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Hear poet Yvonne Marjot read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Yvonne Marjot back next the poet Yvonne Marjot washed up on the Isle of Mull in 2001 after a varied career that took her round the world. Her poetry, inspired by her surroundings, often links mythology with the natural world. She's been published online as well as in anthologies – the most recent of which being In Flight . Her debut collection, The Knitted Curiosity Cabinet , won Yvonne the 2012 Brit Writers Prize for Poetry. the poems Workshop Inspired by the exhibition at An Tobar, Tobermory, Isle of Mull (August 2021) 00:00 / 00:54 How small a space is a mind, to track and trace our place in this landscape. Old stories retold, folded and pressed; pieces sliced and plotted, conjured in gold or barely guessed. Fabric as palimpsest: stone set on stone, dense with ink, tense with meaning. Complexity bounded, a nexus of time and intent. Tree shadows, courtyards, a village traced and lined, a vision confined, a vestige, a moment: a world unfurled. A tight-woven fastness – a limitless vastness: this place, so small a space to hold a mind. Artist Eve Campbell spent lockdown creating textile art arising from memories of the landscapes and places that inspired her – unfurling the world within the walls of her home. The Smith 00:00 / 01:44 In his hands the smith is holding light, his face caught in its glow, thought bent on his creation. Focused, calm, intent, with all his skill he brings it into life. His grasp is confident, fingers deft and sure. Fluent in his clasp, the tongs coax a fine, subtle spiral from the glowing rod of iron. He wipes his brow on his arm, bends to endure the flare of the forge: hungry, its red mouth roars as air wakes the coals. The living metal twists and writhes, vivid in the shimmering heat. His wrist transmits the impulse. He hefts the weight, pours his strength into the stroke, one with the force of each blow; the hammer knows its task. His neck is a molten column, his face a mask marked by the heat, lit from within like the forge. The anvil is rooted deep in the earth, the coals are the world’s furnace, igniting the heat that hides in the planet’s core. Sinews tighten as he shifts his grip, seeing the work whole. The hot iron smells like blood, like sex. Like life. He straightens, observes, moves it gently into water. Steam tempered, the lucent surface, beaded with droplets, gleams in the light. Outlined in crimson, his hammer lies still. He stands, annealed in the fires of his own skill. Harespell 00:00 / 00:16 The hare lies so calm in her form of grass, but she trembles still in the wind from the hill. For the wind is a spell, and the spell is a word, and the word is the weight of a world. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

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

Hear poet Kelly Davis read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Kelly Davis © Clare Park back next the poet Kelly Davis lives on the West Cumbrian coast and works as a freelance editor. Her poetry has been widely anthologised and published in magazines such as Mslexia , Magma and Shooter Literary Magazine . She's twice been shortlisted for the Aesthetica Creative Writing Award, and appears in the Best New British and Irish Poets 2019–2021 anthology. In 2021, Kelly collaborated with Kerry Darbishire on poetry pamphlet Glory Days . Her debut solo collection, The Lost Art of Ironing , appeared in 2024. the poems Calling them in 00:00 / 01:33 Come home for your tea! We called them in, as day fled and night ate our words. The sun had already set. Come home for your tea! Anxiety edged our voices and night ate our words. It was much too late. The sun had already set. Come home for your tea! Anxiety edged our voices, imagined fears grew larger and night ate our words. They grew up so suddenly. Dusk took us by surprise. It was much too late. Come home for your tea! They could no longer hear us. The sun had already set, with darkness at its heels, and night ate our words. We were wasting our breath. It seems a moment ago, but it’s twenty years or more. Somehow they gave us the slip. Time wouldn’t wait. Did we suspect, even then? Anxiety edged our voices. Perhaps we had a premonition – imagined fears grew larger. We tried to call them home, and night ate our words. Grandfather 00:00 / 01:16 My grandfather’s hands were thick-knuckled and strong. Bear’s paws that scooped me up when we swam in the sea at Durban beach. Sometimes they held carving knives, sliced succulent roast chicken or salt beef, stole the fatty trimmings, popped them in his mouth when he thought no one saw. As a boy in Lithuania, his hands must have been small and soft. Perhaps he played chess with his brothers, helped sort envelopes at the family post office. In 1941, in Durban, those hands opened a letter that said his parents, brothers, brothers’ wives and children had all been shot. Somehow his hands continued brushing shaving