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Hear poet Susan Fuchtman read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Susan Fuchtman back next the poet Currently living in Iowa, Susan Fuchtman writes poetry, memoir and short stories. Her work can be found in Plume , Emerge Literary Journal , Stonecrop Review , Stone of Madness Press , Reckon Review and elsewhere. the poems Weight Bearing 00:00 / 01:30 Before I took a breath, before my blood rerouted, while my eyes were still closed, my parents argued about their individual visions for me, and after hours, days, after questions and explanations, they stepped into each other’s dreams and chose my name. Adam and Eve’s first responsibility was naming the animals, and even then, before sin and brokenness, before the veil was torn to make things right again, sitting there in that paradise they proposed and compromised and did the best they could. I visited my parents yesterday, and if you were there, at first you might only notice their faltering gaits, knobbled fingers, and unwavering opinions, but as the day progressed, you’d see they’ve not forgotten how it felt to hold me, stroke my hair, kiss my baby cheeks, to sacrifice a lifetime— to give me a name. I thought about all the names written in all the world in all time— charcoal on cave walls, quill and ink on papyrus, blue ballpoint on number ten envelopes, crayon on school papers, typewriter ribbon on essays, sharpies on name badges, pixels on phone screens, fingers in red dirt— How does the earth bear the weight of them? Riders 00:00 / 00:54 I think you, meaning the gray-haired audience in a dark bar on the north side of Chicago, will like our arrangement of this song. The guitar glisses into space. From closed eyes I see stars pulsate down to a green pasture, mating-marked sheep grazing, dead tree in the center. Out of the ominous sky, lightning. Tree flares flame, grass too wet to catch. I open my eyes, sit back. Irrelevance hangs in the air like smoke. The singer’s voice softens to a whisper, tapping out riders on the storm like impatient fingers on a table, waiting for the next bright blaze. What If Wars 00:00 / 02:02 were fought by old people say, 60, who have retirement in their sights and grandchildren they hope to see grow up— so they take vitamins and do exercises or maybe yoga, and eat organic and get eight hours of sleep— what if those old people were dressed in camouflage and sent to basic training where they climbed over walls and crawled under barbed wire while live ammunition was shot over them and then, having demonstrated their fitness, were given guns and 50-pound packs and loaded onto planes to go to a country they may or may not be able to point to on a map, a place where they may or may not understand what is being fought over, a place so far away that they can’t come home for Christmas and little ones will cry and say, ‘I miss my Grandma.’ And what if the other side did the same, and the battlefields were filled with grandmothers and grandfathers and great uncles and aunts and brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers, all in camouflage and all with guns— You’ve already guessed this poem isn’t very clever because you know what would happen: The grandmothers would bring sugar cookies and the grandfathers would share cigars and talk about baseball or soccer, and the guns would be forgotten as big picture albums were pulled from back pockets. They would forget what they were supposed to be fighting about, and host each other in their respective homes, maybe a container on base here or a tent there or a foxhole in between. Because by the time you are old, it’s not that you’re so feeble that you can’t remember, but you know there are some things better not remembered. And by the time you are old, what you must remember is that time is short and life is precious and life is short. I apologize for repeating myself but it’s so easy to forget. Publishing credits Weight Bearing: Emerge Literary Journal (Issue 16) Riders: exclusive first publication by iamb What If Wars: won an Honorable Mention in the Sinclair Community College Spectrum Awards 2015 and was published in the awards booklet

Hear poet Jim Newcombe read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jim Newcombe back next the poet Born and raised in Derby in the heart of the English Midlands, Jim Newcombe moved to London in 2006. Since then, he's lived in every quarter of the capital – enjoying an active cultural life of concerts and visits to theatre productions, museums, galleries and taverns. Jim's writing has appeared in numerous publications, and was shortlisted for the prestigious Bridport Prize, as well as for the Pendle Prize for elegies commemorating the First World War. the poems Eight Owls for Hieronymus Bosch 00:00 / 01:43 I Between the inward and outward wave upon the shore a rhythm in feathers that wasn’t here before called into being its substance and its law. II Between the masculine and feminine, between the how of her and why of him, came one with wings who shamed the seraphim. III Out from opposing poles that brought us here with eyes of sun and moon that knew no tear a tremulous