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Hear poet Brian Bilston read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Brian Bilston back next the poet Brian Bilston, author of the Costa-shortlisted novel Diary of a Somebody , has been dubbed both the ‘Banksy of poetry’ and ‘Twitter’s unofficial Poet Laureate’. His first book, You Took the Last Bus Home featured poems he'd shared on Twitter. His poem Refugees was adapted into a picture book for children, and his new collection of poetry, Alexa, what is there to know about love? was published in early 2021. the poems How to Avoid Mixing Your Metaphors 00:00 / 00:50 It’s not rocket surgery. First, get all your ducks on the same page. After all, you can’t make an omelette without breaking stride. Be sure to watch what you write with a fine-tuned comb. Check and re-check until the cows turn blue. It’s as easy as falling off a piece of cake. Don’t worry about opening up a whole hill of beans: you can always burn that bridge when you come to it, if you follow where I’m coming from. Concentrate! Keep your door closed and your enemies closer. Finally, don’t take the moral high horse: if the metaphor fits, walk a mile in it. She’d Dance 00:00 / 00:55 She’d dance like no one was watching although she liked to think he was. The kitchen was her grand ballroom; her partner was a mop. She’d foxtrot among the pots and pans, she’d paso doble to the sink, and as she swept across the floor, her mind danced, too. She’d think of how he’d held her in his arms at the Locarno and the Ritz - whirling, waltzing, a world apart - in the years before the kids, and longer still before the shadow the doctor spotted on his lungs. How dazzlingly they had danced! How dizzyingly she had spun! Her neighbours saw her sometimes, shuffling bent-backed to the shops. But at home, she’d dance like no one was watching although she liked to think he was. How Much I Dislike The Daily Mail 00:00 / 01:01 I would rather eat Quavers that are six weeks’ stale, tie up the man-bun of Gareth Bale, listen to the songs of Jimmy Nail, than read one page of the Daily Mail . If I were bored in a waiting room in Perivale, on a twelve-hour trip on Network Rail, halfway through a circumnavigational sail, I would not read the Daily Mail . I would happily read the complete works of Peter Mayle, the autobiography of Dan Quayle, selected scripts from Emmerdale , if it meant I didn’t have to read the Daily Mail . Far better to stand outside in a storm of hail, be blown out to sea in a powerful gale then swallowed by a humpback whale than have to read the Daily Mail . If I were blind, and it was the only thing in Braille, I still would not read the Daily Mail . Publishing credits How to Avoid Mixing Your Metaphors: Diary of a Somebody (Picador) She’d Dance: Alexa, what is there to know about love? (Picador) How Much I Dislike the Daily Mail: You Took the Last Bus Home (Unbound)

Hear poet Alan Buckley read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Alan Buckley back next the poet Alan Buckley is a poet, editor, and poetry tutor, who was brought up on Merseyside and now lives in Oxford. Author of two pamphlets – Shiver and The Long Haul – Alan's first full collection, Touched , appeared in 2020. His work has been highly commended in the Forward and Bridport prizes. Alan was a founding editor of the award-winning pamphlet publisher ignitionpress , and has taught creative writing to young people with both Arvon and First Story. He's also a regular contributor of essays and reviews to The Friday Poem . the poems My Country A man is judged by his work ~ Kurdish proverb ~ 00:00 / 01:53 His fingers work the lotion into my skin. His palms come to rest, pressing my cheeks, before he draws them back. I close my eyes but can’t not see the history between us – in the Boy’s Own stories my grandfather read this man would be swarthy (I would be ). He’d flash his teeth , grasping a curved dagger. I’d stand aloof, wielding a service revolver. We talk, as he brushes the lather up in a little bowl – second lockdown, Premier League (Man U: I offer my sympathies). I don’t ask why he came here. It’s my country, my country’s friends, my country’s enemies’ enemies, that spent a century drawing straight lines across his forefathers’ lands, that gunned and bombed and gassed, that drove him here to this shop on an English street corner, a cube of light resisting the dusk. O Mesopotamia: derricks rose up, drills bored down, and black gold gushed, with the force of blood released from a jugular vein by a razor’s quick slit. I feel the stainless blade caressing my throat, as he scrapes off the stubble with patient, professional love. Flame Use matches sparingly Instruction on front of matchbox 00:00 / 01:06 Not meanness or thrift but wisdom; respect for each small torch that’s kept in there. Lover, the same is true for words. I bring you no fireworks. A room is never so dark that it needs more than one slim burst of sulphur to show the mirror hung on its wall, the way to its door. And lovers know too how even a single flame might raise a scar that time can’t heal. So come, stand next to me; let’s flip this little box. Strike softly away from body. See how it urges us. The Error 00:00 / 01:11 They’re standing like figures on a cake, by a pre-war Hillman Minx. My father, stiff as the mannequin his suit was lifted from, has a pleasantly startled expression, as if he can’t quite believe he’s got to this threshold beyond which adult life begins. My mother’s hiding behind her lipstick smile, the blinding white of her dress. They think they’ve found a way out, and here’s the car that will take them away to a housing estate that’s still being built, to earth that’s yet to be dug over to make a vegetable patch, to a life untethered from its past. They’re wrong, of course; I’m witness to how their histories followed them out of this frame. But look – here’s where I’ll choose to say I come from, that small place of reassurance that something else is possible, the warm hollow made by their locked hands. Publishing credits My Country: The Friday Poem (February 2022) Flame: The Dark Horse (Issue 34) The Error: Touched (HappenStance Press)

