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Read 45 poems from 15 emerging and established poets – and hear their authors read them too. Welcome to wave 14 of iamb. wave fourteen summer 2023 Alice Stainer Aysegul Yildirim Dave Garbutt Deborah Finding Devjani Bodepudi Ed Garvey Long Hannah Linden Ian McMillan J L M Morton Jamie Woods Jerm Curtin May Chong Ramona Herdman Valerie Bence Victoria Punch

Read 45 poems from 15 emerging and established poets – and hear their authors read them too. Welcome to wave 12 of iamb. wave twelve winter 2022 Caitlin Stobie Doreen Duffy Jenny Mitchell Jeremy Wikeley Jim Newcombe Jinny Fisher Leanne Moden Louise McStravick Ruth Wiggins Sadie Maskery Samantha DeFlitch Sue Butler Susie Campbell Thomas March Zannah Kearns

Read 45 poems from 15 emerging and established poets – and hear their authors read them too. Welcome to wave 6 of iamb. wave six summer 2021 Andy Nuttall April Yee Ben Ray Charlotte Ansell Dominic Leonard Douglas Tawn Elizabeth Langemak Kathryn Bevis Kimchi Lai Michelle Penn Monica Cure Nathan Dennis Pascale Petit Róisín Ní Neachtain Shaw Worth

Read 45 poems from 15 emerging and established poets – and hear their authors read them too. Welcome to wave 11 of iamb. wave eleven autumn 2022 Charles G Lauder Jr Daniel Hinds David Butler Heidi Beck James Nixon Jan Harris Kittie Belltree Lauren Thomas Lisa Tulfer Lydia Kennaway Maggs Vibo Nichola Deane Rick Dove Sam Henley Smith Susan Fuchtman

Poet directory and quarterly journal iamb is inspired by The Poetry Archive. Hear contemporary poets read three of their own poems. about poets 45 new poems for autumn 2025 © 2025

