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Poet Roy Marshall reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Roy Marshall back next the poet Roy Marshall's publications are Gopagilla , The Sun Bathers (shortlisted for Michael Murphy Award), The Great Animator and After Montale – these most recent three all published by Shoestring Press. Roy is a former coronary care and research nurse now working in education. the poems The Weight 00:00 / 00:46 My friend, Christine the beekeeper, tells me that honey is heavy. How heavy? I ask, and Chris says arm-achingly so. Later, I Google the heaviness of honey, find that a gallon weighs one and a half times as much as the same volume of water. And so, I think about the curation of sweetness; how it requires so much more strength than the nurture of its opposite. Trace 00:00 / 00:51 My fingers walked to the fourth intercostal space. This is where I placed the first gel-backed tab. The next went opposite, across the sternum, on the nipple line. Easy then to make a descending arc, attach the leads until a trace appeared; the heart. Unlike in films when it stopped for good the line was never completely flat, but wavering like the slap of water against the dock long after a boat has passed. Relic 00:00 / 00:45 I’d rather take this road to that chapel of larch on the hill but my boy insists, so we step into a nave of pines screened by webs where sound falls dead, except for the rattle of cones. Each breath is sealed with resin: he finds a long bone, lifts it from the needles: fox or maybe badger, I tell him taking his hand suddenly aware of our temporary skins. Publishing credits The Weight: Finished Creatures (Issue 3) Trace: The Great Animator (Shoestring Press) Relic: The Sun Bathers (Shoestring Press) Share

Poet Zelda Chappel reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Zelda Chappel back next the poet Zelda Chappel's first collection, The Girl in the Dog-tooth Coat , was published by Bare Fiction Press in 2015. Her work has also appeared in a number of journals, anthologies and collaborative projects online and in print. Formerly the Editorial Curator of the now defunct Elbow Room mixed arts journal, Zelda continues to work as a creative mentor and workshop facilitator. She won the National Poetry Library's Battered Moons in 2014 , and has been commended in a number of other competitions. the poems PTSD season 00:00 / 00:42 It is at the most inopportune of moments I am caught remembering the pressures of lip on lip & needing the salt of something to savour it, remembering there is a sea & it is ravenous for gritty light & bare skinned sky, all vulnerable & daring it’s delicious & blasphemous to think of what I wasn’t, what it was, what failures I wore instead of you I was sinking still gladly taking on water, unknowing This time of year 00:00 / 00:50 they’re out pushing leaflets through the doors again asking if we left our baby at St Peters if we know who did and it gets me every time I want to confess I left my baby in a chapel too once but she had already left me on Skype we joke about time travel me six hours ahead and you ask for no spoilers so I tell you a have a new desk plant that I called her Callie that there’s a delay on the line and I can hear myself and it’s strange I ask if you’re coming back soon you don’t know your aunt survives another season and no one thought she would Bad air 00:00 / 01:07 and it was in this place I got caught growing light-sick weed’s damp smell a bitter vexation, sweet urine stench a warning in the alley we take every time this is the beginning of the line and the end and the light is tight as a lime, under-grown between my lives, bad air is a grievance I can’t settle this is the beginning of the line and the end and I mutter our griefs constantly, solitude a scream in a fist kept closed, the beginning of the line, the end and water absorbs everything or simply unmakes what we made beginning, the line, the end is tether and death gets proved in our kneading so hard I am breaking, breaking this beginning, end Publishing credits PTSD season: exclusive first publication by iamb This time of year: The Interpreter's House (Issue 72) Bad air: Luminous, Defiant (Listen Softly Press) Share

