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Hear poet Jay Whittaker read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jay Whittaker wave 10 summer 2022 back next the poet Jay Whittaker is an Edinburgh-based poet who grew up in Devon and Nottingham. She's published two collections to date: Sweet Anaesthetist and Wristwatch – the latter chosen as Scottish Poetry Book of the Year 2018 in the Saltire Society Literary Awards. Jay's widely published in journals that include The North , Butcher’s Dog and The Rialto , and has recently had work accepted by The Poetry Review . Two of her poems appear in Bloodaxe Books' anthology, Staying Human . the poems Egg case 00:00 / 05:33 My left ovary is smothered in seven centimetres of cyst. A risk to be reduced. ~ A beachcombed husk in my palm, multiple crumpled chambers deflated and dried, bereft of hatched whelks. A self-contained nodule of nothing, pod of naught. ~ Wobbling on a wooden stool in the school biology lab, I clench my sharpened pencil, transcribe the handbag and curved horns into my exercise book. I will keep practising until fluent, ready to reproduce constituent parts in cartoonish simplicity – a handbag and curved horns. I lay my transparent ruler across the paper and draw straight lines, and label (best handwriting): Ovaries, Ampulla, Endometrium, Fallopian Tubes. But I don’t know them. Not viscerally. ~ And how much less interesting than the febrile atmosphere in the school hall on the day one hundred twelve-year-olds are herded in to watch the childbirth video . At the crowning, commotion at the front. The boy who faints will be taunted for years. ~ Imagine: my abdomen crammed with congealed jelly babies. ~ Sometimes I looked up and my mother was watching me, as though wondering what she’d done. ~ My mother told me: It was the bloody ants’ fault. I was pregnant with you. Your father was away. You know how I hate ants in the house. ~ I am possible. ~ Inexorable ant-march across a kitchen floor. No one to talk her down or reassure. Scrubbing. Safe to use ant powder inside when pregnant? Not sure. Read and reread the packet. Relentless. Ants keep marching. Need to empty the cupboard under counter anyway, in case the ants find it, find the flour and sugar inside. Visions of a never-ending ant army carrying their sugar lumps aloft, victorious, back to their queen. Lifting and bending – getting up and down – panicking about ants and – wet in her knickers – a pooling. Blood – I am choosing A punishment for leaving it so late to have a child. For thinking, in their cleverness, with their science, they were above this. The thought of her mother’s told-you-so triumph. ~ The GP said his wife took these tablets too; I would never have taken anything when I was pregnant, I even stopped smoking, I was so careful but I thought I was miscarrying — A risk reduced. I am possible. ~ Alone in bed, sleepless, praying to the god her husband denies. ~ She tells me when I am eighteen, have left home for a university ninety miles north, It was in the Sunday Times a few years after you were born. All the cancers in the daughters are at puberty; you’re safe. She tells me now because of course maybe you shouldn’t go on the pill . I am already on the pill. She tells me in such a way that makes it clear we won’t talk about it again. ~ A hunt for the unknown, the untold, the unnamed. In the Science Library, I turn the handle on a microfilm reader, not too fast (nausea). Oestrogen. Estrogen. Diethylstilbestrol. Diethylstilboestrol. Stilbestrol. DES. Leading me to the long shelves of Index Medicus , metres of cloth-bound volumes, to rifle Bible-thin paper. I school myself in libraries, their tools, fiche readers, bibliographies, catalogues, all they contain. All that was withheld. All that was never vocalised. All the swallowed words. ~ My inheritance: Great grandfather – dies of sarcoma. Grandmother – dies of breast cancer. Mother – exposure to DES in pregnancy. Two breast cancers. Dies of ovarian cancer. Me – exposure to DES in utero . One breast cancer (and counting). I am choosing. ~ Buried deep in my pelvis and scheduled for excision: tissue, but more than tissue. My snail shells, my coiled snakes. Mysterious, seen on scans, analysed by faceless medics, discussed in front of me in medical language by my partner and my consultant, doctor to doctor – I have no clue, really. I am excising a possibility. ~ Absence is a poke of pain when I bend forward too quickly, a stabbing gyroscope, a whirligig of knife-ache when I lie on my left side. ~ A risk reduced. From the 1940s till the early 1970s, synthetic oestrogen diethylstilbestrol (DES) was given to at least 300,000 UK women whom doctors believed were at increased risk of miscarriage. A clinical study in 1953 found DES did nothing to reduce such risk, yet it was administered until 1971 – when it was discovered that daughters of women given the drug were at heightened risk of rare vaginal/cervical cancers. Later research linked DES to greater risk of breast cancer in both mothers and daughters. Clearly something was up 00:00 / 00:42 Every time I drove, plink and ricochet, stones on metal like popcorn in a lidded pan. I blamed the untarmacked track, recent resurfacing on the main road – until a warning light came on – under the bonnet, rats had stashed birdseed in every crevice, nestled pebbles into crannies, built a cairn of stones on the engine. The shock of rat shit on the camshaft. Chewed wires betrayed them, building a haven of warmth and food in the heart of a machine I thought was mine. Canopy (Day 20: First chemo cycle) 00:00 / 00:46 Do tree tips tingle, niggle like my scalp? Most people’s hair (I’m told) comes out on day eighteen. White hairs work loose first, waft down. This late summer evening, my scarfed skull as bald and vulnerable as a fledgling’s, I stand under the row of sycamore, my neck sore from looking up to the abundance of leaves. Whatever happens to me, the earth is turning. At the same hour in winter, haven’t I stood in this very spot, watching bare branches implore the sky for light? Publishing credits Egg case: Sweet Anaesthetist (Cinnamon Press) Clearly something was up: The Rialto (Issue 97) Canopy:Wristwatch (Cinnamon Press)

Hear poet Mari Ellis Dunning read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Mari Ellis Dunning wave 1 winter 2020 back next the poet Mari Ellis Dunning is an award-winning poet living and writing on the coast of West Wales. Mari’s debut poetry collection, Salacia , was published by Parthian Books in 2018, and was shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year award in 2019. Mari is a Hay Festival Writer at Work and PhD candidate at Aberystwyth University, where she's studying the relationship between witch-hunts and reproduction/fertility. Her work has featured on The Crunch Poetry Podcast and the BBC. the poems 00:00 / 00:57 00:00 / 00:46 00:00 / 00:55 Publishing credits

Hear poet Susie Campbell read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Susie Campbell wave 12 winter 2022 back next the poet Susie Campbell's poems have appeared in many UK and international journals, visual poetry anthologies and exhibitions. Currently studying for a practice-based poetry PhD at Oxford Brookes University, Susie is the author of six poetry pamphlets – I return to you , Tenter and Enclosures being her three most recent. Her newest work, The Sleeping Place , will be published by Guillemot Press in 2023. the poems A Deictic Miracle, This Boxwood Prayer Nut Exhibit: Waddesdon Bequest, British Museum 00:00 / 01:41 To hold and be held, an uncracked walnut, a little earth. There is something strange about this richness, growing into its own boundaries, rank and subtle as a hunted creature. Time has become a strongbox of interlocking branches. Global complexities, plumbed with pipelines of gold, are reduced to wafer-thin discs, slotted one into the other, light bevelled into a compound syntax of mortise and tenon. An articulation of honest wood, it holds the shape and hard veins of the forest by fitting it to the palm: an armillary sphere circling an internal sun, opened by flicking up a tiny hinge secured on its pin. Ahead, glimmering through a tiny screen, carved and fretted to this terrestrial cage, a thimble saint with his trembling hound bows before the stag. Kneeling here, prayer beads in hand, an intricate system of shadow blows from antler and slender branch to form the cross, thorn-sized and lifted to the wooden sky, as outside bends to imitate this reconciliation. if magic 00:00 / 01:24 if such ordinary box jar tin or burlap and if tested unbought night finds an opening past neighbours fought for squeaking and scratched open by tiny razor- sharp and left beyond and further how the night is done with moss and damp and squelch and how quickly attaching themselves to dark are wet marbles if tied up in a pouch and with mercy new-opened and sticky and still smelling of sleep as sap is and here a soft clink of word against word could be taken for protection a charm new-minted from darkness against theirs ours some dispensable such brittle claims across this globe of glass could be soothed or silenced if won by this as talisman Hush 00:00 / 01:43 A hill beneath and a filled-in door. This bench, its damp wooden flowers. A dead tree stripped clean and time fucking stops. You reach a corner of you are there. You are there. An edge of grief you can park in an empty tongue. The fields are empty. That’s near enough. You expect you have come here to honour the dead. An open field looks like battlefield words: gone, absent, missing. You come to hold it in memory but it becomes spongy underfoot. You do not mean to remember her, the time you brought her here. A list in a notebook of useful words: Blank Nil Null Hush-hush Ssh Shush Sodden ground but your body remembers so you try to follow even as it is hardening and solidifying, becomes a whole, no longer possible to enter nor be held by it. Nil. Null. Hush. Ssh. Shush. You cannot enter nor explore its spaces nor the dead in their apophatic silence that gap in words. Listen. Hush. Publishing credits A Deictic Miracle, This Boxwood Prayer Nut: Shearsman Magazine (125/126 – Autumn/Winter) if magic: Stride Magazine (December 2021) Hush: Tenter (Guillemot Press)

Hear poet April Yee read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. April Yee wave 6 summer 2021 back next the poet April Yee is a writer and translator of power and postcolonialism. A Harvard and Tin House alumna, she reported in more than a dozen countries before moving to the UK. April reads for Triquarterly , contributes to Ploughshares online, and mentors for University of the Arts London’s Refugee Journalism Project. the poems Kopachi / Pripyat / Vilcha 00:00 / 02:07 In the cloud that drifts online, I discover an image of myself, notebooked, remember I toured Ukrainian villages in April, the anniversary of their before and after, the date they understood dirty and clean , touched new energies released into air. My recollection floats ungraspable as air. The high-res photograph does not recover dead actions to the hippocampus, now clean as a blank notebook sheet. I remember the detailed email from my father after I said I’d go to Chernobyl that April. He cited a scientific study: Dear April, Mushrooms, exposed to soil and air, can remain radioactive for years after. For breakfast, the local hotel covered pasta in mayonnaise and dismembered hot dogs. I also half-recall the clean white shirt of an engineer. He’d keep clean our air in a then-future, now-past April with a steel sarcophagus to stop the embers from dispersing particles in global air. His metal tonnes could fully cover the Statue of Liberty, he intoned, after a meal of many courses. I marvelled, after, how he kept his white shirt so pristine clean. A visiting Japanese mother, face covered, gripped two Geiger counters an April and a half since Fukushima blew the air. She earthquaked her body to remember. Actually, I use records to pretend-remember. I Google articles I must have written after that trip, read emails maybe sent from air- craft raining pollutants over unclean nimbuses. I trigger cruellest April, places where every root was covered in irradiated air and nuclear embers. After, I wash my consciousness clean, allow the cover to contain all of April. Listening to Lola Flores 00:00 / 01:03 In your ghost berry house, you screw the leg still tighter in its wooden frame, the hoof suspended, question mark. Botanists peg the mulberry to man, their shots at life quick decades. No estás más, corazón. Silkworms spin threads from fruit before it spoils. You shear off fat, locate shrunk flesh. Off bone it falls. He plumps the fruit your maid slow boils to blood-gelled jam. In your arguileh’s crown, his coals burn orange hot, each breath you take cremation. Hide your father’s jamón bone in the slingshot shadow of the lamp you break, below the mulberries, their blinded lobes seen too in cemeteries of my home. West / East 00:00 / 01:53 My eyes are the hammered edge of a Chinatown butcher’s cleaver, heavy and heaved with momentum, not sharp. There’s enough sharpness in sheared bottles, wires embroidered with barbs, paid bills that slip inside the flesh. I heave my eyes on discards, cleaving past from present: Who touched this can, and can it buy my lunch? My butcher heaves his cleaver through a duck’s shiny body, and I see the X-ray of its bones, perfect whites circling congealed purple cores. The rice: free, my butcher’s Buddha plea. I swallow slowly, seeing with my tongue for paddy stones that seek to crack my teeth. I picked one time a book, heavy with large font: The Geography of Thought. A man inside theorised mankind’s mind cleaved in the age of the ancient Greeks, each fisherman hauling his solo catch while Chinese strewed rice across collective fields. West sees the thing; East sees the place the thing sits in. I can see I am now West: sifting, sorting, seeing the trash, and not the street the trash sits in. Someone saw this book as trash. Were I East, I’d be the rice, the duck, and the butcher, whole in every grain. Publishing credits Kopachi / Pripyat / Vilcha: Commended in the Ambit Poetry Competition 2020 Listening to Lola Flores: Ware Poets 22nd Competition Anthology 2020 (Ware Poets) West / East: Live Canon Anthology 2020 (Live Canon)

Hear poet Marc Alan Di Martino read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Marc Alan Di Martino wave 19 autumn 2024 back next the poet Marc Alan Di Martino is the author of Love Poem with Pomegranate , Still Life with City and Unburial . His poems and translations from Italian can be found in Bad Lilies , Autumn Sky , Rattle and several other journals and anthologies. Marc is also the author of Day Lasts Forever: Selected Poems of Mario dell'Arco – the first English-language translation of the Romanesco poet’s work. Currently a reader for The Baltimore Review , Marc lives in Italy. the poems Runaway 00:00 / 04:23 My mother is sitting alone on a park bench in Villa Borghese, eating a sandwich. It isn’t an easy thing to find a sandwich in Rome in 1966. She's had to root out the Bar degli Americani on Via Veneto, near the Embassy, in order to find ham on white bread. No mayonnaise. Imagine that: a Jewish girl eating a ham sandwich on a park bench in Rome with no mayo. What's she doing there, so far from home? And where is home, anyway? Her parents’ home in Brookline, Massachusetts? That isn’t home. Not anymore. She ran away from that home and came to Rome via Paris via San Francisco. Anywhere but at the shabbos table with that tyrant her mother and her ineffectual father. A ham sandwich on a park bench is better than that, she says to herself as a dapper man appears dressed in a smart black suit. She notices... his teeth. Naively, she thinks he might be Marcello Mastroianni, her singular destiny to meet a movie star, fall in love and become his wife. Live happily ever after. The fantasies that run through a young woman’s head. This man is not Eddie Fisher. Nice Jewish boy. Dungaree Doll. This man is a smooth-talker. He wants to sell her something. Realizing she's American, he begins speaking in broken schoolboy English. He turns on the charm, and she is charmed. What is he selling? Wine—what else? You're in Italy, poor girl, eating a sandwich, all alone. He overwhelms her, makes her feel like Audrey Hepburn. She, in turn, is an easy target. Not like Italian women. To get into their pants you have to go through their families. He knows. He has two sisters. He’s always beating up guys in his neighborhood for putting their hands on them. He’s got a reputation. But everyone knows American women are unmoored. Why else do they come here? To get into trouble. To meet a Casanova. To have what's called a ‘fling’. (He learned that word in a movie.) Then they go back home and get married to a Rock Hudson or a John Wayne, have two kids and two cars and pursue their dreams of happiness. Europeans have history, Americans have dreams. That seems to him a profound insight. My mother crinkles the cellophane into a ball, rolls it in her palm, brushes the crumbs from her skirt. He looks at her knees, the skin boldly exposed, wonders what’s beyond them. She isn’t thin, he thinks, as he absorbs her body with his eyes. He isn’t subtle. You don’t need to be in 1966. All you need to have is charm, and he has excellent charm. She decides in that moment she will go anywhere with this man. She'll do anything he asks. She has nothing to lose, no one waiting for her on the other side of the ocean, no Eddie Fisher. Her brother is married to a German. Her brother the magician, who disappeared into a German woman and never came out. How she would like to disappear into this man, fall into the black hole of him, learn to curse her own parents in his tongue, allow the sensual inflections of Italian to evict the Yiddish gutturals lodged in her throat like fish bones. How she would like like to learn to trill her Rs, double her consonants, put a crucifix around her neck for the sheer pleasure of seeing her mother’s dumbstruck punim , bury her alive with Roman invective: li mortacci tua —fuck your dead ancestors—tear the crucifix off and flush it down the toilet, having exhausted its usefulness. She smooths her skirt, a little flushed. Cartography 00:00 / 00:28 There are maps of knowing and unknowing. Seven thousand species of bird locked in a glass cabinet, brightly colored males & unpretentious females. Almost every living thing on Earth has already perished. My daughter carries a dog-eared copy of Maus in her backpack. I have questions. She has questions. Arboreal 00:00 / 01:00 Leaf’s gold lies guttered, silhouetted to concrete: battle-borne, world-wounded, crenulated by a thousand woes, tossed and torn by turning winds & war-waging weather, stampeded, flattened, distilled into a constellation of shattered veins. Again merciless rains pour down, pound it into mud, in- to less than nothing- ness. It’s spun face down under a new dawn unlacing waterlogged gold to tattered filaments mutated, transformed by bare bludgeoning blows sky clear now crabshell-blue-to- sapphire. Sad fire leaks from lesions, spreads its net over the crackling street shedding evaporate mist of holy hell water, peeling off pavement, this ghastly arboreal face. Publishing credits Runaway: Baltimore Review (Spring 2019) Cartography: Orange Blossom Review (Issue 10) Arboreal: 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 wave 17 spring 2024 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 Kevin Grauke read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Kevin Grauke wave 20 winter 2024 back next the poet With work in The Threepenny Review , The Southern Review , StoryQuarterly , Fiction , and Quarterly West , Kevin Grauke is the author of short story collection Shadows of Men . He's also the winner of the Steven Turner Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Kevin teaches at La Salle University, and lives in Philadelphia. His next collection, Bullies & Cowards , arrives in 2026 from Cornerstone Press. the poems The Secret of Tornadoes 00:00 / 01:07 Tornadoes, I knew at age four, were dragons spun to furious life from sickly spring skies. Watch meant be careful. Warning meant hide. Born in the Alley’s south, I learned this quick. Let’s make a fort in the tub! Mommy once shouted much too loudly, wrestling a mattress past the toilet. Houses could become like weeds pulled up and flung. Cradles landed in trees, sometimes still with babies. But then an older girl, already in school, told me the secret: Touch the sidewalk, honey. If it’s warm, one’s coming. A whisper—wisdom meant only for me. Honored, I stayed quiet. Pretending to tie a shoe I couldn’t yet knot, I pressed my palms to the sun-shot sidewalk, dirtying them in the unicorn dust of her hopscotch chalk. Frightened but grateful, I flew home fast to warn Mommy, my pink hands aflame with a May day’s false prophecy. Ant 00:00 / 01:00 I hope to capture this moment exactly, how the late afternoon sun on this sixth day of May is shining now on this journal page so perfectly, casting a shadow of my pen that looks like nothing if not a hummingbird darting its bill into and out of the flower of yet another attempt at something good. Soon, the sun’s gold will sink below the trees, but for now it holds steady, content to give me a little more time to try to capture its likeness. Onto the glare of this still empty page an ant wanders. Nothing more than a dark speck, it meanders about, a mobile period in search of a true sentence to end. I watch it move from here to there and there to there until it finally disappears over the edge, headed elsewhere, but not before leaving me a path to follow with the words of this very poem, now finished and named in its honor. First Lesson 00:00 / 02:06 Two houses down, a young man, a little girl, and a bicycle. Behind them, in the grass, training wheels tossed aside. Way down and far back, I feel both dad’s stooped patience and the mettle of his daughter’s courage. But what I feel most: the unspoken swirl of their fears—of spills and scrapes, of tears and pain. And it’s almost a more aching beauty, even as clumsy and raw as it is, than I, remembering my own once-tiny girl now grown, can bear on my own. I watch him, the father, so proud, how he claps and shouts while jogging alongside as close as he can manage without jostling an arm or handlebar. He sends out so much encouragement: Go! You’re doing it! Keep pedalling! When the inevitable comes, it’s no surprise. It is, after all, inevitable. The front wheel wobbles, turns too much to the left, to the right, to the left again. The end then happens so slowly—the flailing, the toppling, the falling over— almost if it were taking place in a series of stages (Duchamp’s bicycle descending the stairs) as she moves from upright to tilted to tilted still more to crashed to now splayed on the sidewalk like the insides of a dropped egg. Not unlike a hand-cranked siren from days even before my own, the two wheels spin two cries into the neighborhood silence: one the girl’s, one the father’s. Together, they braid a thin rope that each hopes the other will snatch to save the day’s grace. It swings between them, back and forth, then stops. Each is so certain they’ve let the other down. Except for the crickets, it’s silent now. She’ll learn, of course, and he will have taught her. Of this I’m sure. For now, though, failure. But in memory this will glow like treasure. Publishing credits The Secret of Tornadoes: The Minnesota Review (Issue 101) Ant: Alabama Literary Review (Vol. 32) First Lesson: Poet Lore (Vol. 118)

Hear poet Piero Toto read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Piero Toto wave 23 autumn 2025 back next the poet Piero Toto (he/lui) is a bilingual poet, Italian translator and translation lecturer based in London. Author of Queering Sexual Health Translation Pedagogy , he co-edited Gender Approaches in the Translation Classroom . His poems in English are in Magma , Poetry London , fourteen poems and Queer Life, Queer Love II , as well as in other UK and international publications. In his native Italy, Piero has published the poetry pamphlet tempo 4/4 , and is a contributor to literary blogs Atelier and Laboratori Poesia , for which he translates contemporary UK poetry into Italian. He's also the co-editor of multilingual poetry magazine Atelier International . the poems Emotional Freedom Technique 00:00 / 00:49 My therapist says: narcissism is a form of unspent joy I say: you think you love yourself until you don’t you think you love somebody until they don’t spent is their body a continuum of—what? as if absence could summon the shape of stillness (on the matter of stillness we rewind the hours) and who but who deserves their fate, really? you already exist this time exists the linear cry of your thinking forever exists This was a day of revelations: bleed with me until the tenderness of a pause smoulders from within How to Address Absence 00:00 / 00:24 the outline of shadows reveals we’re born in the depth of zigzags & groans reflecting the impact we make the neon messing with our vibe I turn around to feel you inside me a hollow touch how fickle the dark incessant in this last room The Performance of Pain 00:00 / 00:25 give us a scar or a street corner we can fight when secluded in the chase for a name that fits give us more time to reset the world perception reduced to a pixel of you my hell is an echo of wanderers today’s epiphany: we shimmer still like blood on a scar Publishing credits Emotional Freedom Technique / The Performance of Pain: exclusive first publication by iamb How to Address Absence: Queerlings (Issue No. 2) as part of House Trilogy

Hear poet Catherine Graham read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Catherine Graham wave 9 spring 2022 back next the poet Catherine Graham’s most recent book, Æther: An Out-of-Body Lyric , was a finalist for the Toronto Book Award; while her sixth collection of poems The Celery Forest was named a CBC Best Book of the Year – as well as being a finalist for the Fred Cogswell Award. A previous winner of the Toronto International Festival of Authors’ Poetry NOW , Catherine leads its monthly Book Club, and teaches creative writing at the University of Toronto. Her second novel, The Most Cunning Heart, is due out in spring 2022. the poems Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We’re Dead 00:00 / 02:55 The moon arcs—in and out, playing form. Stars wrap our fate while intruder dreams signal: come back. They hold our stability with quickened steps. Stand where grass weaves basket strands, make the centre heave, the pinched earth speak, before thoughts erase and we have no names. Fixed on the busy you miss the owl-winter, the who-cold crizzling lake. Raindrops inside snowdrops. When our shoes sprout hello-flowers, cold lips pucker, speak— What to do but follow this thread? Wind circular words to chain our necks. A necklace without clasps means another light’s not listening. To think story is to construct from that other realm where jade water cools fire’s friction. Pockets where pleasure finds memory. Take this nosegay, touch intuition, before we float off the page. Now go past sentence. Air-sheets shatter—absorbed by grasses and creatures scurrying there. Viral green points down, we watch the swarm. Swan’s neck quickens to question—her wings, snow-blinding flaps. Nest birds have it—twiggy cup to sink into after cracking. The rub that brought forth twine and twig weaves the cradle. Head naked like a freshly hatched bird, moist with dew from the wormfield. What moves in tawny spurts, jolts. Silence rearranges. It does not mend. Seed. But know bloom. Unravelling defies gravity. False to think otherwise. Fools. We have a future to hatch. When roots shoot out— the sun-calling art of escape: leaf, sepal, petal—the sun plays hide-and-seek. Silence is a kind of flight. Scratch light to a rain-flecked level. Twitch strategic to inhabit submission. Repetition renews. Upland by the railroad tracks—eggs disguised as stones. Slip past daylight to a time held by skein of old stars— past evening, past waiting— Enough! Never enough, until pulled to flight or sleep. And a dog bounds helplessly wet for a tossed stick he cannot find. MRI 00:00 / 01:04 No metal implants or fragments. A long, fibrous stalk. You signed consent, removed jewellery. Face down through the doughnut hole. Tapering into leaves. Contrast material running through your veins. Magnets. Pinnate to bipinnate with rhombic leaflets. Still – lie still. You’ve been given earphones, a padded table. Seeds are broad ovoids. Cushioned openings for breasts to hang. Grown in an open garden. Thumping. Clicking. Knocks and taps. The celery’s a cleansing tonic. Whirs with car-accident screeches – a father’s skull, mother’s mouth. Wide range of cultivars. The technician stands in a nearby room. Inside, a seed; inside, a small fruit. Sleep Patterns for Seamus Heaney 00:00 / 00:33 We hold sleep patterns for him. Clip flowers from seeds; mist hours from worries into a line’s heartbeat. Tears are rinsers, not energy takers. Never waterfalls. We don’t envy his gift, we coax something out— Take me, for instance, my dead mother’s voice— You’re a game changer, a post-autumn woman. Publishing credits Put Flowers Around Us and Pretend We're Dead: Finalist for the Montreal International Poetry Prize MRI: The Celery Forest (Wolsak & Wynn / Buckrider Books) Sleep Patterns for Seamus Heaney: The Belfield Literary Review

Hear poet Helen Kay read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Helen Kay wave 17 spring 2024 back next the poet Helen Kay has poems in The Rialto , Stand and Butcher’s Dog , as well as in her pamphlet, This Lexia & Other Languages . She curates Poetry Dyslexia and Imagination : a creative platform for people with dyslexia and other forms of neurodiversity. A finalist for the 2022 Brotherton Anthology, Helen won both the Repton and the Ironbridge poetry competitions in 2023. On social media, she's known for her hen puppet sidekick, Nigella. the poems Bitter (from OE Biter) 00:00 / 01:37 The fox took away my old hens last night to feed its starving cubs. Its vampire teeth parted feathers, pierced the oesophagus and windpipe below the sinewy neck and severed the spinal cord, quick as birds that snatch worms or pluck a butterfly off a shelf of air. No waste; no signs, bar sequins of spilt corn on moulted feathers. Wearing his wife’s kimono, a QC beat to death a fox caught in the wire fence round his hen coop, blooded his baseball bat. I am not bitter, Foxy. The cruellest bite is the empty plate of death. I would bequeath you my thighs, breast and legs to plump up your bony kin. Worse things lurk darkly: two million hens gassed and eaten daily. We will chainsaw the coop, splintering tears of plywood on the earth. We will plant egg-smooth bean seeds in our hen manure and watch the sparrows steal red cherries. I will stir my tears in a glass of wine or let them fall to dry on a page of words. I will wear my fox socks, post #fox pics cross my fingers, bolt my door at dusk. Scrabble 00:00 / 01:08 Every night Dad and I clicked the tiles slick as casino chips. A whiskey soda lit his petrol-coupon glass to a sparkling chandelier. An ashtray snake-charmed a Silk Cut while he positioned the tiles, turned misspellings into jokes. Winning did not matter; it was our way of talking. We were both dictionary-dependent, lifting its cover like the lid of a Milk Tray box. We fished letters from a yellow wash bag, sliced them into so many meanings. Slotted in our chairs, we made order: ashtray, coaster, fag packet. My pen knitted lines of scores, filled the evening’s blank page, and always, upstairs, Mum, out cold, a burnt stub, empty tumbler, blank tile, jumbled-up bag of letters we could never put into words. My Brother’s Widow 00:00 / 01:05 Not wanting to waste things, she sows your tomato seeds, too late. The seedlings sprout in May, vulnerable and hairy, moving forward imperceptibly, as she is. Soon she has too many plants and gives me two. Neither of us knows which bits to snip, what to feed them, only that we are growing gently together, reaching out. Green leaves unfurl their fingered symmetry towards me. Constellations of yellow flowers hold tomorrows. I can catch your flamboyance in the way they crowd my yard. Sal has planted marigolds with hers, calls it companion planting. In a way, I won’t mind a lack of tomatoes. The absence of them, lurking round and red beneath the leaves, seems fitting. Publishing credits Bitter (from 𝑂𝐸 Biter): Live Canon Anthology 2022 (Live Canon) Scrabble: won first prize at the Iron Bridge Poetry Festival 2023 My Brother's Widow: longlisted for the Cheltenham Poetry Competition 2023