Hear poet Rhona Greene read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Rhona Greene back next the poet Rhona Greene is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer from Dublin, Ireland. She loves to read and celebrate the work of contemporary poets, particularly those in the online poetry community. Rhona has had work published in several volumes from Black Bough Poetry, and was shortlisted for its Dai Fry Mystical Award in 2022. She was the featured prose writer in the second issue of The Storms Journal , and her work has appeared on Susan Richardson’s A Thousand Shades of Green poetry podcast, as well as in The Wombwell Rainbow's Disappearance calendar . the poems Day Trip to Newgrange with my Grandmother When I Was a Little Girl More than 5,200 years old, Newgrange stands at the UNESCO World Heritage site Brú na Bóinne in Ireland. The rising sun illuminates its passage and chamber around the winter solstice. 00:00 / 06:16 My grandmother tells me whispers: ‘Fadó, fadó, far away, far below. Éistigí, eistigí. Listen.' O shimmering sun. O breath of life. Still. Life. Still. Breathing. Below, below. Fadó, fadó. Kings, queens, gods, goddesses, preparing, turning, positioning crowns to glitter, to glow, tilting glinting halos light caught dark to shine between flicker and flow, flaming unborn visions to flight, crowning spinning heads brim full to dreaming, deep in the majesty of time. ‘Éistigí.' Shimmering sun. Breathing life. Below. ‘Fadó, fadó’. She whispers: ‘Tar liom’ . I follow. Up one grassy mound to another, then another, little giddy goat galloping up, rolling down, skipping, squealing, spinning round and round and round. Knowing nothing of time – yet, but to follow the sun following me in cartwheeling revolutions of joy and its grip soft, green, underfoot, holding me here, holding me now and O how it fills a throbbing heart to burst spilling over with bird songs of joy and sparkling wide-eyed wonder. Eyes open. Sun. Eyes Close. Wait. Open. Sun. Bright. Shadow. Bright. Shadow. Close. Cover eyes. Splay fingers. Filter. Flicker. Filter. Flicker. Shimmer – Shimmer – Shimmer. Glimpse. Vision. Dream. Whispering whispers. 'Tar Liom. Tar liom.' Follow the sun. Up ahead, my grandmother billows in floral skirts leading the way beyond here, beyond now, gathering me – ribbons and bows – in ripples, in flow. When the powder puff cloud of her passes on through the yawning gap and disappears, everything slows. My spinning head. My thumping heart. My every motion winds down to stop and I turn to stone – to this chiselled moment tracing rhythms throbbing to touch. There is no name for this. This day of light and shade, cloud and revelation, forever and now humming, thrumming, trembling stone, coiling and uncoiling the spiral of me, of everyone on this trail. 'Ciúnas, le de thoill.' Quiet, please. The stone is singing. I spiral on to the rippling melody of touchstone, following my grandmother’s dusty footprints laid down before me as softly as snow on snow – a faint trail leading toward a mound. The Mound! O how it looms, blooms, blossoms and grows on approach and I, all shrinky Alicey, my heart full of wonder, bending and folding like a butterfly, crouch down and pass on through the low portal of time, entering a long dark narrow passage, becoming one more tiny dimple in the continuum. Squinty blinking into the vast unknown shape-shifting familiars appearing and vanishing between icy breaths, O so shivery cold to the bone, stirring the primal tendrils of instinct to search, reach, touch, intertwining ribboning strands binding, briefly. We connect, reunite and persist in this heart of darkness where shadow dust sprinkles tangled souls into cradles rocked by rhythm and scattered bones, where time bleeds in sun and echoes, where I feel flow. Silently, we seep into sacred chambers, swelling with life in the slip between flesh and bone, where blood pools, warms to touch in anticipation of a promise, a spark. Hearts beat, beat, beat, pounding hard, fast, loud, throbbing rhythm’s ancient pulse, then slowly, gently down, synchronise to quivering harmony and grace notes, time’s simple signature, and O how we hang in this hallowed place oscillating, unknowing, hoping for the untangling of everything so barely contained. Clinging on in unspangled enfolding black ribbons of fragile awakening unravelling, flinging against the entangled dark whispering: ‘Oh Nana. What do I do now Nana? What do I do now?’ Her sweet voice comes calling, softly, again and again. ‘Mo chuisle, a chuisle mo chroí.' Tilt your shattered head skyward, and wait for light to return. Fadó fadó / Long ago (Fa -though) Éistigí / Listen (Ay-shtig-ee) Tar liom / Follow me (Thar-lum) Ciúnas, le de thoill / Quiet, please (Queue-in-us leh duh hull) Mo chuisle. A chuisle mo chroí / My darling, but literally, my pulse/ beat of my heart (Muh cooshla. A cooshla muh cree.) First Love 00:00 / 00:43 It leapt out of me glistening like a wild salmon on the run up the Boyne – river of my heart. Surging on and on, driven by impulse or memory of its pea-sized beginnings. Tiny thing, mother-planted in the burrowed gravel of her love. Flipping itself in the sparkling air, hurling against rushy waters, turbulent life gushing towards it. First love – the flippin’ and leppin’ madness of it! Shiny Distant Thing 00:00 / 01:25 Wings singe-glow transparent in dipping gold – light is leaving. A silhouette in solitary flight far from this catastrophic labyrinth of gloom. Soft comes the crash of night – music melancholy, blue. Waves receding murmur a vow of silence: ‘mare tranquillitatis - hush, hush, hush.’ After comes rain like petals – sacramental, light. Then comes mourning dovetailing dark infinite deep and shadow-dazzled bright breaking fast any commitment to sorrow, resistance to flow. Anointed, ocean-holy, ascend through blossoming trees to sky-high altar sacred-blue and wish a upon a fish high-leaping to catch a shiny distant thing – star-shaped, moon-blest. Then dance! Publishing credits Day Trip to Newgrange with my Grandmother When I Was a Little Girl: Freedom-Rapture (Black Bough Poetry) First Love: exclusive first publication by iamb Shiny Distant Thing: Sun-Tipped Pillars Of Our Hearts: The Dai Fry Award for Mystical Poetry Anthology 2022 (Black Bough Poetry)

