looking for something?

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

Hear poet Maggie Mackay read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Maggie Mackay back next the poet After retiring as a support teacher for young people with additional needs, Maggie Mackay took up writing again in 2009. A Masters degree from Manchester Metropolitan University followed – as did her pamphlet The Heart of the Run , and debut collection A West Coast Psalter . Maggie's second collection, The Babel of Human Travel , appeared in 2022. Her poem How to Distil a Guid Scotch Malt was awarded a place in the Poetry Archive’s inaugural WordView 2020 permanent collection, and one of her poems was a runner-up in The Liverpool Prize, judged by Roger McGough. Maggie is a regular reviewer of poetry collections and pamphlets at The Friday Poem . the poems Reasons for Time Travelling to Byres Farm Cottages 00:00 / 00:53 To witness the birth of my father one hundred and four years ago on that sunny November day To meet my grandmother humming a baloo to her new son To hear the milk cows low beyond the limewashed buildings To walk the fields towards the White Cart, Crookston Castle within sight To feel the oak barley breeze in my hair To watch the Clydesdale’s hooves sink as the plough carves into the soil To smell pure country air To play with my toddler uncle on the stone floor with his home-made wooden train which I have to this day To run it down the hallway and hear the wheels clatter as they have for three generations The Babel of Human Travel 00:00 / 01:37 The day comes when she hears the pasture murmur for the last time, and so/her trunk and her soul head for the/Broomielaw where the ship waits for her coming and the Lord/keeps faith while all manner of Scots are scattered/with all manner of dialects and accents, treasuring them/in this fine, vessel-stranger towards new lives abroad/She waits for a roll call, goes from deck to berth from/dining table thence/to fall upon/her lonely spot and weep the/salt from her pale face/dream of/the final lament her brother played, all/the longing pouring through the/Atlantic waters, that handful of earth/deep in her pocket and/the treasured Christening robe folded where they/packed it with the promise of babies to come. Those too aged waving off and miles away, left/behind. The worn spurtle, flat irons, darning mushroom, cradled too in the hold, as the ship casts off/towards the land of caribou and snowshoes through struggles to/understand othery Baltic tongues which yearn to build/homesteads along riverbanks, seek to befriend the Cree nation, preserve the/songs and stories of home, create new histories of their Manitoba city. Void 00:00 / 00:26 Father hanged himself perhaps above the washhouse mangle, or in the orchard maybe, dead weight dressed in apple blossom. You’re wondering if I miss him, if I miss his hand on my arm, if his voice is fading. It’s in the sparrow’s call, ten chisel clangs, a bicycle bell. Publishing credits Reasons for Time Travelling to Byres Farm Cottages: exclusive first publication by iamb The Babel of Human Travel: The Babel of Human Travel (Impspired Press) Void: A West Coast Psalter (Kelsay Books)

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

Hear poet Stewart Carswell read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Stewart Carswell back next the poet Stewart Carswell grew up in the Forest of Dean and currently lives in Cambridgeshire, where he co-pilots the Fen Speak open mic night. He studied Physics at Southampton University, and has a PhD from the University of Bristol. His poems have recently been published in Under the Radar , Envoi , Ink Sweat & Tears , and The Fenland Reed . His debut collection, forthcoming in 2021, is Earthworks . the poems Earthworks West Kennett 00:00 / 00:34 I migrate back to this farmland burdened for summer with corn, where the mound distorts the harvest and the great stones form the façade of a house that swallows the dead and has for centuries. On a ledge inside the entrance a line of faces stares down at me, their flesh behind glossy feathers, and guarding its nest is the swallow, inverting the tomb into a cradle, raising five lives from this chamber. Listen to this 00:00 / 00:26 The river is fed by brooks that pour sound down the hillside. A season of rain fattens it. The level has risen higher than I expected, but it is level still and that is important: to stay balanced no matter how much rain has fallen, no matter how much you want to flow