Poet Paul Brookes reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Paul Brookes back next the poet Poet and shop assistant Paul Brookes lives and writes in a cat house full of teddy bears. He's published numerous volumes of poetry, including The Fabulous Invention Of Barnsley (Dearne Community Arts), The Headpoke and Firewedding (Alien Buddha Press), and A World Where and She Needs That Edge (Nixes Mate Press). He's also collaborated with other artists – on Stubborn Sod (Alien Buddha Press) with Marcel Herms in 2019, and on the forthcoming Khoshhali with Hiva Moazed. Paul is a contributing writer of Literati Magazine and editor of the Wombwell Rainbow Interviews . the poems R Ash Wednesday 00:00 / 00:30 Thas gonna mucky me forehead wi old codgers ashes what we burned yonks since as if it could remove our guilt and sinfulness for doing so. As tha finger paints a cross on me bonce al see our ancestor crinkle and pop Like it were fireworks and watch all harshness and fret go up in smoke. Al have to go mi sen a wesh afore a sees our lass else it'll get her all wonderin' an we don't want that. Don't want folk pryin'. No need. The Gent 00:00 / 00:35 The regular gent as I beep the barcode of his white bread, I take correct change from his held out palm. He struggles to put his purchase into his thin plastic bag. I open the bag wider and drop the bread into it. My wife is cremated, he says She'll be buried Thursday. I say I'm sorry to hear that as my till queue gets longer he lingers, a heavy silence. I say hello to the next customer. The heavy silence moves towards the door. We Wait For Sick Sunblaze To 00:00 / 01:22 go. Too long in the barren teeth of glare, lustre is death, see this wrinkled skin, cancerous blotches, blinded by this sharp, dry lucence. The soft, sodden darkness will give us life. Make us young once more. Rub out these wrinkled laugh lines. Smile again in the night. Blood unclenches without light, opens nightscented warm inside thighs and playful inside fragrant mouths tastes a sweetlife of shadows. Darkness outside reflects the firedark between your thighs, welcoming wild cave of your mouth. Our tongues play together in the juicednight. What has come into being in us is life, life that is tenebrous; eyes use what sunless gives, dark shines in lightness, and lightness cannot overpower it. Aphotic. Listen, words bear witness to dark, so that everyone might believe through them. Words out of warm, wet atramentous mouths. Words are not the dark, they bear witness to the dark. Real dark that gives dark to everyone; it is coming into the world. Publishing credits R Ash Wednesday: Stubborn Sod (Alien Buddha Press) The Gent: Please Take Change (Cyberwit) We Wait For Sick Sunblaze To: A World Where (Nixes Mate Books) Share

Hear poet Anna Milan read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Anna Milan back next the poet Currently based in Hertfordshire, England, Anna Milan has had her poetry featured in various publications – Butcher’s Dog , Under the Radar , Eye Flash Poetry , Black Bough Poetry and Ink Sweat & Tears among these. the poems The wind is not yet awake 00:00 / 00:47 Patience, eyas. The wind is not yet awake. Wait for its breath to rise and turn till you can scoop the air under pointed wing. Your eyes are not windows, but walls. Enamelled with anger, watchful, siege-ready; mistrust kept safe behind ashlar and buttress. Although the frosts snap at your feather buds the spathes will grow curved and strong. When the barbs lock firm to collar the wind then, eyas, we’ll be ready to begin. Eyas: a young hawk; especially (in falconry) an unfledged nestling taken from the nest for training money & sex 00:00 / 00:46 I’m doing it for me she says & though in a way that’s true she speaks the softened vowels of her great grandma who heaved out the bastard child of the earl of bath & wrecked her voice in the process so forever & ever after it had an echo of the master’s tenor like the bass notes below the hymn’s melody in the estate chapel on the big hill & when she’s in those killer heels doing it for her I can’t help but wonder how many male choirs are in the harmonics singing yes yes that’s my girl you don’t answer to god or man do you what a chance to write yourself your own sweet song girl House guests 00:00 / 01:01 My mother drew cedillas in lipstick on the mirrors, scrubbed the skirting boards clean, and left stands of autumn grasses growing right up against the patio doors. Afterwards, my sister came to throw wet leaves at the ceiling and do handstands in the kitchen. The first man I loved told me a lady never bares her feet until she is alone in her room. He always turned off the light with his thumb before he shut the door. The next one, a man with grey curls and eyes saddened by the sea, hammered nails into a newly decorated wall to put up a shelf, and heaped sand onto it in restless piles. Others roam about outside, waiting to come in. Someone once said to me, In the end, aren’t we all just guests in someone else’s house? I think it’s true, but these days, I am more careful about letting people touch the walls. Publishing credits The wind is not yet awake: Atrium money & sex: Butcher’s Dog (Issue 16) House guests: Under The Radar (Issue 25)

Poet Carolyn Jess-Cooke reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Carolyn Jess-Cooke back next the poet Carolyn Jess-Cooke lives in Glasgow with her husband and four children. Her prize wins include an Eric Gregory Award, a Tyrone Guthrie Prize, and a Northern Writers' Award. Her third poetry collection will be published by Seren in 2021, and her fiction has appeared in 23 languages. Carolyn's most recent novel (published as C J Cooke) is The Nesting . the poems Hare 00:00 / 01:31 I kept you in bed with me so many nights, certain I could hold the life into you, certain that the life in you wanted to leap out, hare-like, go bobbing off into some night-field. For want of more eyes, more arms I strapped you to me while I did the dishes, cooked, typed, your little legs frogging against the deflating dune of your first home. Nested you in a car seat while I showered, dressed, and when you breastfed for hours and hours I learned how to manoeuvre the cup and book around you. Time and friends and attitudes, too. We moved breakables a height, no glass tables. Fitted locks to the kitchen cupboards, door jammers, argued about screws and pills someone left within reach. I’ll not tell you how my breath left me, how my heart stopped at your stillness in the cot, and who I became when at last you moved. There is no telling what skins of me have dropped and shed in the fears I’ve entered. The day beyond these blankets, beyond our door, is known to me now, fragile as moth-scurf, its long ears twitching, alert, white tail winking across the night-field. Yesterday, I Failed 00:00 / 02:31 I failed, and the failing was great thereof. I failed all the way to the sulphur cliffs of cynicism, then bungee-jumped. I shot a hole in one in failure. I failed and changed the course of history. I failed admirably, catastrophically, unremittingly, relentlessly, perspicaciously, deliciously, spaciously, and