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Poet Sarah Fletcher reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Sarah Fletcher back next the poet Sarah Fletcher is an American-British poet whose poems have appeared in The White Review, The Rialto and Poetry London. Her most recent pamphlet, Typhoid August was published in 2018 by The Poetry Business. She is currently working on the full-length collection, PLUS ULTRA. the poems Capitulation 00:00 / 01:42 i. Feigning the playfulness of Mother-May-I he asks for a days-of-the-cane throwback I refuse Back then I tendered my touch more dearly I lived in his kiss for so long I was born in it Now anechoic and him a guerrillista of nettles and wit I can give him what he came for and what he now resists ii. The decapitated photograph of a torso Sexless in the high contrast tender in the anonymous lust-trade is constant as static to my mind like my friend describing the sting her boyfriend draws from her heels tied and does she feel like a present as he tightens the ribbons so tell me what is your luxury and who delivers it iii. All the milkmaids inconsequential as achoo have jostled into wakefulness at his arrival they are burning their hems legs rising like the vim of popped champagne he says Thank You but I did not mean to revive him you fucking dirty pigeon of a man The Garden of Love's Sleep After Messian’s Turangalila 00:00 / 02:48 Dinner is poured Then: his hand on mine — Instead of sensation I receive The dream Of two green peacocks Pouring smooth grails of touch Each across the other Necks arched in extravagant, Romantic love. * Insomnia swells a congealing city Congests each head with phrases: “A horse called Horus or just Birdy” “A wine press named War on Earth”: Those haute couture contraptions from the ancién French regime * Áwake Who is with me? Whó Will unhook The colours’ ruffles from sunrise Each by each? When we talk about Manifestos I feel white Doves sprung from a Magician’s Sleeves on sleeves Release In this state And at this event * On open caboose On train to Vladivostok Mosquitoes are breeding quickly in the dark Clouds’ petticoats uncross Cross again Flashing the sun from which we cannot hide Which catches us Spoiled and sticky Like Love’s Sunday * The emperor’s clothes are very beautiful and they Are very real I remember them like the song That climbs back to me in snatches: Harbouring The antiseptic beauty ` Harpooning the August moon Haranguing the something something something Noon * Have we slept? I’ve found us Flabberghastly Clean and glamorose Like the courtesan who appears here And all other places in a new state age dress civility Having forgot the crashing sound of a beating door The stench of a night closing in Endarkening O Carrion! * At last Something beautiful arrives! The equal weightéd phrase That leaves your mouth and the sky At the same time The Judgment 00:00 / 01:37 ‘It’s not supposed to be like that’ he said and then accused me of embellishing it all. But I swore I told him nothing more or less than how it really felt. ‘Embellishing’s for dresses’ I explained, holding my ground. ‘Dresses,’ he repeated, looking down, ‘then what are you?’ I told him how I felt like rotting fruit, which is to say too sticky and browned-over at the edges; how my lips became a pith to be peeled off. And how we moved like we were drowning, but in the way a horse might drown, which is to say, showing resistance. Which is to say, still looking for some ground, some anything, something to stand on and start galloping. He sighed, and said that I sounded all wrong; it should be different, that with him, it would be different. ‘How’s it supposed to feel then, sir?’ I asked. He smirked and pulled me in, administering the Bible-black conviction of his kiss, the hands-in-hair pulp of his love. I felt my body pull; my legs go weightless once again. He whispered in my ear ‘like this.’ Publishing credits The Judgment: The Rialto and Kissing Angles (Dead Ink Books) Capitulation: Typhoid August (Poetry Business) The Garden of Love's Sleep: The White Review Share