Poet Amelia Loulli reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Amelia Loulli back next the poet Amelia Loulli is a poet living in Cumbria. A pamphlet of her poetry was published by Nine Arches Press in Primers Volume Four . Her work has twice been shortlisted for the Bridport Poetry Prize, and longlisted in 2020 for the Rebecca Swift Foundation's Women Poets' Prize. Amelia is an MA Writing Poetry student at Newcastle University, and was recently selected by New Writing North to deliver creative writing workshops to young writers as part of their Inkubator scheme. She's currently working on a pamphlet of new poems, as well as a verse novel. the poems Teenage Mother 00:00 / 01:18 they talk to me, the day you were born, as though another me stepped out and never returned, my very own double image, retreating, and for years I only know knees of the dirty kind, hands which would struggle to pick up a small stone, a halo fastened at the neck. There is a world in which I never had you, the handle to my parent’s bedroom door was missing, leaving behind a small square eye hole, just above bed height. I carried love around with me like milk in a shallow bowl, watching it lapping the sides, each drop bleaching my skin, there were days I broke our home with only a few words, I am not your mother. Mother has gotten itself stuck in my throat, grown like a tumour or a foetus but faster, from poppy seed to broad bean until it’s swollen so hard I can’t say anything more. In your bunk bed, behind your back, I lie, holding on to your plaited hair like a rope. First Blood 00:00 / 01:11 The dolls are bleeding, all of them leaking, red and black from their forever open mouths, what can we fill them with? I don’t like the way they look at me like they expect something more. Since you’ve been gone, they’ve started touching themselves, running their plastic fingers up their own shiny thighs. I don’t know how to stop them, so I wait for you to come home, whilst they slide their tongues around their lips and look at each other, eyes growing big. Last night I filled an egg cup with baking soda and vinegar, and tried to clean their faces, you were still gone, they wouldn’t let me near, until I promised to pour the vinegar away and bleed with them, so I did, legs touching, my bled fingerprints forming like wax seals upon our skin. Broken Waters 00:00 / 01:22 Most people drown without making a noise or splashing. See me here Baby, watch me lying out plank, below the surface, all that stillness, all that peace, see how long I can breathe down here alone. You must trust me, I am your mother after all, don’t think about the firefighter who lies to the woman on the phone inside the burning building, says he’s on his way up to save her, then hands her brother back the phone, tell her you love her, knowing all his tears won’t be enough to quiet the flames, I am your mother after all, I am made to do this. When the mother harp seal leaves its cub, nobody calls it a mistake, I have been at this much longer than twelve days – just let me float here a while, Baby you will still remember my face. It will be the same one you wear every time life cuts in such a way – the serration drags the exact formation of ripples upon its shape. Publishing credits All poems: Primers: Volume Four (Nine Arches Press) Broken Waters: Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre Weekly Poem Share

Poet Leah Umansky reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Leah Umansky back next the poet Leah Umansky is the author of two full-length collections – The Barbarous Century and Domestic Uncertainties. She earned her MFA in Poetry at Sarah Lawrence College, and is the curator and host of The COUPLET Reading Series in New York City. Her poems have appeared (or are forthcoming) in Thrush Poetry Journal, the New York Times, POETRY, The Academy of American Poets' Poem-A-Day, Rhino and Pleiades. Leah is resisting the tyrant with her every move. the poems Alternate Ending of the Tyrant 00:00 / 02:11 In an alternate of King Lear, written after Shakespeare’s death, Cordelia dies in her father’s arms and then Lear is hanged. No rights are wronged; no savior is found. Wrong begets wrong. Betrayal begets betrayal. In an alternate ending of this life, the tyrant falls in a swift, a swoop, in a spoon’s width away from comedy. In this ending, the tyrant gradually falls to pieces; circuits fail, edges crack, and hinges bust; the tyrant frails, his hands are already taken; in one hand lies all the evil deeds and in the other, all the cries of the people. All the Americans; all of those people he tried to separate, nullify, procure; all of those beautiful people he mined against one another, who he propped up with his puppetry and from whom he mystified the truth, those are the ones leading the fray. Lie by lie, layer by layer, the tyrant falls to the earth, and there is no burial song, no choir leading the audience in prayer; death is death. It is a certainty — we all die — and here, the tyrant is without his hands, and here, he is now without his tongue, without his voice, and without his hearing; he falls and falls and falls; no one pities him and no one