with that water away from this place. Sleepers 00:00 / 01:45 A curtain of ferns spreads at eye height to a child and parts from the push of a hand to expose the shrinking clearing and the treasure at its centre: an ancient sleeper laying like a sunken casket and shrouded by a puzzle of oak leaves. The specimen ornamented with metalware: rusted plates and bolts, brooches carried by the dead to the next station of life. Close the curtains. Change the scene. A figure stands at the end of the platform, his face masked by a flag. Steam spirals around him, a spire above rows of sleepers. There is one line drawn from childhood through junctions to connections, and the destination is close to definition. I feel the platform vibrate from something about to begin. The figure sounds his whistle. His flag drops and it is my face unmasked and it's time to leave this dream and I see it now. The trackbed has lost its track and I have lost track of time. I get up to check my phone but there’s no signal and my daughter is asleep, habitually dreaming of a better life to travel in and I see it now. The ancient sleeper is a relic, an inherited burden, second-hand history. I step outside, and the first engine of the day sets out light, and I see it now: I know what to do. Publishing credits Earthworks: Ink, Sweat & Tears Listen to this: Eighty Four – Poems on Male Suicide, Vulnerability, Grief and Hope (Verve Poetry Press) Sleepers: Elsewhere

Hear poet Samantha DeFlitch read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Samantha DeFlitch back next the poet Sam DeFlitch, author of Confluence , is a National Poetry Series finalist. Her work has appeared in The Missouri Review , Colorado Review , Iron Horse Literary Review , Appalachian Review and in On the Seawall , among others. Sam has received awards and fellowships from the Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, The Massachusetts Poetry Festival, and the University of New Hampshire, where she completed her MFA. the poems Confessional 00:00 / 01:39 This is what happened: I found the wren frozen stuck to the ground and I kept on moving. The onion snow came too late this year; the hard freeze took out the plums. Some farmer kept the coal barrels burning through the night. Another lit half his land on fire to save the grapes. Some theologians think God gave us grapes— but not wine—so we, too, could find joy in creation. See: we make bread to be torn apart, hot. Hot and full of yanked-up wheatsheaf. We love the dog even though we know, we know— be it love or oats, we know it when we plant it— most things don't make it out alive. This is just to say: I'm not a theologian, or a farmer, or even the woman who scooped up the wren's body, tucked it in a plastic bag, and kept it in her freezer between the berries and winter greens, waiting patiently for the final thaw to bury it in soft earth. I'm just a girl with an emergent deer in her cupped palms; a girl saying: Look! This is what I have created with my grief. This is what love has made out of me. Garbage Night 00:00 / 01:54 It is Thursday night. It is garbage night. The trash is my old clothes and my old clothes are slipping through my hands. My hands are a box full of flies. The flies are taking off with my hair – look! I am bald. I am my mother’s truck engine. I am the space the deer left sleeping in the ferns. I am 7:52 in the evening. See, the sun has already set and the dog is crying to go out. Am I her, too? Her nose raised, twitching, into the evening air? My parents are getting old. I don’t like to say that out loud, but it’s true. The dog is old, too. I am rubbing the dog’s legs. I am a car full of empty coffee cups – see, I can’t bring myself to dump them. They remind me of yesterday. I am all the days that the sky has broken clear and cold, spilling oranges across the dawn-line. I am the Ohio line. I am West Side Road after all the tourists have left for the day I am laying myself down on the asphalt to watch the stars come out in real soaring spires above my head until the dog begins her howling. I am waking all the days. I am the ferns, and I keep space for you, for the coffee cups. I am peeling my long body off asphalt, and gone round back to feed the chickens. Final Thaw of Soft Earth 00:00 / 01:29 Something's not right with my river, my mother says. And it is Truth: each night the beavers pull apart saplings, pull them apart fresh and at the edge. The river gets blocked. The water stops and at night I hear howling in the east. In the year of