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Poet Ankh Spice reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Ankh Spice back next the poet Ankh Spice is a sea-obsessed poet from Aotearoa (New Zealand). His poetry has appeared in a number of online and printed publications internationally. He often uses natural imagery, myth and strong derealisation to explore the personal and shared traumas that keep us unsettled, environmental issues, and the drive to persist against our odds. Two of his poems were nominated for the 2020 Pushcart Prize courtesy of Rhythm & Bones and Black Bough Poetry. the poems Have mercy Written following Hurricane Dorian, September 2019 00:00 / 01:44 This island opens the iris of her day, calm curve of bay all visioning glass deepsight clear to the seabed stones, each a distinct sharp note, becalmed in unstirring kelps oh yes here the huge animal of the world is all lull but I turn where the trail ends in a groan the road inhaled by her winter heaving and on your side of her body that same skin murmuring wet nothings down there where the road was is tearing holes in itself right this second and if we are any kind of people we know what to do with an animal struggling just to breathe when did we close our eyes so tightly we forgot that desperate creatures fight hard and close more eyes as they go down gasping So from me running caught between breaths to you caught in her throat I can’t say anything except oh god you know you know she never wanted this New cloth 00:00 / 01:27 Your pattern pinned itself to the fray of me the first day. Not yet stitched, aligning fragile tissue, judging bias – the wounded cut carefully always holding their breath. When they remade you, I slept on a hospital couch with your dress, bundled like a woollen heart, to my nose. Five hours inhaling-exhaling bargains a short time to outfit a whole woman into her own dear self. We tied knots with every colour we could find. Understand, love always gets down to the wisp beyond fabric, to stroke the finest thread of a person – our making looms us legacies of holes – you fear cutting yourself short, me born running with scissors, and all of us rippling fast towards the great unravelling Yet the great thumping treadle of a heart can still say now you’re mending – billow with the wind. This poem did not stand a chance 00:00 / 02:03 Begotten, I failed to thrive, all at once and for years after, perhaps this poem will be rejected before it can speak from spite. I learned young that every strand and bead of us is base, self- interested only in making more of itself this poem will know it can never be good enough Here is a sore-tooth socket of a truth for a tongue to test – we persist by errors in our replication, success for this whole bolt of shivering animal fabric is in the dropped stitches, in failing to be perfect this poem will blame itself for signalling predators this also describes a number of fathers selfish patterns unstrung, then unshuttled, without any binding, so this poem will unravel red threads into the sea this poem will fail to finish even that I have stopped you going on. I did not beget, I have not made anything at all of myself this poem was stillborn I pick up this small body of work, headed for the coffin-drawer, and it is still warm and so blameless a great rack-and-rattle shakes the mistake of it from my hands, even despite resurrecting you, it begins to speak: This poem was still born Publishing credits Have mercy: Kissing Dynamite (Issue 10) New cloth: Rhythm & Bones (Issue 6) This poem did not stand a chance: The Failure Baler (Issue 1) Share

Hear poet Kathryn Bevis read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Kathryn Bevis back next the poet Hampshire Poet 2020-21 and founder of The Writing School , Kathryn Bevis won several awards, including first prizes in poetry competitions run by Poets & Players and Against the Grain Press. Shortlisted for the Nine Arches Press Primers scheme, Kathryn was longlisted for the National Poetry Competition. Her poems appeared in print and online, and were broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Kathryn also designed and delivered ACE and county council-funded Poetry for Wellbeing projects for adults in mental health and substance misuse recovery settings, as well as in prisons. Her debut collection was The Butterfly House . the poems starlings 00:00 / 01:50 in the beginning is the skydeep and the skydeep is shapeless and hollow and blankness dwells there and the bodyus broods over the belly of the horizon clinging to skeletons of trees and we say let there be wavetrail and there is wavetrail and we divide the wavetrail from the skydeep and the outpour from the inshrink and we call the wavetrail WE ARE and we call the skydeep IT IS and we say let there be curlsmoke in the midst of the skyswim and let it divide the WE ARE from the IT IS and we fashion the curlsmoke from the skyswim and it is so and we call the curlsmoke ONE and the skyswim we call MANY and we say let the breakwave be heard among the MANY and the pebblerush also and we call the breakwave FLESH and the pebblerush we call SPIRIT and thus it is then we say let the SPIRIT be divided into the skybright we will call LIGHT and the outsnuff we will call DARKNESS and let DARKNESS bring about a great shitting upon the earth and we say let DARKNESS herald the downpull and the stenchsweet, the dirtroost and the clutchheart and so it goes glory be to the skydeep and the bodyus the curlsmoke and the skyswim glory be to the breakwave and the pebblerush the dirtroost and the outsnuff for we are the MANY we are the ONE Tidal Race For Ollie 00:00 / 01:29 This morning found you capsized and sinking in the campsite kitchen, bloodless, clammy, haunted by the world and all its doubles. They hauled you off in their blue-light bus and I rode beside, squeezed your shoulder tight, willed you back to yesterday. Drowning here, the reflected twin of everything swims in your eyes, pulls you far from reach. They wheel you out and in, from scan to scan, pump dye around your veins and brain to find the chink that let the shadows seep inside. Hours slide behind this green curtain and still you get your sums wrong, still believe in clones of fingers, faces, clocks that press at the corners of your eyes, maintaining they exist, insisting on their right to be here. Come back. We’ll grip the cliff edge while the seal’s sleek head lifts above the water’s surface, melts to gloss again. Gannets will plunge, gold-hooded, into the tidal race and splash to scoop out cloud-marked mackerel, flaring silver in the sun. Matryoshka 00:00 / 01:20 We’re all in the family way. Full of ourselves. In the pudding club, my dear. On our shelf, we gather dust like dandruff and listen to the sound of human children growing. Their girls – once born – are great squishy, smelly things that pule and puke and shit the sodding bed. Not ours. We are a nest with all our pretty chicks inside. We are the hatchling and the egg. Each of us is mother to a daughter who is pregnant with the next in line. Our bodies rhyme, like the faces of the moon. All except our smallest. We don’t talk about it but let me say it softly: she was born with no space inside. That’s right. She’s wood all the way through. It’s not that we judge her, understand, but we know (as only mothers can) she’ll never get to split herself in two, she’ll never have to bear the others as we do. Publishing credits starlings: winner of the 2019 Against the Grain Press Poem Competition / Fenland Poetry Journal (Issue 4) Tidal Race: shortlisted in the 2020 Live Canon Single Poem Competition / Live Canon Anthology 2020 (Live Canon) Matryoshka: commended in the 2021 International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine / 2021 Hippocrates Prize Anthology (Hippocrates Initiative)