with the dexterity of the common impala. I did not merely stall, pause, or change my mind – I failed, like any serious attempt at oil painting in a wind machine. I failed, but the crops did not. I failed in a field, and filed as I fooled. I walked right up to failure, kicked it in the shins, and insulted its mother. I fell in love with failure. We got married and raised a family of failures. I failed to the sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle. I failed in the key of D flat. I failed my heart out, I failed until my lungs burned, my brain rattled, my skin flapped like a rag against my bones and my tongue uttered only ‘failure’... I failed, much to the regret of the management. I went scuba-diving in failure, I camped under failure, I hiked to the summit of failure, I painted the floor with superglue while failure was sleeping and when it woke up ... I laughed. I failed in several languages. I added failure on Facebook. I failed from caveman to Homo Sapiens. I failed stupendously, outlandishly, biblically, savagely, juicily, Byzantinely, heroically, intergalactically. I failed in hard copy, fax, text, email, Skype and podcast. I failed to the soundtrack of James Bond. I failed as magnesium is to water, as the Apocalypse is to a Saturday morning lie-in, as Godzilla is to the streets of Tokyo. I failed, and I failed, but at least I tried. Newborn 00:00 / 01:17 What are you like? A minute old, you’re a sky-blue candle quarried from the fire, beeswax on my belly, then a nub of warm dough and in the basket by my bed you’re a bag of ripe peaches, soap-bubble fragile, a slow-waving field fattening with wheat and at the breast you’re a zoo of verbs mewling, snuffling, pecking, wolfing, then coiling into sleep, where you’re a water-wheel churning ancestral reflections in the journeys of your face until it’s morning and you’re unleashed light, a pinking pearl, a key turning in the lock of clocked breath filling our house with hows – how did the soul arrive there? like a stitched wish or the way the wind winds itself into the sea’s receiving skin or did life find you, invite you to climb to the nib of the wick and, if so, what flame set you alight? Publishing credits Hare: 2013 National Poetry Competition anthology (The Poetry Society) Yesterday, I Failed: The Stinging Fly (Issue 13, Vol. 2) Newborn: Inroads (Seren Books) Share

Hear poet Mark Carson read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Mark Carson © Jon Bean back next the poet Born in Belfast and educated in Dublin and Cambridge, Mark Carson has enjoyed an engineering career that's included sea-going with oceanographers, teaching in Nairobi, and running an engineering software company in Cumbria. He's published two pamphlets with Wayleave Press – The Hoopoe's Eye and Hove-to is a State of Mind – and a wheen of poems in various places such as Ink, Sweat & Tears , Smiths Knoll , The North , The Rialto , Orbis , Obsessed with Pipework , London Grip and Stride . Mark was short-listed for the Bridport Prize for Poetry in both 2009 and 2012, as well as for The UK's National Poetry Prize in 2014. His work has also been commended in the Troubadour International Poetry Prize, Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, and the Mirehouse Poetry Prize. the poems Möbius Strip 00:00 / 00:43 reducing her life to seventeen bullet points was simpler far than she’d somehow imagined and she had them graven in cursive script on a one-sided strip of her native silver given a twist by a cunning smith hammer-welded so the text is continuous with the tip of his finger he traces the edge of the strip with one edge and one surface, re-entrant and cursive like a nightmarish earworm, a catch in four parts, with recursive remorse and the cyclical tides of unable to finish The New Footbridge 00:00 / 03:18 It springs across the river like a slice of rainbow, arched as a vertebrate, golden in the sunlight and the mayor cuts the ribbon, the councillors are ready and they all march together, march across the Guadiaro. Is it not a great idea, a bridge so light and springy? The laminated timbers so pretty and so buoyant? The abutments are substantial, the footings thick and massive, and the bridge rests lightly, lightly on its ledges. * * * The rain fell heavy in the Guadiaro catchment, red with mud the river rose, covering the footings and the river surged and rose again, thrusting the abutments and again the turbid river rose, tearing at the handrails. Who could imagine the buoyancy of timber? Who would consider the drag loads on the structure? Who did the sums on the piddling little brackets, the tension, the shear, the bending and the torsion? The goats and the sheep retreated to the hilltops, watched as the racing spate tore the banks asunder, watched as the carcasses were tumbled down the valley, watched as the pretty footbridge wrenched itself to pieces. Where will it end, the bridge, and what the hell can stop it? Smashing through the gorges, crunching on the boulders, tossing under viaducts and swept across the weir, the stepping stones, past long-abandoned piggeries, until it crashes, snags against the Old Bridge. Snags and floats and traps the trunks of willow trees, of splintered, fractured alamos and olive brash and figs and oleander torn from sodden banks. It rises like a floating dam, the water flooding over terraces, creeping up the door frames, sluicing through the sockets and the fusebox, lifting tables, chairs, cupboards, sofas, floating in a tangle to the ceiling, twisting shutters from their pintle hinges, toilet doors and pictures, prints. Guitars from hooks. Cushions. Books from shelves, maps and guides from folders, useless telephone directories, magazines, a grim confetti, paper-porridge slopping in the slimy flow. There’s no transparency, just thick brown oxtail, rich in clay washed from the groves of olives, ploughed lands, hillsides scarified and naked. Quietly, it starts to settle, thick and smeary. Now the water’s reached the Old Bridge deck, crushing foliage up against the chainlink handrail. Abruptly the bridge gives way, the concrete pier collapses, prising its footing from the river bed. A hundred thousand tonnes of water make a charge for freedom down the valley, tearing the gable from the house below, scattering roof tiles. From the broken windows of the flooded houses, water spews. In County Clare 00:00 / 01:14 And if you should stay in the town of Lahinch after your dinner and a glass in the hotel bar walk out in the long evening on the road to the west and perch on the dry stone wall, your eye to the left for the drama of the sinking sun, and to the east where soon the figure of the girl will appear and walk past you firmly as though stopping for no one only at the last minute she’ll spin like a dancer, coming to a halt in a stylish chassé with her back to the wall beside you. Then you may learn her name, that she is walking to Le Scanoor, which you had thought was called Liscannor, and that her age is not to be revealed on a first meeting, and that she loves to dance, and that there will be a marvellous opportunity to dance with her, next week in Le Scanoor, if you were still to be around. But for all of this to happen, you must be a slender boy of nineteen with an open countenance, and time on your hands. Publishing credits Möbius Strip: Ink, Sweat & Tears (May 2022) The New Footbridge: The Hoopoe's Eye (Wayleave Press) In County Clare: Hove-to is a State of Mind (Wayleave Press)