presence maintained the biosphere. IV Between one nation’s customs and the next a primal entity that left the scholars vexed denied in its descent the doctrine of each text. V In the skewed trajectories of time and space it roosted aloof and in the darkest place rotated the clock of its expressionless face. VI The wood has ears, the field has eyes, and dawn reveals the eyes in every ear of corn that scans our thoughts, their verdict full of scorn. VII It is the decoy to all you think is true, to everything you ever thought you knew; the one note in its voice asks Who-are-you? VIII Both the signal to a secret and a lure, it hears the silence of a spider on the floor and sees most clearly when it’s most obscure. The House 00:00 / 02:16 Boundaries were defined by harsh words and bolted doors, yet by night I snuck past sleeping sentinels, the dark air pregnant with unanswered prayers, the page of each wall scripted with shadow, seeming to swell with pressure, as though something passed through it. Rain tapped at each window where the gloating stars peered in like patient voyeurs, the rhubarb blanched in moonlight as the clematis loomed, scaling the house, rending foundations I could not fortify. Spiders were hatched from cracked corners. I searched for clues, listened at keyholes for conspiracies, my memory mapped with creaking floorboards that betrayed my presence. I would spend hours in prayer and soliloquy trying to subsume the guilt I had inherited. Before they could be caught or killed the spiders would scuttle back to their dark dimension, as though a gash could suck up its own blood. Somewhere in hiding was the eight-legged mother of them all, her deftly strung web a grid of carcasses; wings, shells, corrupted husks mauled and festering. I couldn’t sleep for fear of it. Sometimes I would try the cellar door: deep and forbidding, that underground lair, where steps descend into a darkness that writhed with apprehensions. I couldn’t reach the light switch to dispel my suspicions which grew like rumours of a secret sin. One day I would confront whatever was down there and return victorious (if return at all) to where another, like me, would dare to descend along the cellar’s corpse-cold walls, dank and mildewed, the treacherous gloom now bristling, bristling and black with all that is unassumed. The Moon and The Sea From A Shake of the Riddle 00:00 / 01:00 VIII The moon and the sea – are they in harmony or at war? The martial marriage of the pale satellite and the brisk lush rasp of breakers – their sickly scurf and slosh, the weft and warp of crawling froth, and the pendulum tide like a nag gone berserk in its bridle, while the blind pupil of the milky moon dumb and vacuous, dimpled with craters, barren as the soul of an atheist. Holding dominion over the toiling water, that wormy, comet-scuffed wafer, that shrunken bauble of colourless light, still separate despite its travelled distance, its clean light of clinical intellect frozen from shadow, whose oblique brilliance does not illumine, but only reflect. Publishing credits Eight Owls for Hieronymus Bosch / The Moon and The Sea: exclusive first publication by iamb The House: Eunoia Review

Hear poet Laura Lewis-Waters read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Laura Lewis-Waters back next the poet Secondary school English teacher Laura Lewis-Waters gave birth to her first son during the UK's COVID-19 lockdown. Small wonder then that motherhood, mental health and traumatic birth feature prominently in her writing. Laura also researches poetry as a means to raise awareness of rising sea levels; her forthcoming collection, Where Sea Meets Sea , will explore the changing East Anglia coastline through writing both confessional and imagined, as well as verbatim. Laura's debut chapbook, Bathroom Prisoners , was born in May 2022. Her second collection, Beneath the Light , arrived in March 2023. the poems The Faceless Lady at Covehithe 00:00 / 01:20 She waits near the edge. Wind catching at her white linen dress. She waits for the fishermen to tread the headland toward her. They’ll come at low tide to the morlog, to the sand and shingle banks for their bass and their sole. And she’ll call to them. Wondering why recognition then fear always flits across their features. They’re too close to the edge again. In the dawn, mist rises off the broads. They don’t hear the cliffs sigh and let go. They don’t hear her moan. She retreats to St Andrew’s. A boy in a red bobble hat weaves himself through tumbling arches around graves on their seaward tilt as though ready to go back. Every William – every John – every sailor – every fisherman. The sea was hungry this year. But she’ll not let her Matryoshka home fall. Somewhere a baby cries, or perhaps it is the wind or sea martins. The bobble hat has disappeared. She hopes the church still stands on its return. From the tower she watches the cliff crumble and creep inward. She cries into the night, but nobody comes. They stay away on moonless nights when milk and mist mingle. The babies are hungry. Come morning she waits by the edge, her face as flat and featureless as the sea while the fishermen’s wives hang their