Hear poet Robin Helweg-Larsen read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Robin Helweg-Larsen wave 21 spring 2025 back next the poet Anglo-Danish but raised in the Bahamas, Robin Helweg-Larsen was educated in Jamaica and at Stowe. He's lived and worked in the Bahamas, Denmark, Canada, Australia and the USA. Robin has had more than 400 poems published in various literary journals, including the Alabama Literary Review , Allegro , Ambit and Amsterdam Quarterly. His chapbook, Calling the Poem – on the art of summoning and working with 'The Muse' – is available to read online. the poems Camelot at Dusk 00:00 / 01:44 From under low clouds spreading from the south The red sun drops slow to night’s waiting mouth. Rush lamps are lit; the guards changed on the walls; Supper will not be served in the Great Halls With Arthur still away. Each in their room, The members of the Court leave books or loom To say their Vespers in the encroaching gloom. Lancelot, up in his tower, Sees the sunset storm clouds glower, Feels his blood’s full tidal power, Knows he has to go. In her bower, Gwenivere Puts a ruby to her ear, Brushes firelight through her hair, Feels her heartbeat grow. Guard, guard, watch well: For the daylight thickens And the low cloud blackens And the hot heart quickens To rebel. From his tower, caring not For consequences, Lancelot Crosses courts of Camelot, Pitying his King. In her bower, Gwenivere Feels his presence coming near, Waits for footfalls on the stair, Lets her will take wing. Guard, guard, watch well: If attention slackens When the deep bond beckons, Evil knows Pendragon’s In its spell. And as the storm clouds, rubbing out the stars, Deafened the castle and carved lightning scars, Drenched Arthur rode for flash-lit Camelot Where he, by Queen and Knight, was all forgot. Old Sailors 00:00 / 00:54 Two tars talked of sealing and sailing; one said with a sigh 'Remember gulls wheeling and wailing, we wondering why, and noting bells pealing, sun paling — it vanished like pie! And then the boat heeling, sky hailing, the wind getting high, and that drunken Yank reeling to railing and retching his rye, John missing his Darjeeling jailing, and calling for chai? While we battened, all kneeling and nailing, the hurricane nigh, and me longing for Ealing, and ailing?' His mate said 'Aye-aye; I could stand the odd stealing, food staling, not fit for a sty, and forget any feeling of failing, too vast to defy – home-leaving your peeling-paint paling too far to espy – all because of the healing friend-hailing, the hello! and hi! and, with the gulls squealing, quick-scaling the mast to the sky.' This Ape I Am 00:00 / 01:48 Under our armoured mirrors of the mind where eyes watch eyes, trying to pierce disguise, an ape, incapable of doubt, looks out, insists this world he sees is trees, and tries to find the scenes his genes have predefined. This ape I am who counts 'One, two, more, more' has lived three million years in empty lands where all the members of the roving bands he’s ever met have totalled some ten score; so all these hundred thousands in the street with voided eyes and quick avoiding feet must be the mere two hundred known before. This ape I am believes they know me too. I’m free to stare, smile, challenge, talk to you. This ape I am thinks every female mine, at least as much as any other male’s; if she’s with someone else, she can defect – her choice, and she becomes mine to protect; just as each child must be kept safe and hale for no one knows but that it could be mine. This ape I am feels drugged, ecstatic, doped, hallucination-torn, kaleidoscoped, that Earth’s two hundred people includes swirls of limitless and ever-varied girls. This ape I am does not look at myself doesn’t know about mirrors, lack of health, doesn’t know fear of death, only of cold; mirrorless can’t be ugly, can’t be old. Publishing credits Camelot at Dusk: The HyperTexts (2015) Old Sailors: Snakeskin (No. 146) This Ape I Am: Better Than Starbucks (Vol. II, No. X)

Hear poet Elisabeth Sennitt Clough read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Elisabeth Sennitt Clough wave 15 autumn 2023 back next the poet Elisabeth Sennitt Clough is the author of the 2017 Saboteur Awards Best Pamphlet winner Glass , and the editor of the Fenland Poetry Journal . Her debut collection Sightings won her the Michael Schmidt Award, while At or Below Sea Level was a 2019 Poetry Book Society Spring Recommendation . Elisabeth has also written The Cold Store and My Name is Abilene , which is shortlisted for The Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023. Elisabeth's poems have appeared in Poem , The Rialto , Mslexia , Wasafiri , Magma , The Cannon’s Mouth , Ambit and Stand among others. the poems There was a door & then a door Poem beginning with a line by Ocean Vuong 00:00 / 00:54 The second door was oak, brawny with a heavy-duty handle & latch, the sort that could mutilate a child’s hand if pushed too much. This is how thresholds are reinforced in farming country. Give your prayers to the sky. The neighbours are out of earshot. What could a flappy city girl know about the ebb of backwaters? People here read shotgun holes like exegesis. Old mail piles up. All letterboxes are sealed shut. Some days even the windows shudder. Everyone’s forgotten the first door. Histerid 00:00 / 01:22 In a hardbacked book with charcoal-grey covers in an attic, above a small bedroom, next to an illustration, the error of a typeface places a hole in a word, His terid , so that it becomes owned. You are mine says the pronoun to the beetle. But the neglectful parent had let his terid go, its skinny legs toddling beneath its round belly in-between legs in crowded market places, through garden fences to the edge-of-town industrial estate and beyond – the place where all lost things end up – the Gymnasium of the Forgotten. There his terid crouches on a varnished floor at the end of a long wooden bench, next to Arthur, who’s sat next to Tom, willing someone to sight him, make a call from the black telephone: Hello, Mr England, we have located your terid, reported missing and suspected extinct in 1936. Please come and collect. The Arse-end of Summer 00:00 / 01:01 Like warlords, the neighbour’s firs cast darkness across my lawn. So much in my garden promised to blossom but never did. A section of wasp nest dangles from a tree like a slice of dried meat. The splatter of an heirloom tomato still decorates next door’s patio beneath a sign: trespassers will be composted . A wood pigeon repeats itself four times. I mimic it twice. Sunday afternoon alone in a rose-less garden, still in my nightie – maybe I’m no longer alive, but don’t realise? A motorbike engine growls out the miles over cracked asphalt, past wheelie bins stinking of yesterday’s burnt ends. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Claire Orchard read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Claire Orchard wave 23 autumn 2025 back next the poet A Pākehā poet from Aotearoa New Zealand, Claire Orchard is the author of Liveability and Cold Water Cure . She's had poetry published in a variety of journals and anthologies, including Turbine | Kapohau , Sweet Mammalian , NZ Poetry Shelf and 4th Floor Journal . Claire's work was also picked for Ōrongohau | Best New Zealand Poems in 2014 and 2016. A Hawthornden Fellowship recipient in 2016, she holds an MA in Creative Writing from the International Institute of Modern Letters, and was a poetry columnist for Capital Magazine from 2015 to 2021. the poems After one storm, before the next 00:00 / 01:19 Packing sandbags, hand over hand, against the crumbling bank. Some days it all dribbles away, although they say the human brain retains everything somewhere or other, if I only knew exactly where my subconscious laid it down and the noise rain makes on a corrugated iron roof when heard from beneath the covers of a warm bed is still the best sound in the world. Opening drawers, things overflow, and where to start? Chickens come home to roost but what of these mental bantams, flapping about? Sometimes, moving in the shiny eye of it, I’ll catch sight of your photograph and I’d swear you’re just some model I’ve never met, posing with a full wine glass in an interior design magazine. When I bring up advance care planning 00:00 / 01:46 Mum says oh yes, I keep changing my mind about whether or not I want to be cremated and I say Mum, once you’re gone you won’t care and we’ll just do whatever we want. I’m not talking about after you’re dead, I’m talking about when you’re still alive, about what you want us to do if you can’t speak for yourself, if you’re unconscious or can’t understand what’s going on anymore. Oh, she says. Well, I don’t want to be put in a home, that’s for sure. Unless there’s no other option. So, if the only other option is being dead, you’d rather a home? Yes, I think so. I really don’t want to be in a home but I suppose if it’s that or being dead then I’ll have to consider it. Mum, I’m talking here about when you won’t be able to consider it. Like, do you want to be kept alive if there’s a good chance you won’t wake up, and if you do, you’ll not be able to wipe your own bum or feed yourself? What if you can’t recognise people, if you can no longer hold a conversation? What if you have a massive stroke, and then you stop breathing, would you want CPR? Do you want artificial ventilation if you can’t breathe on your own? These are the sorts of things, the kinds of scenarios you need to consider and then tell us what you want us to do. I suppose so, she says doubtfully. Where duty lies 00:00 / 01:05 It seems my great-grandmother and my grandmother did not get on, even though (or perhaps in part because) one fell in love with and married the other’s son. Yet, when the time came, the younger passed on to me the elder’s Sunday School award she’d kept safe through six weeks sea voyaging and forty-odd years up and down the country on trains. A novel by Silas K. Hocking, gilt embossed, illustrated, awarded in 1899 as first prize to nine-year-old Annie Entwhistle of Albert Road Congregational Sunday School for punctual attendance and good behaviour. And indeed what more could be asked or expected? Publishing credits After one storm, before the next: Sport (No. 46) When I bring up advance care planning: Mayhem (Issue No. 9) Where duty lies: Liveability (Te Herenga Waka University Press) Author photo: © Ebony Lamb

Hear poet Angela Dye read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Angela Dye wave 4 autumn 2020 back next the poet Angela Dye is a writer, editor, podcaster, teacher, reviewer, interviewer and radio broadcaster. She runs many literary events and projects in Kent, England, and has worked for various magazines and businesses creating audio content. Angela's work has appeared in several print and digital magazines. She's currently writing a novel, as well as her second poetry book. the poems 00:00 / 00:50 00:00 / 01:33 00:00 / 02:11 Publishing credits

Hear poet Anna Saunders read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Anna Saunders wave 2 spring 2020 back next the poet CEO and founder of Cheltenham Poetry Festival , Anna Saunders has been described as a poet 'of quite remarkable gifts' (Bernard O’Donoghue) and 'a modern myth maker' (Paul Stephenson) who 'surely can do anything' (The North ). She's the author of five collections – including Communion, Kissing the She Bear and Ghosting for Beginners – with her sixth, Feverfew, due out later in 2020. the poems 00:00 / 01:23 00:00 / 01:36 00:00 / 01:05 Publishing credits