cream on his chin, patting his daughter’s head, fastening his cufflinks, wiping his eyes when he wept. Meeting in deep time 00:00 / 01:20 I’m on a journey inside my husband’s head. We normally exist in different worlds – me with my words, him with his rocks. But now I’m editing his book and travelling back 400 million years. I’m starting to understand how slowly tectonic plates meet and move apart; how layers of rock can shift; how they thrust, fold, edge into one another’s space; how vast glaciers freeze the warm earth and thaw into torrents, sculpting jagged peaks and scooping out deep valleys. I’m seeing orange pyroclastic flows obliterate ancient slopes; and swarms of rounded drumlins under the grass, like whales breaking the surface; realising that a million years is the tiniest sliver of time; that the two of us, and every thought we’ve ever had, are at once utterly unimportant and infinitely precious. Publishing credits Calling them in: Dusk: Stories and poems from Solstice Shorts Festival 2017 (Arachne Press) Grandfather: exclusive first publication by iamb Meeting in deep time: Magma (Issue 81)

Hear poet Doreen Duffy read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Doreen Duffy back next the poet Doreen Duffy, MA Creative Writing DCU, studied creative writing and poetry at the National University of Ireland, Maynooth, University College Dublin, and online with the University of Oxford. Her work has appeared in many publications – among them, Poetry Ireland Review , Washing Windows Too , Arlen House , The Galway Review , The Irish Times and Germany's Beyond Words Literary Magazine . Doreen won The Jonathan Swift Award, and was presented with The Deirdre Purcell Cup at the Maria Edgeworth Literary Festival. the poems An Altered Landscape 00:00 / 01:33 They changed the flow of traffic along the quays we were seventeen Bernie Phelan got in a car with Rasher Mullen full of the joys of life We could see her throwing her head back gurgling, laughing but he forgot and drove the wrong way We could see her head being flung back her throat gurgling Someone made the journey to our house to tell us because we had no phone, back then Two days later we made the trek to her funeral in Bawnogue A flat piece of grass where people dance that’s what Bawnogue means But there was no dancing that day We climbed the fence and crossed the fields bundles of poppies splats of red where the diggers had thrown them aside four of us girls all silent, when we were never quiet They’ve cut the road straight through there now so I can hardly remember the long walk through the fields of grass or even where they were but I remember how she danced the night before, spinning and turning until the memory’s a blur How to press a rose 00:00 / 03:17 I Google ‘How to press a flower’ a sunflower fills the screen This star-shaped flower petals spread like an open hand bring me back to the image on the news fingers immersed in dust grasp and scrape among the rubble for someone’s wife, a child, a mother ‘How to press a flower’ ‘Pick all the petals off, lay them out face down like soldiers,’ The TV continues to spatter dystopian scenes of the darkest opera the barbarity of its sole composer buried in every image I leave the room to breathe when I return framed behind the glass this city, this country in black and white women and children walking towards borders a hollow caustic scene The thorns that remain clutched tight cause my skin to bleed, the people I see, become my own My mother walks across the screen Her knotted hand clutches her scarf her bewildered eyes searching My child muffled in her warmest coat the skin of the rose in my hand her velvet collar Her feet sweep through all our photos and memories littered on our floor My son, eighteen yesterday, clutches her to him just once And then, he turns to me, his eyes already reflect the fight seventeen years evaporate he goes to join the other teenage boys teenage boys with kissing mouths drawn into hard lines A dog that doesn’t understand Why his human boards the train And leaves him there alone Strains on the rope that keeps him there There is lace over the trees over the screen billows of smoke over a hidden thing Slanted rain washes birds from the sky their screams a painful slide on a guitar string A flame shoots across the sky at a hundred beats a minute A coin flicks in the air it spins and all eyes below roll A cluster of clouds in the sky form a star My red rose has turned brown the petals curl away the stem still strong holds its heavy head weeping, the colour drains away Gypsy Moth 00:00 / 01:01 In this November night sky tucked in the corner of a window in the radiology room a fully winged flightless moth is trapped She tries to vibrate her wings to fly The blue gowned child watches from the bed death still She waits The silence is frightening waiting for the sound is worse Cut between slats of MRI slices she isn’t here anymore Beneath celestial moonlight the pull too great she plummets into a spiral flightpath until radiant she touches the source of this light the energy of the sun and like the moth she has gone Publishing credits An Altered Landscape: Poetry Ireland Review (Issue 129, Ed. Eavan Boland) How to Press a Rose: Live Encounters 13th Anniversary Edition 2010-2022 (Live Encounters) Gypsy Moth: exclusive first publication by iamb