the year of the plague — this the age I restring my mother's mother's Miraculous Medal and hang it from my dash — the days are long as a year. Ticks fall like spring melt from branches and cling to the legs of the moose calves. A great fir tree falls on a man as he sleeps. The mountain is angry, my mother says, and it is Truth. In the days after this, another surgeon would open me. There is never any good explanation for my pain, which is real. I must have it. Night after night, this racket in the woods; the re- building of the thaw-rushed dam which, this time around, might make a good home. This remarkable rumpus chirping hope. Publishing credits Confessional: Barren Magazine (Issue 19) Garbage Night: On the Seawall Final Thaw of Soft Earth: Moist Poetry Journal

Hear poet Emma Lee read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Emma Lee back next the poet Poet and reviewer Emma Lee is the author of The Significance of a Dress and Ghosts in the Desert . She was Reviews Editor for The Blue Nib , and the co-editor of Over Land, Over Sea : an anthology of poems expressing solidarity with refugees crossing the Mediterranean on small boats and rafts. Emma's poetry has featured in many print and online journals including Fevers of the Mind , Ink, Sweat & Tears , Clear Poetry and more. the poems The Bridal Dresses in Beirut 00:00 / 00:41 Each dress hangs from a noose. One is plain satin with scalloped lace, another an orgy of tulle, dreamy organza with appliqué flowers hanging from wire strung between palm trees. One is short, a shift with a tulip skirt, the sort of dress picked in a hurry to satisfy a shotgun or Article 522. The breeze breathes through them, bullies the dresses into ghosts, brides with no substance, angels bereft of their voices. What the Dust Left Uncovered After art installation The Fading Afterglow of Creation by Dave Briggs and Jack Squires 00:00 / 01:10 A screen sculpts a crumpled mass in an empty house, a 3-D image that takes the shape of what could be a heart. A sci-fi trope: machines outliving us. We all hope what will survive of us is not the pile of admin, worthless warranties, the embarrassing tweet, the spilt coffee, but our Insta life, our filtered wishes. The sculpture is not the easy outline of an emoji, but the complexity of valves, veins, a possibility of an organ, a human's engine. Here, what's left is our digital footprint, the avatar we taught to fight, scavenge, collect. Playerless it repeats the same responses, contact only from bots, a drift of binary lint. It's the unedited part of us that decided who we touched. The digital heart waits for us to breathe emotion into it, sculpting the memory of what it most wanted. The Wrapped Hedges 00:00 / 01:26 It looks as if a fog has whirled around the hedges, wrapping them in a swirl of candy floss like a fleece protecting them from frost. The implication is the hedges will be unwrapped to show a healthy growth, firm stems, perfectly green leaves, branches stretched in welcome. The covering takes on the texture of a regular weave, as if a team of spiders had worked solidly for months, but the structure is too crude to be natural, too regular to constructed by anything but a programmed machine. It reflects a grid of lines running from left to right with rectangular holes. If laid flat, it would represent a map of a housing estate, plans made by those seeking to enrich themselves on the grounds councils cannot demonstrate they have an adequate housing supply, that somehow executive, four bedroom homes, beyond the pockets of those on waiting lists, will meet and it’s fine to build in the country out of reach of public transport and amenities but it’s just these birds who will prevent building during the nesting season that are the problem. So man-made webs are their suggested solution; mimic nature to prevent it. Publishing credits The Wedding Dresses in Beruit: The Significance of a Dress (Arachne Press) What the Dust Left Uncovered: After... (December 8th 2022) The Wrapped Hedges: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Sarah James read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Sarah James back next the poet Nine out of ten solo poetry titles by prize-winning poet, fiction writer, journalist and photographer Sarah James have either won or been shortlisted/highly commended for various awards. Her latest collection, Blood Sugar, Sex, Magic scooped the CP Aware Award Prize for Poetry in 2021, and was highly commended in The Forward Prizes. Her newest