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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 Carolyn Jess-Cooke read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Carolyn Jess-Cooke wave 4 autumn 2020 back next the poet Carolyn Jess-Cooke lives in Glasgow with her husband and four children. Her prize wins include an Eric Gregory Award, a Tyrone Guthrie Prize, and a Northern Writers' Award. Her third poetry collection will be published by Seren in 2021, and her fiction has appeared in 23 languages. Carolyn's most recent novel (published as C J Cooke) is The Nesting . the poems 00:00 / 01:31 00:00 / 02:31 00:00 / 01:17 Publishing credits

Hear poet Nathan Dennis read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Nathan Dennis wave 6 summer 2021 back next the poet Nathan Dennis is a playwright and poet of Floridian extraction. He is the Vintner-in-Chief of Wine Cellar Press, a poetry press dedicated to free and formal verse in equal measure. Nathan's work has appeared in The Knight's Library , Anti-Heroin Chic , The Cabinet of Heed and Serotonin. His upcoming chapbook, I Am Hades , is forthcoming from Exeter Publishing. the poems Waltz on the Adriatic 00:00 / 01:03 I’m running out of money. And the money I have, I’m burning on twelve euro Turkish Coffee. Sacking Constantinople, cup by cup, as a Deadbeat Doge seated outside myself in a composite memory of marrying The Sea, in the Drawing Room of Old Europe – where we turn our sins to museums, and make most serene our palaces of failure. My dwindling euro pays for more dwindling daylight, golden dusk that smudges off the cruelties of cold accounts: bank or historical. A sunset censor. A fuzzy shadow blanket. A halo of streetlights off the Basilica that washes our decay into the Adriatic. Venice: I weep the beauty of atonement as the stars tinker down a soft waltz on Piazza San Marco that I shuffle to in a twisting trinity of errors repeated, that somehow becomes more beautiful with each misstep. Blood Orange 00:00 / 01:23 I met a blood orange at the grocery store. I wore gloves when I picked up the blood orange. I wore gloves when I brought the blood orange home. I wore gloves when I took off my gloves. I asked the blood orange to get a test, But the blood orange said that tests were hard to come by And to trust her, because oranges are organic And I can trust organic. And the orange asked me if I had been tested, And I said no, but I wore gloves when I picked her up. So the orange said she wasn’t worried, so I shouldn’t be worried, But if I was worried, she would just peel herself. But I was very hungry. And her peel looked very clean. So I ran the blood orange under some water. And I lathered her peel until her peel relaxed. And I peeled her peel with nails clipped clean, Until the scent of citrus was screaming in my nostrils And the hemoglobin in the pith strained into my hands As rivulets, flooding the channels of my palm lines. And the death god that loomed so large in my mind Shrank so microscopic when looking at an orange unfurled, Asking me so kindly to eat. And vitamin C does a body good. Leviathan America 00:00 / 01:44 Danger! Danger! Harpoons are upon her – Us! Us! Leviathan America: Sperm whale, punctured and moored by her own spur, Bartered without care to any stranger. Danger! Leviathan America! At sea: Cannibal of Democracy. See how she grows fat: guzzling her krill Past her fill. Terror on the open sea: A fifty-foot blubber-laden danger. Stranger! Leviathan America! She: ravenous for ivory and oil, She: sells her calf to Ahab for a helm, She: stalks the seas for leaky heads of spoil. Have you seen that? A whale captain a ship? Watch the leviathan spear her own kin, Overladen with sin, she grows greater. Traitor! Leviathan America! Mutiny! Mutiny on the high sea! No barter left! She sold her sweet plunder. She sold all her oil for all her blubber. She sold her blubber for her ivory. She sold her ivory for her harpoons. She sold her harpoons for her ambergris. She sold her ambergris for drops of oil. And her ship rattles as the tempest howls, And her crew flees as the storm cleaves her bow. And all the sharks and orcas and krakens Circle the overladen cetacean With harpoons of her own perverse making. Lashing, lancing her till the chop foams red From her leaky head: weeping blood and dread Rancid failure: curdled over us – her! Hunted and drowned at our hand, our mother. Mother! Leviathan America! Publishing credits Waltz on the Adriatic: Neologism Poetry Journal (Issue 28) Blood Orange: Anti-Heroin Chic Leviathan America: Wine Cellar Press (Issue One)