Poet Rachael de Moravia reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Rachael de Moravia back next the poet Rachael de Moravia is a writer, journalist and university lecturer whose arts, culture, travel and business features have appeared in UK and international publications. She's been a magazine editor, broadcast journalist and radio news presenter, and her essays, fiction and poetry have been published widely – both in print and online. Rachael was granted an Authors’ Foundation Award from the Society of Authors in 2019. the poems The Topography of War Home 00:00 / 03:36 By the window, a grandmother sits, grey eyes on the jagged edges of buildings, a no- longer city of disorder and dust, powdered to destruction, the ashes of white marble. Precious ancient city, my ash-Shahbaa, living, breathing, marble {white} veined with porphyry {red} and diorite {green}, cracked and broken, open-veined, bleeding into dust, emptiness and substance bleeding out together on the margins of the streets. In dreams she hears {impact} the sound of one glass edge against another glass edge almost like a whisper; in waking she sits with splintered glass in her lap like jewels embroidered in the folds of black fabric, here in the frame of the once-window. Framed as in a painting, and, if looking up from the streets, caught in a moment, the moment a painter imprisons his seated subject looking elsewhere towards an imagined horizon, eternal gaze falling into the distance, she sits. Ancient city of calcined bone-ash, powdered minarets, ash-drift alleys, souqs submerged. {annihilate} They leave, they return. They burn, they destroy. They come to hide, shelter, rebuild; dredging, sifting, dreading, shifting. She doesn’t recognise the map laid out beyond the window now, the chart in the frame. Cartographer of disorder, she scans the ruins of the city. She tries to trace the arches of the caravanserai, delineate the rooves of the hammam. The walls of the citadel lay in ruins in the scarred landscape of her memory. Streets cede to dust cede to twisted steel, twisted like the limbs of pistachio trees in the orchards she knew as a girl. She is in the orchards and at home, past and present eviscerated, past and present forming a continuous loop as she sits in the window of the horizonless city. The grey city suffocates its past in a toxic fog of dust, and, sitting by the window, she recalls fragments of childhood; technicolour days and vivid past-lives preserved in black and white on glossy paper in the unsealing peeling plastic film of dry albums in dusty boxes. Former adhesions unstick in the present; mortar crumbles, families fragment, half-lives corrode. Mortars fall, mortar disintegrates. What holds together is torn apart, coherence to chaos. {mortar // mortar} For millennia we spoke this language of binding and building — now the words crumble in our mouths like broken teeth in bad dreams and we spit out destruction. {mort // morte} Steel shell-fragments pierce the words of a poem daubed on the lime-mortared citadel walls. City of learning, here is the lesson: lessen, lessen. Hospital 00:00 / 03:32 The evening sun gives the city a golden aura, hushed and hallowed, phoenix-feather clouds the colour of fire. It lays itself across the white façades like the yellowing photos in dry albums, a sepia city. {sepia // sepsis} Yellowbrown, sulfur mustard, toxic halo. A pause in the bombardment and the smoky city tries to catch its breath, but its lungs fill with weaponised air, bronchial alleyways and arches {inhale} grilles // gills {breathe} balconies, lintels {breathe} vaults, cupolas {breathe} the vapour penetrating tunnels and passageways, and deep into the alveoli of filigree windows and lattice-work shutters. Porous structures exhale their dead. A father carries his child through the scorched streets. The shattered concrete of the hospital climbs to eat the sky and spits out shell-casings caught between its teeth. He sits by the bed, fingers pulling at the thin white sheet, fingers flexing and tensing against the fabric the way he once gripped bedsheets in ecstasy. Now he rents in agony. His child lays, dustgrey skin, ashes to ashes to ashes, the hell of this skindust, fleshwounding red. Doctors shout to be heard but despair is louder. Louder still are eyes {clawed} and throats {raw}. Strip-lights flicker — doctors pause — flicker again and go out. The hospital is lit only by the evening, by the dark greyscape of trauma, and in the dark, bodies {pupils fixed} still writhing and convulsing. The blind acrid air scavenges in the dark for verbs: to choke, to vomit, to curdle. Powerless, the ventilators and monitors are silent, dead as the back-up generator in the basement where the dead used to lay. Now they lay in the dust. Treating the just-living, doctors scratch the cupboards bare for antidote, for atropine, for alkaloid. Running through corridors {bloodstream} labyrinthine in the dark, they go hunting for liquid relief, for release. Desperate to stay awake, exhausted, a father {don’t leave me} drifts bodily to the halfworld of dream-state where he walks between the planted lines of pistachio trees, the lines he walked a thousand times with brothers and uncles at harvest time. In the dark of his sleep the lines of trees become lines running into bodies, the lines of hospital drips and tubes, the bodies dissolving into sheets on beds, threadbare sheets becoming brittle sheets of paper, lines drawn on paper like careless