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

Hear poet JP Seabright read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. JP Seabright back next the poet JP Seabright is a queer disabled writer living in London. They have four solo pamphlets published: Fragments from Before the Fall , No Holds Barred , The Insomniac’s Almanac , Traum/A and the collaborative works GenderFux and MACHINATIONS . They have been published in journals such as The Rialto , One Hand Clapping , Fourteen Poems , Culture Matters , Under the Radar and 14 Magazine , as well as nominated for Best of the Net, The Pushcart Prize and The Forward Prizes. the poems Dungeness 00:00 / 01:04 The shingle glistens suggesting buried treasure under a bleached whale of a sky, grey smoke mingles with ashtray clouds, a nuclear desert crunches underfoot. The hum of the reactors is silent now, the world's contracted thus, blue-feathered birds curl and call over a dilapidated corrugated shack. Time stands still. Cronus and Chroma collide where stone solicits sky, the air itself imbued with solace and the metallic taste of sea. Stories of those who sought a living as scattered flotsam on a desolate shoreline, are lost in the rags of time. Dungeness is less a place and more a state of mind. Clothe the Night with Stars, My Love 00:00 / 01:43 in the sunshine. your horse. the forest. hungry and frail. the woods are washed. with the orb of broad waves. eyes disdain the world. and the cough of the poet sings of flowers in the stream. the autumn of the west. the splendour of the moon. this wilderness of death. so vast and beautiful. dust strobes. the self is still. our faith has dispersed. peacefully. noiseless and few. a gap in the clouds. an impossible sun. its curtain hangs with the heavens. abandon those who rest in the shade. wear the storms of men and brides. acrid in the stream. rainbow shadows. like a birthday. heavy and decorous. starlight wanders at the threshold. feeble yet found. clothing the night with stars. the calm of the sun. a servant of the past. a bright steed mingles in the water. streaming of stars. your screeching. eyes of the sea. winged with the bursting. overwrought and mournful. felicitas seeking the sun. one life of a day. a garden flower. the sound. and sometimes the heavens. murky and white. lovefull. Nocturnal Omissions 00:00 / 02:56 : I am a ghost of a chance : a weeping husk of a human : scattered remnants of once-functional behaviour : barely grasped : longed for : no longer attainable : I am my own undoing : an unravelling : this unbelongingness : this : this unwarranted fuckering bliss : this sickening lurch : I play paper scissors stone with my memories : each trauma crushing : cancelling out the next : the act of obliteration : a removal of meaning : how joyous! : a negation and a revelation : a quivering flatline : cut down to the quick and the dead of our own true selves : whatever that is : this : skeletal kiss : embryonic kick : fuck the shame away : in the dark : on your own : your phone’s flickering hiss : a faithful companion : outside : the city is on heat : your body a hot flush of mistaken identities : mixed media on rye : the city is a hex : your body a burnt match : fire flares the streets : your body stains the sheets : with thoughts of filth : nightmare ejaculate : lick your bones clean : and yet : it is darkest before the dawn : this : is a lie : sometimes the dawn never comes : sometimes the darkness is within us : some have darkness thrust upon them : the city is a hellscape : life is hard : don’t let anyone tell you otherwise : the utter aliveness of it all : this : this relentless existence : sometimes I think about dying : peace for our time : go home and get a nice quiet sleep : looking back on this half-century : a battlefield : these scars : wars fought : sometimes won : mostly lost : losing : still : the slow decline to senility : I ask for pity : as I age : for despite all best intentions : I come to closely resemble : the man I most despise : tomorrow never dies : but this darkness before the dawn : this what if this is all there is : and yet : lighter days are coming : is a lie : I tell myself : Publishing credits Dungeness / Clothe the Night with Stars, My Love: exclusive first publication by iamb Nocturnal Omissions: Impossible Archetype (Issue 11)

