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Poet Kim Harvey reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Kim Harvey back next the poet Kim Harvey is a San Francisco Bay Area poet and Associate Editor at Palette Poetry. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. You can find her work in Poets Reading the News, Rattle, Radar, Barren Magazine, 3Elements Review, Wraparound South, Black Bough Poetry, Kissing Dynamite and elsewhere. She won The Comstock Review’s Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award 2019, and placed third in the Barren Press Poetry Contest in the same year. the poems Standard Credibility Inquiry for Displaced Plant Life 00:00 / 02:23 Are you now or have you ever been considered an invasive species? How long can you survive in the desert without water? Have you ever lied to the U.S. government? Are you lying now? You let me know if you need something to drink. To what fungi have you been exposed? Are you infectious? Do you carry contagions? Are you viable? How much attention do you require? Are you wild? Tell me why you are afraid of fire. What is your country of origin? Do you seek the shade of others? Do you plan to uproot established trees? How far back can you trace your seed? Are you a clone? Are you barren? Are you a weed? Will you reproduce incessantly and choke the perennials? Why were you harmed? When were you harmed? So you were witness to a violence. Are you damaged at the cellular level? Under what conditions will you wilt or wither? How did you escape? And where have you been since? On whom or what do you depend? Are you a hallucinogen? Are you medicinal? Are you lethal to domestic animals or people? Can you be bought and sold? Are you illegal? And the Plant Answers Back [Redacted]: (muffled, inaudible) …my sister was burned part of me died too I don’t know how I got out I will tell you I flew I was a samara on the wind I can still feel her like a phantom limb [ ] I could [ ] smell her [ ] singed skin [ ] raining down around me [ -------- ] Even now I hear her howling Light & Shadow The best way to know God is to love many things. ~ Vincent Van Gogh ~ 00:00 / 02:17 A hawk takes a snake in its talons, flies to the top of the trees, aspens I think, above the canyon. Can we agree the snake is dead now? Your words, shards from a broken vase I turn over in my hands, crush fine like millet into the fallen leaves. Stop brooding on the form of things. Think of Van Gogh. Modest blue room. Towel hung on a nail by the door, bowl and pitcher, water if you’re thirsty – absinthe green spilling in through paned glass like a sickness. Loss, a lamp lit long ago. Wasn’t it you who told me blue was the last color to be named in every language? Show me again in moonlight the hollows of you – the places where your body starts and stops. I remember you told me about Van Gogh, how he ate yellow paint to try to get the light inside him. How when he died his body was laid out alongside easels and brushes in a room full of yellow dahlias and sunflowers. How, in the end, it wasn’t just the light he was after. What he wanted was to drink turpentine, to choke on black cadmium and lead. What he really wanted was to die eating his paints, breathing them in, every color, all of them – orange, sienna, crimson, ochre, gypsum, lapis, gold, cobalt blue. Winter Solstice Incantation 00:00 / 01:00 Snapdragon petals, pink and yellow, rose hips, gold paint chips tossed over my shoulder. Hellebore and phlox, candles to burn through the long pitch-black. This spell’s being cast at last light and you’ll come back through the mirror’s crack like Lazarus from the dead tonight if I can just find the right words. Close and closed, what you were to me and a door slammed shut between this world and the next. Outside, a wild wind whips through the trees, whispering its warning—what’s done cannot be undone. Slippery as winter ice, you’re gone. Publishing credits Standard Credibility Inquiry for Displaced Plant Life: Poets Reading the News Light & Shadow: The Comstock Review (Fall/Winter 2019) Winner of the Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Contest 2019 Winter Solstice Incantation: Black Bough Poetry Share