Hear poet Ruth Taaffe read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Ruth Taaffe wave 10 summer 2022 back next the poet Hailing from Manchester and having lived variously in Sheffield, Thailand, Australia and Singapore, Ruth Taaffe is now settled in the south of England. She writes about her experiences of living overseas, the idea of home, and how the natural environment finds its way into our identity. Ruth has taught English internationally for more than 20 years, and has a Masters degree in Creative Writing from Lancaster University. Her poems have appeared in such literary journals as The Poetry Village , Acumen and One Hand Clapping , and her debut collection is Unearthed . the poems Driving Over the Snake Pass Under a Shed with a Goldfish on my Lap 00:00 / 01:04 These were the final items to repatriate taken over the hills to my first home – the cats had gone ahead two weeks before. Young enough to still depend on parents, we knew the baggage that we did not take could be left at their door and kept for us. Tied to the roof rack like a tortoise shell, the shed, unconstructed, was just boards of wood. I peered skyward as you drove, for any shift in light foreshadowing some avalanche of splinters. We kept the radio off, tuned in to creaking and the steady slosh of fish water that I was powerless to stop. We had no idea how our life would be rebuilt a thousand miles away, or why fish, when moved into some larger water, grow. Acrobat 00:00 / 01:23 He toes the wire which sways like a hammock, outstretches his knotted arms of rope. Ears ringed gold as a sailor of air. His back and chest inked by compass, star. Fixing his eye low on the horizon where he’ll land in time with our ovation, he climbs the unicycle, inches backwards, slowly unwalking the plank. We buoy him up with our applause, become his crew, his wave and tide, life vest of his triumph. And he ours. Four clubs fly like seagulls mobbing a fish, or words trying to land on a line. Each catch sharpens our awe. Then, he’s passed a fifth on fire! We stow the clapping, trade in calm. For this moment we anchor him with our belief, as the solo drumbeats start. He catches in time, leaps to land, and signs a charter of hope on our hearts. Nightjar 00:00 / 00:58 Squat like a knot of dark upon dark at the edge of dusk. Folded blades of downed chopper, landed mound of bark and leaves. Your snake eye opens up like a moon glassing the night. Bug-eater lacking fangs to pierce the nocturne skin, only your baleen beak sifting plankton from the sky, flat as an unsent valentine. You shoot soft tuts of fireworks cluck up Morse code. Heart monitor for the forest, it was told that you stole milk from goats, but you preserve such sweetness, Chupacabra. Open wide, let the world pour its song back into your throat. Publishing credits Driving Over the Snake Pass Under a Shed with a Goldfish on my Lap: 192 Magazine Acrobat: exclusive first publication by iamb Nightjar: Finished Creatures (The Poetry Village)

Hear poet Emily Blewitt read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Emily Blewitt wave 5 spring 2021 back next the poet Author of This Is Not A Rescue and poetry submissions editor for New Welsh Reader , Emily Blewitt has poems in The Rialto, Poetry Wales, Ambit and The North , among others. She was Highly Commended in the 2016 Forward Prizes, and has appeared at the Hay Festival and on Radio 4. Emily has collaborated with other writers and artists on the Weird and Wonderful Wales project, and is a recipient of a Literature Wales bursary. She's currently writing her second collection. the poems 13 weeks, 2 days 00:00 / 01:18 I don’t know how to say it, but there you were—little ghost in my ceiling, floating on your side. The outline of your slim hips, strung spine stretched lazily in the same position I sleep some nights, facing away from your father. We watched you refuse to show us your nose. You offered your crown instead, crossed and uncrossed your arms and legs, dipped upside-down. You were turning the way a seal rolls underwater for joy. You were radiant and reluctant to share. The midwife said this was your place, that we were just visiting. When finally you lay on your back, a small otter cradling clam and rock, she was quick as a heron slipping a fish to the gullet to capture your image. She had to be. You were elusive. A natural phenomenon observed perhaps twice. Luminous like algae on the water, like