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

Hear poet Phil Vernon read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Phil Vernon back next the poet Trained originally as a forester, Phil Vernon has done international humanitarian and peacebuilding work since 1985. His third collection, Guerrilla Country – forthcoming from Flight of the Dragonfly Press in 2024 – draws together his interest in landscape, peace and conflict. Phil's two previous collections, Poetry After Auschwitz and Watching the Moon Landing , are complemented by his version of the mediaeval hymn Stabat Mater (with music by Nicola Burnett Smith), which has been performed internationally. the poems The command ‘An order is heavier than a stone.’ 00:00 / 01:23 The magistrate, for fear his fear will come to pass, sends formal notes to regiments. The chief of police, sure they wish bloodshed over peace, calls out the words that make it so. The soldier puts in play his plan to teach these people what he understands. *** A simple mark, a sound or gesture sets in motion—everything. Block exit gates with bayonets. Cut through the crowd. Fire tear gas, baton, then live rounds above their heads— then lower. Aim at where the densest groupings are. Don’t shrink—redouble your resolve when they begin to flee. Send in the tanks. *** Inside, the image of the golden sanctum barely shimmers, pilgrims walk in silent circles, heel to toe, around the sarovar . *** How certain must they be, who utter these commands, the stage they stand upon and laud and idolise is crumbling in the sea? Where do their shadows go? And where do ours, who fail to prevent their words? The King’s Peace 00:00 / 00:57 To keep his peace, our king built temples, courts and palaces, and scarred the land he’d won, with ditches, ports and roads; determined how we die; and blessed us with his enmities. To teach us irony, he named his cousins lords and justices. Apprised of God’s mistake by priests and clerks, on pain of punishment he made us speak a single tongue. His word was written, maps were drawn. But laws and maps and roadways lengthened distances, and when he sailed, he left no instrument through which to see, but a kaleidoscope. We turn and turn its wheels but cannot make the fractured picture whole. Dereliction 00:00 / 01:14 We learned the forest long before we learned our books: heard woodlarks, cuckoos, jays, watched roebucks, martens, wolves, each in its place and in our secret places— hillsides, hilltops, streams and dips. We learned that trees brought down become a space for sunlight, seedlings, tillers, scents and sounds; that canopies of beech and oak and angled beams of dancing light make way for vistas, brambles, willow, birch, then beech and oak and angled beams of dancing light; that a loved and loving land is always moving tirelessly from sun and sound to quiet shade, from quiet shade to sun and sound. Our land’s become a hungry, dull-eyed fox made ragged and thin by mange and hunched in the edges hearing and seeing nothing; limping to nowhere, too tired to be afraid or unafraid. Publishing credits The command / The King's Peace: Flights (Issue 4) Dereliction: exclusive first publication by iamb

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 Lisa Tulfer read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Lisa Tulfer back next the poet Dutch-to-English translator Lisa Tulfer is a UK-based writer of non-fiction articles, poetry and reviews (as well as an occasional blogger ). Her work has appeared in The Pilgrim , The Cardiff Review , the Earth Pathways Diary , Redemptorist Press , Green Ink Poetry and as part of The Poetry Archive's Poetry Archive NOW . Lisa is also a poetry submissions editor at Full House Literary Magazine . Exploring ideas of identity, belonging and home, Lisa is currently working on her first book. the poems Telling the bees 00:00 / 00:54 We told them because we knew it was something that had to be done. Trying to speak the words out loud our voices broke, fragments swept away on our tears, so instead we whispered the words, standing by the hives holding hands, the ‘she is dead’ barely louder than the buzzy breath. Did we imagine that the bees paused for a moment in their vibrating lives? Afterwards, it felt not better, but that the worst was behind us. We had told the bees, said the words, made it real. The average human body is 60 percent water After We’re All Water an art installation by Yoko Ono 00:00 / 01:30 we’re all water and DNA and cells, dividing shared genes and history we’re all blank canvasses and memory intuition and reflexes synapses and electricity we’re all cruelty and pain, potential unrealised or twisted energy discharged in violence against