borders drawn on maps, terrible and stained and perishing maps, scrawled with places he once knew, pock-marked and blood-flecked like bulletholes in walls, and all his life-lines written on the {palimpsest} landscape. In the black night, a father sits in the hospital. Over his heart a shirt pocket, and within it a photo. Hollow 00:00 / 04:55 Not far from the border, a mother sits in a hollow of earth, sheltering from the snow. Navigating by day away from smokedrifts over the city {remains}, at night she rests. She walks the limestone massif through the Dead Cities of antiquity. Beyond these forgotten cities, farmlands to the north and west where the olive and nut trees grow, orchards abandoned, the earth heavy and pregnant with unharvested fallen yields. Hungry, hollow-cheeked and skull-thin, she moves the tip of her tongue across the velvet bone of her lower jaw to feel the space where her wisdom teeth once buried their roots. Enamel may be the strongest substance in the body, but even teeth rot. These roots are not so firm that they can’t be displaced by metal. The doctor said bone would grow back over time, and each passing month the gumflesh swallows the void, little by little. Flesh grows back with healthy blood-flow. Flesh grows back unless you’re dead. She tongues the root-hollows and tastes the air — acid that carries for miles with the wind. She tastes metal on bone, metal on flesh. Her body, too, hollow after bearing a child, born still, and her whole hollow body cries into the cold of the night, unheard. In the silence of the hollow {in the stillness of her womb} echoes of voices, anisotropic, immeasurable, like the echoes of shells falling in the city where a grandmother sits in grey dust // where shrieking echoes of mortars bounce off the carcasses of buildings // where the shrieks of children echo in the streets where bombs fall indiscriminate // where the children feel it in their eyes and throats and lungs before they even know it is raining at all. In the silence of the hollow, a memory of her brothers’ voices in the rows of pistachio trees, seeds closed-mouthed and ripening, shells splitting, an ecstasy of dehiscence. She recalls the orchard arteries, trees planted in parallel avenues, rooted deep like teeth, lines of gnarly trunks, rough-ridged grey bark, twisted limbs {like the children falling in the streets} waxy-leaved, canopy-dense, fruit-heavy. She recalls the changing colour of ripening drupes, the soft grey-green smooth nut inside, soft like the velvet gums against her tongue inside her hungry mouth which waters when she thinks of the harvest. She swallows the saliva, unsated. She thinks of the harvest, of sorting the nuts, open-mouthed shells here, closed-mouthed shells here, the abrupt splitting apart, the audible pop of hundreds of ripening, opening seeds in the fertile orchards like rapid joyous gun-fire. She cannot forget how the shells fall — in the orchards, in the city, on the hospital. She cannot forget the cracks in the citadel walls, or the crack of nutshells underfoot at harvesttime. From her shelter in the hollow she draws lines in the softly falling snow on the frozen ground, rudimentary map-making, marking out cities, coastlines and borders. The snow melts to her touch. She draws slowly, a lover running her fingers across another body, tracing blood rivers and sinew paths and flesh hollows. Mapping her thoughts, she finds some lines are organic: natural forms like rivers and plateaus and mountain ranges. Others are territorial, made by man, deliberately drawn and visible, like train tracks and roads and borders. But the best sort of lines are invisible to the eye: ley lines and desire lines and the shortcut she took through the trees to play with her sisters in the orchard —drawn by intuition, by routine, by heart— and how these undrawn lines seemed to her the most human topographical feature of all. Not far from the border, a mother sits in a hollow of earth, sheltering from the snow. It is night, and the land is nothing more than a colourless spectrum that spreads itself out between the black and the white. Publishing credits All poems: FELT: Aesthetics of Grey (ZenoPress) Share

