of my face, and my invisible top hat (which, foolishly, I'd had made out of frayed nerves rather than woven silk) is once more pushed to the edge, and once more (just about) remains in place. Hard Tears 00:00 / 00:43 I often cried in front of you – sometimes when you hit me, once when, as you were teaching me to ride a bike, you let go of the handlebars and losing control I fell off, and once, when teaching me DIY, you gave me a heavy claw hammer to bang some nails into wood and I proceeded to bang my thumb instead. ‘For Pete’s sake!’ you said, disgusted. ‘You’re thirteen. Don’t you think it’s about time you managed to resist the urge to blub like a girl every time you get hurt?’ Well, I never cried in front of you again – not even years later at your funeral. Though I was devastated, the tears just wouldn’t come. I wish you could have seen it. You’d have been proud. Publishing credits Susan Sharp: Co-incidental 4 (The Black Light Engine Room) Look at That!: Ink, Sweat & Tears Hard Tears: Burning House Press

Hear poet Elisabeth Sennitt Clough read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Elisabeth Sennitt Clough back next the poet Elisabeth Sennitt Clough is the author of the 2017 Saboteur Awards Best Pamphlet winner Glass , and the editor of the Fenland Poetry Journal . Her debut collection Sightings won her the Michael Schmidt Award, while At or Below Sea Level was a 2019 Poetry Book Society Spring Recommendation . Elisabeth has also written The Cold Store and My Name is Abilene , which is shortlisted for The Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023. Elisabeth's poems have appeared in Poem , The Rialto , Mslexia , Wasafiri , Magma , The Cannon’s Mouth , Ambit and Stand among others. the poems There was a door & then a door Poem beginning with a line by Ocean Vuong 00:00 / 00:54 The second door was oak, brawny with a heavy-duty handle & latch, the sort that could mutilate a child’s hand if pushed too much. This is how thresholds are reinforced in farming country. Give your prayers to the sky. The neighbours are out of earshot. What could a flappy city girl know about the ebb of backwaters? People here read shotgun holes like exegesis. Old mail piles up. All letterboxes are sealed shut. Some days even the windows shudder. Everyone’s forgotten the first door. Histerid 00:00 / 01:22 In a hardbacked book with charcoal-grey covers in an attic, above a small bedroom, next to an illustration, the error of a typeface places a hole in a word, His terid , so that it becomes owned. You are mine says the pronoun to the beetle. But the neglectful parent had let his terid go, its skinny legs toddling beneath its round belly in-between legs in crowded market places, through garden fences to the edge-of-town industrial estate and beyond – the place where all lost things end up – the Gymnasium of the Forgotten. There his terid crouches on a varnished floor at the end of a long wooden bench, next to Arthur, who’s sat next to Tom, willing someone to sight him, make a call from the black telephone: Hello, Mr England, we have located your terid, reported missing and suspected extinct in 1936. Please come and collect. The Arse-end of Summer 00:00 / 01:01 Like warlords, the neighbour’s firs cast darkness across my lawn. So much in my garden promised to blossom but never did. A section of wasp nest dangles from a tree like a slice of dried meat. The splatter of an heirloom tomato still decorates next door’s patio beneath a sign: trespassers will be composted . A wood pigeon repeats itself four times. I mimic it twice. Sunday afternoon alone in a rose-less garden, still in my nightie – maybe I’m no longer alive, but don’t realise? A motorbike engine growls out the miles over cracked asphalt, past wheelie bins stinking of yesterday’s burnt ends. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Gaynor Kane read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Gaynor Kane back next the poet Gaynor Kane from Belfast, Northern Ireland, came to writing late in life, having finished an Open University BA (Hons) degree with a creative writing module. She's since had poems, fiction, creative non-fiction and visual art published in journals and anthologies in the UK, Europe and the US. As well as performing at several literary events – The Belfast Book Festival, Open House Festival and Cheltenham Poetry Festival among these – Gaynor's organised, curated and hosted literary events for various other festivals. She's also judged for the North Carolina Poetry Society, and was guest sub-editor of Issue Two of The Storms: A Journal of Poetry, Prose and Visual Art . Her poetry is published by The Hedgehog Poetry Press . the poems The Lock 00:00 / 02:11 I can’t resist the challenge of working out your code. Listen to the click, click, click of teeth nipping past the pin. Listen for the tock of the clock, as the dials rotate. Listen for ticks of numbers falling in place and your combo clunk. You meet my nose with coldness and the scent of blood, newborns, and his collection of