Northern Lights. Archaeology 00:00 / 01:25 It’s getting your eye in: scraping the surface layer by layer with the edge of a trowel, moving the earth towards you and exposing the soil, a clutter of generations before you. Brushing dirt off dirt. Holding dirt to the light and tossing. Sifting dirt like prospectors. We dampen the ground, show the plough-lines’ scar, the clay cap that looks like stone, the outline of the ring pit. Stains show organic matter. Marrow sticks to the tongue. We mark what we find in situ because we must. Context is everything. Love, this is how we find ourselves once more in a field, with swifts and hares and the farmer. Where tributaries fuse, where a person might stand from a rath with her children and look out to sea. For every two people on their hands and knees, four more wait at the edge of the trench. This slow unearthing makes us. We dig, not knowing what it is that we are digging for. Parch Marks 00:00 / 01:26 That was the year it snowed in March. Drifts inside the front door, a small snowman in a corner of the attic, and I crunched up and down the hill to our house in walking boots, keeping to the verge. We scattered bird seed in the garden. I conceived and lost it just before the heatwave struck, in May. The grass singed, my sweet peas failed to flower, our house was airless and we couldn’t sleep or touch each other. The cat shifted from tile to tile. I blistered walking up and down the hill in sandals. By August, thunderstorms broke the tension between us and my headaches eased. You told me that when lightning strikes the junction box three times, it shorts. I became lighter, stronger, like wire. When the clouds cleared, parch marks everywhere: seen from the air, scars on the body of the land that prove there were settlements; that someone once lived here and here . Publishing credits 13 weeks, 2 days: Islands Are But Mountains: New poetry from the United Kingdom (Platypus Press, 2019) Archaeology: exclusive first publication by iamb Parch marks: Creative Countryside (Spring 2019) Author photo: © Michael Willett

Hear poet Sadie Maskery read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Sadie Maskery wave 12 winter 2022 back next the poet Sadie Maskery lives in Scotland by the sea. She's had her poetry published in numerous journals – among them, Fevers of the Mind , The Selkie , Green Ink Poetry , Crow and Cross Keys , Lothlorien Poetry Journal and Burnt Breakfast Magazine . Her chapbook Push was published by Erbacce Press, while her debut collection, Shouting at Crows was published in 2022 by Alien Buddha Press. the poems Beginnings 00:00 / 02:42 The first time we meet the shock is there but small, a pause in the celestial clock; a tick of time suspended, potentiality acknowledged. My heart refinds its beat. Life moves on. In quiet moments I find myself replaying the curve of shadows under your eyes and I wonder at your weariness. Another day, a touch of fingers on my shoulder and the heat flows, how can you caress so intimately? I walk away yet feel you across the room. When our eyes meet I know from the way our cheeks flush, we are magnets, an exquisite tug dilating pupils, veins, souls, it is more than imaginary, this pain, this want. We meet by chance, friends of a friend, and I want to say, if you were to take my hand right now, lead me to an empty room, press your leg between my thighs as I pull your face towards me, the wall cold against my back and the warmth of you so overwhelming I almost faint from hunger quenched, ferocity and joy, terror and delight, your tongue in my mouth, my fingers entangled in your hair, your hands caressing beneath the black soft cotton, belly, breast, my sighs, your breath gasping, diffident explorer, urgent devourer and all this Oh my God my dear did you not know? if you were to take my hand it would be beyond words, beautiful, defiled in ecstacy ... and inevitable – it has happened – it – will – happen – remember – the universe played this moment to infinity before we were born but yes, hi, no I don't think we've actually been introduced, although we've met. We've met. We've met. A Nice Cup of Tea 00:00 / 01:02 I knew he had died Because every day he woke first To bring a nice cup of tea in bed. And that morning the kettle Didn't wake me and he lay Still beside me. I eased into my slippers Padded to the kitchen. Made two teas, put them on tray. The nice cups, with saucers, Fine china that needed a wash Because of the dust, for show Usually, we could see our hands Through