Hear poet Tracey Rhys read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Tracey Rhys back next the poet With a New Writer’s bursary from Literature Wales, Tracey Rhys finished her first pamphlet, Teaching a Bird to Sing . Its theme of parenting a child with autism, told through poetry, would later feature in two touring theatre productions, and as part of an exhibition at The Senedd. Tracey’s work can be found in journals from Poetry Wales and New Welsh Review to The Lonely Crowd and Ink, Sweat & Tears , and she's no stranger to being long and shortlisted for poetry competitions – the Cinnamon Press Pamphlet Competition, Poetry Wales Pamphlet Competition and Cardiff International Poetry Competition among them. Tracey was also among the 20 winners of The Poetry Archive’s WordView Now! competition in 2020. Her first full collection, 21st-Century Bathsheba , will be published by Parthian in 2025. the poems Flood 00:00 / 02:07 Flood woke up on the wrong side of her bed, flowed over the bank with displeasure. There was power in her upsurge, the great swell of her being. Birds who waded in, the egrets and cormorants, recalled that once Flood was happy, but now was better. By better, they meant Ocean. Flood was broad and tidal estuary. She left a salty ring around their beaks and gave them shells. Flood was beautiful, they said. She should stop and feel it. But how could Flood pause when she was all reflection? Moon-driven, surging to sea. * Flood recalled her first taste of tarmac. Compared it to fennel. Preferred it to liquorice. She drawled, No need for glass when you have fibreglass. Or slate stacks, when you have those aching aluminium greys: the skeletons of automobiles. Ever since she’d drunk her first bollard, Flood had regretted concrete. The way it sunk into her pit and stayed there, trolley-bound for years. * Stories began circulating that Flood had been a stream, had thought big and got lucky. She was fast becoming folklore. It was true that she’d tried all the tricks; consuming lakes, spouting dams. I am braver than I know, Flood told the starlings. Bigger than is necessary. Beaks rippled in. The sun gave her prisms. Soon, she was run through with flowing, even as she was imbibed. I am always inside other bodies, she confided to the water rats on the underside of her skin. Interview with a Flood 00:00 / 01:41 I appreciate you must be busy … Well, I’m nothing without my fans. And your fans love you. Why, thank you. They want me to ask what your favourite colour is? My favourite colour is calcite. Pearly, like the inside of a tooth, all pulp and tusk. It reminds me of better days; snow quartz skies, rain on the way, white horses rising to pummel the hard brick houses. Where do you go on holiday? The fat berg. Everyone will be surprised by that! I think we imagined the Maldives … The fat berg is an island destination, a busman’s holiday if you like. Not everyone’s choice but I confess to enjoy oozing up through a drain grille, along waste pipes to vanity units, coating myself slick on the gunge loaded with hair in the trap. The limescale on the U-bend is a good day out. What keeps you going? It has to be the Blob Fish. Have you seen how ugly they look, dead on land? That nose! Almost human. 4,000 feet under the sea they don’t look half bad. I live by that. What are you afraid of? Jugs. What advice have you got for our youngsters, starting out? Get yourself a spot, it doesn’t have to be nice. Grow into it. To be small is no small thing. I always felt as big as I could be. As if the air was with me, walls parting at the dam. Shame 00:00 / 00:43 Though she’s old enough to have forgotten all the embarrassing beginnings, Flood lets them in at night, which is when the wind rushes at her edges and the riverbank is audible in its silver spoons. Flood remembers her great shames, burns with them. Her vast stupidities. Didn’t she once boast to the moon that she had the bigger tides? She pours herself into the earth, spreads herself thinner than vapour. Nothing will find her until morning, when the tinny glug of her belly will answer the flushing loos. Publishing credits Flood: Poetry Wales (Vol. 56, No. 3) Interview with a Flood / Shame: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Alice Stainer read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Alice Stainer back next the poet Alice Stainer is a lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing on a visiting student programme in Oxford. She is also a musician and dancer. Her work has appeared in Green Ink Poetry , Atrium , Feral Poetry , After… , The Storms and The Dawntreader . Alice has been nominated for Best of the Net, The Pushcart Prize and the Forward Prizes, and recently submitted her debut pamphlet. the poems Firebird A ‘Golden Shovel’ after Fleetwood Mac’s Songbird (as sung by Eva Cassidy) 00:00 / 01:12 Hair severely chignoned, pearls choking your throat and always, a white-feathered bodice holding you in. But the heats of Brazil are simmering beneath—swans and songbirds are all very well, but you are a firebird. Fervid rhythms are hard to resist, Tito’s black eyes like cinders singing sparks for you alone, Margot, lighting you to dance like all of Covent Garden is watching. Pas de deux. Oh they don’t like it, though fluting your praises. But you know those flights between London and Panama bear the flame of your being, uncontained by a ballet score. Gradient 00:00 / 01:56 A glorious day, Dad, as you would say (that always made us snigger, did you know?) Pull on your boots—you do still need them?