Hear poet Craig Smith read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Craig Smith back next the poet Craig Smith is a poet and novelist from Huddersfield. His writing has appeared in The North , Blizzard , The Interpreters’ House and MIR Online . Craig’s poetry publications so far are L.O.V.E. Love and A Quick Word With A Rock And Roll Late Starter . His first novel, Super-8 , is out of print. Craig is currently working toward an MA in Creative Writing at Birkbeck University. the poems The New Trogolodytes 00:00 / 02:09 They speak so well, these New Troglodytes, as if porting rubies in the pouches of their cheek or swirling cognac in the brandy glass of their jaw. Their hair is cut thick like good bacon in a public school sweep, a money cut, and their torso is layered in gold thread with magician's pockets to facilitate the bait and switch. They speak so well but they lie, lie, lie, and steal things, smirking, and drop public wealth into the pockets of their cronies. Their schooling was a family investment to jemmy open the cash box of State, using Latin and Greek to spin fables that make their greed noble, their privilege inevitable, their entitlement heroic, their crimes forgivable, their theft philanthropic, aligning their reputation with the triumphs of the nation while stashing the takings off shore out of reach. We call them My Lord, these New Troglodytes, Your Honour, the Right Honourable, His Highness, Lady, Sir, Dame, Duchess, Duke, Ma’am, though their title was a reward for exploitation and brutality and was flipped through the currencies of the age – power, platform, credit – until we perceive it as a gift from God. Yet, they are beholden, not to us, but to the pocketbook of oligarchs, the good will of global media. I’ve seen them, the New Troglodytes, on TV, in the unelected upper house, in rotten boroughs across the land, or beamed in from a loan home in Marbella. They destroy in a session what was built over a lifetime and front the betrayal because their tone belies that they are lying. Their sophistication is a quiet word with the right person to swing a debate or stymy public good. They provoke my anger, but I met one once and liked him, and that frightens me. A Poem for a Friend Long Gone 00:00 / 01:37 A bottle of pills, wasn't it? Or your parents' Scotch, guzzled like pop, or a bash on your temple on the backroads above Burton from which your driver walked away? Or a leap from a viaduct in Scarborough because a boy didn't love you? The means are less important than the fact that you're gone. You no longer occupy the space we put aside for you. I remember our last encounter, a word in passing one Friday night at the Clothiers on my return to the Asteroid table with three pints of Tetleys shored between my finger ends. It was bands, probably, or beer, or football, or possibly love, a hint of our dreaming flattering the mundane with last orders looming and a tramp through the woods to a supper of tinned potatoes, beans and stewing steak. We were swamped with drink and giddy with the moment, sidling up to our possibilities, bashfully, approaching our futures, shyly, embarrassed by our desires but confident we could handle our dreams, regardless. You rarely visit the forefront of my thoughts. We never lived like that so why die like that? My memories of you are not keepsakes or heirlooms. They would not impress my son in the telling, or make a chatshow chortle. Ours was an ambient friendship of kindness and good-nature, and quite enough as that. Café 00:00 / 00:15 Another year in the same café, the rain on the window like a microscope sample, a cross-section of watershed, a perfect example of our foulest weather. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Pam Thompson read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Pam Thompson back next the poet A Hawthornden Fellow in 2019, Pam Thompson is a writer, educator and reviewer. She's been widely published in magazines including Atrium , Butcher’s Dog , Finished Creatures , The Alchemy Spoon , The High Window , Ink, Sweat & Tears , The North , The Rialto , Magma and Mslexia . Pam is the author of three poetry pamphlets – Spin , Parting the Ghosts of Salt and Show Date and Time – as well as full collections The Japan Quiz and Strange Fashion . Her fourth pamphlet, Sub/urban Legends , won the Paper Swans Press Poetry Pamphlet Prize in 2023. the poems Shoes for Departure After Marina Abramović 00:00 / 01:21 You are about to set off on your journey. What will you need? Map and compass? Or if you’re at sea – telescope, sextant – to track angles between you and the stars. Tonight Polaris is brighter. You are no stranger to True North. No one is awake to wave you off. Suitable clothing is taken for granted – the hood of your parka, fur-lined, detachable or your blue raincoat, as light as the song of itself, is groundsheet and sail, folds into the size of your hand, the hand which feels under the bed for the shoes for departure, hands which find shoes of pale carved amethyst. Putting them on is like stepping inside the Earth, and as you do, the room, your city, the galaxies, spin away and you are the fixed point, each foot, re-making gravity, hardly moving at all, travelling far away. Reading my mother's diaries 00:00 / 00:59 admiring again her sloping handwriting. I have been trying to fill in the gaps in