the glaze. Nice cups. With fresh milk, not yesterday's. Watched the kettle boil. The steam curled Across the worktop And disappeared. Where does it go I wondered. The sugar shook From the spoon a little. A nice cup of tea. Ruth 00:00 / 01:47 When we were young we played at the beach on a blustery day. The waves snapped against our legs. We bellysurfed through spume, not knowing if the wet on our cheeks was foam or rain or tears of laughter. Then you were tumbled by breakers against the groyne, the length of it, up with the wave and then sucked back by its retreat, and I still laughed because you were a rag doll flailing, sand and weed in your hair, mouth wide. You crawled back to me, stood, and from every inch of you blood welled, a thousand striations of intricate symmetry, delicate etchings, red rubies, mingling on skin marbled with the salt water but shock kept you numb, at first. I don't remember how you reached hospital, maybe someone from the pier phoned. I was confused, you went away, your parents came with white-edged lips and no words. I never saw you again. You were safer away from me and the sea. I went to the beach that winter to watch waves surge and ebb. There was no newly realised aura of doom. I ran fingertips along my body at night, wondered if your scars were raised or flat, if they held in their patterns the beauty of those first beads of blood through the pale, that surprise, and the wonder in your eyes. Publishing credits Beginnings: Push (Erbacce Press) A Nice Cup of Tea: Anser Journal (Dec 2020) Ruth: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Jude Marr read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jude Marr wave 13 spring 2023 back next the poet The Pushcart Prize-nominated non-binary poet Jude Marr (they/them) is the author of the poetry collection We Know Each Other By Our Wounds . Their work has appeared in many magazines in the US, the UK and worldwide. After ten years of living, learning and teaching in the US, Jude is now back in Britain working as a freelance editor and writing coach. They're looking forward to expanding their horizons on the UK poetry scene. the poems Live from the Billionaire Philanthropists’ Banquet 00:00 / 02:06 at this false table appetite is not loss: love cocoons blame while self- proclaimed good servants shave bottom lines and spin kaleidoscopes before the famished (slivered glass as thought salad) as well-tended hands offer bread to shrinking, wrinkled bodies the would-be unhinge their hearts, still filthy from a dream of delights meanwhile children, graveyard wraiths, stuff restructured bread into unlined mouths: their hands hang angular: their eye-skeletons are sockets of birds who sing, featherless in the graveyard of power-hungry minds, dark famine eats air: rainfall’s undelivered: a mess of struts rises around barred gold— three meals feed expectations: a bountiful garden, bread without errors, heart-table dreams and we say, let’s eat expensive: grind night like we grind coffee: remind the pot that we are appetite: but what terror of the rambling heart, rock-fraught and filthy, empties a child’s hand without touching? graveyard children make our sold-out hearts raw: we draw our hands from their hunger: we make coffee without touching the world. Solitary 00:00 / 01:07 spider on a cold expanse of glass: your padded claws, tiny to the human eye, never misstep: your leg-hairs hear the beat of winter’s wings— find my window’s crack and crawl in: my home’s dark corners do not hide a broom: make my room your own: spin filaments as sanctuary, silk strong enough to catch the light— cold-blooded spider: I know you do not fear winter’s beak: nature has made you predator and prey: stay of execution is my offering: all I seek is fractal consolation from the corner of my eye. Silence Will Not Save Us 00:00 / 01:14 word-heat rises, carbon-oxidised, as oily lies combust: on city streets we are still breathing, just: our children trusted us— masks act as word-catchers, trapping holy lies as halitosis, drowning saviour fantasies in spit: still, the unmasked spew their shit— jugglers, jousters, clowns conjure witty lies to please a crowd: word games to distract: even mimes may misdirect— in my silent room, I pass my cup from one hand to the other: I am the loner I declaim, my wasted words already ash— in my room, silent, I smell smoke. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Dale Booton read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Dale Booton wave 13 spring 2023 back next the poet Dale Booton (he/him) is a queer poet from Birmingham whose poetry has been published variously by Verve Poetry Press, Young Poets Network, Queerlings , The North and Muswell Press. He has work forthcoming with Magma , and recently hosted the Young Poets Takeover at Verve Poetry Festival. Dale's debut poetry pamphlet, Walking Contagions , is available to pre-order from Polari Press. the poems Church 00:00 / 01:05 when told that God is not meant to be understood I crumbled felt the weight of expectation as it dragged my body below the floor and held it there if knowledge is power then why can I not know why I am so powerful is it that my voice can be used as a weapon that my thoughts can soar beyond these four walls I’ve heard it said captivity is a state of mind I’ve been told theologists are the wisest of all well I beat Pastor at chess at pool broke out of the cage he put me in little child the Lord moves in mysterious ways but is never wrong so you tell me why you tried to darken my heart denied my being why the spirit of someone can only be what you say it is Classroom 00:00 / 00:54 how strange that want to preserve what is so obvious I have heard parents speak how they don’t want their children to know of people like me just like I don’t want my classes and colleagues to know how alone I feel we erase what we fear what we cannot understand drive it into the shadows in the hope it will never make it to light again here my voice is foreign this place where sexuality is a question-and-answer session each one a stone’s throw further from purpose no room for growth no stature that can define a willingness to teach those whose kin would want you dead Nightclub 00:00 / 00:52 I have heard the music speak to me it was the bodies of friends and strangers that introduced us kindred arms wrapped around the uncomfortable relax we move as one there is strength in physicality there is softness in letting go that not-so-sober shove onto the dancefloor that not-so-innocent rush to be close to some other proximity is breath a closely guarded secret here my breath is not foreign this place where love and lust are two words that begin with l like living Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet David Pecotić read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. David Pecotić wave 17 spring 2024 back next the poet Born a poet nearly five decades ago, David Pecotić has had many adventures in the years between then and now: as seeker after truth, academic, partner, public servant, father and counsellor. Recently, tragedy reawoke in David a need to express himself in poetry. His poems have so far appeared in the Australian Poetry Collaboration and The Canberra Times . David lives in Australia, where he's in a complicated relationship with his daimon. the poems There are Days You Cross Hunted 00:00 / 01:08 There are days you cross hunted in rivers, shaded and breezed. Foot after sucked foot, this little can be a lot if it’s yours in the solid dark. Where you stand, others barely there move slightly unseen and you see to live is to live around yourself closer and finer and doesn’t take the eyes in a face. Where they narrow, they blow in. Where they long, they draw out. Such small round things slip through the net strings. Even at the last strung at the estuary’s edge. Inheritance 00:00 / 02:00 Out of time, I am become what I was: a fisherman off & on a black goddess island, where the fish that make dreams school their poison. Back on shore, I tell the bees the names of every gutted vision earned. A million glass wings beat sweetness in return. Further inland, I am the goat man, hoofed hard-on chasing every woody piece of arse, even my own. Up on the mountain, I’m his father, equally erect but frozen, the holy thief whose hungry mouth made the music. A dead ringer for shades who wings for tricks. Only in the forest dark can I reach down my throat to pull myself out, a vukodlach , wolf-skin turned inside-out, drum-like and ruddy. Village monster I kept down for so long, I had cut my hams, pricked my whole body with pins to prevent this: I cannot pretend after this operation I won’t walk about forcing your submission. Strigun —human by day, demon by night; held in check by my krsnik : the warlock gift with his hawthorn stick, that takes away, gives peace by piercing, the heart again. Hoarfrost Future 00:00 / 01:02 Winter is always colder half-broken— the frost bleeds out as a sacrifice to what comes. Today is as hard and cold, sparkling a sharp wet razor. So many melting facets, so much hoarfrost future. Glass candy hard on a ground we can’t feel getting warmer, so subtle the seasoning. I flow out the same, rhyming the solid ebb-tide— wounded words and eyes swallow unsatiated spongey beds of loved leaves. What does the sun-warmed wind mean to their delicate rise and fall? They tell me to my autumn and spring I don’t owe anything at all. Publishing credits There are Days You Cross Hunted: Australian Poetry Collaboration (Issue 34) Inheritance: Australian Poetry Collaboration (Issue 30) Hoarfrost Future: The Canberra Times (February 2021)