cries. In this alternate ending, the need to feel fades; victory triumphs, freedom triumphs, peace triumphs, love triumphs; in this alternate ending, his ashes become a stone and the stone is buried in the dirt, captured in the dank and the dark and in the damp of eternity. The tyrant is just that, a pebble beneath the surface; one we know is always there, always there, always. Self-Reflection 00:00 / 03:02 i Apparently, St. Margaret was so pious that she was indigestible when the dragon tried to swallow her. The dragon didn’t want her, was repelled by her, and saw her as alien. She was both easy to resist, yet also irresistible. It often feels like I am of the same flock. I repel; I reject; I shun; I halt; I discard; I deter; I resist and I disavow. ii Inside is the alien/ inside is the hunt/ the hunt that makes monsters out of us/ the hunt that makes us hunt the want/ the hunt that makes the want/ the hunt that makes us want the want/ the hunt that makes us want the want that we want. iii My friend says: you are different; you walked through the fire and came out on the other side. // I think about that fire. All my phoenixing. All my aligning and redefining. I think about all my reframing, all my scaffolding and my lexiconic leaps. What are they for? To establish this monstrosity? To establish my monstrosity? To establish the reflection of myself to myself? // In myself, I see the hope. I see the urgency. I also see the bleak. I see the way I reinforce this to myself, tearing the edges, punching the holes; I see the way I keep, and I hold and I stare, and I see the way this should go, and I see the way this would go, and then I see the way it actually is. In my own self is what is alien: the woman I’ve become, the woman I now am, and the woman I thought I’d be. Who is to say any of us are better than any one of us? Who is to say we aren’t all the same woman, for what woman is ever the same? // Okay, let me stop dramatizing. iv What I know is that I’m tired of fire, its heat and its staunch; its climb, its origin, its sanctimony. I’m tired of its necessity, its ritual, its height, spit and sear. What I know is that I’m tired of looking at myself. I’m tired of looking within myself. I’m tired of looking around myself. I’m tired of looking at you in relation to me. I’m tired of looking at this in relation to me. I’m tired of looking. I’m tired of sifting and treading oh so lightly. In an instant, it is you. We are all of this now, of this Tyrant. In an instant, nothing is bolstered, and everything is let loose. Unleashed 00:00 / 04:33 I want to tell you that I felt more than alive; I felt pulse; I felt acutely in tune and gorging. I felt more than the familiar, the self. _______ from the beginning a wrestle with my self a labor of work and breath. a canvas of body and beauty of breath. like a new day a new inside coming out out out like a sun enflamed engaged enrapt in light _______ I didn’t say saturated, though yes in image, in text, in breath, and beauty and breath and beauty, and oh the beauty. It was the first time and yet, better than the first time. A replacing of the actual first time; this new turn; this new length; the reach of it. A mirroring of body and beauty and body and beauty; a satisfaction, a testament; an order of allowance and gift and a decree of density; a plunge. There was a delay satisfying, a flash of body of beauty of breath and beauty and breath and body and breath and breath and breath and then then then—the sense of my blooming before my self before my former self before the new self stuttering before me for-me for-me and for-me _______ What I said was I felt engorged. I said I felt engorged and I did. I felt enlarged with breath and body with blood and breath and body and beauty in the flash of body and word and beauty, and the body was my own and my own only body and the medium, the channel was forged in breath and image and in beauty and breath and the way I showed myself to myself. _______ Did you know there's something called a “spark bird”? It’s the first bird you see with your eye; it's the first bird that changes you, changes your life, and inspires you to love birds. I’m not sure what mine was exactly but it could be the first time I saw a hummingbird in Santa Fe in 2016. I couldn’t believe I saw it with my own eyes: all that color in its beak; its wings; its forehead. I marveled at its ferocity; its splendor; its small breath. I saw another one in Utah this summer, which is probably ordinary, but I found it extraordinary. It makes me think of what Ocean Vuong says in his novel: “It was beauty, I learned, that we risked ourselves for.” It is always the beautiful we are after, or at least that I am after; the