collection, Darling Blue , due out in 2025, combines ekphrastic poems with a book-length fictional poetry narrative – winning Sarah the Geoff Stevens Memorial Poetry Prize 2024. Author of a poetry-play, an ACE-funded multi-media hypertext poetry narrative > Room , and two novellas, Sarah also runs V. Press publishing . the poems An Atlas of Tears Inspired by Rose-Lynn Fisher’s work ( The Topography of Tears) 00:00 / 01:35 Under the microscope, entire landscapes contained in every dried human tear. In these photos, grief’s saline secretions are aerial shots of flooded cities. Tears of change are a slum, overpopulated with flimsy dwellings. Basal drops are quake-lines from the cracked mud of a parched riverbed. Each one is mapped as art, but doesn’t chart what happens when ducts block. Nothing explains the tears that won’t flow, or how a body of skin and bones can carry years of non-stop rain inside, yet still remain whole. It wasn’t always like this. A few decades ago, we had cradles of ice for our polar cubs, summer skies counterbalanced by the days of snow. Who’s to say which tears would shine brighter – mine or the mother bear’s, trekking for miles across our thinning seasons? My son’s room 00:00 / 00:51 I can only hear birds, from his open window but their song rises and falls on his sleeping breath. Like this, love is peaceful. Sure in its presence – listened to and witnessed. A hymn that silence turns to prayer once he’s not there. Birds sing on through the opened glass. Air moves within. The empty-bellied note that settles on my outstretched finger has a mother’s hunger. It feeds on the crumbs of my heart. The River Girl After The Lady of Shalott by John William Waterhouse 00:00 / 02:19 Maybe her real curse is Lancelot himself, glimpsed unwillingly. The glass in her mirror shatters like a Cinderella slipper forced onto the wrong foot. Or so, the myth goes … She steps into her boat in a dress of innocence that’s bridal white. Sitting upright, her gaze is alive, but eyes fixed on something out of sight. She has no oars or means of steering, only her arms outstretched slightly at her sides like swan-wings half-prepared to fly or glide. Except, she doesn’t move; she’s as still as a dead Viking on a funeral pyre about to be lit and set adrift. As yet, the only flames are a lantern at the golden prow and one taper candle, another two having blown to smoke. But her hair is ready to set fire to the autumn trees in a slow blaze across this whole landscape. Her tapestried quilt drapes in the water. Already, a layer of colour from the tales patterned by that fabric has slipped onto the river’s surface, like a dream which has lost both shape and meaning but not its fluidity. If she were to dive in now to swim for shore, she’d arrive with a new life dyed into the white of her clinging dress – dripping weed, yes, but also the taste of fresh flowing rain and how brightly sunlight shines through when freed from a cracked mirror. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Hilary Sallick read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Hilary Sallick back next the poet Vice-president of the New England Poetry Club from 2016 to 2024, Hilary Sallick is a teacher with a long-time focus on adult literacy. She's the author of Love is a Shore – long-listed for the 2024 Massachusetts Book Awards – and Asking the Form . Her poems have appeared in Action , Spectacle , Halfway Down the Stairs , Permafrost , Potomac Review , Notre Dame Review and elsewhere. Hilary lives in Somerville, MA. the poems rough edges 00:00 / 02:34 rainy I got up and went outside before my coffee before this long work in which time vanishes I walked in the drizzle not far down Elm and back along the park crossing the field the ground soft beneath my feet and remembering the little kids the games of catch with Will and pushing Verna on the swing then I hurried home poured my coffee and came to sit by these windows I don’t like to let go of old efforts because I feel those same desires unfinished passing me and I think about that a lot there are pearls of rain on the mulberry beads of light in the rain there’s the murmur and tapping of droplets on the house I opened an old document scrolled slowly through its digital pages remembering how bit by bit I made edits and changes now the version before me seems stripped of grace or whatever meaning the original once hoped for as if an essence has been polished away I think I’m going about this all wrong and here I am still doing it a squirrel