Hear poet Sarah Holland read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Sarah Holland wave 17 spring 2024 back next the poet Sarah Holland is a writer, poet and meditation teacher living in rural England. She's a regular at the writing groups and open mics held by the Poetry Pharmacy , where she also teaches mindful writing practices. This is the very first time Sarah's poems have been published. the poems Unseen 00:00 / 00:43 The sly smile of flesh knows its own beauty. Somewhere, a naked body is screaming, sweating, still. It howls when uncapped by sleeves, cold slicing bone, shocked by its own need to be covered. Now a lonely, lost landscape, blindly eroded. Tiny streams in rivulets you won’t remember weren’t always there. Your care of my nakedness is all I will ever know of love. When I’m next uncovered, I’ll no longer witness myself being seen. Dress in Stars 00:00 / 02:06 The dress is clustered with flowers join the lines between the nodes to find her stories in the eyes of the stars. Virgo Here I trace a girl standing proud in new folds of fabric paid for by her own wreath-weaving hands. The hem is hitched to her waist in a teenage tryst the stars hold her heart when broken. Draco The dress becomes lazy, lounging in corners forgotten for pyjamas and red-tipped hair and freedom and pint-size laughter. Notes are absent, margins full of rhyme. Aquarius The fabric sprawls dazed with travel on a bugged bunk-bed. See here, a map of islands, an elephant’s wrinkled ear, the currency of symbols smoke singing from the folds. The Bears Here is a woman now, buying new dresses from markets, city-chic, following rivers to return to the ring where the bear was tied to steps and she will sometimes wait. Gemini The straps sting like cuts on reddened shoulders muddied by festival swamps. Friends fade to twin with pole stars. Behind a closed door, the dress hangs limp and worn. Leo The dress has been lifted from sun-striped skin a tigress released again and again and again she curls alone into her warmth and swims the wide water. Hercules Hold the dress as carefully as that first love hang from a hook that drags the door but remember to hope. There is still space in its starred sky amongst the moss-worn patches. Gargoyles 00:00 / 01:53 I had remembered you wrong with a hoop in your ear but the curls were real that uncoiled from a cap another woman pressed to your scalp. Coffee from a market stall instantly chilled as the wind whipped the steam to the gargoyles who supped it like breath. We chose a face for each of us and perhaps that was a gift, seeing how we would soon jeer across the distance, bitterness spitting the air. I wanted you to ease me down the river on a boat you had made, wade with me across the brown water. I thought it would be glassy, our faces two stars reflected there. But we were just tourists, disappointed by the churn of the silt and the slime and the mud, a memory punishing itself again and again. The bridge suspended us over floods that might have carried us to fences, flowers. We didn’t know we’d be sucked under, crushed by the wheels of a tour bus as a gargoyle cackled, ringing from a city’s tall tower. I scratch into stone with my nail I don’t want to write these poems anymore but my blood obscures the words. I want to cup you in my palm feel your breath mist my skin. We played house in a home I thought had two beds. I still feel the warmth in our current as I flick fragments of stone into the ripples, sneers etched over smiles, but even though I’ve been here before, we are forever gargoyles. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Ricky Ray read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Ricky Ray wave 3 summer 2020 back next the poet Disabled poet, critic and editor Ricky Ray lives on the outskirts of the Hudson Valley. Author of Fealty and the forthcoming chaps Quiet, Grit, Glory (Broken Sleep Books) and The Sound of the Earth Singing to Herself (Fly on the Wall Press), he's also founding editor of Rascal: A Journal of Ecology, Literature and Art. Ricky's awards include the Cormac McCarthy Prize, the Ron McFarland Poetry Prize and a Liam Rector Fellowship. Ricky was educated at Columbia University and the Bennington Writing Seminars, and can be found hobbling in the old green hills with his old brown dog, Addie. the poems 00:00 / 02:31 00:00 / 01:35 00:00 / 02:37 Publishing credits