linen out to dry. Haze-bruh 00:00 / 01:01 The sea gives and the sea takes and when it takes, it is with fire it threads itself in sky, lets the air ride its brackish back like a thousand battle-driven horses charging to reclaim township, it is all the elements knotted together; double sheet bend against farmer country. Sometimes it crawls up unnoticed lapping up sand with unquenchable thirst, a love too strong for stratified silt. One winter, the sea devoured two bungalows; the bells of a 14th century stone church destined to toll beneath the waves. Its wilding rampage on yellow gorse- lined path wind-whips the tower; north-westerly, chipping at field-boys’ teeth at teatime. Another winter, it tucked away four houses, shop and bakery overnight its briny breath inhaling more than flat margin brown its craggy sigh raking shrinking cliff top and painting the silty clay horizon where the sea gives, and the sea takes takes. Living with someone else’s anxiety 00:00 / 01:09 is adopting it as your own it’s realising you have counted black linoleum squares 1,000 times sat on the bathroom floor incapable of standing up. It is learning magic tricks the way you learnt to ride a bike, slowly, painfully, rituals that have to be adhered to a couple a day at first until every little task that keeps you alive is riddled with them – it’s turning the tap on off on off just because you brushed your teeth and always stepping into a room with your right foot because if you don’t you’ll never conceive. It is being your own failure you feel selfish for acknowledging because you are the ‘normal’ one, the unmedicated one, reassurance that asbestos is not in the crumbling Artex one. It is filling in the gaps in the grout so one day the house can be sold as a show home when all you really want is to fall down those little hollows. It is slamming doors, crying, collecting swimming certificates faster than anyone around you, legs growing tired, throbbing beneath the water. It is befriending magnolia walls because your husband, best friend, sister, colleague are the ones that need you. Publishing credits The Faceless Lady at Covehithe: exclusive first publication by iamb Haze-bruh: Trees, Seas & Attitude (Black Cat Poetry Press) Living with someone else’s anxiety: Bathroom Prisoners (Written Off Publishing)

Hear poet Yvonne Marjot read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Yvonne Marjot back next the poet Yvonne Marjot washed up on the Isle of Mull in 2001 after a varied career that took her round the world. Her poetry, inspired by her surroundings, often links mythology with the natural world. She's been published online as well as in anthologies – the most recent of which being In Flight . Her debut collection, The Knitted Curiosity Cabinet , won Yvonne the 2012 Brit Writers Prize for Poetry. the poems Workshop Inspired by the exhibition at An Tobar, Tobermory, Isle of Mull (August 2021) 00:00 / 00:54 How small a space is a mind, to track and trace our place in this landscape. Old stories retold, folded and pressed; pieces sliced and plotted, conjured in gold or barely guessed. Fabric as palimpsest: stone set on stone, dense with ink, tense with meaning. Complexity bounded, a nexus of time and intent. Tree shadows, courtyards, a village traced and lined, a vision confined, a vestige, a moment: a world unfurled. A tight-woven fastness – a limitless vastness: this place, so small a space to hold a mind. Artist Eve Campbell spent lockdown creating textile art arising from memories of the landscapes and places that inspired her – unfurling the world within the walls of her home. The Smith 00:00 / 01:44 In his hands the smith is holding light, his face caught in its glow, thought bent on his creation. Focused, calm, intent, with all his skill he brings it into life. His grasp is confident, fingers deft and sure. Fluent in his clasp, the tongs coax a fine, subtle spiral from the glowing rod of iron. He wipes his brow on his arm, bends to endure the flare of the forge: hungry, its red mouth roars as air wakes the coals. The living metal twists and writhes, vivid in the shimmering heat. His wrist transmits the impulse. He hefts the weight, pours his strength into the stroke, one with the force of each blow; the hammer knows its task. His neck is a molten column, his face a mask marked by the heat, lit from within like the forge. The anvil is rooted deep in the earth, the coals are the world’s furnace, igniting the heat that hides in the planet’s core. Sinews tighten as he shifts his grip, seeing the work whole. The hot iron smells like blood, like sex. Like life. He straightens, observes, moves it gently into water. Steam tempered, the lucent surface, beaded with droplets, gleams in the light. Outlined in crimson, his hammer lies still. He stands, annealed in the fires of his own skill. Harespell 00:00 / 00:16 The hare lies so calm in her form of grass, but she trembles still in the wind from the hill. For the wind is a spell, and the spell is a word, and the word is the weight of a world. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Fidel Hogan Walsh read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Fidel Hogan Walsh back next the poet Hailing from Ireland's County Cavan, Fidel Hogan Walsh has seen her poetry appear in many journals, including Poethead , Pendanic , The Irish Times , The Storms Journal , and in the University College Dublin Archives. She's been heard reading her work on the Eat the Storms poetry podcast numerous times, and was a featured poet on A Thousand Shades of Green . Fidel's poem What Peace Feels Like made her a winner of the inaugural Enlighten Prize (with Hambly & Hambly), which she won again in 2021 with her poem for you . Her first collection, Living with Love , was published in 2020, while her second – Time , a collaboration with photographer Julie Corcoran – launched Ireland's Culture Night that same year. the poems We Are the Night Lovers (save our souls) 00:00 / 01:00 A canvas showing off on a sweeping splendorous indigo sky crowded in bright twinkling trailing stars Waning nightmares seek solace in the silver crescent of a moody moon Nocturnal shift ends on a peeking pink sunrise whisking away dreams Death itself wanted part of A river lullaby lulls sleep on a meadows lush green grass in the dark shadows of love — we are the night lovers Travel Through Time 00:00 / 01:07 We are born of water in a white mist of sea & of everlasting memory Where land & ocean touch wild wind storms sing in a whistle of waves Loud natural eerie sounds erupt from ancient callings of man & of beast On a rough morning tide with poor visibility I see you out of reach You adrift of free movement wandering aimlessly where memories have no meaning I now must travel through time to bring you back to our sacred beginnings Surreal ~ 22nd May 2024 ~ The life you know, is no longer known. 00:00 / 01:08 the mountains half in shadow & hues of deep blue they beckon only then do i whisper out your name quiet quickening echoes take you to my outstretched arms nonexistence reality were we of this world & of our time the sea we dip down to those stormy crashing dreams the end we are no more / you / me / & of now what remains deep green lush mountains & a calm sea Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Holly Peters read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Holly Peters back next the poet Holly Peters is a Creative Writing PhD student at the University of Plymouth. She held the position of Plymouth’s Young City Laureate from 2019-2022, and had her poem Artificial Moons featured in the Moths to a Flame: Art and Energy Collective installation at the Glasgow Botanical Gardens during COP26. You’ll typically find Holly hiding somewhere between the covers of a book, or out walking her crazy spaniels, Dotty and Booby. the poems Building the River a Bed 00:00 / 01:12 a river skitters in the dark wriggling like a lullaby’s shh I take the first rock; it weighs the same as the peach pit in my stomach. Clay rolls in the canyon of my palm, squishing between fingers, then shuddering back to shape. An audience of stones, I deliberate, the choice all mine. nothing falls fast in the waves, settling down for its final rest The second breathes dust, hot to touch, singed syllables filling my throat. You don’t have to ignore the craters: use your nails and crack them open. The river shapes beds from burdens: kneel down, whisper them gently. water ages slow, sighs as it swallows my offering Crumbling. I’d avoided the river for years – it no longer able to relieve me – yet I still gather the third rock that slices through the sand timer’s neck. The bank cuts into the hard white behind my shins and I cry as I litter what’s left like ashes. soft drops melt like they were never there at all The Bread Affair 00:00 / 00:53 Her teeth grind in time with the knife that slathers butter over his slice of bread. His dinner steams, fragrant with turmeric and all the time she has spent stewing over it. Not that he takes any notice. Whatever plate she presents him with – matsutake mushrooms, moose cheese, wagyu beef – his mouth waters only for the ample half-wheat bread. Her arrangement of lip-pink tulips has already been extracted from the table’s heart, so his bulging loaf can fill its centre. He takes his time massaging butter into the bread’s porcelain cheek. He cups his hand, its back arching, then spoons his dinner inside, letting the slice envelope it like skin. He chews it, mouth opening wide, tongue slopping. The crumbs cascade, shredded like the last slivers of her patience. I Want to be a Forest 00:00 / 00:49 You won’t know which part of me you hold in your hands: my lower lip, a worn-down heel or knobbly elbow – because it’ll look no different to dirt. You’ll be given a watch-sized box filled with two palmfuls of what’s left of me, and even though I’m only saying it, those flakes, like tree bark, are my heart. All the rest, enough to fill a wheelbarrow, will be mingled with the remains of others. What was once kneecaps, earlobes, eyeballs will become part of the damp woodland floor. But in that forest, it will always be a part of me you hold in your hands. It will be earth, and worm food, a home for tentative tree roots, a world unravelling in the planet of your palm. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