copper coins. Mother’s gold charm bracelet with clover, wishing well, clog and key. Or her grandfather’s old toolbox, a cacophony of giants: chisels, claw-hammer, hacksaw, caulk. Your colour has me thinking of boulders along the edge of Belfast Lough, where O’Neill’s red hand alighted after being cleaved and hurled from sea to land. Or mountains of fossilised rocks, stacked at the docks. Coal carted, then scooped in spade loads into sacks. You are tugboat shaped, but my thoughts go large to Arrol gantries and liners nesting within skeletal stocks, until fully formed. Rivets struck like rhythmic heartbeats. Chocks lodged in place, to stop them slipping out to sea, until waters broke and ships were birthed by tugboat midwives. Everything was monochrome, chalk, smoke, firebrick, slack. Dunchers and dungarees, grubby hands and faces at clocking-off, men’s boots still gleaming with pride. Pride passed down paternally, reflecting on shiny surfaces, until the yard was boat-less, barren, and the gates all locked. Envelope 1) a flat container, usually paper; 2) something that envelops; 3) a natural enclosing. 00:00 / 01:45 I have felt hand-cut paper, folded; held letters of the heart. shut feelings away; sealed by cardboard button & green twine, soft-stamped beeswax & gummed saliva. I’ve safeguarded policies on punishment, the Eton mess of government contracts, procedures for lubricants & movements & bills for climate conferences & parties. I have been the surface for a botched plan over lunchtime drinks; sometimes binned & other times brought into being. I’ve been a tube of long thin glass encapsulating gas, creating neon light & illuminating bars with my brightness. I have been blindness of a field covered in snow. Blue ceramic of tiles, holding the reflective mirror of a pool. I have been the hedge squaring a lawn. I’ve been the breeze buoying a dancing kite. I’ve had a window & seen the curve of the earth. I might have been a musty prickled husk of Autumn’s conker or chalky sedimentary shell, cradling yolk & albumen. In my first life I was an emperor’s invitation within unbroken pottery. Hope 00:00 / 00:37 is a pile of chalky bones, dusted off and laid in formation. Fine drill bits whirr as holes are bored and granules gathered for DNA testing. A life takes shape, a skeleton reverse read like tea leaves. Smashed skull— all the lines of a messy story— until the puzzle pieces come together and somewhere a family hear a knock at their door. Publishing credits The Lock: Venus in Pink Marble (The Hedgehog Poetry Press) Envelope / Hope: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Sue Finch read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Sue Finch back next the poet Sue Finch's first published poem appeared in A New Manchester Alphabet in 2015 while she was studying with Manchester Metropolitan University for her Masters. Her work has since appeared in a number of magazines including The Interpreter’s House , Ink, Sweat & Tears , Dear Reader , One Hand Clapping and IceFloe Press . Sue's debut collection, Magnifying Glass , was published in 2020. She lives with her wife in North Wales. the poems Flamingo After Liz Berry 00:00 / 01:47 The night she bent my elbows to fit the candy floss cardigan for the twenty-third time, my limbs turned to wings. She wished me to be a pink girl. My neck grew and grew, elongating, extending, black eyes shrunk in the pink like submerged pea shingle. Light in my fan of feathers, I was lifted like a balloon puffed with helium. Body and wings held stately, magically anchored by one leg, miniature rough patellas marked my hinges. When the scent entered half-moon holes in my new beak I could have salivated at the raw rip of scaled flesh but my juices would not run – I was gizzard now. I couldn’t bear the confinement of the flock, but flight had me fearful. Passing through flamingo phase I fattened, darkened. A birch broom in a fit, I shook my thick cheeks side to side became a dodo with a waddle in my walk that slowed. She sent my father then. He came alone with gun and incongruent grin and shot me dead. Skewered me above his heaped fire under moonlight, turned me slowly round and round. When he turned for the sauce I dropped; charcoaled feathers, beak tinged with soot, burning in the blaze. I laughed as I rose higher and higher; a golden bird from the fire. I Can’t Send You Back, Can I? 00:00 / 01:56 I I can’t send you back, can I? she said. What if I wanted to go? To have her voice filtered through skin and fat. Those words, those questions, that curious consoling babble. What if I wanted to be enclosed again? To be unseen, hidden. What if I wanted to keep her expectant? To have us halted in anticipation. II Last time I led with my head; tunnelling though grip after grip of concentric circles. A hot salted mucus sealed my squashed nose denying me her scent. Air on my hairless head shocked me as my face squashed tighter for my slow unscrewing. The throb of heartbeats confused me with her; fast and faster in my ears, my chest, my head. Longing