my memory. No that’s a lie. I have been trying to bring her back, to unspool her words and sentences until they loop themselves into her own true form. Mum, where have you been? All evening I've watched for the blur of your shape in the stained-glass panel of our front door. I have been a watcher at the gate. What kind of mother would stay out for so long, stay out this late? I have been reading my mother backwards, standing on the slope of my own life, looking down to that squiggly, tangled path. She is so far ahead, the sun’s bright, I’m shielding my eyes. In Whitby 00:00 / 00:53 on a January morning my heart climbs the 199 steps turns, takes a breath, and for seconds is terraces, the swelling North Sea, Inside St. Mary’s Church, my heart reads a notice, Do not ask the staff where the grave of Dracula is because there isn’t one and my heart smiles, moving very slowly between pews looking for, but not finding, a carved effigy of itself. Instead, is an offering and a candle that stays lit even in the day’s sudden gusts which blow inside and outside my heart in the abbey where it settles at last, in front of a statue of St Hild. Publishing credits Shoes for Departure: The High Window (Autumn 2023) Reading my mother's diaries: Sub/Urban Legends (Paper Swans Press) / winner in the Paper Swans Pamphlet Prize 2023 In Whitby: Mary Evans Picture Library

Hear poet Richard Jeffrey Newman read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Richard Jeffrey Newman back next the poet Richard Jeffrey Newman is the author of Words for What Those Men Have Done and The Silence of Men , as well as the translation, The Teller of Tales: Stories from Ferdowsi's Shahameh . Richard curates the First Tuesdays reading series in Jackson Heights, New York, and is on the Board of Newtown Literary . He's also Professor of English at Nassau Community College, where he recently stepped down to focus on his writing after a decade of service to his faculty union. the poems Just Beyond Your Reach 00:00 / 00:54 The prayer you say is neither seed nor plow, nor is it rain to quench your soul’s old thirst. The parched and blistered field your tongue is now bespeaks the long neglect about to burst, like rotten fruit thrown to chase from the stage a comic leaving dead words at your feet; and she, or maybe he, responds with rage, shrinking the room until the single seat that’s left is where you’re planted. Confront your god, shimmering and luscious, there, his skin— or is it hers?—a proffered gift, a prod to every hunger you have called a sin. Welcome each new taste; spread wide; bow low. Lose yourself till loss is all you know. This Sentence Is A Metaphor For Bridge #20 00:00 / 00:55 Imagine hell unfenced, yourself the unburned center of all that burning, every prayer you’ve ever said undone line by line, until the empty page is all you have. Enter there the path in you that is only a path, gather its shadows into a dance, a movement that ends with love, that keeps on moving till love becomes the rhythm, and you the fire, and the dance, the life you’ve chosen to make your loving possible. You thought you had to be the clench you’ve held where none but you could feel it. Give yourself instead to all that rises. Fill that cloudless sky with laughter. After Drought 00:00 / 00:58 Knees rooted in the bed on either side of your belly, my body’s a stalk of wheat bent in summer wind, a bamboo shoot rising, an orchid, and then all at once a cloud swelling, a swallow sculpting air, a freed white dove. You pull me down, but you are hot beneath me, and the gust that is my own heat lifts me away: I’m not ready. Outside, footsteps, voices. Two men. Giggling, we pull the sheet around us till they pass, but if someone does see, what will they have seen? A couple making love. No. More than that: they will have seen the coming of the rain; they will have seen us bathe in it, and they will say Amen. Publishing credits Just Beyond Your Reach / This Sentence Is A Metaphor for Bridge #20: exclusive first publication by iamb After Drought: The Silence of Men (CavanKerry Press)

Hear poet Sue Finch read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Sue Finch back next the poet Sue Finch's first published poem appeared in A New Manchester Alphabet in 2015 while she was studying with Manchester Metropolitan University for her Masters. Her work has since appeared in a number of magazines including The Interpreter’s House , Ink, Sweat & Tears , Dear Reader , One Hand Clapping and IceFloe Press . Sue's debut collection, Magnifying Glass , was published in 2020. She lives with her wife in North Wales. the poems Flamingo After Liz Berry 00:00 / 01:47 The night she bent my elbows to fit the candy floss cardigan for the twenty-third time, my limbs turned to wings. She wished me to be a pink girl. My neck grew and grew, elongating, extending, black eyes shrunk in the pink like submerged pea shingle. Light in my fan of feathers, I was lifted like a balloon puffed with helium. Body and wings held stately, magically