Hear poet Victoria Punch read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Victoria Punch © Erika Benjamin back next the poet Voice coach and musician Victoria Punch is curious about voice and identity, the limits of language, and how we perceive things. She has had her work published in Poetry Magazine , Mslexia, Magma and One Hand Clapping – as well as in Christmas Stories: Twelve Poems to Tell and Share . the poems A cold striding 00:00 / 00:54 Bridled with ferns in April, a year uncurled. Up – yet feeling low on the blue fuzz of new rain – the brush of a wing on the eave The earth, it seems, has turned on the warming drawer and laid the plates inside, crockery carrots and cucumber, cutlery laid in lines and rows, potatoes, peas and purple sprouting broccoli babies The earth rises like dough. Proven, prickling with spring, the lick of blackberries prophesied, the implacable hedge, laden with strings of wildflower childlings, seeded by flight, small mice and hiding birds, a little shy I’m asking, but I can’t recall the question in the face of the morning an ode to the unexpected find 00:00 / 01:08 I marvel. oh my, oh you – small lime green lurker how did you – damp smirker – get there. armpitted and puckering gloop grip in my top sneak under my collar your squeaky sneaky ways and hazy origins amaze me you have umami, by the look of you tang of salt on my tongue, you tiny appetiser, so phlegmatic, enigmatic part of my one point five daily litres of mucusy nasal secretions little air crumb catcher, dust, dirt and pollen snatcher, crunchy bacteria beguiler you are crisper as you dry your quasi-spherically makes me queasy, I quease I am uneased by your tacky feel, your unexpected gloop your roundness – rolled who rolled you, oh green one? wherefore and what nose did you come from? oh how I’d like to know or maybe (s)not Last Flight on the Road 00:00 / 01:54 that morning – stung by cold blankets on and steam-breath in the air low motor hum of the old car, road ticker-taped and on for miles grey and dim in the husky half-light sidled by the frosted trees thick as thieves the trees stood, still and stoic, lime-cold leaning on the morning light that came in waves upon the air replicating pine for miles they lined the open, empty road we made our way along the road surrounded by the stream of trees counting down the miles and miles curled and hunched against the cold hats and coats and frosty air looking for the early light his silence was a kind of light he joined our vigil down the road cut through the still and lingering air the owl came softly through the trees I held my coffee long gone cold and I forgot about the miles I felt he stayed with us for miles orange wingtips in the light his face was braced against the cold level with my eyes, along the road he slipped like water past the trees gold and russet on the air I held his presence in the air carried it for miles and miles wings the colour of the trees wings the colour of the light eyes held fast along the road I forgot that I was cold his face – the air, his wings – the light I sat for miles in silence on the road I watched the passing trees and felt the cold Publishing credits an ode to the unexpected find: Invitation to Love – Issue 3 (the6ress) A cold striding: Magma (No. 85) Last Flight on the Road: exclusive first publication by iamb

Poet Jack B Bedell reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jack B Bedell back next the poet Jack B Bedell is Professor of English and Co-ordinator of Creative Writing at Southeastern Louisiana University, where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. Jack’s poetry has appeared in Southern Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Pidgeonholes, The Shore, Cotton Xenomorph, Okay Donkey, EcoTheo, The Hopper, Terrain and other journals. His latest collection is No Brother, This Storm . Jack was Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017 to 2019. the poems Neighbor Tones All a musician can do is to get closer to the sources of nature, and so feel that he is in communion with the natural laws. ~ John Coltrane ~ 00:00 / 01:07 In Coltrane’s circle, all tone shares a common ancestor. The vibrations between F and F# wave in invitation. Tremolos whisper desire, not dispute, and every pitch shares a bit of itself with its neighbor, like electrons swapped during the intimacies of physics. Even when scales cannot reconcile themselves geometrically, we can choose to hear them together. We can transpose the culture of sound, make room for the diminished and the supertonic. These connections yearn to be made, even if our ears resist. How much of ourselves do we leave with each other taking the same seat on a bench, or grabbing the same spot on the handrail to pull our weight upstairs? We share the breeze, the noise it carries. The space between us, never empty, is full of us. Summer, Botany Lesson 00:00 / 00:43 No matter how many blossoms I point out exploding overhead on our neighborhood walk, my daughter isn’t buying it. She’s in love with the sound of bougainvillea, thinks the word’s so pretty, there’s no way it stands for something real. She believes I made it up, strung long vowels and kissy, soft consonants on a strand of rhythm to make her giggle. I wish I could tell a story that would win her faith, but learn to let it lie. Some truths beg for a fight. Some would