Hear poet Dominic Weston read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Dominic Weston back next the poet Dominic Weston makes wildlife programmes for television, runs over the Mendip hills, and writes poetry. His work has appeared in numerous print and online magazines, journals and anthologies, including Ink, Sweat & Tears and Green Ink Poetry . Once, he even slipped off the page into poetry film . Dominic's work veers into the natural world – often with a healthy undercurrent of darkness. Adopted as a baby, and having lost both parents to prolonged illness in recent years, Dominic treasures most the poems he writes about his family. the poems November 00:00 / 01:35 Scissoring volleys snip across the dripping field call and counter-call sewing lines of reassurance between fleets of long-tailed tits as they slip westwards from the cider orchard through the beeches to infiltrate a long thorn hedge Half the front leg of a roe deer is sheathed in mud-washed fur, a finger of matt bone protruding at one end, a black flinty hoof at the other – rejected by the nose of a curious hound articulated by the shunt of a cautious boot Ghost memories of deer appear along the Fosseway in the dun flanks of fallen field stone greenish with algae half-light fashioning their features Pale flashes on the path, peroxide husks look like Bambi tails not the fallen maize wraps from a squirrel’s overhanging store Thwud! Strikingly rigid and damp-dense Millie claps my knee backs with an over-long branch Labrador trots her pride in the mimic trophy – her own piece of Jane Doe Beneath our feet limestone knucklebones push up through the blackspots of let down sycamore palms yellowing gloves smooth the naked crevices November is the time when the ground is made. The Daedalus I Knew Inspired by the bronze statue Daedalus Equipping Icarus by Francis Derwent Wood 00:00 / 01:28 The father of Icarus is on his knees, left hand deftly lacing a leather cuff around his son’s bicep, while the right carries the weight of the wings It was not my father but my mother who knelt before her own boy wonder to tie the laces on my new school shoes and launch me into the world Daedalus’ rapt attention to his son as unimaginable to me as flight itself, a pantomime played out on a mythical isle, nothing I could know My mother sprang my father from the loveless island his parents confined him to determined that her own children would never see its brittle shores My father’s skills earned the salary that paid for tan sandals in the summer and black lace-ups in winter, that put food on the table year round So no, he never did kneel before me to tie my laces or straighten my wings, but he lent me his place in my mother’s heart and that selfless act let me fly And The Third Wish 00:00 / 02:41 It would be an unseasonably warm afternoon when I would turn myself inside out start to roll the skin back from my crown unrooted hair flopping down onto my chest the skin slinking over shoulders to the ground An unexpected easterly wind would rise making it a very good day for laundry so into the tub with it, and half a box of soda to scrub, scrub, scrub with the old bristle brush and then three times through the mangle The hottest part of the day would see me sitting in the shade on that stool from St David’s with its three clawing rhododendron legs me thinking about nothing in particular until my freed skin flapped bone dry in the wind Once the steam from pressing had dissipated I’d take out my reglazed glasses and look for the first time into every crevice and wrinkle survey the landscape supported by my fingers and audit my own hide for scars Out of the long-crushed grey shoebox I’d lift the gold leaf embosser I’d liberated from Reading Grammar’s library stores retired from inscribing Dewey’s digits on leather spines in favour of cold hard print Plugged in the mains and finally hot to its tip I’d parsimoniously press through foiled tape to fill in the full extent of every scar I’d found with a thin shield of gold, soon gone cold the chink in my cheek where it kissed the steel-lined typewriter case in the hall the dent in my forehead where it struck the brake lever of my Raleigh Tomahawk the grave accent over my right eyebrow inscribed by an open can of baked beans Then my hands, oh my hands! my pride, my strength, my means the scenes of countless crimes and remedies so many nicks, so many cuts, so many gouges painstakingly gilded into delicate koi scale gloves At the end of this burnished afternoon I’d slowly pack my tools away for the last time then burn my clothes in that rusting rubbish bin carefully step back into my newly sequinned skin and shimmer my way to Gomorrah. Publishing credits November: exclusive first publication by iamb The Daedalus I Knew: The Language of Salt (Fragmented Voices) And The Third Wish: Gallus supplement of Poetry Scotland (Issue 101)

Hear poet Heidi Beck read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Heidi Beck back next the poet Heidi Beck grew up in a small New Hampshire town – emigrating to the UK in 1998, where she now lives in Bristol. She holds an MA in English Literature from the University of Chicago, and an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University. Her poems have been published in The Rialto , Magma , Poetry Ireland Review, The North, Butcher's Dog , Finished Creatures , Under the Radar and The Alchemy Spoon . Heidi also has poems with The Friday Poem and And Other Poems . She was longlisted in the 2020 UK National Poetry Competition. the poems Hunting Season 00:00 / 02:35 A girl steps from a yellow bus at Loon Pond Road, anticipating a long walk home—down the hill, around the pond, past the swamp with the beaver dam, the final stretch just woods—with her heavy bag of books. It’s hunting season, and the men are out in pick-up trucks, stalking through the woods with ammo, scopes and shotguns, dressed in their camo, carrying coolers stuffed with cans of Budweiser, Coors, Tuborg Gold. The girl puts on a safety vest, flimsy fabric in fluorescent orange, begins to sing—Supertramp, Fleetwood