— army surplus from the funny shop in Hotwells. We scoffed, but you said they were ‘value for money’. Come on then, Dad—there’s a hill needs climbing. Plastic-pocketed map bouncing on my chest— I’ve learned its language as you did, and more: zigzag up a slope, flex with the contours, pick your way over hummocks. Skirt the bog but don’t cry over lost wellies. Vivid green patches have a forked tongue. Heather helps you to hang on. There’s one path I have yet to find, Dad— but I will. I will. Right, binoculars slung round my neck— chance of a ptarmigan, wouldn’t you say? Those chubby boulders of bird. Once, Mum and I saw a whole flock— consolation, we thought, for a stumbling day when the cloud came down. I remembered, you see, what you said about the hills. Now bog myrtle is spicing the air. Hurry up, Dad! We have got all day but still, this clarity of sky is precious. Mete it out like Kendal mint cake in the high places. My turn to lead the way—although in truth, you’ve climbed this hill ahead of me, and now will never leave it. Jane Austen's Teapot 00:00 / 01:24 Time to bring in the tea-things. Cups rattle like eager chatter; china-blue leaves twine about their rims; stems graft, tighten. The wooden caddy is plundered, yielding riches. Silver spoons refract the light, and in the exquisite pot brooding at the white cloth’s heart, the leaves infuse in swirling heat. Steeped then strained, the tea arcs into cups in a long, dark stream. One sugar or two? White sweetness to mitigate black bitterness. But let’s not talk about that. Round the table, a froth of muslin. Cups are cradled, alliances formed and fractured, fragile as porcelain. Then the ritual is over, the tea-things put away—until the next time. But look inside the pot: advancing up its ivory sides, a deepening stain. Will it ever be time to talk about that? Publishing credits Firebird: After… Jane Austen's Teapot: Paradox Literary Gradient: Atrium

Hear poet Elizabeth Langemak read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Elizabeth Langemak back next the poet Elizabeth Langemak’s poetry has appeared in AGNI Online, Shenandoah , Pleiades, The Colorado Review, Literary Imagination , Sugar House Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal and elsewhere. Her work has twice appeared in Best New Poets: 50 Poems by Emerging Writers , and been featured on Verse Daily . Elizabeth lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and is the recipient of fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center and Breadloaf. the poems What Everyone Has Done vs What Everyone Would Do 00:00 / 01:36 Even taught hard and so long the truth is we have and would always back out again. I think. Really, who has not, is not still ready to erase their own name, to flip and come up new. Not unsing the Song, precisely, just stop singing. Like seeming stopover or changing clothes, like promised return but stepped or stepping out for good, into Gray: how simple it was and would be again. Each wolfthought behind us reappears fresh, everyone did and keeps flicking back hoods, revealing our faces changed and still changing. So many faces behind and beyond us. With lap-hands, with crossed legs, an upright spine of baked bricks and stiff, Virtue forgot us and never remembered. Unfooled and refooled by gnawing and guilt, each breath and Choice was and still would be lastingly fixed, decisions made wholly from cinders, from shadows and sparks hopped free of our fists. So here’s what we did, what we would still do despite having done: eyes shut and necks turned we reached and keep reaching shoulder-deep and our hands fell still falling on something blind but Beating O Beating and warm. We are pulling it into the Light. All My Questions Become Their Own Answers 00:00 / 01:23 When her legs struck out shuddering like fat lightning bolts. When my breasts turned to stones within stones on my chest. When I couldn’t tell hindmilk from foremilk, and my collapsed tent of gut held no guess. When she wouldn’t sleep and so no one would sleep, or vomit flew like a fist on the end of a long, gloved arm from her throat. When I knew better, but still. When over a phone, when in fever, when in the puce doctor’s office with my list and all I’d forgotten to write there. When I held her up to the mirror I looked like a person holding her question like it could be her answer if only she could coax it to speak. Is she sick. Should the doctor. What should I. Who should you. When I finally nippled a finger into her mouth would you believe I felt first punctuation squatting under her tongue full stop like a fat bud of cartilage, an unfused bone of statements from which all questions understand how to grow. I asked then, I keep asking: who planted this pea an inch under soil, who waits for that pea to lift its hand into the light, who knows what it will want to know. Conspiracy Theory 00:00 / 01:48 In Arkansas, the red-wings go down, nearly two thousand slapped out of the night. Beaks pointed, wings drawn to their sides as men shot from cannons, they land unseen, on their sides, like pepper shook out on a small Southern snow. They fall in a scene now cut from the movie. They fall together with a noise mistaken for gunfire, or soundless as dust falls, one to the ground at a time. One burrows up from the earth. Like a stone from a sling, one kills a deer with a crack to the head. When they’re poisoned or struck or sucked whole through the props of a low-flying plane, when they cramp, when wind ices their sails or God licks them with lightning, they fall. They fall from great heights, not as Icarus fell, flailing, but they duck into the dive and go down as though grateful, or, some say, they fell upright like jumpers whose chutes wouldn’t open, feet first toward accordion crush. Not every faller makes for the grass, but some plunge into the false skies of blue cars, some are delivered to doorsteps like badly thrown papers. Before you wake up, some are dog-gotten or swept downstream like small ships, one lands in a nest, one is not dead but crawls into the hand of a man dressed in orange. While you sip coffee and news of air travels over the ground, an enemy folds one into your bed. Most are gone by noon. Some were never there. Wherever they go to, they stay. Publishing credits What Everyone Has Done vs What Everyone Would Do: earlier version appeared as The Be Good in Yew All My Questions Become Their Own Answers: originally appeared as The Answer to Everything in Storyscape (Issue 19) Conspiracy Theory: Shenandoah (Vol. 63, No. 1)