rather echo on branches in crooked light while you just walk off holding hands. Dusk, Meditation … like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. ~ Herman Melville ~ 00:00 / 00:40 Sometimes the truth hides in the wide open of a shorn cane field, and no matter how you stare its lines will refuse to define themselves. They’ll pulse in the dull breeze, and spread like ribbon snakes across furrows in the dirt until the whole ground blends and furls in waves. Squint all you want, or close the distance on foot. What’s there to see won’t shine any brighter. Open yourself to the field’s expanse like a shell in salt water. Purge your questions before they pearl. Publishing credits Neighbor Tones: The Cabinet of Heed (Issue 12) Summer, Botany Lesson: L'Ephemere (Issue VII) Dusk, Meditation: One (Issue 18) Share

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

Hear poet David Butler read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. David Butler back next the poet David Butler's third poetry collection, Liffey Sequence , was published in 2021 – the same year as his second short story collection, Fugitive . His novel, City of Dis , was shortlisted for Irish Novel of the Year 2015. the poems Distancing 00:00 / 00:53 Now we are wintering – the whole hive stupefied to silence, each in their cell who isn’t soldiering, an inmate of a new Shalott – the cities, simulacra: drone-shot piazzas; enchanted palaces; empty trainset trains; vistas dreamed by de Chirico; traffic lights sequencing the memory of traffic – confined while, ineluctably, somewhere else, the toll, the toll, until we’re numbed by the scale of it; each week, the heat and bustle more distant, more unlikely; nothing to feed but waxing apprehension: what will eclose this long cocooning, and on what tentative wings? And then the sun broke through 00:00 / 00:46 A sea of jade and muscatel; the sky, gun-metal. Landward, the storm-portending birds, white-lit, Riding wild contours of wind, uplift To tilt at the raucous crows. This Is how it is to live, the ticker tells, Looping the floor of the newsfeed. Somewhere, an outrage; an airstrike; Somewhere, a politic withdrawal. This Is how it is to live: the wind blowing The charcoal of crows’ feathers; The rent in the clouds; oblique tines beating Sudden ochre out of a sullen ocean. These Are Not Days 00:00 / 00:46 These are not days, they are shadows flitting over the too-familiar ground, dry and rubble strewn, where our choices are buried. These are not days, these shades, tremulous, mere changes of light. Quiet as thieves, as witnesses, they slip past in silent legion. Count them up, and they come to years, but years empty of substance. They are the dry husks of our lives, the whisper inside the hourglass. Days are not the coinage of will, as once we imagined. One day they rise like locusts, to devour us. Publishing credits Distancing / These Are Not Days: Liffey Sequence (Doire Press) And then the sun broke through: All the Barbaric Glass (Doire Press)

Poet Matthew M C Smith reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Matthew M C Smith back next the poet Matthew M C Smith, a Welsh poet from Swansea, is editor and founder of Black Bough Poetry . His poems have been in Anti-Heroin Chic, Barren Magazine, Icefloe Press, Wellington Street Review, Other Terrain and Fly on the Wall Press. Matthew is writing his second collection after his debut, Origin: 21 Poems . the poems Cool Oblivion '... llithro i’r llonyddwch mawr yn ôl.' from T H Parry Williams' Dychwelyd 00:00 / 01:23 Choose life; extract yourself from systems, circuits, voices, spies in ether. Crawl as servant, slave from your masters, take freedom in roadless deserts. Leave gasfields burning. Echoes in canyons, drift of caverns, find your channel in rock, seeking nothing, nothing at all. Close your mind in cool oblivion, hide inside your silent shadow, where blood slows to deep time’s pulse. Dying King 00:00 / 01:51 I am with you. I am always with you. You pulse with a click of the drive. The dying king. I press your paper-thin shroud of skin, as thumbs curl over balsa bones, ridges royal. My eyes probe famine’s faultlines, scan this lucent husk, your twilight mask. Under your arm, now thin, translucent, I once slept, sheltered from terrors in the night. Now, I keep watch. How did it come to this? Morphine dulls your silent ward. It keeps you from fires in the fields, from the sibilant hiss of the underworld, the gaping maw of night. We are skin, my dark follows your dark. * Above tides, I feel winds of unconquerable spirit. I stand at the edge, choking with loss. Cosmology 00:00 / 00:50 from static we make our slow Rosetta linger lone in void of dark no one can hear us in these rooms of silence this is our language of stars fingers of intricate play & movement there are lights faint and far as moths we are drawn & dance Publishing credits Cool Oblivion / Cosmology: IceFloe Press Dying King: Anti-Heroin Chic Share