anchored by one leg, miniature rough patellas marked my hinges. When the scent entered half-moon holes in my new beak I could have salivated at the raw rip of scaled flesh but my juices would not run – I was gizzard now. I couldn’t bear the confinement of the flock, but flight had me fearful. Passing through flamingo phase I fattened, darkened. A birch broom in a fit, I shook my thick cheeks side to side became a dodo with a waddle in my walk that slowed. She sent my father then. He came alone with gun and incongruent grin and shot me dead. Skewered me above his heaped fire under moonlight, turned me slowly round and round. When he turned for the sauce I dropped; charcoaled feathers, beak tinged with soot, burning in the blaze. I laughed as I rose higher and higher; a golden bird from the fire. I Can't Send You Back, Can I? 00:00 / 01:56 I I can’t send you back, can I? she said. What if I wanted to go? To have her voice filtered through skin and fat. Those words, those questions, that curious consoling babble. What if I wanted to be enclosed again? To be unseen, hidden. What if I wanted to keep her expectant? To have us halted in anticipation. II Last time I led with my head; tunnelling though grip after grip of concentric circles. A hot salted mucus sealed my squashed nose denying me her scent. Air on my hairless head shocked me as my face squashed tighter for my slow unscrewing. The throb of heartbeats confused me with her; fast and faster in my ears, my chest, my head. Longing to cry, my lungs had me impatient. A metallic tang hung in shivers of cold as at last my body slung out behind. I was landed. III This time I would be her contortionist daughter – her womb my lockable box. I would have to go backwards, lead with my feet, point my toes. Contoured contractions would twist my legs into a rope their powerful vacuum cramping, pulling, spiralling me upwards until the smooth, curled width of my hips pushes her pelvis, demanding to come in. My left shoulder would force her wide just before that warmth grabs my neck. Her stretch for the sharp shock of my head would finally close my eyes. Jars 00:00 / 01:27 It was a surprise so I kept my eyes closed all the way to the garden. My empty stomach was a theatre of kaleidoscoping gems. She stopped me walking, invited me to open my eyes. Slowly I began to see. An enormous glass jar had been delivered to our lawn. Above it, swinging from a crane was a lid. Do you like it ? she asked. It’s huge , I managed. I am going to exhibit you , she said excitedly. You like things in jars . I did. That was the truth. A collection of smurfs, smartie lids, miniature carved owls, that figure of Dick Tracy. I liked looking at them, it made dusting easier, they could be handed to someone with ease, for scrutiny. I wasn’t sure this was right for me. I ordered an extra large one , she was saying. She seemed to be making a speech, a declaration of love. I was supposed to be grateful now, touched, overwhelmed. Two men were smiling at me asking her if I was ready. then I was on a platform being lowered in. I smiled like a good exhibit should as the lid was lowered on. It fitted firmly. Did she know I would make condensation spoil the whole effect? Publishing credits Flamingo: won second prize in the Cheltenham Poetry Festival Competition 2020 I Can’t Send You Back Can I?: Interpreter’s House (Issue 69) Jars: One Hand Clapping Magazine

Hear poet Robert Harper read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Robert Harper back next the poet Robert Harper’s poems have appeared in The Interpreter’s House , Prole , Acumen , Ink Sweat & Tears , And Other Poems and elsewhere. He's also had work featured in anthologies such as Fathers and What Must Be Said , A New Manchester Alphabet , The Every Day Poet , An Anthology to Seamus Heaney and The Valley Press Anthology of Prose Poetry . Robert founded and edited the magazine Bare Fiction , and has recently launched online poetry magazine Disjointed . the poems An embarrassment of poverty After Michael Hoffman 00:00 / 01:09 At 1pm you sit and look at the poem. Among the other things you should be doing, you drink water to allay the sweat and read, squint at, your midnight endeavours, a tower of books leering like an old professor. You, compelled, or just desperate to let the thoughts flow, lay on your side unable to sleep. She, right there, like the painting you love and for which a light is always on. A thought enters your head. You tried too hard, yet held back and, subsequently, pushed too far forward. You wonder if the sleeping, the loss of it, curled like a cat in an empty box of paper, is what is up. You read it again. Embarrassment comes and you thank the gods for your humility, ask of the page – How dare I look at you and think of poverty? Obstacle 00:00 / 01:14 A boy sits alone (a roundabout) watching cars oblige as they dutifully trust an indirect route around the obstacle. He considers himself ‘obstacle’, traces his eyes via entrance to exit and nods his head. Half