Hear poet Moira Walsh read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Moira Walsh back next the poet Originally from Michigan, USA, Moira Walsh now calls southern Germany home – her poetry finding homes in a variety of Austrian and German journals. She's the author of Earthrise , and with Wilfried Schubert, Do Try This at Home . A founding member of Kollektief Dellgart, Moira has co-translated contemporary poets such as Olja Alvir, Ken Mikolowski, Halyna Petrosaniak, Maë Schwinghammer and others. the poems White noise, they say 00:00 / 00:22 as if it’s all one color. But then there’s the Lake: a rainbow of sushing and loshing and ashing and flishing and sething and hayshing Apology to local vegetables 00:00 / 00:36 Sweet corn – hours old, stalk to table! Oak-leaf lettuce, garlic scapes! Beet greens, basil, cucumbers! I’m sorry. On days like these nothing can squeeze down my throat except, after dark, some good cheese and a weird combination of transportation starches. Removed 00:00 / 01:09 Small room, only the right twin bed mine, half the bookshelf, half the table and one chair so half time chair sitting I miss those tranquilisers sometimes wish I’d kept the ones they slipped in a small paper envelope for my test night at home when the ward went up in smoke someone set a bed on fire and I missed it Two weeks later the next arsonist nurses changed the sheets too soon fine ash everywhere home again for a night I missed that too If I were still delusional seeking connections at all costs I would feel responsible for incendiary absence Publishing credits White noise, they say / Apology to local vegetables: exclusive first publication by iamb Removed: [kon] (Issue 10)

Poet Aaron Kent reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Aaron Kent back next the poet Aaron Kent is a working-class poet and publisher born and raised in Cornwall. He runs Broken Sleep Books and has had several pamphlets published. J H Prynne called his poetry 'unicorn flavoured'. How do you top that? the poems Ice Skating, Garden of Eden, 1998 00:00 / 01:31 When the floods erred over the pyre, the ice caps were still ideas – a convergence of crystal starlings invoking themselves to a hemisphere. My father still spoke in Rather, comparing potential to outcome and living through the theoretical choices of a coin flip. (Nothing would prepare him for a side, a continuum never considered ad infinitum). In evening’s grubby light we married mushroom while he sung broken harmonica for an orchestra of junction – the tip forms; mistakes we promised to make, a space to take. You, I was told when we returned from the registry office, sledded down Wollaton hill in the first stretch of snow; your first instinct to battle and claim each sheet like condensation racing to the bottom, engorging itself on itself. I piled snow against the door of a man you never met, a cleansed soul burdened with a front he couldn’t forecast. The cat determined to hide in his arms, the whistle of his harmonica drowned out by a meow stretched thin across the enveloping mist. I broke my arms in a race to the finish, I snapped my tendons to calm the light. Portmanteau 00:00 / 01:41 All of us; you, Aaron Kent, and I spread ourselves across the mattress where we read ergodic fiction to each other – where she lay the golden chariot, alchemy by alchemist, unenviable task of poisoning the dinner party. We bought a simile, like we had bought a mouse – petted, fed, hygienic born to serve a different purpose. We, all Aaron, carried him in our arms, our wasted arms in nuclear unrest, and dug lead into turf as we pressed its aching body into a shoebox and begged each other for entropy. The tone of conversation had changed and the split had guaranteed doubt. I’ve seen myself against a foreign backdrop like the breast of a white swan paralysed by the lines and ripples elegantly stamped on water’s canopy, where the drinks are quaffed before the bruschetta stuffed. Three of us, the inheritance of each other, like buds snatching for the sun, sent to follow a slope so weak so long so dark against the paleness that eats the very best of every silver lining etched in the folds of heavy cloth / case. I still hear them, us, myself in every quaint out-dated piano solo of a rehearsed broken moonlight sonata, like a sober actor playing drunk – the chimes jangling somewhere in absentia, the simile sleeping on the crook of midnight, a desperation becoming faint. I overcame and landed with tender spring between the three of us there, between the Godlessness of uncertainty. Reasons to Take Part In a Treasure Hunt 00:00 / 01:03 Time consumption is mindlessness, you are the waste of water, there are stars in the back rooms of your neighbour’s houses how will you ever know about them if you don’t search? The cats tell us how to move, the world is shaped like an egg, every part of your face tells a lie you tried to keep, I have eaten both of your novels; neither tasted like paper. Your sanity has fallen into the wrong hands, your mouth is open too wide for your feet, there are more ostriches than mistakes, you don’t know to use a full stop. Properly. If at all there is a no better time than the present tense, Kanye West is waiting, the whole town is waiting, why do you keep us waiting? Just find it already. The clues are there. Publishing credits Ice Skating, Garden of Eden, 1998: originally appeared in an altered form in The Rink (Dostoyevsky Wannabe X) Portmanteau / Reasons to Take Part In a Treasure Hunt: exclusive first publication by iamb Share

Hear poet Ilisha Thiru Purcell read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Ilisha Thiru Purcell back next the poet A poet from Newcastle upon Tyne, and one of three to be chosen for the inaugural Poets of Colour Incubator 2023-2024 , Ilisha Thiru Purcell was previously a Young Creative Associate with New Writing North . She performed at the 2023 Newcastle Poetry Festival, and is part of the group Brown Girls Write . Ilisha's work has appeared in Butcher’s Dog and the Bi+ Lines Anthology , and she was shortlisted for Nine Arches Press' Primers: Volume Seven . the poems Coast | 00:00 / 00:51 I stand before the north sea and think that a coast | is a lie. I look for the definitive | separating the sea from the shore, water from land, wet from dry. Where is the cartoon | you see in children’s books dividing the yellow from the blue? I search for a | or a _ or even a ---- telling us what is ours and theirs, but all there is is negotiation between the land and the sea. Haven’t you seen a chunk of cliff plunge into the sea toes pointed? Or how the water takes larger chunks out of the sand, ignoring the white |s on a map saying stay ? Germination 00:00 / 01:05 My shadow strikes out from my body/ as if I'm announcing that now is the time the time is now/ I have been kept in time and now I am the keeper of it/ Meeting my own gaze/ I expand like the lungs of the city I rest my feet upon/ I smile a wry smile/ a 'you can’t even imagine' smile/ A man on a child’s bike asked me where I got it from/ this crescent