in the mulberry is climbing nosing seeking nutritious bits to gnaw on those long awkward and winding branches how good the rough bark must feel to its feet reliable interesting I still want everything a hundred per cent as Eileen Myles says in a poem by that name a crack of light a step an ocean and the day is about to disappear I have my students’ notebooks too beside me hand-scrawled urgent or tidy they like me to read their works and write back to them how would it be if someone wrote back to me I sort of do that for myself to the extent possible and there is no risk involved no danger of being intruded upon or hurt but what’s the point then So soft our hearts 00:00 / 00:31 So soft our hearts— how to keep the softness the give the resilience when to be hard-hearted seems solution or result what one should do what one cannot help doing (then pain when the hardness cuts) The body’s made of softness with gentleness carries us Parting 00:00 / 03:59 Because of my heavy suitcase and my tote bag loaded with poetry we decide as we walk through the dark-red door of her apartment to take the elevator down; wafts of feeling like air through a window surging through me as my daughter closes her door behind us locks secure her world its views that look without and within meaning a few bright windows that orange wall beneath a stripe of sky and those paintings she’s made and is making Too feminine she worries because of palette and curve that draw the eye showing how things fold into themselves making new pathways in secret there in the studio where nothing is ever exactly as dreamed yet continues so a dream too is behind the door now the dream I imagine and carry in memory as we push the button for the elevator wait for the sound of its rising or descending as every day through decades bearing families with children in strollers tenants with laundry with groceries with musical instruments furniture languages; clanking softly it nears we hear its door shuffle open pull the landing door to enter and there’s a man before us bent motionless over his walker and for the briefest moment his implacable eye meets ours until he inches back politely we slip past him into the elevator’s box feel the downward motion the machine’s joints creaking four floors to the bottom where the landing door won’t budge my daughter pushes hard but we’re enclosed a long instant then rising again to the second floor where the doors open freely so down we go once more oh quiet man oh gentle lovely daughter oh self of each of us contained within silence curtained by courtesy; no luck we go back up we’ll have to take the stairs do you need help she asks him as we emerge to the second floor almost a murmur her tone and at his barely vocalized assent she lifts the walker carries it lightly down the fifteen steps then returns and offers her arm; they’re not quite strangers they’ve nodded in passing before now they’re descending each worn tiled stair in slowest motion I follow the pair of them Take your time she says in a low voice when he needs to rest and eventually here we are on the first floor we part from him step out to cool spring the few small trees beginning to leaf a softness of color against the brick and concrete and how will I do us justice in memory in poetry; it’s late much later than I’d meant to leave I’ve seen him waiting before she tells me someone is coming and we walk up the hill together she’s giving me directions for the subway we’re hurrying hurrying though my train will turn out to be delayed Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Jenny Mitchell read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jenny Mitchell Billy Grant back next the poet Jenny Mitchell is the winner of the Poetry Book Awards 2021, and joint winner of the Geoff Stevens Memorial Prize 2019. She also won the inaugural Ironbridge Prize, the Bedford Prize and the Gloucester Poetry Society Open Competition. Her best-selling debut collection, Her Lost Language , was one of 44 Poetry Books for 2019 as chosen by Poetry Wales. Jenny's second collection, Map of a Plantation , was an Irish Independent ‘Literary Find’, and is on the syllabus at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her latest collection is Resurrection of a Black Man . the poems Bending Down to Worship 00:00 / 02:42 Church Mary said her God was in the ground, not Satan but all the things that grew, and flowers were the gems upon His crown. She made a garden all around her house – a broken shack she called a palace where