ourselves or others we’re all creative makers of bread, words, art love or babies makers of mischief, belief war, peace we’re all alive, dead fear, hope past, future we’re all strong, weak holding hands and killing clinging to life and dreaming nightmares and visions we’re all hate, fear and othering we’re all love, surprised, consumed we’re all water Blue 00:00 / 01:53 There is a certain kind of blue that happens at six o’clock on a February evening, when the sun has slipped off the edge of a clear day, trailing strands of candyfloss clouds – improbably pink – leaving behind a grey dullness that feels like a bereavement. Then paradoxically the sky begins to brighten, gains a depth not only of colour but of dimension, and as the colour shifts from grey to blue it begins to glow, luminous, greenish at the horizon, indigo overhead, striped with lines of cloud now darkest midnight against the cerulean blue. The bluest blue, bluer than a Cornish bay, bluer than the skylark-thrilling sky of summer, lying in the grass, squinting sunwards, bluer even than my lover’s eyes. Backlit blue, achingly fleeting, the blueness reaching a climax, unbearably intense and then suddenly dying, fading, becoming flat, two-dimensional. Now Prussian, darkening, dark. And into the darkest blue a sickle of silver rising, cold and clean, scything across the stars to gather the last blueness and leave the sky black. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Maxine Rose Munro read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Maxine Rose Munro back next the poet Maxine Rose Munro is a Shetlander adrift on the outskirts of Glasgow. Her poetry has been published widely, exhibited at the Stanza Poetry Festival, shortlisted for the SMHAFF Awards, and nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Maxine runs the First Steps in Poetry feedback programme, which offers beginner poets free feedback and support. the poems Finnman 00:00 / 01:12 My land is a constant, stripped by inconstant seas and I should know better: allure soon abandons all promise and beauty lies like an oily film on your surface. I have no use for fortune-tellers spinning gaudy futures – tall, dark strangers on narrow, isolated islands can't be true, but are surely puzzle and paradox. False, false man there is as much plastic in your offer as silver fishes in the sea. Now you tell me of your sunken treasures and hidden depths, but never your shifting, treacherous nature. I dream of your sea rising to enfold me, cover my mouth and stop my breath. I am lost and will go with you. But first come close, closer, let me see if, like waves meeting land, you break against me. The Finnman is a legend of the Northern Isles. Sometimes he can be benevolent, others he seeks to entice women down to his undersea world, only to turn them into his slaves. Let me sing a song of love 00:00 / 01:11 though we both know I'm not romantic. Though it could end in embarrassed mumbling and staring at our feet. I know I take time to get going, and often head off in a confusing direction, but just sit, and I'll do my best. Let my voice crack, wander between dialects like it does when I'm worried I'm an idiot putting myself forward for a kicking, a puppy wanting to pee all over the floor, shivery with terror, anticipating horror. I've written the words and rehearsed them a dozen different ways but none of them were as right as I wanted. It's funny how so very hard it is to do this, but let me try. Let me stand up before you, not quite look at you, let me sing the words I wrote you, edited over and over and over again. Let me sing this song – I love you. I'm glad I found you and no one else. Let's live all our lives together. There. I have sung my song. I hope you don't think I got it wrong. I hope you feel the same. Mother Tongue 00:00 / 01:04 If I were to speak with my mother's tongue my words would reach up out of the land, rooted deep in the language she learned sat at the knees of Viking descendants – the soil pressed against her bare skin: möld , a word that grew in her fertile mouth. To be dirty rich was möld -rich. To be nearly buried by the drink, möld -drocht. Her word for the Earth: Aert . Spoken with an ai , a rolling r , and a tih . Compact. Solid. And if she were to say 'from all the earths', well, this was her way of saying 'everywhere'. Stuck and grounded, both aert -fast. And that was how she looked to me, a woman who couldn't work with abstracts, their gush, their drift from the source. But my father, ah now, my father, he was one who was soothed by this. His words were dreams of the sea. Publishing credits Finnman / Let me sing a song of love: exclusive first publication by iamb Mother Tongue: Acumen