beauty in love, in dream, in hope, in the body and the body of the body of the body _______ A friend offers the word unleashed, and yes I was unhanded and ponied away (a bitch, a slut, a woman—call it what you will); I was the wild and the hunger; and the circling in the darkness was a rhythm of my own—the guide of my own destination—but who held the bridle? (It doesn’t matter.) Still, the rival of the struggle; I rivaled and rebelled in the light and dark of the flush and the curved; the dips and stirs and in my sigh, in my clank, an imagined grip or pull. See it—there I am—clacking my feet to the breath; the clop of my hand, of the way that spark sat above me, like a chant; a breath, slick and slender and slendering-still sliding. _______ I want to go back to the spark bird. Maybe I am my own spark bird. I have changed my own seeing with the seeing of myself. _______ Mapplethorpe said, “If I had been born one hundred or two hundred years ago, I might have been a sculptor.” If it were me, I would have still been at this struggle—this work of being a poet in this life. I would still be finding other ways to show myself to myself; to unravel the beauty of the word. Here’s the truth: we are always arriving at ourselves. I gave myself to myself and the giving was revelation was destination was body and body was brush and brush and brushfire was unburied and unbound. Publishing credits Alternate Ending of the Tyrant: Glass (April 2020) Self-Reflection: Poetry International (March 2020) Unleashed: POETRY (November 2020) Share

Poet Jo Bratten reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jo Bratten back next the poet Jo Bratten writes and teaches in London, but was raised off-grid on a farm in Ohio’s rust belt. She moved to the UK to study at the University of St Andrews, where she completed a PhD on the modern novel. Her poetry has appeared in Ambit, Butcher’s Dog, The Interpreter's House, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Ink Sweat & Tears and elsewhere. Jo is working on both her first pamphlet, and a novel about cicadas. the poems Sunset Over Watford 00:00 / 00:52 I am not terribly good at love. Yet I begin to think I could be, if love is loving small things: the moment when the second magpie lurches across the path; or the girl in the purple coat running towards the dog she doesn’t know; old men on the bench with sandwiches in the rain; the back of your neck; breathing you in quick, thick gulps, like cold water after bedtime; the smell of dying daffodils that still strain to hold their heads bravely towards the February sun as it sets over Uxbridge, Ruislip, Pinner, Hatch End, Watford – all bright and glittering in the smoky air. Amulet 00:00 / 00:57 In these times we tighten, fasten locks like lips, stockpile pills, believe our own haptic power to summon the fever-gods, draw blood to rub across the lintel, into apotropaic scratches cut into doors and walls. You touch me like a mezuzah, hang me by your heart, an omamori, a scapular, a locketed caul; hold me on your lips a cicada of jade, in your pocket like a hare’s foot, a whelk’s shell; I circle you like hag stones, word you a breverl: the skies are quieter, clean; a blackbird pauses, tilts her head, builds a nest. After Us 00:00 / 00:53 When the floods clear what will be left, washed up at our gate or lodged between the polite paving stones along our tree-lined road? Other people’s newspapers, bags for life, little rusted badges with an old slogan, lost socks and dreams, righteous anger bloated like a dead rat, effluent thoughts and prayers sludged blackly across our doormat’s smiling welcome; bits of ourselves we’d cut away and scattered in the river as fish food stuck now on the stern brick of our house, obscene in their pinkness, puckered like little sucking mouths, trying to get back in where it is so warm and so dry. Publishing credits Sunset Over Watford: Ambit Amulet: The Mechanics’ Institute Review After Us: Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal Share