yes, half whatever appears on the road around him—obstacle. JCC 428H, Bangor 1970, Cortina Mk III, yellow and chrome trim. HFK 015E, Dudley 1967, the lost Ford Zephyr, abandoned, a yard monster. Dreams plagued with red trucks, green buses, black Austins to remind boy of time before his own existence. Dad, car, ahead, his birth. Obstacle. What is he looking for behind the seven inch sealed beam of a Hillman Imp? A connection to his beginning—an accidental merging where 2 people, going past obstacles, become stuck. How do others make such 00:00 / 01:31 Forked tongues. Unsure how to proceed, I detach my arm, look inside the open flesh for morsels hiding beneath the skin, quivering before the opportunity to be plucked or nurtured in the between state of draughty window by a slavish boy who wishes for nothing but new worlds and the road right in front of him. The road, full of signs, made up symbols to delay the choosing of the path, the leaving of one, one side which will not be taken, will take time. So I remove my leg and look beneath the skin; surely hidden there is knowledge of the groove, how one hops in and out needling the unsung sound — like a shellac 78 left in the heat of the sun to warp and throw you off the scent of music long lost; the jive and the rock, hard places rolling beneath your single step, out of reach of your one arm. I cannot see anyway so I pop out an eye, peel back the layers for clues — something observed but missed, known yet forgotten. It conjures nothing new, but I begin to understand the little boy whose appetite is itself ready to be swallowed whole. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Jonathan Humble read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jonathan Humble back next the poet The poetry of Jonathan Humble, a retired deputy head teacher who lives in Cumbria, has appeared in numerous print and online magazines and anthologies. He's published a short collection of his work – Fledge – and is editor of the much-praised, much-admired children's poetry website, The Dirigible Balloon . As well as delivering poetry workshops in schools for Wordsworth Grasmere, Jonathan was Poet in a Fridge for Radio Cumbria's Poetry Takeaway during the BBC's Contains Strong Language Festival in 2020. the poems Derek’s Theory of Quantum Stiles 00:00 / 00:51 Einstein phoned the other day. Wanted to speak quite urgently with my dog, Derek: said that Derek’s theory of quantum stiles was interesting but lacked empirical evidence and wasn’t supported by the mathematics. Derek disagreed: described the process of walking with me, taking the early morning river route along the side of the Kent under Cumbrian skies. Every gate and stile a quantum barrier, separating countless possibilities of constantly branching parallel universes: facts on the far side of each wall blurred, until the stile is crossed with a new reality created through observation … and sometimes, rewarded with a biscuit. Red Pencil 00:00 / 01:36 I am six years old, my pencil breaks mid-word in Mrs Foster’s class. So I turn to my friend Martin, show him the pencil and whisper, ‘Martin, Martin, my pencil has broke.’ ‘Use this,’ he says and passes a substitute, secretly under our desk. ‘But it’s a red pencil, Martin,’ I say. He smiles a smile. It is an ‘it’ll all be okay’ sort of smile and so I carry on, copying lines of words I cannot read, but which I try my very hardest to replicate, as neat and true to the original as I am able, at six, to do. At the finish, I look down at my page of writing; my teacher’s lines above, with mine in red below, and I wonder about the words I have written. I am happy with the result of my effort; especially the esses, which are smooth and curvy, and flowing and lovely. They are the best I have ever done. So, I walk twenty paces to Mrs Foster’s desk, clutching my paper with pride, and return ten yards with a slapped leg, my work in shreds in a basket, having a brand new perspective on the way of things, and on the reliability of my friend Martin. Early Morning Effrontery 00:00 / 00:59 I fear porcelain is not your milieu and your persistence in performing eight-legged running man dances up sheer white bathroom edifices under the gaze and malevolence of the attentive cat bastard flexing its tail on this toilet seat will prove an effrontery too far. Darwin’s theory of natural selection will happen well before adaptation occurs. Before the hairs on your scopulae develop greater adhesive powers and you are able to ascend unharmed, I suspect you will become terribly broken. So here I am again, 6:30 in the morning, offering toilet paper ladders in the bath tub, before I can shower in peace and the furry purry assassin, so beloved in our household, can be persuaded out of the bathroom to wander off and find something else to murder instead. Publishing credits Derek’s Theory of Quantum Stiles:Tyger Tyger Magazine Red Pencil: Atrium Early Morning Effrontery: Fledge (Maytree Press)