Poet Amantine Brodeur reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Amantine Brodeur back next the poet Amantine Brodeur is a literary alchemist seeking out the universes inside words. Her work can be found at paragraph planet, Pink Plastic House, 100 Words of Solitude, Black Bough Poetry – Deep Time (Vol 1). Forthcoming in Thrice Fiction later this year are two commissioned pieces: her surreal short fiction The Anaphora House, and her poem in four acts, In a Scattering of Tongues, on the women in the works of Samuel Beckett. She's currently at work on a novella, due out in 2021. the poems Body Standing 00:00 / 00:50 I leave his body standing; the preserve of collaborative paper. Disorder. Entrances. Words. An ease of Uncertainties. And then redemptive emptying out of memory. Along this landscape of prayer, his lines suffer their partial evidence. Purpose. Breathing. Rivers drawn. Invasions dissolved. Standing. Layers. Later, much later, Bodysilt. Holding Space 00:00 / 00:50 Once upon a time, where The Bosporus imbued the Marmara Sea, our dense salinity rose upward. In this rich up-swelling we drank up all our silt. Like laundry, we spread our lives openly breasted to the wind and tall trees, our dyed sails ripped and unstitched. The remains of our wooden ships, unmasked in this wild stillness. In this vertical motion of water and lint, we’re holding fast along darker edges, turning salt into air, and us into a study of porous water. Jalopy Poison 00:00 / 00:54 You lark the heart of my frivolous wing; beat the soar of my day, dark – and wondrous. You play discordant against love’s laughter. You line the shore, gull-cawed to fishing the tackle of our mindplay: Pretending the afternoon’s cool swagger into dusk against the tide, when the sun slides deep into the awe that floors me. You hip the jilt of poppy stems, red, to become my jalopy poison. You are my proposition hazard, you’re the In-between of Auden and ice-cream: The string to trip my fall. You’ve become my voyage across God, into Reason . . . and none at all. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb Share

Poet Martin Figura reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Martin Figura back next © Dave Guttridge the poet Martin Figura’s collection and show Whistle was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award, and won the 2013 Saboteur Award for Best Spoken Word Show. His books Shed and Dr Zeeman’s Catastrophe Machine were published in 2016 – the spoken word show to accompany the latter earning Martin a shortlisting in the 2018 Saboteur Awards. That same year saw a new edition of Whistle . Martin had hoped to showcase his theatre show Shed in 2020. He lives in Norwich with the poet Helen Ivory, and sciatica. the poems Land of Opportunity ‘This is a new start for everyone in the UK … so let's get going.' Michael Gove, July 2020 00:00 / 01:00 Here we are then, huddled on the exhausted stained mattress in the seaside boarding house of state. Rusty springs squeak out Rule Britannia whilst we make love to ourselves. The bed, digging its heels into a tidemark carpet that’s shrinking away from the chipped gloss of the skirting boards and the terrifying flora of the wallpaper. Thin rayon curtains spill yellow light onto our gilt-framed Boots the Chemist reproduction of Constable’s The Hay Wain, picks out the greyed varnish craquelure of the wardrobe quietly looming in the corner containing who knows what – a little shoebox of secrets perhaps? Suitcases sticky with dust sit atop – their handles ripped off. Failure after Gillian Wearing's 2 into 1 (1997) 00:00 / 01:22 He loves me I suppose. I am a failure, there's a better way of doing things. I am a dramatic woman. I know I think too much of myself and I should be submissive – a proper wife. He's very caring really. He says I like to be dominated. When he's jealous he's abusive towards me. I'm afraid I won't grow old – I sometimes tell him that. He's beautiful looking. He will try and tell me about love, but hate is something he needs and I don’t. He says I am a failure and I don’t. He says I am a failure but hate is something he needs. Try and tell me about love. He's beautiful looking, he will grow old. I sometimes tell him that he's abusive towards me. I'm afraid I won't be dominated when he's jealous. He's very caring – Really? He says I like to be submissive – a proper wife. I think too much of myself and I should. I am a dramatic woman! I know there's a better way of doing things. I suppose I am a failure, he loves me. Harold Wilson Rows Towards Bishop Rock 00:00 / 01:10 Harold, knees like little moons, bends his back, puffs through the clamouring halyards of the bay. Always six moves ahead of the other buggers, be they Old Etonians or fellow grammar grubbers. And where else to escape serious concerns, but these Scilly Isles. The cormorant is attentive company at the blunt end of the boat, kinked wings hung out to dry, Harold’s words gulped down like slippery fish. The oars are worn soft in their locks, while he rows he recalls himself a boy in a school cap, at the steps of Number Ten. On the slipway, Mary diminishes to the red dot of her coat. The lighthouse lays down her path, tugs the glow of Gannex mac and pipe smoke through the net curtain of mizzle. Mary turns, heads up the slope towards the archipelago’s clustered lights and their ugly little bungalow. Publishing credits Land of Opportunity: The New European Failure: Dr Zeeman's Catastrophe Machine (Cinnamon Press) Originally commissioned in 2011 for the Norwich Castle Museum Family Matters Exhibition Harold Wilson Rows Towards Bishop Rock: The Rialto (Issue 89) Placed second in the 2017 Rialto/RSPB Nature Poetry Competition Share

Poet Polly Atkin reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Polly Atkin back next © Adam MacMaster the poet Polly Akin lives in Cumbria. Her first poetry collection, Basic Nest Architecture , was followed by her third pamphlet, With Invisible Rain, which draws on Dorothy Wordsworth’s late journals to express pain. Polly's first pamphlet, bone song , was shortlisted for the 2009 Michael Marks Pamphlet Award, while her second, Shadow Dispatches , won the 2012 Mslexia Pamphlet Prize. Her second poetry collection, Much With Body, will be published by Seren in October 2021. Polly is also working on a non-fiction book that reflects on place, belonging and chronic illness. the poems Motacilla flava flavissima 00:00 / 01:39 When you came to us in the grey yard it was out of the darkest season the first bright day brightest of bright challenging to identify at the time the trees black streaks with sticky buds like rain drops against the grey-green fell you flew out of the lightless mouth of winter with the sun in you most yellow of yellows the sun in you the sun trailing after the spinning rock of your body blazing yellow spreading yellow with every dab of your tail the train of a comet the augur you were you must have flown into the darkness and found the sun by the thin arc of yellow escaping from the well where she had been buried I thought you must have carried the sun in your beak like a seed that you jolted and swallowed her yellowest of all yellows most yellow most bright you coughed her out from your perch on the splintering fence and filled your mouth with nest stuff instead you stayed with us chose us you built your yellow world in the cracks in our grey one lit up with yellow yellow glowed from the fissures in the slate they call you a migrant breeder when you turn to red a passage visitor you knit your home in the passage between houses the passage between one and another your yellow between your yellow lighting the way Still 00:00 / 02:11 For a while I was still. They made me still in a room with a castle view they taught my arms to lie still. It hurt to jerk pinned down. Still they live. My electric elbow. My stutter wrist. Knees skip on the spot. Feet stick reflect the kick. Running in sleep eyes rolling. Viscous movement. Stammering rest. My left leg crossing my right is terrified trapped its breathing heart the hand of a metronome set too fast. I watch it swinging counting out frantic time to the patterned code of the carpet. I cannot feel it. I cannot control it. This is the blood’s attempt at communication. This is the body’s refusal. It throws its hands up. Listen to the hidden. I am not paying the right attention. You say stop frowning. I do not know I am frowning. My forehead aches with trying. With shaping the mouth for a motion like speaking. Radiant somebody says confusing alarm with wellbeing. No one can interpret the language of my blood’s blind panic. The figures add up to nothing. The pressure keeps building clicking up a shifting scale. For a while I was still. They made me still. In a room where I could not move for wanting. Now I am matter and current flux radiant energy dripping ticking. Leeches 00:00 / 01:38 Leeches have three hundred teeth. Leeches leave a bite mark like a peace sign. Leeches excrete anaesthetic when they pierce your skin, like Emla cream. Leeches are precious. A medicinal leech is hard to find. We are listening to the radio on the drive to the hospital. Natural Histories. A half hour of leeches. A leech is doctor. A leech is a fiend who sucks you dry. A leech is a bad friend. A good leech will save lives. Leeches are curious. Leeches migrate around a body. Victorians tied strings to their leeches and let them roam, mine the body’s unseen continents, drain what they couldn’t control. I consider the grace of leeches. The diaspora of leeches. The harvesting of leeches to extinction. An old man reads a young man’s poem, in which a leechgatherer on a lonely moor becomes a beautiful cure: the last leech in England and I think of him now - as I lay on my bed, a needle in each elbow crook, the cold saline dripping in, the hot blood dripping out – skulking in a pool on the weary moor, a small striped ghost very beautiful, very precious, very good. Publishing credits Motacilla flava flavissima: Watch the Birdie: For the Sixty-seven Endangered Species of Birds in the United Kingdom (Beautiful Dragons Press) Still: With Invisible Rain (New Walk Editions) Leeches: Gush: Menstrual Manifestos for Our Times (Frontenac House) Share