Poet Carrie Etter reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Carrie Etter back next the poet Carrie Etter is an American poet resident in England since 2001, and Reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. She has published four collections – most recently, The Weather in Normal – and numerous chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, The Guardian, The Iowa Review, The New Republic, The New Statesman, Poetry Review and The Times Literary Supplement, as well as in anthologies such as The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem and Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK . Carrie also publishes short fiction, essays and reviews. the poems A Birthmother's Catechism 00:00 / 00:56 How did you let him go? With black ink and legalese How did you let him go? It’d be another year before I could vote How did you let him go? With altruism, tears, and self-loathing How did you let him go? A nurse brought pills for drying up breast milk How did you let him go? Who hangs a birdhouse from a sapling? Eldest 00:00 / 01:28 Lean forward in shadow. The room is corridor opening into square, passage and purpose. On the distant bed, a spill of mottled flesh, the white cotton gown fallen to little use. You gape in the doorway. His body is positioned away, toward the window. You stare until he calls, calls you into mutual shame. Now you must gentle. The mind, relieved, packs away its unfinished question. The bowl of green gelatin has no scent. You hold it to your nose as he draws the cloth up with a tug, his grasp like a bird’s. No, not shame. Not now. Though he doesn’t know it, he will be glad when you sit down at last. This is your father. The room is white and inescapable. Paternal 00:00 / 02:24 A parent a plinth. The first week he regarded hospital as hotel. So the variables include the kind of stone, its consistency, the velocity of prevailing winds. What’s purer than an infidel’s prayer? How strangely, in the second week, the swollen limbs stiffened. And the effects of climate change: milder winters, more precipitation, two, three heat waves each summer. All American, non-Jewish whites are Christian by default. Incredulous, I realise his bicycle may rust and walk it to the shed. Such an ordinary act of reverence. The pulmonologist, the neurologist, the family physician. A bed is a bed is the smallest of bedsores. Blood doesn’t come into it. Ritual, of course, is another matter. A Midwestern town of that size exhibits limited types of architecture. I’ve yet to mention the distance. Come now, to the pivot, the abscess, another end of innocence. In every shop, the woman at the till sings, 'Merry Christmas,' a red turtleneck under her green jumper. I thought jumper rather than sweater, a basic equation of space and time. Midnight shuffles the cards. Translated thus, the matter became surgical, a place on the spine. Each night the bicycle breaks out to complete its usual course. A loyalty of ritual or habit. 'ICU' means I see you connected to life by wire and tube. A geologist can explain the complexities of erosion. The third week comes with liner notes already becoming apocryphal. Look at this old map, where my fingers once stretched across the sea. Publishing credits A Birthmother's Catechism: Imagined Sons (Seren) Eldest: The Weather in Normal (UK: Seren / US: Station Hill) Paternal: Divining for Starters (Shearsman) Share

Poet Jean Atkin reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jean Atkin back next the poet Jean Atkin's latest collection is How Time is in Fields , in which there’s a lot of walking and witnessing of place and the natural world. Her work has featured on BBC Radio 4’s Ramblings with Claire Balding, and appeared recently in The Rialto, The Moth, Agenda, Lighthouse and Magma. In 2019, Jean was Troubadour of the Hills for Ledbury Poetry Festival, as well as BBC National Poetry Day Poet for Shropshire . She works as a poet in education and the community. the poems The not seen sea 00:00 / 01:54 Under cliff, under white chalk, Under Hooken we walk down the throat of the harts tongue and talk. Our boots are glossed with clever ivy. Overgrown, overhead and soft under old man’s beard, bosomy June leans down on us, up close to cyclical drift, centimetre shift of earth. While, sunk in its cage of feathers, a blackbird rots, deflates into the flint step down to the beach. Shingle rumbles in our ears. It hisses, passes, as we wind the path between the cliffs, and only now and then we catch the hill-high lurch of chalk in mist. Keen in the nose, the salt and fret of