Mac, all the lyrics to Evita —loud and long, so they hear she is not a deer, so loud she does not hear the pick-up truck slow behind her. It pulls ahead, stops, just past the swamp. Hello, Honey, where you heading to? She smells the beer as they corral her. Let us help, all smiles and hands. The book bag drops, the vest falls off, she’s on her knees, white rump to the air, trying to keep her tail down. She shakes her head, now fuzzy and furred, nose dark as dirt, everything narrowed. Her ears stretch, eyes widen, gaze becomes fixed, the world slows. She remains still, their laughter like an echo, then lifts herself on spindly legs, fragile bones at risk as she attempts to kick, hooves flailing. She tries to buck and punch, awkward in these limbs. Flanks damp, she spins, all panting ribs, spins again, falls. A girl steps out of the forest, arriving for dinner, late. They glare at her clothes, her hair, her wet, evasive face. She tries to describe how she was a deer. Stop! they cry, stop with your lies, your make- believe tales. Don’t bring this trouble here. All the Things Flying are Overwhelming 00:00 / 01:34 Even here, which feels like home, I need to be ready for the planes, the sucking sound and roar, the possible explosion— I’m mapping the trajectory of falling and flame while trying to track the flamingos, their splayed-out necks, the pink under wings as they jockey and speed, then they’ve gone too far and a flash of godwits whistling past, turning white turning black left white right black white black and he shouts You’re missing the spoonbill, just over your head! Didn’t you get it? and I swing my lens and there’s only an egret flapping to splash too late but then storks, Shit , my settings are all wrong, wheeling higher and higher, keep calm, find the pattern, pull them into the frame and keep on walking past the mountain of salt to Iberian magpies in the pine tree shade and don’t startle the hoopoe on the manicured grass, then the bright yellow spot of a weaver bird calling from the reeds by the lake, but look up, maybe an osprey or eagle, how the gulls squawk and lift in a tangle and a pintail duck crash-lands by an ibis, startling a grebe and everything’s flying and the crack of a golf ball and I flinch, remembering that man and the blood pouring out from under his hands. Family Bible 00:00 / 03:00 GENESIS On the first day I watched The Flintstones , The Jetsons , Sylvester and Tweety. I created sculptures from slices of American Cheese. I climbed up my slide and saw that it was good. EXODUS And so 2.6 million men were sent to Vietnam; another 40,000 fled to Canada. LOTTERY The Law said birthdates should be placed in capsules, mixed in a shoebox, transferred to a glass jar. NUMBERS The birthdates of three of my uncles were chosen. GEORGE He raised his hand when they asked who could type, and stayed behind the lines, tapping out words like defoliation. He didn’t know about the truce between Agent Orange and his chromosomes until he was nearly sixty, when we learned how acute lymphocytic leukaemia could kill you, and how quickly. HARRY He remained in combat, first with ‘the Gooks,’ who took out part of his intestine, and then with Benedictine and brandy and blackouts, with nicotine and nightmares. The hemochromatosis turned his skin grey, the liver cancer waited for the lung cancer to get him first. He died on the bathroom floor, haemorrhaging from a shot of chemotherapy. 1 PETER He once kept a pet duck and ordered a crocodile by mail. He could recite the statistics of every attack by a Great White Shark. He met the love of his life over there, Heroin. He married her, became a panhandler, settled down to a lifetime’s free access to methadone. 2 PETER He sits in a classroom of medical students at Yale, Exhibit A, a shrunken, shivery gnome in a beanie, insisting that everyone would be happier with Heroin. WIDOWS Katheryn and Antoinette. REVELATION On Christmas Day my father is on his seventh mission, flying cargo out of Okinawa, with seven Vietcong shooting at his tail. I visit Santa on his Throne in the belly of a Lockheed C-130 Hercules, the seventh child to sit on his knee. I beg him please could he bring me a Barbie. He gives me this Bible, full of Good News, instead. Publishing credits Hunting Season: Live Canon Anthology 2020 (Live Canon) All the Things Flying are Overwhelming: Finished Creatures (Issue 6) Family Bible: The North (Issue 63)

Hear poet Natalie Crick read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Natalie Crick back next the poet Studying for an MPhil in Creative Writing at Newcastle University, Natalie Crick has had poems in Stand , The Moth , Banshee , The Dark Horse , The Poetry Review and elsewhere. One of her poems was commended in the Verve Poetry Festival Competition 2020, and awarded second prize in the Newcastle Poetry Competition that same year. Another of Natalie's poems received a special mention by judge Ilya Kaminsky in the Poetry London Prize 2020. In 2021, Natalie was highly commended in the Wales Poetry Award, and nominated for The Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. She is co-founder and poetry editor of small literary press Fragmented Voices , which is based in both Newcastle and Prague. the poems Cut 00:00 / 01:17 the lovely fairies in Sister’s room have blades on their backs and lately Lee sucks lemons for their sharps looks for wounds in snow on his morning walk with Mam fantasizes he is sliced like a pear but today the blood smells real he wipes his hands on his trackies dizzy tries to walk not run because he doesn’t want to scare and blooming like a cherry tree stumbles out there is a metallic grinding scream when Next Door ignites the hedge trimmer the winter sun pierces Lee’s eyes blue sky sawn open in that moment the sky is too big for Lee far too big and empty he wants to find the stars wants a knock on his bedroom door wants to be red for somebody Doctors and Nurses 00:00 / 01:10 Lee’s Sister is upstairs Septembering in the back bedroom where Lee sometimes eats old bread. After long days of waiting, Lee moves like an infection up stairs that smell of cigarette smoke. Sister’s shadow is a boy of five in the right light. Lee lights her smile with a tickle, breaks the pill onto the spoon’s curve and tells his patient to suck on it. She coos. This is what doves do, excited through open lips. Lee tends to Sister’s most-hurts, examines the cut on her toe and kisses it. Allows her to undress to rub salve into her cattle state. Sombre Doctor Lee, grave in gloves, checks her pulse: Miss, there’s something you should know. Girlfriend-Watch 00:00 / 01:55 Poorly Girlfriend sleeps like a parched stone. Boyfriend watches her instead of television. Boyfriend watches when light slats dangerously expose her black eyes to him. His hand is a quill; the crow feather a flutter to ease out her bad, the nib a point stroking her cheeks. Boyfriend makes up Girlfriend’s face with motes of ash from his fingers. Her face is lengthening, looking up. To Boyfriend she seems Unsafe. Undelicate. He plays love with her, plays fetch, plays harm. He likes her to suck his fingers, He likes her to smile, always. Boyfriend likes to use the biggest knife to slice Girlfriend’s strawberries, likes to see the red of them against the lap of white at her throat. Boyfriend confesses how much he loves Girlfriend to the mirror. He whispers the names of the others he loves, but can never change the channel on the remote. Boyfriend watches Girlfriend instead of television. He turns the ceiling light on and off to see just what she will do, lights up the room bright to check she is still breathing. Off and On. Publishing credits Cut: The Manchester Review (Issue 23) Doctors and Nurses: The Interpreter's House (Issue 76) Girlfriend-Watch: placed second in the Newcastle Poetry Competition 2020