Hear poet Ruth Wiggins read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Ruth Wiggins back next the poet Ruth Wiggins, a British poet based in London, has had her work published in journals and anthologies at home and abroad. Her first pamphlet, Myrtle , was published by The Emma Press; her second, a handful of string , by Paekakariki. Ruth's first full collection, The Lost Book of Barkynge – a lyric history of Barking Abbey – will be published by Shearsman Books in 2023. the poems Daughters 00:00 / 01:34 The feral dogs can smell the glitch inside the cardboard box – two salvaged female pups, not yipping much, as they are carried across the unadopted lot, their sister discarded on the sidewalk. The tourists (like us they are here, and yet they are not) can't quite get with the programme. We have three weeks on them and watch as they make for the grocery store, cardboard crib fading in their arms. Next morning, we see them outside the temple. The pups have spent the night in a tee shirt, dining on peas and tuna. A food bowl improvised from the bottom of a bottle, moulding not unlike their mother's paw print. They have a sign that reads – TO TAKE – a little heart to encourage the monks and stallholders. But no one wants a girl pup. In the National Gallery behind Sükhbaatar there is a bust entitled Give Me a Daughter. Give me a daughter, one with a soft-furred belly, fat with peas and tuna. Make her golden eyed and skittle legged, and with a bark to raise the dead. Kallisto From Playing the Bear 00:00 / 01:12 Do you feel my weight pressing on the atmosphere? Out here, circling. Jointed with stars, my dazzling exile. Not to touch the Earth, nor wet my toes – Hera's vow, extracted from the Ocean. But gingerly the Earth shifts its hip and I am dipped, a claw to prise off the lid, to get at something sweet. As one entering sacred water I will tear away the sky and climb back in. Your woods recede, do you think of me? The girl that once ran at your Virgin side. Me, who could bend the bow like no other, spit olive pits further than the rest. O thumb away the black smudge upon my lip kiss me again, the winner. K is for Keats 00:00 / 01:17 In bright white sparks I try to pick your whole name from the night sparkler in my hand the whip of the upright the K that is gone the K that is velar plosive tongue against soft palate pulmonic consonant after which all airflow ceases gone before the flourish of t into s really takes in the air And so instead I slip you finger deep into estuary mud that holds you holds until tide yearning to be held by reeds steals back into the creek lifts you out to sea how cease holds the sea which does not cease how cease holds the sea holds the sea which does not cease Publishing credits Daughters: The Poetry Review (Vol. 108, No. 4) Kallisto / K is for Keats: exclusive first publication by iamb

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

Hear poet Ed Garvey Long read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Ed Garvey Long back next the poet Life coach Ed Garvey-Long is a queer poet from North London. He has an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, and published his first pamphlet, The Living Museum , in 2019. Ed's poems have featured in Under the Radar , Perverse , clavmag and harana poetry . His hobbies include hand-sewing quilts, and long walks with his husband. the poems Visitor 00:00 / 01:06 I look up from my muesli and Jane Austen’s in my kitchen, red-cheeked from dancing and tiny like a museum mannequin. She comes to join me at the table, doesn’t say a word, smiling warmly like we share a funny truth. I don’t say a word either – what would she make of my accent? She looks around bewildered but taking it all in her stride. Maybe she often falls out of time to join gay men eating their muesli? We look at each other awkwardly again with beaming smiles and a sense of when is this going to end? She goes to speak, looking at me directly, but she fades out, and then she's gone. Sunday in the Woods 00:00 / 01:10 All the dogs follow us home. At first we pretend it’s an inconvenience, but then we start dancing and skipping with a conga line of cavapoos and dachshunds, labradors and cockers, huskies, newfoundlanders and chihuahuas gambolling and prancing behind us. Once home, we thrive drenched in dog slobber, swimming in kibble and poo bags – our flat’s a Pets At Home warehouse. But we love them all endlessly, yes. We love them all more than the bored middle-class families did. We love the chaos of it, we love the glory and the noise. And the love: we love the love of having them with us, falling over each other in an abundant pile, a glorious fur phantasmagoria. Borrowed Light 00:00 / 00:43 Friday and I pick off the moss of this week and let myself stand in brightness streaming through our modest windows yellowing my books the snake plant likes to be crowded and the song thrush is back to nest if we have anything it is borrowed light warm on our faces large and powerful and second-hand Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb