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Hear poet Steve Smart read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Steve Smart back next the poet Poet and poetry filmmaker Steve Smart is based in Angus, Scotland. His poems have appeared in Atrium , Firth , The Poetry Shed , The Writer's Café , Ink, Sweat & Tears , Poetry Scotland , Gallus , Consilience and elsewhere. Recent collaborations have meant Steve's poetry has featured in anthologies published in New Zealand, Canada and Scotland – while his poetry films have been screened at various international festivals and exhibitions. In 2023, funding from Creative Scotland helped Steve and Irish poetry filmmaker Colm Scully deliver a new poetry film workshop for the Scottish Poetry Library. the poems luminous without being fierce 'Light in Scotland has a quality I have not met elsewhere. It is luminous without being fierce, penetrating to immense distances with an effortless intensity.' Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain 00:00 / 01:20 We meet were ridge meets sky – your kin are only here, above a rising contour of warmth, an unrequested flood shrinking your island tundras, stranding you upward, a feathered bellwether. You switch from being, to being unseeable – lichen-hill-skin you’ll speckle-wait me away, hunker into arctic whites – if the high corrie snows hesitate, else doubtful greys for spring. I forget so much, but remember each of all our meeting places. The map knows their names – I recall stones and land and the rise and fall, where you were, were not, and were again. I saw your presence shimmer, while I gazed breathless – while you waited, while I was not too much, while you were still. entrenched 00:00 / 24:07:02 Mine hunters with doll-sized trowels, flense the russet soils with caution. Is that slight discolouration the circumference of a wooden post? That line a distant season's burning? Stratigraphy layers the plot, yields the story. Circumstantial evidence – is that scrape a street number, a mason’s strike, or just more tumbledown sandstone subtext? The palm gifted a stone tool finds an easy accommodation, caresses as if to cup a cheek – to retouch, re-dress familiar bodies, in more than a change of clothes. How much for ten minutes chat? Of different days and other treasures – of how children always fight, of what the sky says in the dark, of one mind horde to another. sidelong From the United States Library of Congress details of the first photographic portrait image of a human produced in America: Robert Cornelius, head-and-shoulders self-portrait, facing front, with arms crossed. (Daguerreotype, 1839.) 00:00 / 00:59 Robert Cornelius remains sceptical. He does not trust that it will work, or that a specific future develops when this image will be visible. He does not pause to comb his hair or consider us, but guards himself against the possible exposure, against the theft, of unmarshalled spirit. Slow counting silent hesitation, he glances sidelong from 1839, doubtful of our existence, his focus on what he next intends. Publishing credits luminous without being fierce: Alchemy and Miracles (Gilbert and Hall Press) entrenched / sidelong: exclusive first publication by iamb , though sidelong was previously blogged by the author

Poet Mariah Whelan reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Mariah Whelan back next the poet Mariah is a poet from Oxford, UK. She is the author of the love i do to you (Eyewear, 2019), while the rafters are still burning is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. She is currently based in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester where she is completing a PhD and teaches creative writing. Mariah has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, the PBS Student Poetry Prize and won the AM Heath Prize. She also co-edits online poetry journal, bath magg . the poems Hefted 00:00 / 01:24 One by one the black-faced ewes file through the gate. Up and out of the field over the burned heather to lamb where their mothers lambed them. I try to pull a map around the stories: I know here is where my father was happiest— if I sit on this rock and let the same cold enter my body can I say I’m part of it? Plates of ice across the mud crack under weight, catch light like the light is something good enough to frame and hang in a hall where guests first enter. His maps were always like that— half an advertisement of character, half a mirror to hold the face that looked square in its white mount. On and on, the hundred or so ewes file through hefted to the particular slope that bore them. Muscle memory, DNA, where do their bodies hold the bone-hunger that leads them back, precise as a compass point finding its way through layers of tracing paper and folded map to hold its beam-arm straight, making the distance between them measurable. In the Archive The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford 00:00 / 02:05 When the door closes we let the quiet of the archive settle around us. The chilled air from bales of frozen film comes to a stop and the room begins to fill with the hum of the corner unit rinsing air clean of contaminant on our clothes, proteins in our breath. The curator lays the album on the foam cradle. We stand shy of each other like friends at a christening unsure of where to stand or what to do with our arms, not letting our voices drop to break the silence. The curator begins with the facts: Mr Phillips reported how the Juju City reeked of human blood. Sir Harry mustered a force of 1200 marines, Mr Bacon had reason to believe enough ivory would be found to pay all expenses removing the King from his stool. I have come to understand there are various kinds of violence. A boot in the mouth, a ring of bruises around an upper arm, the way that inside this archive each fact slips so prettily beside the next like a horse’s bit lies across its tongue. History is the things that have happened, the facts of a body and its breath that come to us through the records and lists, the photographs and their captions curling in neat, even script. In the silence of the archive, all I can hear is the hum of the corner unit rinsing air clean of the dust and acid I bring on my skin, my hair, and the white space, page after page of it— the absences still bearing the administrator’s mark. The Coach Station, St James Boulevard, Newcastle upon Tyne 00:00 / 01:05 Bright station and all around soft dark. Toothpaste and sleep, coffee and the white crunch of salt on the concourse. The headlamps snorting – boarding as the first gull caws began to ricochet. That’s how it was the morning I left, too cold for snow, hills thick with February sloped black-backed and low to where the Tyne bloomed in the wake of a boat. I was less going somewhere than getting out, away from the terraces and rain, tower blocks – the yellow Metro stops that took me in loops, out into the waking-up day. But mostly I was getting away from you, the river below breathing as all rivers do. Publishing credits Hefted: the love i do to you (Eyewear Publishing) In the Archive: exclusive first publication by iamb The Coach Station, St James Boulevard, Newcastle upon Tyne: Best New British and Irish Poets 2018 (Eyewear Publishing) Share

Hear poet Oliver Comins read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Oliver Comins back next the poet Growing up in Warwickshire, heading north to York, then finally south to settle in West London, Oliver Comins has had his poetry collected in pamphlets from The Mandeville Press and Templar Poetry. His full collection, Oak Fish Island , was published in 2018. the poems Brown Leather Gloves 00:00 / 00:58 These are my Father’s gloves with which I am wrestling as I walk down to the station on another crisp morning of frosted cars in a frozen suburb. Who’s holding whose hands now? Inside the gloves’ fingers there’s more of him than there is of me – all those years of rubbed skin. Leather gives a better grip, doesn’t really overcome the cold. But it’s better than nothing, this thin layer of brown which keeps the weather off. On the platform I remove one Father, reach out to greet a friend. My other Father holds me steady. Eight for (Almost) Nothing 00:00 / 01:09 Doug bowled floaters which travelled slowly through the air, almost settling as they landed. Some days the ball soared over the boundary, cutting his spell short. On others, their batters, groggy or over-excited, made a pig’s ear of it, so our hero bowled through them with a smile, not knowing much more than his opponents. That day was one of those, his eight for (almost) nothing a remarkable feat, and their captain said he’d write it up for the local press. Daft, really, to have believed he’d do that and not be left, twenty-five years later, writing and wondering if anyone out there reading this remembers the all-night grin on Doug’s face, celebrating. Not a Stranger 00:00 / 01:21 My neighbour’s carer does not come from round here. The same can be said for most of us who call this place home after moving in from somewhere else. Water running in the taps on this street tastes different to what we drank before. Light slants another way above the roofs to shadow the paths that run between these orderly semis. For some people my neighbour’s carer is still a stranger. This positioning is neither correct nor fair. She is one of us and she is living here with a purpose. My neighbour has needs. I often overhear the two of them talking – re-confirming the day of the week it is and deciding what ought to happen next. Occasionally, I hear my neighbour’s carer singing in the kitchen, and at these times, I hope my neighbour is sitting nearby, tapping out the melody with her fingers. Publishing credits Brown Leather Gloves: Anthology of Fatherhood (The Emma Press) Eight for (Almost) Nothing: The Rialto (Issue 94) Not a Stranger: first published under the title She is Not a Stranger in Westerly (Issue 66.1)

Hear poet Matthew Stewart read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Matthew Stewart © Marina Rodriguez back next the poet Dividing his time between Extremadura in Spain and West Sussex in England, poet Matthew Stewart works in the Spanish wine trade. Following on from his debut collection, The Knives of Villalejo – a work some 20 years in the writing – Matthew recently published his second full collection, Whatever You Do, Just Don’t . He's also the author of the popular, influential and much-praised poetry blog, Rogue Strands . the poems Los Domingos 00:00 / 00:48 You’ve taught me to sip a café solo , to let its bitterness seep through my gums and mark the end of our tapas and wine, just as you’ve taught me to relish silence in the slow, shared sliding-by of minutes. I no longer force the conversation these never-ending Sunday afternoons while muffled westerns blink on the telly. An ancient carriage clock fights to strike four and your mother pours her glass of water. Perhaps this week she’ll suddenly repeat her suspicion of a neighbour’s illness. Or we’ll sit here without the need for words till your father stirs and cranks the volume to signal kick-off at the Bernabéu. Heading for the Airport 00:00 / 00:40 The cab suddenly turning up twenty-seven minutes late after my ten frantic calls from the pavement outside your block, your dressing-gowned silhouette hovering on the balcony with a halo of wispy hair. My suitcase thrown in the boot, doors slammed, the driver crunching gears, I forgot our goodbye wave while checking my flight. If only that cab had left me behind, longing for Spain. No way to know I’d never see you alive again. The Last Carry El Paseo Marítimo, Chipiona 00:00 / 00:32 You were seven and hadn’t asked for one in months, but the salt wind had whipped your energy away before calamares fritos at our favourite place on the prom left you woozy, slumped in your seat. Even as I threw you over one shoulder and braced for the trudge to our house, my back was hinting at a future without your breath tickling my neck. At you walking, beside us, if we were lucky. Publishing credits Los Domingos: Wild Court (King's College London) Heading for the Airport: The Spectator (July 16th 2022) The Last Carry: The Spectator (January 30th 2021)