Poet Aki Schilz reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Aki Schilz back next the poet Aki's poetry and short stories have been published online and in print in Popshot Magazine, Synaesthesia, Ink, Sweat & Tears, And Other Poems, Mnemoscape, Birdbook: Saltwater and Shore, CHEAP POP and An Unreliable Guide to London. She was chosen by Roxanne Gay to feature in the Wigleaf Top 50 (2015), was a Queen's Ferry Press Finalist (Best Small Fictions), and won both the inaugural Visual Verse Prize (2013) and the Bare Fiction Magazine Flash Fiction Prize (2014). With Kit Caless, she founded the LossLit digital literature project and co-edits LossLit Magazine . the poems If he asks 00:00 / 00:57 A mouth full of applause Wedding bells stretched between two hands Rush of silk as traffic At midnight all the trains hover over the water in silence: love as a sixpence or a moon, there’s no difference when you turn them clouds have no meaning here or a single orange flower growing out of the platform (he left you, hang up the phone before he returns to kiss your mouth shut) Knucklebone pressed into the small of my back Step over the unsaid things If he asks say nothing say [circle] yes/no The Fall 00:00 / 01:20 I have clasped your edges so hard they leave grooves in my palms, deep as the grooves of horse-reins beneath the bridges on towpaths wasted with bracken and buddleia. These, and mine, cut across lifelines: a geometric interruption. I cannot document dropping you on a sunlit day, startled by the sudden noise of a narrowboat any more than I can document losing you but the fall happens as if both were inevitable. The first: a drowning of lungs, the plosion of capillaries, a haemorrhage behind your eyelids like a summer storm. The second: a smaller drowning though no less significant, this arcing towards water of hard edges and palm-deep cuts: the only photograph I kept of you after your death. Did you dive in after it? she asks me when I tell her what has happened. I am at a loss to explain, when I shake my head, why I didn’t. It never occurred to me I might be able to save you this time. Flystrike 00:00 / 03:29 Tipping point, the cracked rim of a teacup, your spikes turned inside-out. In my cupped hands you curled, gently, despite your pain. I could sense something was wrong: you shouldn’t have been out in daylight, wobbling down the garden while the dog barked a warning into the rain. It echoed sharp into the bay, and you fell sideways onto the grass as if the sound had hit you. Starry moss, your toes curling, the mud caked around your neck: it looked like a noose. We took you in. You trusted me to hold you and I took you to my chest, brought you close. I could see a single fault-line, a wetted rim, thick with crust. No blood. What lay beneath was invisible to me, but I could smell it. It filled the car when we rushed you in, the dog in the back straining to look under the towel, whining as we punched the co-ordinates for the local vet into the sat nav. You snuffled, pushed all your strength through your soft snout to suckle from the pipette. ‘Drink, little one’ I said, and you did. Your teeth clacked against the plastic and hope surged like a current through my chest. We sped past lavender rocks, the sea blurring between them, silver slices glancing off the windscreen and birds looping ahead of us, clearing the way. The vet uncurled you, a little too roughly. ‘Look,’ he said, and showed me where the skin of you was coming away. The maggots twisted up into the light like strange white roots. ‘We can’t save him,’ he said. ‘Would you like to leave the room?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘I want to stay.’ Something in my heart kicked out. I held it down, clamped my jaw shut. I wish he had been more gentle with you, wish the needle was not quite so big, that it could have been slipped into a spot that wasn’t under your chin, the whole thing in sight, right under your nose. Your nose, small wet thing that moments ago had sought me out, had tickled my palm as you took the water from me. I wished as the pink liquid flushed through your small body, I could touch you, stroke your spikes, curl you gently back into yourself. Instead, I clutched the towel to my chest. I said, ‘It’s OK little one.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry.’ The nurse snapped off her gloves. The smell was on my hands, in my mouth and ears, under my skin. In the waiting room, a naked dog was striking his cone against the wall. Publishing credits If he asks / Flystrike: written exclusively for iamb The Fall: And Other Poems Share

Poet Mona Dash reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Mona Dash back next the poet Mona Dash is the author of the memoir A Roll of the Dice: a story of loss, love and genetics , the novel Untamed Heart , and poetry collections A Certain Way and Dawn-drops. She holds a Masters in Creative Writing (with distinction), and her work has been both long and shortlisted in leading competitions such as Novel London 2020, SI Leeds Literary Award, Leicester Writes Short Story Prize and The Asian Writer Short Story Prize. Her short story collection, Let us look elsewhere, is due out in 2021 from Dahlia Publishing. Mona has an MBA and an engineering degree, works for a global tech firm, and lives in London. the poems Implications 00:00 / 01:10 Born and raised an Indian; not living in India now British, not born in Britain a mother, working full time a sales manager, a mother a woman, a mother a writer, a technocrat an engineer, an artist a businessperson, a poet becoming more than I was meant to Venn-diagram like I seek finding intersectionality implied: not Indian implied: not British implied: not a mother implied: not a sales manager implied: not a woman implied: not a writer implied: not an engineer implied: not a businessperson implied: a sense of erosion implied: commonalities implied: a pinpoint Unsaid, Unwritten 00:00 / 00:59 Unseeing, unthinking piece words unrelated like flowers in a vase on the kitchen table lark, larkspur, lavender When the night calls answer