she reigned. You couldn’t step beyond her door unless you brought her a bouquet or something green and pulsing full of life. She filled each glass and bowl she found with blooms she called her jewels though they were better as they gave a lovely scent. She tended to her tiny Eden till the flowers reached above her head – the colours bold against dark skin, so filled with shining light. Her headwraps were like floral wreaths, and every dress was made of faded flowers, the age-old boots like clumps of mud. The days when she was forced to work out in the fields, she feared the sun might scorch her garden. She ran out of the cane the moment that the whistle blew and went to fetch pure water from the stream. Her flowers had to live as they were all the freedom that she knew. On nights when she was grieving, she went outside to kneel amongst the plants, bend her head and talk to God. He answered back by showing her another rock or stone she had to move, revealing yet more ground on which to grow more buds. One Sunday, when the white priest tried to make her go to church, she offered him her shining patch of land with one sweep of her arm. She said I never saw your Jesus, but when I die I’ll end up in the ground to feed the things I love to grow, and that is all the heaven I will need. He damned her as a Godless slave. But when he left, she heard the voice of God again. He spoke to her of flowers as she bent to ornament His crown. Black Men Carry Flowers 00:00 / 01:23 red blossoms on their palms. hibiscus blooms from fingertips. waterlilies circle wrists in contrast to their shade heavy-laden with this crop, they move with grace. vines cling to arms. ferns worn as green insignia. warriors of peace they grow on any street. if you look up. see men are grand estates. a wealth of plants. once torn from land. they burgeon in the wild reach out in dappled light. wide shoulder blades replete with yellow orchids. chests are dappled lawns rolling to a bank of leaves delicate but strong morning glories shape their legs. bougainvillea bends the knees. ripples as it clings to thighs tumbling to the shins. agile on the ground jasmine moves the feet. every step a heady scent rising through a man-made-plant. flourishing. their words fall out as petals. The Seamstress For my grandmother 00:00 / 01:33 I’ll be the dress she never owned – immaculate for special days, the only burden heavy frills and English lace along the hem. I’ll never trail in dirt or suffer dust from cane fields. My heart will burst to make a bodice, stitched with bold Jamaican flowers: yellow orchids, red hibiscus. There will be a giant fern appliqued on her back: my ribcage opened to its full extent. I’ll raise my chin to make the high, firm collar – a throat so elegant, with space to hold my voice. I’ll ask her what she really wants – plain cuffs or golden buttons. Underneath the dress, I’ll make myself silk underwear, a soft and pretty petticoat. Its one equivalent will be her newly coddled skin. My feet will make such dainty shoes, and she will go like Cinderella to the ball. But if she doesn’t want the prince this time she’ll dance away without a care. The English lace will shimmer as she moves. Publishing credits Bending Down to Worship: Map of a Plantation Black Men Carry Flowers: Resurrection of a Black Man The Seamstress: Her Lost Language (all collections from Indigo Dreams Publishing)

Hear poet Nichola Deane read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Nichola Deane back next the poet Nichola Deane’s first collection, Cuckoo , followed on from her pamphlets Trieste , a Laureate’s Choice, and My Moriarty , which won the 2012 Flarestack Poetry Pamphlet Prize, and was The Poetry Book Society’s Autumn Pamphlet Choice for 2012. Nichola’s poems have appeared in Poetry London , Archipelago , Magma , Oxford Poetry, The North and elsewhere. Michael Mackmin describes her work as ‘amazing’, while Carol Ann Duffy says Nichola is a poet who is ‘sophisticated and lyrically charged, precise and daring.’ Douglas Dunn goes further, calling Nichola ‘a future English Elizabeth Bishop.’ the poems ‘Hotel de la mer’, ‘Hotel de l’Etoile’ After Joseph Cornell 00:00 / 00:44 I have arrived here with my suitcase, full of the sea wind. I am unpacking, laying out on the bed, Black Rock, Port Madoc, Rhos Neigr, Caldey: small hotels of my childhood, rickety static caravans, the last pinks and purples in the west, the tracing of lines and faces and first names in darkening sand. I am looking at all that I made with mere pebble and shell in those fading oases. I am looking at my hopes and can smell salt. Cuckoo 00:00 / 00:34 When the buds on the birch disappear I appear so spooked, het-up, heaven-fretted, bejesused, souped up with all the may- bees in May, the new plight of the new ( Cuckoo , Cuccu ) to haunt us back, to the sleeping greenwood ( like that? how so? ) with a – wake for a voice, my loopy echo, a bit of locus pocus Anubis January, 2015 00:00 / 00:22 The heart will weigh – what after all its watching? Less than a sparrow’s, and then, then nothing at all: heart-in-the-branches, heart-in-the-split-bark, heart-in-the-nodding-wind. Publishing credits 'Hôtel de la Mer', 'Hôtel de L'Étoile': The Rialto (No. 84) Cuckoo / Anubis: Cuckoo (V. Press)

Hear poet A R Williams read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. A R Williams back next the poet Hailing from Shenandoah Valley in Virginia, USA, A R Williams has had his poetry published in various anthologies and magazines – among them, Anti-Heroin Chic , Black Bough Poetry , Fevers of the Mind , Ink, Sweat & Tears , ONE ART and tiny wren lit . He's editor-in-chief of East Ridge Review , and his debut chapbook, A Funeral in the Wild , came out in 2024. A R enjoys nature walks with family, the savour of good-quality coffee, and wearing black t-shirts. the poems Virginia Bluebells 00:00 / 00:35 growing wild in a wooded clearing where I go to dream, graceful, bowing clusters of sky-colored goblets dotting the ground haphazardly near a prattling creek, now bundled in my hand, for you, delicately wrapped in unadorned brown paper, to celebrate faint double lines— the promise of a new bloom. Alone in a Cemetery: A Golden Shovel ' … if I stepped out of my body I would break Into blossom.' ~ James Wright, A Blessing ~ 00:00 / 01:08 As I wandered the grounds, I pondered what it would be like if I lay down, closed my eyes, and imagined that I had merged with the earth, like rain into dry ground, and stepped beyond myself into an existence where, out in the wooded part of this cemetery, I became one of the venerable oaks, one planted long before my grandfather was born, long before his body was ravaged by illness, long before I learned of his condition, and promised to visit. If only he would have stayed till snow's break. So now, I ease into this dream, with roots extending, yearning, until we finally blossom. By Your Bedside 00:00 / 00:19 You lay in the hospital bed with breath heavy as iron, a face frozen like a retired pocket watch, and limbs as numb as the prayers uttered at your side. Publishing credits Virginia Bluebells / Alone in a Cemetery: A Golden Shovel: exclusive first publication by iamb By Your Bedside: Red Eft Review

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

Hear poet Julian Bishop read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Julian Bishop back next the poet A former environment journalist turned poet, Julian Bishop lives in Barnet with his family and dog, and runs a small media company. He’s worked for many years as both a reporter and a producer with the BBC, and also on ITV’s News At Ten. Julian's first collection of eco-poems, We Saw It All Happen , appeared in 2023, and his poetry has been published widely. He was a runner-up in the International Ginkgo Prize for Eco Poetry, and is currently writing a series of poems about masculinity, as seen through the life and times of Italian painter Caravaggio. the poems Lobster 00:00 / 00:58 Pepsi – it was the brand he grew up with – the sweet memory of it, the familiar tang of aluminium. Each night cradled in a cot of cans, suckled on bottles, sleeping on a seabed littered with plastic toys, tops spinning on the floor. Every one of them Pepsi. He dressed up in armour – it became a habit (with a Pepsi logo) – hung out with a pile of drifters, washed-up types who didn’t even look fine on the surface. They all drank Pepsi. He got a tattoo – festooned in red and blue, he soon became a brand ambassador, the extravagant fandangle spangled on a hand. But he threw it all away. Bottled it. Abandoned, he washed up on a beach – that’s where I found him. Junked, with only a Pepsi filigree. Even his mother had sent him packing. Sitting for Caravaggio 00:00 / 01:46 Ground floor of the Palazzo Madama – I walk into the blasphemous dark, black as a Vatican bible. The air hangs heavy with myrrh, hint of dead flesh. He wants an assistente – a boy to prime canvas, grind his earths and ochres. The pay – two soldi less than my age, dieci per