to cry, my lungs had me impatient. A metallic tang hung in shivers of cold as at last my body slung out behind. I was landed. III This time I would be her contortionist daughter – her womb my lockable box. I would have to go backwards, lead with my feet, point my toes. Contoured contractions would twist my legs into a rope their powerful vacuum cramping, pulling, spiralling me upwards until the smooth, curled width of my hips pushes her pelvis, demanding to come in. My left shoulder would force her wide just before that warmth grabs my neck. Her stretch for the sharp shock of my head would finally close my eyes. Jars 00:00 / 01:27 It was a surprise so I kept my eyes closed all the way to the garden. My empty stomach was a theatre of kaleidoscoping gems. She stopped me walking, invited me to open my eyes. Slowly I began to see. An enormous glass jar had been delivered to our lawn. Above it, swinging from a crane was a lid. Do you like it ? she asked. It’s huge , I managed. I am going to exhibit you , she said excitedly. You like things in jars . I did. That was the truth. A collection of smurfs, smartie lids, miniature carved owls, that figure of Dick Tracy. I liked looking at them, it made dusting easier, they could be handed to someone with ease, for scrutiny. I wasn’t sure this was right for me. I ordered an extra large one , she was saying. She seemed to be making a speech, a declaration of love. I was supposed to be grateful now, touched, overwhelmed. Two men were smiling at me asking her if I was ready. then I was on a platform being lowered in. I smiled like a good exhibit should as the lid was lowered on. It fitted firmly. Did she know I would make condensation spoil the whole effect? Publishing credits Flamingo: won second prize in the Cheltenham Poetry Festival Competition 2020 I Can’t Send You Back Can I?: Interpreter’s House (Issue 69) Jars: One Hand Clapping Magazine

Hear poet Louise McStravick read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Louise McStravick back next the poet Birmingham-based writer, poet and educator Louise McStravick says her writing is concerned mostly with extracting the extraordinary from the ordinary. Her recent work can be found in Popshot , Ink Sweat & Tears , Dear Damsels , Aphelion, Porridge Magazine and several other respected publications. Louise's debut poetry collection, How to Make Curry Goat , was published in 2020. the poems My sister was born a sunset 00:00 / 00:44 When children come out healthy, they are pink. Or the bit when pink meets red like that point in the sky when the sun reminds of its power to make us forget everything that came before it. Even if only a minute. This blood spilled sky an ending. Children are not yellow like a fully baked sun. They said she must have jaundice. My mother tells them her father’s skin holds the burnt ochres of a Caribbean sunset. They do not say sorry when they hand her over. A daughter’s guide to poaching an egg 00:00 / 01:17 Make the water rearrange its insides, shift shape as it is told, steam rise drip drip vinegar, sour the water to not let things stick. Watch it fight its way to the surface. It is not an easy process, such transformation, if not careful it can erupt, break onto skin that has already learned this is too hot, but does it again anyway. Turn the heat down. Don’t hold the egg too high or it will spread itself open, reveal itself, some things should be left to the imagination. Wand a whirlpool and crack it in watch it bring itself together, composed, despite itself. Let the bubbles teach it how to mature, push it to the surface, fully fledged yolk whole, unbroken, ready for charred bread. In one move, let the knife cut it open watch it pour itself out, ready for hungry tongues. Bake yourself some unicorns After Rishi Dastidar 00:00 / 01:19 Start your day with a cheese board; wear lycra to work; decorate your eyelids with glitter made from reclaimed rainbow tears; slay your greetings—wink with both eyes—say goodbye instead of hello; only consume things that are the yellow of the midday sun; defy winter, wear a bikini, manifest warmth; yoga yourself to a luxury holiday at least 8 times a day—the more you do it the more the universe receives; eat squirty cream for lunch straight from the can and inhale the gas after; go on a 24-hour lunch break—if your boss asks why tell her to read your daily horoscope; stop your thoughts at the click of a notification; order yourself a slice of knowledge; you’re owning it babes you’re shitting out that deposit with every reusable cup. You can do this! Start a petition to ban white bread; teach the bacteria in your stomach to recycle plastic; don’t eat anything that could look sound or feel like it could have been crawled on by anything that can be named. Keep going! You know you’re winning when you wake up and it isn’t raining. Publishing credits My sister was born a sunset: How to Make Curry Goat (Fly on the Wall Press) A daughter's guide to poaching an egg: Porridge Magazine Bake yourself some unicorns: Ink, Sweat & Tears