in words swallowed in a past forgotten eels, egalitarian, eccentric then it is morning slicing sun through clouds unopened eyes, sleepy sex a day to use, misuse harvest, hyacinth, harbour a month is over the thought still shattered ravaged and unformed the words meant to disappear in bloodstreams vapid, victory, vilify like Rodin’s Thinker count words on fingers the tongue struggling still to form the unformed the pen curling, curling to write the unwritten For Plath, for Love 00:00 / 01:25 Let us then recite Plath Let us wear white bikinis and smile up at the sky, blue in our hearts as in the heavens Let us sing mad-girl love songs and in its rhymes search for a thunderbird, hold the bird close dip into its heart, tasting its blood, mine, yours Let us find these Hughes-like men who love deeply, amorously, thick-honey words that choke so well, filling us, filling us with still, deep water, cleansing and drowning who twist deep into us, severing every self-belief, every little hope we have burning away the mind-body-soul chain Let us write, write crazily into the night and let our words howl in the still dawn and let us then open the oven door and lay ourselves in, breathing in purist like a single strain of air, lying still, lying while our children lie in their beds, dreaming, dreaming Publishing credits Implications: May We Borrow Your Country (Linen Press UK) Unsaid, Unwritten: Sarasvati 057 (Indigo Dreams Publishing) For Plath, for Love: exclusive first publication by iamb Share

Poet Helen Ivory reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Helen Ivory back next © Dave Guttridge the poet Helen Ivory is a poet and visual artist whose fifth collection, published by Bloodaxe Books, is The Anatomical Venus . She edits webzine Ink Sweat and Tears , and teaches creative writing online for the UEA/WCN. Her book of mixed media poems –Hear What the Moon Told Me – was published by Knives, Forks and Spoons Press, while her chapbook Maps of the Abandoned City appeared with SurVision. As part of Versopolis Poetry , Helen's work has been translated into Polish and Ukrainian. the poems All the Suckling Imps 00:00 / 01:32 Summon your children by their given names be wet nurse; harbour; slatternly distaff – let them suck of your virulent blood. Now issue them Elemanzer, Pyewacket, Peck in the Crown to derange the neighbours rabbits, kittlings, polecats and rats have them spill from your skirts; from your crimson teats. * A hare on the threshold tame like a dog bright crooked cast in its lemony eye. * Basket of apples placed on the floor of a virtuous larder. A peppery grimalkin curled on the roof. A Goodwife takes to her bed body a roost of convulsions an apple a day an apple a day * A palaver of mice big as squirrels ravage the hayloft winter rises early a smother of crows draws its cloak across the pale vault of heaven. * A scabrous dog kiss cold as clay springs from the lap of its fostering bedlam to dance and dance the black dance of itself atishoo atishoo, we all fall down * Old woman old woman who lives in a shoe oh monstrous mother now what will you do? The watchers have come to unclothe your imps the prickers are here sing witchery, sing jinx Cunning If a woman dare cure without having studied, she is a witch and must die. ~ Reverends Kramer and Sprenger ~ Malleus Maleficarum (1486) 00:00 / 00:53 She comes when summoned with birth blood and earth caked to the hem of her skirts and dark little half-moons packed under broken nails. The hedgerows are her pantry: to quicken labour, there is cock-spur, balm of poppies to assuage your pain. Her senses are sharp as hoarfrost – she will bid you when to squat like a brute. And when the physician invents himself he will call at your door in the empirical light of day with his bagful of leeches and headful of planets. He will scribe the words of the Lord into your waxing belly. And when your daughter happens her crowning, he will rip off her head with forceps. Thou Shalt Not Suffer a Sorceress to Live Exodus 7:11 00:00 / 00:42 For her neighbour’s sickness was more than merely unnatural; for he sang perfectly without moving his lips. For she is intemperate in her desires and pilfers apples from the orchard; for she hitches her skirts to clamber the fence. For her womb is a wandering beast; for she is husbandless, and at candle time brazenly trades with the Devil. For she spoke razors to her brother; who has looked upon her witches’ pap and the odious suckling imp. For the corn is foul teeth. For the horse is bedlam in its stable. For the black cow and the white cow are dead. Publishing credits All poems: The Anatomical Venus (Bloodaxe Books) Share

Hear poet Deborah Finding read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Deborah Finding back next the poet Originally from North-East England and now living in London, Deborah Finding is a queer feminist writer with a background in academia and activism. Her poetry has featured in fourteen poems , The Alchemy Spoon , The Friday Poem and anthologies from Live Canon, Renard Press, Victorina and Fly on the Wall Press. She came first in the poetry category of the Write By The Sea Literary Festival Writing Competition 2022, and was commended in the Troubadour International Poetry Prize 2022. Her debut pamphlet vigils for dead and dying girls is forthcoming from Nine Pens. the poems amortisation 00:00 / 01:34 you explained to me that amortisation is the depreciation of non-tangible assets which are things like goodwill and loyalty and relationships you can depend on it’s a complex calculation to figure out what these things are worth, the factors that add to or detract from their value and how quickly they can be lost but I want to try, I always did I can show my workings out, in your spread sheets, under which we did, to an advanced level, excel … I write this as addictive additive, also when you said you would love me all of the days. like infinity plus one but plus one was the problem which leads us to the minus column your creative accounting of her to me, to her of me, every evasion a reduction of your credit score and now we disagree on the answer I show you a number in the red you tell me of future investments and paint me a unicorn valuation but it turns out amortisation is just the process of slowly writing off a debt on paper at least. so consider it done, books balanced, no net gain loving you was a zero-sum game dear ______ 00:00 / 03:24 My therapist told me to picture you as a scorpion in a guided meditation, in which she had me imagine – in a very visceral way – crushing you to death with my foot, till you were nothing but shit and dust. Now, I know what you are thinking: surely a real therapist would never suggest such a thing! but to be totally honest with you she is somewhat unconventional in her methods and only the week before this she had asked me to imagine finding a grave and looking down to see your lifeless body in the deep and open dirt – the knowledge