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

Hear poet Cora Dessalines read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Cora Dessalines back next the poet Cora Dessalines is a queer, London-based freelance writer. They were former assistant editor of their university’s creative writing magazine ~FACTORY~ and editorial assistant at Guts, an independent publisher of memoirs and short-story anthologies. Cora has had their work published in Lacuna, a literary magazine that showcases the writing of young women and non-binary people of colour. They are a lover of fashion, space and anything colourful, and are currently at work on their first afrofuturist science-fiction novel for adults. the poems takotsubo cardiomyopathy 00:00 / 01:53 they say it feels like s i n k i n g that tectonic plates shift and create fissures wide enough to swallow you whole quite the opposite, in fact it isn’t quicksand nor an overlap of scrambling hands and clawing fingers craving to drag you under no, it is a rupture in the laws of physics a losing battle between mass and energy where gravity knows no bounds— it is the feeling of your feet g n i t f i l and your body capsizing gnizispac to mould with this wretched world in which you rise, climbing the clouds, your head facing the ground all the way they say it feels like a cavernous well but the devil is a liar that chilly water is the fluid in your lungs, sib the build-up from elevating to such high altitudes where dew droplets crystallise on your eyelashes and your oxygen is slowly snatched while you ascend them six layers as punishment by this, a most wicked cosmos to be honest, you should’ve guarded your rassclart heart instead of looking up and thanking the universe for blessing you with syrup and silver and steadfast loyalty that love was on loan, little horror and the night sky tricked you into thinking those were jewels stitched onto a dark tapestry instead of black sheets stuck on using a roller and wheat paste i wish i could’ve warned you the light you saw are just bullet holes we call stars. so this is love 00:00 / 01:35 i want it to be glorious. i want us to douse ourselves in it to take a match in each hand light them and set ourselves on fire! our mixed ashes must ripple and rumble until we, two phoenixes, rise birthed from the pyre of our own making— it needs to be … ravenous. and make us forsake all earthly foods save the tongue-plucked cherries that grow above our inner thighs, swallowed and savoured a sempiternal reminder that we are the fruits of a supernova, dual spheres of magma. we will steal matter from each other like two thieves in the night gorging in tandem lava— combust we until i only want it if it’s going to bring me beyond the brink of destruction and make astronomers believe planets will form from we, these dead stars’ disk. stars above, it must be r a p t u r o u s! and so fucking consuming that my lungs become your air becomes my lungs fill faster than what my breath can catch. trust, we best be willing to lean over balconies sever our bloodlines and make a pact that our hearts may only beat at the same time as each other or else, leave us permanently breathless. … i want it to leave us breathless. because to us that is love. love in reverse 00:00 / 02:38 legend has it our meeting made flowers blossom in the gloom of winter, spurred leaves into elevating back to their branches as they shifted from red yellow to green again with every day we spoke we, two divergents, formed our own timeline and while everyone else’s nights came quicker the sun would spread its arms just for us, purposely setting when the rest of the world rose for work this was back when i thought my love for you shattered laws when i believed the night we met caused mangoes to grow in the north pole like a unity of contradiction sprouted from life’s continual war of opposites instead of lying in that field of tension i made my love for you alter the meaning of cause and effect in the hope i could understand how the imprint of your head on my shoulder was there before i even knew you see, i used to think we would be infinite to spite the general line, that even though we’d submitted to the logic of change, pledged our lives to nada hay absoluto y todo revoluciona me and you would stay the same but this was back before i knew my honesty would have me barred indefinitely, would have my words chewed up and spat back to me at a later date, with the mushy remnants of them laid on my palm like a spoiled crop you told me afterwards you didn’t want us to end like this but i’d already washed my hands i only wish you hadn’t waved the wrong red flag, my love it was better when whatever we were was an unspoken thing, curved into your left cheek like a tiny sickle it is said our meeting unravelled the rules of the cosmos, burned the cool red stars so hot we made one another tremble, as proof that in the last analysis we could’ve won this world together if either of us just had some compassion now the thought of you reminds me that we are in the time of monsters, running parallel to each other so that our contradictions never overlap, never reveal that me and you were in the bloom of life, from a planet where you don’t refuse to see me even after i beg the politburo for a meeting Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

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 Simon Alderwick read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Simon Alderwick back next the poet Raised in Surrey and now settled in Oxford after several years of moving between various locations in England, Wales and the Philippines, Simon Alderwick is the author of poetry pamphlet ways to say we’re not alone . His poems have been featured in Magma , Anthropocene , Ink Sweat & Tears , Berlin Lit , Acropolis , Dust Poetry Magazine and elsewhere. Simon's debut collection, reaper in a headlock, will be published by Broken Sleep Books in 2026. the poems love in the age of extinction 00:00 / 01:01 hot day on her lips, record-breaking thighs. no ice left when she tells me – we need a circular economy. she breaks the bones in my fingers, feeds me water – filtered – through a paper straw. straddles me, hushes my concerns, this aging population. she knows love’s impossible, keeps sandbags stacked against the door. we can't die out like dinosaurs – she says – we are God's chosen creatures. but her laugh, a tipping point. she drills me until she strikes oil. we spill across the bedroom floor. smoke like chimneys after. she says: the future’s out on Mars. – i don’t think we’ll make it. when she's gone my cat brings me birds fallen from the sky. the game 00:00 / 01:11 my daughter holds a red building block to her cheek, says: hello . i pick up another brick, say: hello . no daddy , she says, taking my hand, you’re in London . she walks me to the bedroom; goes out; closes the door. i put my ear to the receiver of the block. i can hear her through the door. hello . brick heavy in my hand. i miss you . my hand against my head. when are you coming home? i tell her soon. i tell her i’m on the airplane. i break down the bedroom door. holding my arms out like an airplane; fly around the front room; land in the front garden; run to the front door. my daughter runs to me kicking toys across the floor. i hold her in my arms. it’s a silly game but it feels good to make a game of it at last. flubbergust 00:00 / 00:35 can't come out today – bit of a mad one i was opening a packet of crisps and found a blue whale inside i said: normally the packaging is inside you but he failed to see the funny side i called a number on the crisp packet but i don’t think the girl was listening she said it should go out with the general waste i said for the love of god it's still alive Publishing credits love in the age of extinction: exclusive first publication by iamb the game: shortlisted for The Telegraph Poetry Competition 2022 flubbergust: Magma 81