Hear poet Di Slaney read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Di Slaney wave 13 spring 2023 back next the poet Di Slaney lives in Nottinghamshire, England, where she runs livestock sanctuary Manor Farm Charitable Trust and independent poetry publisher Candlestick Press . She was the winner of The Plough Poetry Prize 2022 , and has had her poetry broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Di's poems have been published and anthologised widely, as well as highly commended by both The Forward Prizes and the Bridport Prize. She is the author of two poetry collections: Reward for Winter and Herd Queen . the poems Creation 00:00 / 01:48 In the beginning there was a farmhouse without a field, and a woman and a man without children. The man was content but the woman wanted. The old farmhouse knew, it had always known what the people who lived in it wanted, although most wouldn't listen. This woman listened. She heard the house breathe her thirst through its beams, wear her desire into its scuffed flags. She smelled its loss when wind spat ancient soot down the chimney, saw how every spring wildgreen crept a little closer to the back door. So the farmhouse and the woman made a pact, a promise without words. They sealed the bargain with palmpress to wood, flesh on oak. She proved her faith first, reclaimed the land though it wept scars of rubbish when it rained. The woman marked the field with scent and sticks, walked it over and over till she knew the pits and folds like her own body in the dark. The farmhouse waited, humming on a frequency only she could hear. That first winter, with planting done and everything suspended, she doubted the bargain. The cold seemed to freeze out good intentions, make every possible thing one step closer to impossible. But the house still thrummed its constant yes , and when spring returned, and new trees perked first buds east to face the pale sun rising, hope fluttered like greedy sparrows on the feeder. Diptych 00:00 / 01:18 i. Brick by brick If I could lift it up and move it, brick by brick, I’d gladly build it all by hand again myself, and pick the best location here, against these trees, back to the wood, view facing clear downhill towards the stack of small red chimneys huddled round the church, where it sat waiting, calm, untroubled, four hundred years, knowing that such vigil would pay off, timbers aching for it, stone hearth breaking. ii. Buying it back Fitting that this field returns, unharmed, now that the deal is sealed, to where they farmed hard living those long days before, leaving no trace but bones and stones, their ways at odds with my mad pace stuttering slowly to a crawl along the sloping rocky track, across the weatherweary wall with seedlings pointing every crack, my greedy eyes fill up with green, buying it back, borrowing a dream. History of a Field 00:00 / 01:39 Roll it back, roll it back, this greentipped scroll, this loosetop layer, from how-it-is to how-it-used-to-be; unplant the trees, dig up the hedge, blur out the track, return the moat, the gate, the square of earth you see behind the church, give sheep those other lives or deaths, keep rolling till loose cattle stroll black graveyards late at night, pigs begrudge their lack of straw in tinlid huts, hayyield begets huge stacks and roll, keep rolling while World War II Italians pick fat fruit from applepears and sing sweet songs and trick young localhearts with tiny matchplanes crafted under candles in the loft, keep rolling back past all their prayers, soil shifting, harrowed, furrowed, shires turning, bridled, harnessed, tacked; keep rolling – now land is wider uphilldownhill, woodside, broadside, trees reaching overunderround, leaves smacking heads, rumpsandtumps, the forest’s knack to spread and swallowwhole this little patch, its shack of small dominion, its stamp, its hearth, your heart. Stop rolling. Fold it back, fold it back. Publishing credits Creation / Diptych: Reward for Winter (Valley Press) History of a Field: winner of The Plough Poetry Prize 2022