Hear poet Elisabeth Kelly read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Elisabeth Kelly back next the poet Elisabeth Kelly lives on a hill farm with her family and too many animals. She's been published in numerous anthologies and journals both online and in print, and she's authored three poetry pamphlets: Carbon , Mind Mathematics and Wild Chamomile . Her first children's book is due out in 2022 from Stairwell Books. Among Elisabeth's favourite things are puddings, and the changing of the seasons. the poems Otzi and the Giant’s Eye 00:00 / 00:31 Sometimes, I feel I am curled up in the eye of a giant, light glints makes an iris out of sunbeams that wink from the depths of this ice sea. I forget for a moment, that suffocating pressure keeps me still as bonded molecules suspend me in a sphere of solid fluid. And I wonder, if I tap a finger against this lens would my world fracture into crystal tears and cry me out from the depths of this ice sea. Tiny Bird Heart 00:00 / 00:15 Light whispers at the window, blue burrows through nudges the dark away. Quietly I uncurl, the nest gives way, as your tiny bird heart beats through the sound of your feet dabbling across the floor. Wild Chamomile 00:00 / 00:40 It smells of pineapple when your crush it, I didn’t know that was the smell, until later. It is the smell of summer, concrete cracks where engine oil pooled, rainbows on slurry puddles, afternoon trips across fields to find an old milking carriage eroding in dens of nettles, the corrugated roof calling like Sleeping Beauty’s turrets full of promise, drizzling reality across the rotting wooden floors. It is scars created by rusted metal treasure, submerged in bogs, or broken bottles used on flat stones to cut berries, it is long days alone. Publishing credits Otzi and the Giant's Eye: Dodging The Rain (This Ice Sea) Tiny Bird Heart: Green Ink Poetry (Discovery Part 2) Wild Chamomile: Wild Chamomile (Selcouth Station)

Poet Amelia Loulli reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Amelia Loulli back next the poet Amelia Loulli is a poet living in Cumbria. A pamphlet of her poetry was published by Nine Arches Press in Primers Volume Four . Her work has twice been shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize, and longlisted in 2020 for the Rebecca Swift Foundation's Women Poets' Prize. Amelia is an MA Writing Poetry student at Newcastle University, and was recently selected by New Writing North to deliver creative writing workshops to young writers as part of their Inkubator scheme. She's currently working on a pamphlet of new poems, as well as a verse novel. the poems Teenage Mother 00:00 / 01:18 they talk to me, the day you were born, as though another me stepped out and never returned, my very own double image, retreating, and for years I only know knees of the dirty kind, hands which would struggle to pick up a small stone, a halo fastened at the neck. There is a world in which I never had you, the handle to my parent’s bedroom door was missing, leaving behind a small square eye hole, just above bed height. I carried love around with me like milk in a shallow bowl, watching it lapping the sides, each drop bleaching my skin, there were days I broke our home with only a few words, I am not your mother. Mother has gotten itself stuck in my throat, grown like a tumour or a foetus but faster, from poppy seed to broad bean until it’s swollen so hard I can’t say anything more. In your bunk bed, behind your back, I lie, holding on to your plaited hair like a rope. First Blood 00:00 / 01:11 The dolls are bleeding, all of them leaking, red and black from their forever open mouths, what can we fill them with? I don’t like the way they look at me like they expect something more. Since you’ve been gone, they’ve started touching themselves, running their plastic fingers up their own shiny thighs. I don’t know how to stop them, so I wait for you to come home, whilst they slide their tongues around their lips and look at each other, eyes growing big. Last night I filled an egg cup with baking soda and vinegar, and tried to clean their faces, you were still gone, they wouldn’t let me near, until I promised to pour the vinegar away and bleed with them, so I did, legs touching, my bled fingerprints forming like wax seals upon our skin. Broken Waters 00:00 / 01:22 Most people drown without making a noise or splashing. See me here Baby, watch me lying out plank, below the surface, all that stillness, all that peace, see how long I can breathe down here alone. You must trust me, I am your mother after all, don’t think about the firefighter who lies to the woman on the phone inside the burning building, says he’s on his way up to save her, then hands her brother back the phone, tell her you love her, knowing all his tears won’t be enough to quiet the flames, I am your mother after all, I am made to do this. When the mother harp seal leaves its cub, nobody calls it a mistake, I have been at this much longer than twelve days – just let me float here a while, Baby you will still remember my face. It will be the same one you wear every time life cuts in such a way – the serration drags the exact formation of ripples upon its shape. Publishing credits All poems: Primers: Volume Four (Nine Arches Press) Broken Waters: Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre Weekly Poem Share