of your death giving me back my own breath which I'd been holding all these months terrified that I could see you on every corner your dark hair swinging behind you in front of me a kind of ponytail PTSD. I wish I was joking. Anyway, back to you as a scorpion, did you know it’s said they're viciously venomous for no reason? Have you heard that fable about the frog and the scorpion, that ends with the scorpion saying, it’s in my nature ? Well, I don’t believe that shit. I don’t believe you were born like that to sting for the sake of it. But it doesn’t matter because you are that now and you should be approached with extreme caution and protective clothing, if at all and I learned the hard way that anyone who would keep a scorpion for a pet is a fool. There’s an urban myth that if you light a circle of fire around a scorpion it will sting itself to death horribly … for a long time I thought about how I could set your world on fire: trap you in a prison with only your own poison for company, and glass walls and spotlights for all to see who you really are. I texted your name so often that my phone still wants to gift it to me in autocorrect whenever I type the first three letters but this is progress, because for a while just the E would do it. One day I hope I can look at your name in black and white or even meet someone else with it, and not hate them on sight and though today is not that day I know it must be coming. I don’t think of you so much now and I wear a scorpion earring. Not every day but on those mornings where I wake up shaking or when the offence of an injustice is simply overwhelming. It helps remind me that it’s ok if a battle is too bloody to fight, that self-care sometimes means you don’t get to win even when you’re right and the day I grew up is the day I understood that the sun shines just the same on evil and good. Ah, scorpion … despite all I learned about you it’s not in my nature to claim you have no path to salvation but it does bring me comfort to know that at any moment any enemy can be crushed if only in imagination. distracted 00:00 / 00:42 today I did not want to write about desire I had loftier plans for worthier topics some notes about injustices and a page already half-baked with an idea about a town but you walked me home last night after dinner and before you took a cab so now my hands are your hands thinking dextrously of the five delicious minutes spent kissing you in the rain, our cold wet faces in refreshing contrast to our hot wet mouths tongues tasting intoxicatingly of our desserts and of not having kissed each other for a week Publishing credits amortisation: Live Canon Anthology 2022 (Live Canon) dear ______: exclusive first publication by iamb distracted: Hearth & Coffin Literary Journal (Vol. 2, Issue 1)

Poet Mark Antony Owen reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Mark Antony Owen back next the poet Syllabic poet Mark Antony Owen writes exclusively in nine original, self-created forms. His work centres on that world where the rural bleeds into the suburban: a world he calls ‘subrural’. Mark is the author of digital-only poetry project Subruria , as well as the creator, curator and publisher of online poetry journals iamb and After... the poems Tom & Jerry & me & you 00:00 / 00:57 I wish you had known your great-grandfather, my granddad, stubbed out by thirty years of smoking and lying about it. Anyway, he loved Tom & Jerry. I remember his cigarette wheeze; how he’d laugh at the pair and fold in two whenever Tom got smashed in the face. He fought in a war (Granddad, not Tom). Actually, Tom did fight a war: your great-grandfather’s name was Thomas – ‘TOM!’, as your great-grandmother reduced him. Jerry did terrible things to Tom. There are war stories of him, punching through doors to escape the memories of men he served with, men he saw killed. Yet the Tom I knew was a pussycat. Muntjac 00:00 / 00:36 A dog escaped from its yard, straying from the bounded woods, you drop like a ripened fruit – slip from your disguise of fog to reveal the awkward wedge of you, disrobed and alert. The sprung trap of your leaping; desperate kick at the wire wall that separates our worlds. You are willing me to freeze, be you, and instinctively, my muscles seize with your fear. A designated public place 00:00 / 01:03 You are in a designated public place, watching a thin stegosaurus of bunting get battered by the wind. The Jubilee beds, crowned by grey roses; the never-ending rain. This time of year there would normally be stalls, bouncy castles, young mothers wiping picnics from the faces of toddlers. Look up and you might see swifts, winding invisible maypole streamers round the shifting contrail of a jet. Today, swings unswung, slick, unclimbable frames. You are in a designated public place, yet you’ve never felt more private in your life. Come again when the bins are dizzy with wasps and the bandstand buzzes with hits you can hum – before that old gaoler winter chains the gates. Somehow a honey bee 00:00 / 00:24 Somehow a honey bee made it into the house. All the windows locked, doors shut. Found it could pass through panes with the ease of birdsong; knew no structure would bar the way to one so vital. Or had been here, all night. Publishing credits All poems: Subruria (Release Two) Tom & Jerry & me & you / Somehow a honey bee: exclusive first publication by iamb Muntjac / A designated public place: Places of Poetry Share

Hear poet Mims Sully read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Mims Sully back next the poet Nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, Mims Sully is a poet from Sussex, England. She was a winner of the Visual Verse Autumn Writing Prize 2022 , and has had her work published in Prole , Ink, Sweat & Tears , The Ekphrastic Review , And Other Poems , Obsessed with Pipework and other journals, as well as in anthologies by Sidhe Press and Black Bough Poetry. Mims started writing poetry after studying Creative Writing at the Open University, and many of her poems are inspired by her experience of caring for her mother, who had dementia. the poems Simple Hex For A Slanderer 00:00 / 00:51 Write their name on a piece of paper. Put it through the shredder. Place the ribbons in a bowl. Ignite. Watch them grow tongues, curl back and blacken, flaking to ash. File your nails (the sharper the better) then clip the tips, sprinkle over. Add some callus freshly grated by pumice, a crust of wax picked from your ear and one salty tear. Lubricate the mix with your own spit and lashings of mucus then stir and speak: Unkind words will not go unpunished but form ulcers yellow and bulbous tight with pus on the tongue. My Father’s Belt 00:00 / 01:00 looped around my waist, moves when I breathe like a phantom limb. The leather cracks, moves when I breathe. With bronze lustre the leather cracks as if with laughter. With bronze lustre, his face creased as if with laughter as disease spread. His face creased, a shifting of skin, as disease spread its tightening belt. A shifting of skin drawn across bone like a tightening belt; his body buckled. Drawn across bone this broad strap buckles my body with a strong clasp. This broad strap holds me together with a strong clasp like my father's arm. Holding me together; like a phantom limb my father's arm loops around my waist. Afternoon Entertainment, Chamberlain Court 00:00 / 00:58 I wasn’t sure at first if she was even listening, though we sat in rows in front of the baby grand, as the piano man played all the old classics. It was when she closed her eyes that it happened – her hands started patting her jeans in time to Over the Rainbow. Then her fingers stood to attention, as if remembering: the coolness of ivory, warmth of wood, weight of black and white keys. She leant into the music as her right hand rippled across her lap onto my leggings, while her left hammered chords on the neighbouring gentleman’s knees. And just when I thought I should intervene, she opened her mouth and sang at the top of her voice about a blue-skied cloudless world where someday, I might find her. Publishing credits Simple Hex for a Slanderer: Prole (Issue No. 27) My Father's Belt: Pulp Poets Press (March 1st 2021) Afternoon Entertainment, Chamberlain Court: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Corinna Board read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Corinna Board back next the poet Corinna Board teaches English as an additional language in an Oxford secondary school. She grew up on a farm, and her writing is often inspired by the rural environment. Her work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in And Other Poems , Anthropocene , berlin lit , Propel Magazine , Spelt Magazine , Atrium , Ink Sweat & Tears , Magma and elsewhere. Corinna won the Gloucestershire Wildlife category of the 2023 Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust poetry competition, and was commended in the 2024 Verve Poetry Festival Eco-Poetry competition. She published her debut pamphlet, Arboreal , in January 2024. the poems Picking up my prescription ‘Sometimes as an antidote to fear of death, I eat the stars.’ ~ Rebecca Elson ~ 00:00 / 01:00 There are no stars in this city. I nibble on concrete, sip cocktails of NO₂. I’m dying for a decent constellation. Would some of those neons do? Or the flashing red lights on a high-rise? I FaceTime Olivier in the Pyrenees. He points his camera at Ursa Major, Cassiopeia, Orion’s Belt … Star after star devoured through my screen. I whisper Merci , then sleep like a baby. When the woman in Boots tells me I’m glowing, I say it must be the new meds. I keep quiet about the stars. On the tube ride home, they twinkle in my stomach like a Tiffany’s heist. My uncle brings back a fox tail from the fields 00:00 / 01:09 He is carrying his rifle, brandishing the tail like a trophy. A week ago, the fox (was it this one?) got into the coop and slaughtered all the hens. My uncle is grinning. The tail is cleanly cut, bloodied at the end. It hangs from a nail in the big barn, swinging like a corpse on the gallows. For days, I'm scared to touch it. The fur is coarser than I expected. I comb it with my fingers, breathe in its musk, close my eyes and pretend it's whole. Later, I run wild with my cousins. We are foxes — and I, the eldest, am the mother, the vixen. Driven by hunger, I burn through the fields, my cubs left hiding in the ripening wheat. The wind ruffles my coat the wrong way. Too late, I pick up his scent. Field notes 00:00 / 02:02 1. field noun : an area of land, used for growing crops or keeping animals, usually surrounded by a fence. 2. Green as far as the eye can see, then the brook. Water-mint, pebbles bedraggled in weed. 3. A six-year-old girl with a net, a bucket full of bullheads. Friesian cows bellowing, tick of the fence. Where did the years go? 4. Before he died, my uncle planted a rowan tree – there in the tall grass. 5. When we first saw the barn owl, it could have been a ghost. It flew low over the field, wings whispering. 6. If I buried my heart, what would grow? Perhaps a sapling. 7. Today, I have counted three kinds of butterfly: marbled white, common blue, speckled wood. 8. Dear Field, Do you ever dream of picking yourself up and striding off over the horizon? Be honest now. 9. I don’t know what I’d do if you left. I love you, field. Please stay. 10. Are you crying or is that rain? 11. In the field, I’m a child again. All this green, all this sky. I could disappear. 12. Meadow foxtail, yellow oat, timothy. I am the field, and the field is me. I am , the field is . Publishing credits Picking up my prescription: Anthropocene (July 2024) My uncle brings back a fox tail from the fields: Modron Magazine (Issue Four) Field notes: exclusive first publication by iamb

Poet Colin Dardis reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Colin Dardis back next the poet Colin Dardis is a poet, editor and sound artist based in Belfast. He's been listed in the Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing, Over The Edge New Writer of the Year Award and Best Reviewer of Literature, Saboteur Awards 2018, and published widely in Ireland, the UK and the US. Colin co-runs Poetry NI , a multimedia poetry platform, co-edits FourXFour Poetry Journal , and co-hosts the monthly open mic night, Purely Poetry . His latest collection is The Dogs of Humanity . the poems The Unforgettable Dog 00:00 / 02:05 I told you the story of that day, remember, the one with us on the sandstone promenade, the bay’s breath hushed, just for us. And how into the day came one remarkable dog, alone, no collar, no tag, no visible owner. He held a gnarled tennis ball, tracking beside us, the request obvious. And how we marvelled at this dog running and leaping, corkscrewing backwards mid-air, to snatch the ball in his God-crafted jaws every time. Our smiles grew. And then he ran off, disappeared over the rocks and back to a home of which we would never know. I told you our story, of these few minutes. You could not remember. Knew of no dog, denied the beach, dredged out the bay. And because you could not remember, never beside me, never with some dog, then it did not happen; the story undone in one simple act of forgetting. The experience shared is the memory shared and without memory, who do we become? Perhaps you ran off too, somewhere, over the rocks, away from pools and foam; or perhaps the tide came in, unseen, to wash you clear of my life, leaving me astray, astounded, observing, remembering a lie. Stages 00:00 / 01:27 Back then, you would go through the stages: the voice box, the hair sprouts, the growth spurts; now, you just stage passing Go and pretend to hit all the required stations while collecting your pay check at the end of the month. And the thing about a Monopoly board is that it’s really a circle, and the only way out is either bankruptcy or jail. Some of us get to land on Mayfair or