una seduta . Then the Master appears, brighter than The Crucifixion, blinding rays of mezzogiorno sunlight stabbing a straw-covered floor. He thrusts towards me a set of predator’s feathers, angels’ wings cadged off Gentileschi. My heart flutters; just like the others his eyes strip me before I can undress. Shucked and pinioned, I edge onto a set cluttered with props: crumpled bed-sheets, bawdy musical scores, violin, plated armour, a dead flower. I don’t feel sweet like Cupid. Legs wide, an angel’s wing brushes my thigh – I’m his Love Conquers All, unadorned. My right arm aches from clutching arrows without a quiver. I grin. The Master spits grape pips as he paints. Although we never touch, I feel his fingers flicker over me. He spits another pip, his temper sweeter than the flesh of a maturated fig; Bellissimo Cecco, next time I make you a saint. Pangolin ‘ ... a splendor which man in all his vileness cannot set aside ... ’ Marianne Moore, fromThe Pangolin (1936) 00:00 / 01:07 Part botanical, part mechanical dragon – Marianne considered you more Artichoke than mammal, more plant than ant-eater, your pine-cone whorls Nestled snug among the jungle under-scrub. Ardently pursued for your aluminium Glossiness – armoured dinosaur, your snakeskin plates were scraped quite clean by Opportunistic traffickers; exotic crocs served up as mysterious elixirs to quicken Lactation or help drain pus. Alas, uncanny pangolin, maybe your foil-covered flesh Incubated more than a quick fix, your silver plates Stripped by unscrupulous poachers, Name made notorious by those who sickled open the last cans of your slatted metal backs. Publishing credits Lobster: Ginkgo Prize Ecopoetry Anthology 2018 (Ginkgo Prize) Sitting for Caravaggio: winner of the 2021 Poets and Players Poetry Competition Pangolin: runner-up in the 2020 Ver Poets Open Poetry Competition

Hear poet Annick Yerem read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Annick Yerem © Barbara Dietl back next the poet Annick Yerem is a Scottish/German poet who lives and works in Berlin. She's been published by River Mouth Review , Anti-Heroin-Chic , 192 Magazine , Green Ink Poetry , Sledgehammer Lit and more. Annick has also been a guest reader on Eat The Storms and Open Collab . Her first chapbook, St. Eisenberg & The Sunshine Bus , is due out in 2022. the poems St. Eisenberg & The Sunshine Bus 00:00 / 01:10 I am sure now that you were sending me signs Heavens opened and closed, heat blazed through me. The smell of freshly poured tar on the motorway, turbines, sunflowers, left right centre We stopped for a break near parched woods, found raspberry gifts, barley spikelets, wispy and gleaming like fairy hair The damp, green quiet after a big rain, fog hanging low in the mountains, blurred brake lights Midway, I lay down in a parking lot, crying on my dog's blanket, trying to make sense of what we were doing You were sending me signs: robins, rainbows, star fish trails That day, we drove towards your body, to that uncluttered, bright space which enclosed your darkness in those last, long years That room where, when you left, someone opened the vast window, so that your soul could find its way out Belonging After Brené Brown | For Ankh and Cate 00:00 / 00:45 You wordful mindsmiths, you seawitch patterned beauty along cat-eared shores. You fill cars with music, You send love over thousands of miles (I imagine) the air around you smells of sandalwood You are who you are, no need to feed those unkind fires You belong here, stand your ground, will a forest of breath and light into being. Then steady its roots with your ways, your wonders. When you call me six times at 1am, I think of One Art 00:00 / 01:06 I've made a science out of listening to the space between books, the silence between songs, tiny increments of time suspended mid-word I bring songs to this fight, make mountains of lingering doubt disappear, send arrows into apple trees. Say windfalls , say what you see, what you don't. Forgetting is so hard to master. It is not purpose, not spite, but years of fights and fears pulled to the surface of an unquiet lake. A code for your memories, how was your day, your breakfast/lunch/dinner, the last book you read? Tell me, what can I do to make this better? I offer sugarcoated words: take a pick, pick three. Say I love you . Mean it. Publishing credits St. Eisenberg & The Sunshine Bus / When you call me six times at 1am, I think of One Art: exclusive first publication by iamb Belonging: Bale of Joy (The Failure Baler)