Poet Geraldine Clarkson reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Geraldine Clarkson back next the poet Geraldine Clarkson lives and works in Warwickshire. Her various occupations have included teaching English to refugees and migrants, working in warehouses, care homes, libraries, churches, offices and a call centre, and living in a silent monastic order for some years in South America. She has published poetry pamphlets with Smith|Doorstop and Shearsman Books. Her debut collection, Monica's Overcoat of Flesh , was published by Nine Arches Press in 2020. the poems winding down 00:00 / 01:04 maybe a tree falls or a bear keels maybe all the creatures of song are brought low and the grasshopper drags itself along and the moon fails clearly a light has left the earth bleeding slowly while the waters stopped clapping their hands it’s the end of lilies and liver-freckled butterflies the last flew off this summer the wind is tired now has petit mal is going home shutting up shop just a few scarlet leaves spin in its sigh as it boards up the door Muzzy McIntyre 00:00 / 01:35 Muzzy McIntyre brushed her bangs and went pell-mell down the staircase. The banisters pulled her palms back with their waxy residue and the ball at the bottom looked grey-black with grease. This place has gone downhill, she thought, descending. But she went out onto the front step and the mahogany door was flaming—it was that time of day—and the brass lion knocker, brilliant, was shooting out gold spears. All around, the red brick of the houses was deepening. For the sake of these twelve minutes or so, perhaps, one could tolerate the blanched mornings and the puny electric nights; the dust; and critters; the drunken singing of the wind in the passage; the pious crooning of the neighbours. The waiting. Her other self, the slow Muzzy, ambled out to take the air. She looked up and down the street, laid the flat of her hand to her forehead, against the slanting light. Another fine day tomorrow, she drawled, headlocking a memory. Brood 00:00 / 01:59 After two unhappy marriages, my sister settled on a man who marked their mid-life union by retraining as a vermin operative, the neon strips in his kitchen having turned caramel with cockroaches. He mastered the mechanics and theory of quenching little lives that flickered briefly in strange environs. And noted, for instance, that when roaches infested a disused cooker, it was always the babies who emerged first when you ignited the gas. The gas was, that if you left it burning, little roarers kept on coming, and in increasing sizes, till the fat daddy-roaches finally left the ship. He studied weevils which flourished in flour. And silver fish that slivered at human approach. Rat-trapping was daunting at first, then a thrill. I heard that housewives would call him out to halt fledgling tits which had flown into summer kitchens, twitching behind fridges; pigeons plumped in chimneys; squirrels nesting in lofts, all high hiss and spit. He used to say, my sister’s husband, as he polished his leather belt on a Saturday, ready for church (the belt had a fine silver buckle which shone and jingled), that pests are only creatures who happen to have strayed into alien territory. It made me hope my sister pleased him, and fitted in; was protective of her brood. Publishing credits winding down: POEM (Summer 2017) Muzzy McIntyre: No. 25 (Shearsman Books) Brood: Infinite Rust Share

Hear poet Rebecca Goss read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Rebecca Goss © Natalie J Watts back next the poet A poet, tutor and mentor who lives in Suffolk, Rebecca Goss is the author of four full-length poetry collections and two pamphlets. Her second collection, Her Birth , was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2013 – while in 2015, she was shortlisted for both the Warwick Prize for Writing and the Portico Prize for Literature. Rebecca is the 2022 winner of the Sylvia Plath Prize, and her newest collection, Latch , was published by Carcanet in 2023. the poems The Hounds 00:00 / 00:48 It’s as if something calamitous is coming. Their lament rising across fields, its claim on the dawn keeping all the birds silent. I want to know what stirs them, the force of this pack. What causes them to stand, muscled frames trembling, throats full of baleful song. I am wakeful, rapt and disrupted, their bays sonorous against glass. Should I slide the thin pane, push my upper body into emerging light let them scent out my sex, and tell them we are all afraid. O this night, this bidding, claws at the latch, pure thunder of them running, my mouth opening to the cool and agitated air. At the Party I Shadowed Susie 00:00 / 01:02 who was happy to slip away walk with me into the back field where I drank her 17-year-old wisdom could look at her hair the opposite colour of mine her blue jeans convincing myself my twelve years were not an issue both of us plucking at grasses when we got almost to the oak we ventured back to the adults neither of us missed I lost Susie in the drunken stir of my parents’ garden until night got ready to flood the party I thought I might go in search of her or the cats so went to the furthest barn and in the black that had rolled inside I saw Susie being held by Richard the boy I’d ignored because his punky clothes confused me now his left hand inside Susie’s back pocket as they sought each other’s mouths air urgent unfamiliar standing there considering myself betrayed waiting until breakfast to utter it the sudden turn of my parents’ heads curious to know what I saw my mother sensing something flicker staring at her daughter so full of heat and blood and questions Gate 00:00 / 00:27 Here she comes, hair a stream, path home, dog’s ears pricked to the latch, and I’m in the garden, pear tree spilling, day of poems behind me, hiding my stored dark, thinking I must look old and not extraordinary, her skin the truest surface wanting to kiss her as she drops her bag, turns, every atom of her near me, and I make my slight gesture, feel the quickening. Publishing credits All poems: Latch (reproduced with gratitude to Carcanet Press for its kind permission)

Poet Steve Denehan reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Steve Denehan back next the poet Steve Denehan lives in Ireland with his wife Eimear and daughter Robin. A widely published, award-winning poet, he's the author of two chapbooks and two collections (one of which is forthcoming from Salmon Press). He's been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and Best New Poet. the poems Fists 00:00 / 02:01 It took me forty thousand punches to realise forty thousand too many sure, I landed a few, enough to take me to this ring but he is quick as light and made of iron and his punches his punches come again, and again, and again the fists of my father, my mother, my schoolmates, of God himself the glancing blows, the blows of the children I saw for half an hour last Christmas eve I am winded from two body shots unseen I disguise it but he knows, I look in his eyes, he knows he comes for me and though the ring is an infinite thing I can find no place to hide then, an opening, a tunnel for my right hand and I watch my fist blur toward him and feel the contact rock the columns of his temple and he is dazed and he is mine and his eyes look through me and I call upon that old right hand one last time the hand that signed my title deeds, my wedding certificate my divorce papers the hand that held my babies, that held your face before that first kiss my sledgehammer, my bomb but, it is so heavy now and the fuse won’t light, and then, I know two seconds pass two seconds that will stretch over all my days two seconds when it was all there, another world two seconds when I betray myself, as I always do and so, I wait, with nothing left to get what I deserve and when he comes I do not run, and I am baptised in a flood of fists I fall through the roar of the crowd and am caught by the blanket of childhood the lights above are so bright, and so pure, and just beyond my reach I lie on my back and watch dozens of moths in frenzied compulsion flying head first into the lights again and again, and again Jesus or Rasputin 00:00 / 00:46 I wonder how many times these raindrops have fallen they land on the attic window loud and heavy reminding us that eventually they will win I wonder what these raindrops have fallen on spitfires and lollipops brides and widows endings, beginnings, endings I wonder if these raindrops have fallen on Hitler or Harold Lloyd, Cleopatra or Elvis, you, Jesus or Rasputin the sky is a grey lake pouring itself upon us muddying the garden puddling the drive trapping us, again it is June Plastic Bag 00:00 / 01:03 We stood on the canal bank under a bruise of a sky she was full of questions questions that as usual I couldn’t answer we stared at the fish “What type of fish is that?” “How can you tell which fish are boys and which are girls?” “Why is a swarm of fish called a school?” “How many fish are there?” I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know she pointed at a plastic bag in the water near the far bank “Is that a jellyfish?” I did know I told her that she was a silly monkey that it was just a plastic bag that jellyfish would never be in a canal only in the sea in saltwater she was quiet for a moment “Would jellyfishes like canals?” “Why is there salt in the sea?” “Will there ever be salt in the canal?” “Who put that plastic bag there?” I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know Publishing credits Fists: The Irish Times Winner of the Hennessy New Irish Writing 2019 Jesus or Rasputin: Miles of Sky Above Us, Miles of Earth Below (Cajun Mutt Press) Plastic Bag: exclusive first publication by iamb Share

Poet Claire Trévien reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Claire Trévien back next © Sophie Davidson the poet Claire Trévien is a Breton-British writer currently living in Brittany, France. The author of The Shipwrecked House and Astéronymes (both from Penned in the Margins), she has most recently published her pamphlet Brain Fugue with Verve Poetry Press. Claire founded Sabotage Reviews , and now co-runs the unique Verse Kraken writing retreats in Brittany. the poems Daytime Drinking Brain 00:00 / 01:17 I hope it doesn’t end up in one of your poems, he says. Give me a coaster and I will create strange confetti, a dagger. Rape is so cliché. Oh I had a bad experience and now it fills all my words with paralysis and smoke and the trauma of it Yes, I agree, quite enough already from other … The pub is intricate like a chocolate box – and just as lacquered and you came back wrong. [end] [your poems] [he says] [give me] [I will create] [a dagger] [so cliché] [experience] [my words] [smoke] [of it] [quite enough] [from others] [like] [a box] [lacking] [and] [wrong] That was the summer that slates fell off my body like dandruff 00:00 / 01:59 every brick of me dismantled and scattered, I found my arm in the roof of a church. The neighbours collected my fingernails and brought them to me in a glass jar “for when the time is right”. That summer exploded my insides out, was I the city? I felt myself in every street, but nowhere either. My blood was draining down the pavements with the rain. Each bullet in the wall echoed back into my skin. I poked my bones. All of us haunted down the streets looking for our missing limbs. The weather grew so angry with us, we started spitting hail. Every Tuesday to the market, we gull-gathered from stall to stall. It was a miracle the way our legs could carry us from place to place. Our wings clipped and useless. We opened our mouth to speak and only rain came out, dull, grey, roof-like. We are forgetting the names of colours, the way they used to bubble out of our bodies and wriggle through the windows. Our footprints leave ash if anything at all. We must press ourselves into the very walls, hide our feathers from them. A flash of red and all is lost. There is still so much to lose. Sick or Sad? 00:00 / 01:27 Since we cannot speak of the landscape of the crowd, how it turns from hot to cold in a blink, drains my veins dry, makes my body a ghost of itself, you ask me if my absence was due to being ‘sick or sad’? I use the euphemism ‘not well’ to blanket over the trees, the hills, the path that stops being a path, the carpet of burned leaves catching the wheels of trains, the snow duvet that protects the flowers, or kills them (I can never remember which it is). My sadness is sick, my sickness is sad. My sadness has been unplugged from triggers you could relate to and lives in a different city now. My sickness is so connected to my sadness that I cannot tell you which is the chicken, which is the egg. Here is an ankle sprained after it gave way on a flat surface like plastic lit by a lighter. See how it sent my sadness flying and cracked its screen. Here is my stomach full of rams fighting about fleeing. Publishing credits Daytime Drinking Brain / Sick or Sad?: Brain Fugue (Verve Poetry Press) That was the summer that slates fell off my body like dandruff: exclusive first publication by iamb Share