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

Hear poet Laura Theis read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Laura Theis back next the poet Writing in her second language, Laura Theis has work in POETRY , Oxford Poetry , Magma , Rattle and elsewhere. As well as being nominated for a Forward Prize, she's been the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize , the Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize and the Hammond House International Literary Award. In addition, Laura's collection, A Spotter’s Guide To Invisible Things , won the Live Canon Collection Prize. She has two new volumes of poetry due out in 2025: a collection with Broken Sleep Books, and her debut children’s poetry book with The Emma Press, Poems From A Witch’s Pocket . the poems in my mother tongue the name for grand piano is wing 00:00 / 01:00 in my mother tongue words can be feathered which turns them into old jokes or proverbs owning a bird in my mother tongue is sign of great madness: you can accuse someone with an outrageous opinion of cheeping and chirping if you want to convey that you are flabbergasted or awed in my mother tongue you might say: my dear swan which is what I think when I first hear you play as your fingers move over the keys I wonder what gets lost in translation between music and birdsong whether both soar above our need to shift between words then I remember in my mother tongue the name for grand piano is wing Medusae 00:00 / 00:59 Do not lose faith on the day you wake up with spiders instead of hair. Do not cry as you look in the mirror. Remember: They may stay. They may not. They are here for now. If you must, take pains to cover your head. Hide their crawling under your most elegant hat lest people recoil from you in the streets. Or don’t. Remember Medusa and her snakes. She’d turn anyone to stone if they looked at her frightened. She was a monster and proud. All hiss, curse and scorn: danger. And yet to think someone must have loved her enough to name half of all jellyfish those moon-glowing blooms of floating fluorescent umbrellas and bells after her. miðnæturblár 00:00 / 00:47 we have to look up when we search for our dead even though we buried them in the ground but the dead like to call to us from the moon they try to spell out their wildering words in clouds or meteors they try to wave at us through murmurations and other such avian patterns in significant moments they do this to teach us to make lifting up our eyes a habit remember   they say once every day for a couple of  minutes the entire sky turns your favourite colour: the very darkest shade of blue Publishing credits in my mother tongue the name for grand piano is wing: won first prize in the Poets & Players Poetry Competition 2023 Medusae: how to extricate yourself (Dempsey & Windle) winner of the Brian Dempsey Memorial Pamphlet Prize miðnæturblár: POETRY Magazine (April 2022 'Exophony')

Hear poet Pam Thompson read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Pam Thompson back next the poet A Hawthornden Fellow in 2019, Pam Thompson is a writer, educator and reviewer. She's been widely published in magazines including Atrium , Butcher’s Dog , Finished Creatures , The Alchemy Spoon , The High Window , Ink, Sweat & Tears , The North , The Rialto , Magma and Mslexia . Pam is the author of three poetry pamphlets – Spin , Parting the Ghosts of Salt and Show Date and Time – as well as full collections The Japan Quiz and Strange Fashion . Her fourth pamphlet, Sub/urban Legends , won the Paper Swans Press Poetry Pamphlet Prize in 2023. the poems Shoes for Departure After Marina Abramović 00:00 / 01:21 You are about to set off on your journey. What will you need? Map and compass? Or if you’re at sea – telescope, sextant – to track angles between you and the stars. Tonight Polaris is brighter. You are no stranger to True North. No one is awake to wave you off. Suitable clothing is taken for granted – the hood of your parka, fur-lined, detachable or your blue raincoat, as light as the song of itself, is groundsheet and sail, folds into the size of your hand, the hand which feels under the bed for the shoes for departure, hands which find shoes of pale carved amethyst. Putting them on is like stepping inside the Earth, and as you do, the room, your city, the galaxies, spin away and you are the fixed point, each foot, re-making gravity, hardly moving at all, travelling far away. Reading my mother’s diaries 00:00 / 00:59 admiring again her sloping handwriting. I have been trying to fill in the gaps in my memory. No that’s a lie. I have been trying to bring her back, to unspool her words and sentences until they loop themselves into her own true form. Mum, where have you been? All evening I've watched for the blur of your shape in the stained-glass panel of our front door. I have been a watcher at the gate. What kind of mother would stay out for so long, stay out this late? I have been reading my mother backwards, standing on the slope of my own life, looking down to that squiggly, tangled path. She is so far ahead, the sun’s bright, I’m shielding my eyes. In Whitby 00:00 / 00:53 on a January morning my heart climbs the 199 steps turns, takes a breath, and for seconds is terraces, the swelling North Sea, Inside St. Mary’s Church, my heart reads a notice, Do not ask the staff where the grave of Dracula is because there isn’t one and my heart smiles, moving very slowly between pews looking for, but not finding, a carved effigy of itself. Instead, is an offering and a candle that stays lit even in the day’s sudden gusts which blow inside and outside my heart in the abbey where it settles at last, in front of a statue of St Hild. Publishing credits Shoes for Departure: The High Window (Autumn 2023) Reading my mother's diaries: Sub/Urban Legends (Paper Swans Press) / winner in the Paper Swans Pamphlet Prize 2023 In Whitby: Mary Evans Picture Library