Park Avenue, but most sure can’t afford to stay there very long. The rent collectors are out with their long knives and the taxman is looking to take everything you inherited: from your father’s shoelaces to your mother’s good graces and charm. But I hid everything in a deposit box somewhere, left it to rust and utilised nothing of my fortune; that’s why I’m such a miserable wretch nowadays: the dregs of the dogs, down to his last stage There are no refunds, no guarantors, and no one to underwrite your screw-ups. God is coming to collect and the riches He expects won’t be found in your pockets. The Humane Animal 00:00 / 01:23 How many are dying tonight? How many tonight are listening to make sure someone else is still breathing, the dark seconds of void where neither breath nor movement exist and the other side of the bed is the unconquerable distance of a consciousness. How many can’t sleep tonight? How many are unable to lay despite their blackout curtains drawn to the world, the futility of fresh sheets and lumbar support as useless as an alarm clock for insomniacs. How many are scared tonight? How many want to burrow into the nest like the newly-hatched cuckoo and cry the loudest in order to be fed, waiting to be recognised as an imposter amongst the living and thrown out of their present. How many are unanswered tonight? We all are. We all are. We all are. Publishing credits The Unforgettable Dog: the x of y (Eyewear Publishing), now copyright of the author Stages / The Humane Animal: The Dogs of Humanity (Fly on the Wall Press) Share

Poet Lisa Kelly reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Lisa Kelly back next the poet Lisa Kelly has single-sided deafness. She is also half Danish. Her first collection, A Map Towards Fluency , was published by Carcanet in 2019. Her poems have appeared in Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches Press) and Carcanet’s New Poetries VII. Her pamphlets are Philip Levine’s Good Ear (Stonewood Press) and Bloodhound (Hearing Eye). She sometimes hosts poetry evenings at the Torriano Meeting House in London, and is the Chair of Magma Poetry. the poems from The IKEA Back Catalogue Delivery to ASPELUND 00:00 / 00:58 Don’t lose your way in the snow to ASPELUND like being trapped in a white wardrobe, ARVINN. Arrive intact at this Norwegian Arctic city, reveal yourself, like a folding chair, to the city. Hey presto! Like magic, you appear in ASPELUND no longer up against the wall. Out of the wardrobe, ARVINN, you can shrug off the ward robe of white, which gapes like the wide roads of this city, and take up space. ARVINN, this city is not ASPELUND, ASPELUND is a stub, as a toe strikes against a wardrobe in a city. Aphid Reproduction as Unpunctuated White Noise 00:00 / 01:22 . a full stop is an aphid not a comma nor an embryo an aphid is a full stop is a nymph not a womb holding a comma nor a question mark asks nothing of a slash or a backslash bulges with parentheses bears afterthought after afterthought as a full stop parthenogenetic filled with full stops without stopping without comma without pausing full stop after full stop never comma not a comma until all the space is taken with full stop upon full stop not a comma and a full stop develops wings flies off ! an exclamation mark is an aphid on the wing not a full stop not a comma nor an embryo an aphid is an exclamation mark not a womb holding a comma nor a question mark asks nothing of a slash or a backslash bulges with parentheses bears afterthought after afterthought as a full stop parthenogenetic not an exclamation mark not a comma but a full stop filled with exclamation marks filled with full stops bears exclamation marks filled with full stops until summer heat has happened and love is in the air . an aphid is a male on the wing not a full stop is an exclamation mark and an aphid is a female on the wing not a full stop is an exclamation mark gives birth to a full stop without wings mates with an exclamation mark and lays a full stop a full stop is an egg not an aphid but an egg and the egg it is dormant is a full stop not a pause not a comma nor an embryo but a full stop in the winter without wings an egg is a full stop until spring and it hatches a full stop is an aphid not a full stop Sea Wall 00:00 / 01:20 The sea is maddening, cannot be calmed. I have tried throwing life buoys, rafts, all manner of rope. Once I crushed sleeping pills and slipped them overboard, but it cried for more salt. I have to build a wall to save the sea from itself – constantly crashing, destroying castles, leaking into the land, festering in pools of its own brine. Loss of sediment and sense. I have to hold the line. Others argue about options. Option one, do nothing. Option two, rock groynes and beach recharge. Option three, fishtail rock groynes, rock revetment and beach recharge. Once a wall is in mind, it must be built. Norwegian rock is best, cut from mountains with diamond saws, never blasted. It is cut strong in strong blocks. The wall is on its way from the Larvik Quarry. The sea knows what to expect. Publishing credits Delivery to ASPELUND: Anthropocene Sea Wall: The New European Aphid Reproduction as Unpunctuated White Noise: A Map Toward Fluency (Carcanet) Share

Poet Roy Marshall reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Roy Marshall back next the poet Roy Marshall's publications are Gopagilla , The Sun Bathers (shortlisted for Michael Murphy Award), The Great Animator and After Montale – these most recent three all published by Shoestring Press. Roy is a former coronary care and research nurse now working in education. the poems The Weight 00:00 / 00:46 My friend, Christine the beekeeper, tells me that honey is heavy. How heavy? I ask, and Chris says arm-achingly so. Later, I Google the heaviness of honey, find that a gallon weighs one and a half times as much as the same volume of water. And so, I think about the curation of sweetness; how it requires so much more strength than the nurture of its opposite. Trace 00:00 / 00:51 My fingers walked to the fourth intercostal space. This is where I placed the first gel-backed tab. The next went opposite, across the sternum, on the nipple line. Easy then to make a descending arc, attach the leads until a trace appeared; the heart. Unlike in films when it stopped for good the line was never completely flat, but wavering like the slap of water against the dock long after a boat has passed. Relic 00:00 / 00:45 I’d rather take this road to that chapel of larch on the hill but my boy insists, so we step into a nave of pines screened by webs where sound falls dead, except for the rattle of cones. Each breath is sealed with resin: he finds a long bone, lifts it from the needles: fox or maybe badger, I tell him taking his hand suddenly aware of our temporary skins. Publishing credits The Weight: Finished Creatures (Issue 3) Trace: The Great Animator (Shoestring Press) Relic: The Sun Bathers (Shoestring Press) Share