sea. All the while we twist a flint descent by rungs of ivy root, and all the while a thrush repeats repeats its song to coil to coil inside our ears. And another blackbird sings, so blackbird answers it in audible waves. By our feet a chasm of ash and fog. Low in our bones, not visible, churrs the sea. The tattoo'd man 00:00 / 01:26 has had a skinful, to go only by what shows. His bull neck’s chained, a padlock swings above its own hatched shadow. In scrolling calligraphic script, his knife arm pledges faith in love, and brags his unsurrendered soul. His other arm is tidal. On the backswell of a bicep lolls a mermaid, tits like limpets, eyes like stones. An anchor lodges in the flesh above his wrist: its taut rope twists across his sturdy, sandy bones. But much of him’s of land, for deep in the humus of his cheek a splitting acorn roots. An oak leaf grows towards his mouth on sappy, pliant shoots. With men, it’s never easy to be sure, but here’s one who’s tried to take the outside in. He’s shifty as gulls and bitter as bark. Every night he reads that skin: his library of pain and virtue, bright and thin. The snow moon 00:00 / 01:18 On the night the snowfields above the cottage became bright maps of somewhere else, we climbed up in the crump of each others’ boots. Capstones of walls charcoaled the white. The hawthorns prickled it. And a leaping trace below a dyke was slots of ghost deer gone into the fells. There were rags of sheep’s wool freezing on the barbs and lean clouds dragged the roundness of the moon. Jupiter shone steady to the south. It was so cold. And the children threw snowballs, all the time. My old coat took the muffled thump of them. Night snow shirred our mittens with silk. We turned for home, left our shouts hung out in the glittery dark. Publishing credits All poems: How Time is in Fields (Indigo Dreams 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 Mat Riches reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Mat Riches back next the poet Mat Riches, ITV’s poet-in-residence (they don’t know this yet) has had poetry appear in Dream Catcher, Firth, London Grip, Poetry Salzburg, Under The Radar, South, Orbis, Finished Creatures, Obsessed With Pipework and several other journals. He co-runs the Rogue Strands poetry evenings, and his debut pamphlet with Red Squirrel Press is due in 2023. the poems Clearing My Dad's Shed 00:00 / 01:00 Tobacco tins of tacks and screws cover every surface and shelf, a hatchet is Excalibured in a chopping block by the door. The spiders have been working hard to lash together oiled chisels, cables and caulking guns. His words linger in curls of shavings. I haul out offcuts for burning in the old brazier, the ash settling where he's scattered. G-clamps ask questions about the future for the boxes of random tools piled beneath hand-built workbenches. Knowing I’m all gear, no idea, each box is transferred to the car to gather new dust in my loft. The drive home is spent blaming him for not explaining their uses, and myself for not asking. Icebergs When icebergs scrape against each other it’s like running your finger around the rim of a wine glass. from an article in Atlas Obscura 00:00 / 00:57 An ambient soundbed for stressful times, whales’ noises fill relaxation CDs, open seas and icebergs on the covers. The most sensitive devices will capture this chatter on the wires, to be misheard like Chinese whispers or tales after school, but listen, you’ll sense the cetacean fury in songs about growlers, glacier-surfing, ice-calving and splashes of bergy bits. Our hydrophones are recording the sound of break-up songs, pulses and beats repeated over a bassline of bloops to form this soundtrack to the end of days that plays while we run freshly-licked fingers round the wine-glass rim of the earth. Goliath 00:00 / 00:47 You find you’re carrying a cairn in your pocket. You’ve been to some hard places before and found yourself looking down on the rocks you stole as talismans. A bespoke quarrying, they were transported home in a pocket and turned over and over, flipped through fingers like gymnasts looping round balance beams. Before you pick your point short of the horizon, consider more than just saving trouser linings. Take careful aim, winding up and back, then release to watch each brief puncture and skip away lightly. Publishing credits Clearing My Dad's Shed: Dream Catcher (Issue 39) Icebergs: Fenland Poetry Journal (Issue 2) Goliath: The Poetry Shed Share

Read 60 poems from 20 emerging and established poets – and hear their authors read them too. Welcome to wave 2 of iamb. wave two spring 2020 Aki Schilz Angela T Carr Anna Saunders Claire Trévien Emma Page Georgia Hilton Helen Calcutt Jack B Bedell James Roome Jo Burns Maggie Smith Mat Riches Matthew M C Smith Neil Elder Paul Brookes Reshma Ruia Sarra Culleno Scarlett Ward Bennett Scott Elder Seanín Hughes