Hear poet Suchi Govindarajan read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Suchi Govindarajan back next the poet Writer, poet and photographer Suchi Govindarajan lives in Bengaluru, India. Her poetry has appeared in publications ranging from IceFloe Press and Cordite Poetry Review to perhappened magazine and Usawa Literary Review . Her poems have also been included in two anthologies. Poetry is Suchi's first love – fiction is her newest. the poems Of blood and war 00:00 / 02:10 The first time it happens, you are barely twelve. So much blood must mean either wound or war, s o you run to your mother and ask if you are dying. This is not death, she says, this is existence — just the basic bloodshed of being woman. There will be a celebration next week, she says with silks and jaggery, turmeric and gold. But don't be swayed by such fleeting love; the real gift is an unwritten book, stitched with rope, bound with tradition, its pages ornate and yet so sharp with rules, they only slice the fingers of women. Because you are a child, you take this gift, and you come to believe in this unquestioning dark, the flowers that will wilt, the milk that will spoil, the men and other fragile beings that will take ill. Everything, she says, that can be defiled by you. Last April you helped your aunt make mango pickles. This month, even your touch will spoil them — all that careful soaking in brine and spice — all that ageing in the home's coldest corners where you will now sit for days every month, muffling the many mouths of your pain. You cannot go to temples now, says your mother. You cannot worship the goddess I named you after. You are still a child, she says, but you are enough woman You are still a child, but you are already too much woman for anyone to bear, not the men, not the priests. They must pray to save all their gods from you. You told me once that he loved you 00:00 / 01:29 You told me once that he loved you because you were simple. I wondered then if he had seen your bookshelf or your bathroom. Did he see that small callus at the base of your palm? Does he know the weight of your gaze as you look out the window? Even on cold nights, you never cover your feet with a blanket, yet you show me these socks he bought for you to wear. They are the exact shade of purple that you hate and call violet. You told me once that he loved you even if you weren't beautiful. I wondered then if he had seen you speak about justice or poetry. Has he seen how you hesitate before you burst into laughter? Does he know you have your grandfather's hooded eyes? You told me once, under the yellow light of a station, of your surprise at his love and his existence. It was a windy night, your wild hair was held in a bun. You were wearing a sweater that billowed like a storm. You told me then you would try and love him back. I smiled, and felt a new grief in my limbs. Current affairs 00:00 / 02:05 My teacher told me my poems should be more current, should celebrate things in the news like the breaking of sports records, like the eradication of diseases, new machines in our libraries, or how a child, just six years old, sang like he was born of birds. Don't just write about flowers he said, or philosophy or these clouds of unrequited love that billow about your youth. Until we broke the mosque, I did not follow his advice. Until then, nothing in the world had touched my cocooned life: I had touched nothing in the world. But now I felt like it was my chariot wheels that crayoned dried blood into the tar. I watched my parents turn to wolves at orange moons, cheering for men with pickaxes, waving their fists at a box they could not turn off. But when I went to my teacher my words now a raw torment my pen now moving hard enough to leave round bruises on the page behind (at last, I thought, a poem he would praise) he grew narrow and cold. In a play last year, he had painted my face blue, draped me in shawls of gold and Raamar green. I had broken a bow for him. Now he whispered mantrams to protect his gods, and flung my poem back and told me to stick to love and clouds and flowers. Something that would dissolve and disperse easily. Something that would not leave marks even on the back of a page. Publishing credits Of blood and war: Usawa Literary Review (Issue 2) You told me once that he loved you / Current affairs: exclusive first publication by iamb

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)