Poet Scarlett Ward Bennett reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Scarlett Ward Bennett back next the poet Scarlett Ward Bennett is a West Midlands poet whose debut collection ache – published by Verve Poetry Press in 2019 – has been nominated for a 2020 Forward Poetry Prize. She was nominated for Best Spoken Word Performer in the 2019 Saboteur Awards, and came third in the Wolverhampton Literature Festival Prize judged by Roy McFarlane. Scarlett runs several poetry workshops, and hosts the 'Versification' poetry evening in Cannock. A self-confessed hedgehog lady, she volunteers for West Midlands Hedgehog Rescue. the poems Culling Season 00:00 / 00:44 Somewhere in a town that is best known for how deep it has dug underneath itself, where the addresses are earthy like “May Dene” and “Old Fallow”, and roads fling themselves lethargically around woodland bends, a pot hole rips the gut out of an exhaust on an accelerating Ford with all the viciousness of antlers on bark. After all, it is rutting season, and it’s all I can think of lately; feuding stags butting skulls, concrete tearing out metal piping, and the way my neighbour boasted to me this morning of the fawn he shot through the eye socket. We're going to have to talk about it at some point 00:00 / 00:46 aren’t we? Except, I don’t want to. Can’t instead we talk of dandelion manes; the way they nose their way through cracks in the pavement, only to be scattered in infinite directions when kicked violently enough, scorned spores spiraling; frantic heads of fine-spun lace dizzying themselves away, as though away is the only place far enough from that damned kicking boot. Can we focus on the flowers and not think of anything else – not of how I ran home to my mum’s house, shame dampening the crotch of my underwear, and not of the beads from my snapped bracelet that I clutched tightly in my fist. What Is True Of Spring 00:00 / 00:54 is true also of ourselves. Learn from her; how she unfurls her flowered fists, waits for buds to burst from the end of branches, like beading blood on kneecaps, or lacquer slicked at the end of knuckled hands. Heal from your wounds womb first; blood is no omen of death, but of the pact we make with life. Even fossils dream of dawn, brittle from singing themselves hoarse clinking away under all that soil like forgotten coins in a deep pocket waiting to be unearthed. What if none of us ever stopped singing, the same way an oak remembers its notes of green once April comes back around no matter how much white winter had buried it in? Publishing credits All poems: ache (Verve Poetry Press) Share

Poet Marvin Thompson reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Marvin Thompson back next the poet Born in Tottenham, North London, to Jamaican parents, Marvin Thompson now lives in South Wales. His debut book, Road Trip , was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. In 2019, Marvin was shortlisted for the Manchester Poetry Prize. He's been awarded grants to have his work translated into Welsh, and was selected by Nine Arches Press in 2016 for the Primers 2 mentoring scheme. He holds an MA in Creative Writing. the poems from Severn Sisters (after Patience Agbabi's Seven Sisters) Dear Martina 00:00 / 03:36 After 19 years of lies, I guess it’s time. My little sis (your mum) was a dream girl. Your dad? That Bristol Carnival weekend I lured him into my house. You were a foetal child listening to Coltrane’s Crescent. He was a thin boy. I got him drunk on gin and as noon grew dark with rain, I locked him in my basement. You’re ape-dark was the kind of filth he’d text her come evening time and she’d laugh it off: ‘He was my strong, blue-eyed boy!’ That was the least of it. She’d sob like a weak girl, scared he was cheating. ‘You’re so childish!’ I spat as one of our spa days came to an end. She lifted her blouse, back pocked by butt ends. It seemed simple: stuff your dad in the dark for a few humid days. Let him cry like a lost child in my basement. But that was a strange time, London riots that last August. Girl, was being tied up enough for a boy who told me your mum’s bruised ribs left him buoyed? From his phone, I caused your mum pain that weekend with messages supposedly for another girl. My gut acid rose, each text sexually dark. Your mum phoned me that Saturday teatime, weeping. ‘He’s blanking me like a child.’ ‘You’re carrying a shining tiara child,’ I sobbed. ‘Don’t lose it through stress.’ This boy in my womb isn’t yours. It was the first time she’d lied to him. Then came the end when I called my sis a tree-swinging darkie from his phone. We became nihilistic girls for one, star-filled Saturday night. Loud girls with nothing to lose. Because she was big with child, I drank for two, your dad hogtied in the dark, still unsure what I’d do with him. Boy oh boy I gave him a good horse kicking at night’s end, birdsong stirring while I sang, ‘Summertime … ’ At the end, that thin boy blubbed, his face blood-dark, his snot green as thyme. You were a fatherless child. Sorry. And sorry if this girl doesn’t press send. Samantha 00:00 / 04:02 Suitcases carouselled in Pacific standard time. A Black Barbie was dropped by a pouting girl. I crouched down for it. The girl’s grin was endless, the same kind of smile I hoped for from Kai’s children. He felt more my man when he mentioned them, his jokes buoyed. But then I pictured his granddad, Aid, in the dark of a 1940s Kentucky noon where church hats were darkened by woodland shadows. My gran watched time pass through her camera’s viewfinder, the crowd buoyed. Her friends were all grinning pigtailed girls, the rope just out of shot. Aid was still a child, his burnt limbs blurred. The photo marked the start of the end for my mum’s lungs. She asked me, ‘Please put this to an end.’ I froze: her bedside lamp pushing back the dark and her yellow eyes turning me into a trembling child. She pointed to her bag. Its leather was cracked like time, the photo in a pocket made for girls to zip secrets. ‘They lynched him. He was just a boy. Call me Mamma Bundren!’ His smirk was boyish. Then tears trickled, the room’s heat endless. I gazed at the creased photo like a girl infected by its terror and its darkness. A date was scrawled: 12/7/41. I heard time grind. Mum’s face looked faint as she lay childlike: ‘This photo gave me nightmares throughout my childhood. Your gran made me date a Ugandan boy out of guilt!’ Asleep, my mum’s scent seemed beyond time like my Tewkesbury gran whose words had soft endings and a Kentucky twang that twirled round her darkroom – a place that held more magic than Kodak girls. In the airport’s hotel room I dreamt Aid’s White girlfriend (a tall, sweet 16 who fled west with her child) and my first Skype with Kai: my, ‘Sorry,’ sounded bitter and dark. Us made my heart leap and leap like a boy. In the shower, I prayed that our meeting wouldn’t be the end. In the cab, my neck pulsed in panicked time. ‘My Nikon’s my life,’ I told Kai, the shore dark, Kai’s boy and girl chasing the sun’s end. We raced the children, smiling wide as time. Leila 00:00 / 03:37 In the shadows of a Royal Gwent ward, God called time on my DNR. My once sassy inner girl sobbed with envy. Undressing at shift’s end I recalled how I’d act like a spoilt child when my wife preened for work. I’d call her, ‘Ladyboy!’ and let her grab my arms, our kisses rum dark. Most afternoons I hide in the curtained dark re-watching The Wire to kill time. Like a toffee in the mouth of a doleful boy, noise dissolves to ‘Walk on By’ sung by my girl. When I found her, her bathwater was red as childbirth, a Bloody Mary staining her life’s end. God’s cruel game began in the West End. The DKNY fitting room was dark and I was there with black jeans – a child mourning her dead Jamaican dad. A knock halted time. I opened the door to see a shy shop girl. She asked to change the bulb, her cheeks boyish. Her accent? Cape Town. Her freckles? Oh boy! Her badge said Sabrina. That night in Crouch End we laughed and sank shots. A week later, like schoolgirls, we snuggled up and watched Luther in the dark. Sunday nights were our enchanted ice-cream time. I’d watch her sleep while scenes from my childhood churned my gut. I knew I was being childish but her Cape Town accent recalled school’s skinhead boys and PW Botha – his voice the vile sound of apartheid time. When our first kiss came to its sweet, breathy end hate invaded my lungs and made the world feel dark. I tried to talk about it but I’m a reticent girl; I clammed up and Sabrina became a good-time girl who held each Bloody Mary like a newborn child. ‘It's my accent?’ she’d ask in our bedroom’s dark, ‘No!’ I’d snap and she’d run to one of her Tinder boys. We decided to elope one June weekend, our hearts cartoon bombs ticking, ticking time. During anaesthetists’ dark, empty time, the sound of Sabrina’s, ‘Walk on By’ hugs me like a child. She’s still my buoy, my girl, my wife: her voice endless. Publishing credits All poems: Primers: Volume Two (Nine Arches Press) Share

Poet Jo Bratten reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jo Bratten back next the poet Jo Bratten writes and teaches in London, but was raised off-grid on a farm in Ohio’s rust belt. She moved to the UK to study at the University of St Andrews, where she completed a PhD on the modern novel. Her poetry has appeared in Ambit, Butcher’s Dog, The Interpreter's House, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Ink Sweat & Tears and elsewhere. Jo is working on both her first pamphlet, and a novel about cicadas. the poems Sunset Over Watford 00:00 / 00:52 I am not terribly good at love. Yet I begin to think I could be, if love is loving small things: the moment when the second magpie lurches across the path; or the girl in the purple coat running towards the dog she doesn’t know; old men on the bench with sandwiches in the rain; the back of your neck; breathing you in quick, thick gulps, like cold water after bedtime; the smell of dying daffodils that still strain to hold their heads bravely towards the February sun as it sets over Uxbridge, Ruislip, Pinner, Hatch End, Watford – all bright and glittering in the smoky air. Amulet 00:00 / 00:57 In these times we tighten, fasten locks like lips, stockpile pills, believe our own haptic power to summon the fever-gods, draw blood to rub across the lintel, into apotropaic scratches cut into doors and walls. You touch me like a mezuzah, hang me by your heart, an omamori, a scapular, a locketed caul; hold me on your lips a cicada of jade, in your pocket like a hare’s foot, a whelk’s shell; I circle you like hag stones, word you a breverl: the skies are quieter, clean; a blackbird pauses, tilts her head, builds a nest. After Us 00:00 / 00:53 When the floods clear what will be left, washed up at our gate or lodged between the polite paving stones along our tree-lined road? Other people’s newspapers, bags for life, little rusted badges with an old slogan, lost socks and dreams, righteous anger bloated like a dead rat, effluent thoughts and prayers sludged blackly across our doormat’s smiling welcome; bits of ourselves we’d cut away and scattered in the river as fish food stuck now on the stern brick of our house, obscene in their pinkness, puckered like little sucking mouths, trying to get back in where it is so warm and so dry. Publishing credits Sunset Over Watford: Ambit Amulet: The Mechanics’ Institute Review After Us: Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal Share