of grapefruit flesh/ and I replied my mother/ My mum/ who shines brightest in a sea of saris/ who circles my thumb with her forefinger/ like a planet in orbit/ My mum/ dressed in black, absorbing everything, is everything/ a river running to and from everything/ If these images could talk they would tell you/ that there is more than one way to pray/ more than one way to bless a journey/ Dust to Dawn 00:00 / 00:37 The last night I spent alone I couldn’t remember ever seeing daylight and all that came from my mouth was dust. This time I beat back the thoughts like dust off a rug, sank into this new shade of alone. I found within myself a light. Soon I will not need lamplight to protect me from the parts of my mind that have collected dust, I will be content and unafraid alone. Only alone can I watch the dust of my past dance in dawn’s light. Publishing credits Coast |: Bi+ Lines – An Anthology of Contemporary Bi+ Poets (Fourteen Poems) Germination: Sanctuary – Brown Girls Write Anthology (New Writing North) Dust to Dawn: exclusive first publication by iamb

Poet Victoria Kennefick reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Victoria Kennefick back next the poet Victoria Kennefick is a writer, poet and teacher based in Co. Kerry, Ireland, and co-host of the Unlaunched Books podcast. Her pamphlet White Whale won the Munster Literature Centre Fool for Poetry Chapbook Competition, as well as the Saboteur Award for Best Poetry Pamphlet. Her poetry has appeared in Poetry Magazine, The Poetry Review, Poetry Ireland Review, Ambit, The Stinging Fly and several other publications. Victoria was awarded a Fulbright Scholarship to research at Emory University and GCSU in Georgia, and completed her PhD in English at University College Cork. the poems Cork Schoolgirl Considers the GPO, Dublin 2016 00:00 / 01:16 I am standing outside the GPO in my school uniform, which isn’t ideal. My uniform is the colour of bull’s blood. In this year, I am sixteen a pleasing symmetry because I love history, have I told you that? It is mine so I carry it in my rucksack. I love all the men of history sacrificing themselves for Ireland, for me, these rebel Jesuses. I put my finger in the building’s bullet holes; poke around in its wounds. I wonder if they feel it, those boys, I hope they do, their blooming faces pressed flat in the pages of my books. I lick the wall as if it were a stamp, it tastes of bones, this smelly city, of those boys in uniform, theirs bloody too. I put my lips to the pillar. I want to kiss them all. And I do, I kiss all those boys goodbye. January 00:00 / 00:42 I have begun the purge. Month of hunger, raindrops fall from window sills, ice slithers in puddles, the smoky breath of animals greets the air. Morning’s back already broken, veins obvious on everything. Emptying myself of all things ripe and wanton, I am winter grass. Observe me survive as earth’s shoulder blades that jut, cut up the sky that pushes down on all of us as if it wants to die. See, I am transparent as sunrise. Starving, I count my bones as valuable. Family Planning 00:00 / 01:18 You are tugging at my skirt, aged two, wanting a toy, a spoon from the drawer. You are a few months old, just able to hold your big old baby head up on that teensy neck. It is your birthday. I am sweating and empty and you are greasy-white with vernix, rising and falling with my breath. I survived and you did too, your father is crying. We are a little family, neat as a pin. Except you are still waiting, Portia or Lucia or May in parts. I carry a tiny piece I secrete so secretly each month, you grow impatient when water turns that warm and brilliant shade. It is alive while you are not. Daughter-to-be, if you could form your hands into little fists you would bang on my womb, that carpet-lined waiting room, but your father has your fingers and I have wrapped up your nails so you can’t rip me to ribbons. We keep you apart, even as we come together, but I hear him whisper your name, soft as blame in his sleep. Publishing credits Cork Schoolgirl Considers the GPO, Dublin 2016: Poetry Ireland Review (Issue 118) January: The Poetry Review (Winter 2019) Family Planning: bath magg (Issue 3) Share

Hear poet Robert Harper read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Robert Harper back next the poet Robert Harper’s poems have appeared in The Interpreter’s House , Prole , Acumen , Ink Sweat & Tears , And Other Poems and elsewhere. He's also had work featured in anthologies such as Fathers and What Must Be Said , A New Manchester Alphabet , The Every Day Poet , An Anthology to Seamus Heaney and The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry . Robert founded and edited the magazine Bare Fiction , and has recently launched online poetry magazine Disjointed . the poems An embarrassment of poverty After Michael Hoffman 00:00 / 01:09 At 1pm you sit and look at the poem. Among the other things you should be doing, you drink water to allay the sweat and read, squint at, your midnight endeavours, a tower of books leering like an old professor. You, compelled, or just desperate to let the thoughts flow, lay on your side unable to sleep. She, right there, like the painting you love and for which a light is always on. A thought enters your head. You tried too hard, yet held back and, subsequently, pushed too far forward. You wonder if the sleeping, the loss of it, curled like a cat in an empty box of paper, is what is up. You read it again. Embarrassment comes and you thank the gods for your humility, ask of the page – How dare I look at you and think of poverty? Obstacle 00:00 / 01:14 A boy sits alone (a roundabout) watching cars oblige as they dutifully trust an indirect route around the obstacle. He considers himself ‘obstacle’, traces his eyes via entrance to exit and nods his head. Half yes, half whatever appears on the road around him—obstacle. JCC 428H, Bangor 1970, Cortina Mk III, yellow and chrome trim. HFK 015E, Dudley 1967, the lost Ford Zephyr, abandoned, a yard monster. Dreams plagued with red trucks, green buses, black Austins to remind boy of time before his own existence. Dad, car, ahead, his birth. Obstacle. What is he looking for behind the seven inch sealed beam of a Hillman Imp? A connection to his beginning—an accidental merging where 2 people, going past obstacles, become stuck. How do others make such 00:00 / 01:31 Forked tongues. Unsure how to proceed, I detach my arm, look inside the open flesh for morsels hiding beneath the skin, quivering before the opportunity to be plucked or nurtured in the between state of draughty window by a slavish boy who wishes for nothing but new worlds and the road right in front of him. The road, full of signs, made up symbols to delay the choosing of the path, the leaving of one, one side which will not be taken, will take time. So I remove my leg and look beneath the skin; surely hidden there is knowledge of the groove, how one hops in and out needling the unsung sound — like a shellac 78 left in the heat of the sun to warp and throw you off the scent of music long lost; the jive and the rock, hard places rolling beneath your single step, out of reach of your one arm. I cannot see anyway so I pop out an eye, peel back the layers for clues — something observed but missed, known yet forgotten. It conjures nothing new, but I begin to understand the little boy whose appetite is itself ready to be swallowed whole. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Poet Christina Strigas reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Christina Strigas back next the poet Christina Strigas’ work has appeared in Coffin Bell Journal, BlazeVox19, Feminine Collective, Neon Mariposa Magazine, Rhythm & Bones, Thimble Lit Magazine, The Temz Review, Pink Plastic House Journal, Twist in Time Literary Magazine and many others. Her collection Love & Vodka was recommended by CBC News – making it onto its 'Your ultimate Canadian poetry list' . Christina is a full-time public school teacher, and part-time course lecturer at McGill University. She lives in Montreal with her husband and two children, and is currently working on publishing two poetry books and a novel. the poems Measured Teaspoons 00:00 / 01:52 Who loves me anymore? People like to rehash old said shit, From five years ago … You punched a door, There’s still a wrecked hole to remind me. Pin their poetry on your forehead. Jinx, touch red, it’s identical now. Someone brings you red wine you smile taking about reading and writing you try to tell a joke fail miserably. Look around the room like a stranger. That’s not what I meant at all. Who loves me anymore? They see me with fugitive themes, Forgive me for always leaving, Flinch at the sign of my danger Writers like to play sex games in the day, hunting Adventurous and dangerous love. I can never tell who wants me, Damaged and wounded from giving away My secrets for cash or fantasies for free, Or if they do My ego never knows, Did you take out the garbage? I can never tell time anymore. It keeps rambling on and on like a song on the radio you can’t listen to anymore Indifferent to the wrinkles on my skin. It’s not Friday today? When was my birthday? I may be losing my witching powers, Maturing into the skin of my mother and father Perhaps they never existed, Maybe normality is flowing stillness into my veins, I have become what they feared. Old and out of date, Expired. I have walked into a party In the wrong era’s outfit, And when you try to explain it: The meaning of poetry, When they ask, Why you're wearing nylons with sandals, You keep repeating, Because I want to. Yet you realize no matter How you express yourself What you really want to say is: That’s not what I meant at all. 1973 00:00 / 02:55 i have authentic white tiny flowers in my hair the way i was supposed to live walking for my aunt, down the tiny cobblestone roads in the middle of summer, following the gorgeous bride, in the village, my parents were born and fell in love, singing Greek songs in the open air, watching how the Mediterranean sun plays golden tricks on my mother's short 70s crew cut. It's 1979 on the plane with my dad emergency landing to tend to the sick his father is dying and everyone is talking about olive trees. my hair is too short for Europe my knees too knobby but everyone loves my accent they say i'm beautiful i sleep at the top of the hill with my cousin Mimika and two other cousins have my name and moles. I find it weird that we all look alike yet no one sees the sun's brilliance like me or notices how the moon shines at twelve years old. they want all my clothes and look at the brand names while i care more about the sky and my grandmother's sad eyes. she likes to hug me like it's the last time she will every hug feels like her last hug. i felt death hug me when she squeezed and kissed me like that. we sleep in the afternoon or climb out the window to play with the hens. It's 1991 everyone my father loved has died I'm backpacking through Europe with my best friend and we visit my childhood but it's so long gone, i slept all through Paros Santorini saw all our dirty laundry Pensioni Andre had no mirrors so we hid well under the sun's rays. Every day lasted forever every love a lifetime. It's 1998 I'm three months pregnant in Agadir and doing some kind of pregnancy test it feels like this baby will live and he does. my life will never be the same again i'm a mother now. It's 2001 the ultrasound indicates it's a girl and i cry like a baby praying she'll stay warm and safe and never leave me stranded. with blood and tears. it's 2011 everyone sees Greece through the eyes of my children and we love each other madly every year every ocean brings us closer to death and the cup we were meant to drink together and finally alone is full of memories and our future is still full of dreams. he says no matter how old you are you are always young to me you never age. i love you. these are the years that grab me make me cry to our song and i sign death certificates. i grab hold of my soul and shake it a bit then i silence it. you thought you knew me but truly it's 1973 and the sun is the brightest i've ever witnessed and my mother's beauty haunts me. Dead Wife 00:00 / 01:05 I wrote you all the things I cannot tell your hazel eyes. I do not want to even look at you how unromantic of a poet like me. I wrote about— that time when Little Wing played in the 70s basement of Lily’s house on McKenzie Street. We did not know each other then you were at some other party playing spin the bottle, starting to brew your player moves, charming chess pieces. I spent my love on you like a gambler. I can’t I don’t want to be that girl That writes so many letters to her ex-boyfriends ex-lovers ex-husbands where they all have a conversation. They all have a substitute teacher when love calls. My ex was a teacher I killed myself for you like a murderer. I can’t I won’t wish for you to visit me refresh my six-year-old memory when love stumbles you sometimes forget to get up. I pretend your wife is dead. My reality has no filters. Publishing credits Measured Teaspoons: exclusive first publication by iamb 1973: Your Ink on my Soul (Underwater Mountains [1st ed.] / self-published [2nd ed.]) Dead Wife: Coffin Bell Journal (Vol. 2, Issue 4 – Masquerade) Nominated for Best of the Net 2020 Share