Hear poet Simon Middleton read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Simon Middleton back next the poet Simon Middleton lives in Dorset with his wife and small children. His writing has appeared in Envoi, IOTA, The Cadaverine, Firewords Quarterly and The Best New British and Irish Poets 2017 . His poetry has been shortlisted for The White Review's Poets Prize 2022 and The Magma Open Pamphlet Competition 2020. Simon's work was also highly commended in the Winchester Poetry Prize 2020, and has earned him the 2018 Bridport Prize's Dorset Award. the poems Daedalus III 00:00 / 01:18 The parameters of our prenatal world are governed by the gospel of The Pregnancy Bible where life is measured in weeks and foodstuff. (I feel uneasy likening embryos to food. Like Saturn devouring his children.) Still, Kate marks each new seven-day cycle with a new object of comparison: from the first, tentative days as a poppy seed to a kidney bean, from fig to peapod to lemon. It challenges my knowledge of fruit and vegetables. I was scuppered at week ten, when the baby was the size of a kumquat. The weekly shop has become a scientific exploration where the grocery aisle spans an installation of life. The Bible says, 'Fully formed, head to heel, baby will be the size of a small pumpkin.' Near term, I find myself standing absently at supermarket shelving, head tilted, imagining bodily features on a melon. Space Was a Material 00:00 / 02:18 Next time we see him, he is a still-life arranged in a plastic box. A Special Care Nurse leads us like a guide at a museum, where we stand, examining the thin rise and fall of his back. We stand as we did once in Hepworth’s studio, natural light alive against whitewash walls, our focus centred on a table with a plinth that held the polished form of an ‘Infant’. Remember how little air there was? How the whole fabric of our lives seemed to fray then re-thread, so the room felt pliant? And how, standing before ‘Three Forms’, we were told, For Hepworth, space was a material, distance a quality – as much a part of the composition. In the ward, machines draw his life on a screen in shallow peaks, as he lies beneath a knitted sheet. Remember how little air there was in Hepworth’s room? Seeing the child she shaped, knowing ours was forming in the dark of your womb. Was that the texture of longing? Or do we feel that now? Seeing his half-strapped face. The ventilator trunk. The scalp crowned with gingering blood. The newness of his body mapped by wires. Remember how the air seemed to cement, suddenly? As we found our hands parting a break in the air, venturing a terrified palm inside to trace the frightening space above his tiny form, afraid to cup a part of it, in fear we may dent the fontanelles, disrupt the shallow concertina of his lungs. Is this where we are now? Feeling the material of our lives tighten around us, as we wheel him in a tank through the world’s corridors. Isolette 00:00 / 01:13 Thank you for holding him while we can’t, for keeping him safe inside your little frame, for the solace in knowing, clear plastic crib, that at the end of a long white corridor, you exist to prevent his life from faltering, that an object of such sadness, with a most beautiful name, is there, whirring quietly like an undertide, like a holy mother, blessed altruist. Let’s praise these small mercies, despite their slightness: he’s warm, at least, we can still see him through your transparent walls, in your crystallising brightness, and we can pray the grey-lilac of his newborn form will settle, that his knotted pulse can harden, that the prone lightness of his body will brace. Thank you, small plastic island, for bringing him back. Publishing credits Daedalus III: IOTA (Issue 98 – 'Bodies') Space Was a Material: The Bridport Prize Anthology 2018 (Winner of the Dorset Award 2018) Isolette: exclusive first publication by iamb

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

Find out more about iamb – the poet directory and quarterly journal for contemporary poetry inspired by The Poetry Archive. about iamb Part library of poets, part quarterly journal, iamb is where established and emerging talents are showcased side by side. Not just their words, but their readings of them. Expect new poems, every three months, free to your device of choice. ~ Mark Antony Owen, Creator & Curator, February 2020 ~ Auditons closed till Sep 2027 how you can support iamb The simplest way is to share your favourite poets' pages on social media. You can also donate whatever you can afford to help keep this journal online, ad free and free to all. Thank you for coming, for reading, perhaps donating. Above all, thank you for listening.