Poet Tara Skurtu reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Tara Skurtu back next the poet Tara Skurtu is an American poet, writing coach, and speaker. A two-time U.S. Fulbright grantee and recipient of two Academy of American Poets prizes, a Marcia Keach Poetry Prize, and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, she is the author of the chapbook Skurtu, Romania and the full poetry collection The Amoeba Game . Tara is based in Bucharest and leads creativity seminars and writing workshops internationally. the poems Hum for Indrė 00:00 / 01:13 Are you aching? The poet held my hand at the edge of the world’s smallest village. Think of pain as a plane. She wanted me to forgive what I couldn’t forgive. Only the side door to the Assumption of Mary was unlocked—she knelt at the Virgin’s painted feet and prayed, and I took pictures of a crucified Jesus in a fishbowl under the alter table. She wanted me to love the man I couldn’t love. It may take a year. Outside, she translated, word for word, a Lithuanian saying: “When you fall down drunk, the ground will catch you.” My god is no god but the God of Human Will. I needed the poet’s prayer, I wanted her to will my forgiveness to bloom. A bruise is a plane: I fell, the ground caught me, I got up. Writing Poetry is Like Fielding Ground Balls 00:00 / 01:47 Someone is smoking in the lavatory and one of the flight attendants says shit and she gets on the mic and says whoever this is will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law upon landing while I’m writing I hate ballpoint pens with a ballpoint pen because they don’t spray my period-brown ink all over the white designer jeans of the gorgeous Miami woman to my right—which was how I learned not to write poems in a metal box in the sky with a 1930s Sheaffer fountain pen—and I was the one waiting at the lavatory door when we all smelled the smoke and didn’t know what to do and I’d already been between two bombs at a bombing, so after being ordered back to my seat with a full bladder of wine, I order a whiskey, and this turns the Romanian flight attendant on, who winks and gives me nuts and olives on the house, and by now I know again we aren’t about to explode this time, and swallow my nip and eat my snacks and continue, with this ballpoint pen I hate, working on what will, nineteen days short of two years from now, become a poem, and we land in Bucharest and everyone but me claps in perfect post-communist unison and the smoking man gets away with it. Penance 00:00 / 01:58 But it was I who held your arm as the three gravediggers hammered your father’s narrow coffin shut. It was I who drank every pour of your mother’s vișinată, sucked the liquored meat of each sour cherry from its pit, swallowed even the floating worms. But it was also I who disobeyed the two saggy-breasted, callous- handed babas in headscarves, who, after asking if I knew anyone at the funeral, scolded me in Romanian for placing twelve marvelous white roses on the grave and not in the village church, where they’d live longer, be admired by the living. It was I who wiped the vișinată vomit from your face, wiped it from your arms and hands with my hands in the back of the backyard before dark. Daily I wipe everyone else’s piss from public toilet seats. And daily I let traitors kiss my cheeks in public—but tonight, in my sleep, I’m finally arriving in outer space. I’m in orbit with my husband, whom I’m leaving for no one. We’re breathing air that’s just air and I want to go back to our speck on the sliver of earth out the window, but this is now and I am here, so tonight we’re in space for years, and this may shorten my life—but what a view! Publishing credits Hum: Poetry Wales Writing Poetry is Like Fielding Ground Balls: AGNI Penance: The Baffler Share

Poet Neil Elder reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Neil Elder back next the poet Neil Elder’s The Space Between Us won the Cinnamon Press Debut Poetry Collection Prize in 2016. Prior to this win, Neil published Codes of Conduct (Cinnamon Press, 2015) and Being Present (The Black Light Engine Room, 2017). His latest collection, And The House Watches On, will be published in 2020. Neil lives and teaches in North-West London. the poems Ministry of Waiting 00:00 / 01:22 Of course there are no clocks, or windows, that might allow guests to track time. And these days only people over forty wear a watch, and we’re less concerned about them. Mobile devices? We block network signals so that guests can go unbothered by distractions. The décor is always neutral; if anyone asks, which they don’t, we tell them the colour is August Wheat, but you and I can see it’s beige. A pastel shade here or there, a couple of abstract pictures, nothing too involving, nothing too fussy. New arrivals are the most tricky to placate, a lot of pacing often occurs, they fret about why they are here, and for how long; adjustment can take time, but every guest comes round at some point: notice how their bodies mould themselves to the shape of the furniture. Now, let’s leave this Department to look at another Ministry; Suffering is near-by, or perhaps you’re interested in Broken Promises? Truth be told it could be some time before anyone is called from Waiting. Writing 00:00 / 00:52 I am writing this letter of resignation, the one I’ve written every Monday for the last eighteen months, to make myself believe that I might take a risk some time; just pack the basics and head off to South America. I’ll swim Amazonian tributaries, live without Wi-Fi, marry a Yanomami lady and paint myself in clay. Or I might change my name and slip away, to drive a taxi on the graveyard shift in some place where no one lives. But on my desk stands that picture of my kids, and there behind them looms the ocean liner I am chained to – iceberg just out of shot. Like My Daughter Says 00:00 / 00:23 If, like my daughter says, you are now a million particles orbiting in space, may you keep on spinning. Or else as I look out tonight, I hope you fall like snow and settle for a while. Publishing credits Ministry of Waiting: Like This (4Word) Writing: Being Present (Black Light Engine Room) Like My Daughter Says:The Space Between Us (Cinnamon Press) Share