Poet Neil Elder reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Neil Elder back next the poet Neil Elder’s The Space Between Us won the Cinnamon Press Debut Poetry Collection Prize in 2016. Prior to this win, Neil published Codes of Conduct (Cinnamon Press, 2015) and Being Present (The Black Light Engine Room, 2017). His latest collection, And The House Watches On, will be published in 2020. Neil lives and teaches in North-West London. the poems Ministry of Waiting 00:00 / 01:22 Of course there are no clocks, or windows, that might allow guests to track time. And these days only people over forty wear a watch, and we’re less concerned about them. Mobile devices? We block network signals so that guests can go unbothered by distractions. The décor is always neutral; if anyone asks, which they don’t, we tell them the colour is August Wheat, but you and I can see it’s beige. A pastel shade here or there, a couple of abstract pictures, nothing too involving, nothing too fussy. New arrivals are the most tricky to placate, a lot of pacing often occurs, they fret about why they are here, and for how long; adjustment can take time, but every guest comes round at some point: notice how their bodies mould themselves to the shape of the furniture. Now, let’s leave this Department to look at another Ministry; Suffering is near-by, or perhaps you’re interested in Broken Promises? Truth be told it could be some time before anyone is called from Waiting. Writing 00:00 / 00:52 I am writing this letter of resignation, the one I’ve written every Monday for the last eighteen months, to make myself believe that I might take a risk some time; just pack the basics and head off to South America. I’ll swim Amazonian tributaries, live without Wi-Fi, marry a Yanomami lady and paint myself in clay. Or I might change my name and slip away, to drive a taxi on the graveyard shift in some place where no one lives. But on my desk stands that picture of my kids, and there behind them looms the ocean liner I am chained to – iceberg just out of shot. Like My Daughter Says 00:00 / 00:23 If, like my daughter says, you are now a million particles orbiting in space, may you keep on spinning. Or else as I look out tonight, I hope you fall like snow and settle for a while. Publishing credits Ministry of Waiting: Like This (4Word) Writing: Being Present (Black Light Engine Room) Like My Daughter Says:The Space Between Us (Cinnamon Press) Share

Poet Marvin Thompson reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Marvin Thompson back next the poet Born in Tottenham, North London, to Jamaican parents, Marvin Thompson now lives in South Wales. His debut book, Road Trip , was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. In 2019, Marvin was shortlisted for the Manchester Poetry Prize. He's been awarded grants to have his work translated into Welsh, and was selected by Nine Arches Press in 2016 for the Primers 2 mentoring scheme. He holds an MA in Creative Writing. the poems from Severn Sisters (after Patience Agbabi's Seven Sisters) Dear Martina 00:00 / 03:36 After 19 years of lies, I guess it’s time. My little sis (your mum) was a dream girl. Your dad? That Bristol Carnival weekend I lured him into my house. You were a foetal child listening to Coltrane’s Crescent. He was a thin boy. I got him drunk on gin and as noon grew dark with rain, I locked him in my basement. You’re ape-dark was the kind of filth he’d text her come evening time and she’d laugh it off: ‘He was my strong, blue-eyed boy!’ That was the least of it. She’d sob like a weak girl, scared he was cheating. ‘You’re so childish!’ I spat as one of our spa days came to an end. She lifted her blouse, back pocked by butt ends. It seemed simple: stuff your dad in the dark for a few humid days. Let him cry like a lost child in my basement. But that was a strange time, London riots that last August. Girl, was being tied up enough for a boy who told me your mum’s bruised ribs left him buoyed? From his phone, I caused your mum pain that weekend with messages supposedly for another girl. My gut acid rose, each text sexually dark. Your mum phoned me that Saturday teatime, weeping. ‘He’s blanking me like a child.’ ‘You’re carrying a shining tiara child,’ I sobbed. ‘Don’t lose it through stress.’ This boy in my womb isn’t yours. It was the first time she’d lied to him. Then came the end when I called my sis a tree-swinging darkie from his phone. We became nihilistic girls for one, star-filled Saturday night. Loud girls with nothing to lose. Because she was big with child, I drank for two, your dad hogtied in the dark, still unsure what I’d do with him. Boy oh boy I gave him a good horse kicking at night’s end, birdsong stirring while I sang, ‘Summertime … ’ At the end, that thin boy blubbed, his face blood-dark, his snot green as thyme. You were a fatherless child. Sorry. And sorry if this girl doesn’t press send. Samantha 00:00 / 04:02 Suitcases carouselled in Pacific standard time. A Black Barbie was dropped by a pouting girl. I crouched down for it. The girl’s grin was endless, the same kind of smile I hoped for from Kai’s children. He felt more my man when he mentioned them, his jokes buoyed. But then I pictured his granddad, Aid, in the dark of a 1940s Kentucky noon where church hats were darkened by woodland shadows. My gran watched time pass through her camera’s viewfinder, the crowd buoyed. Her friends were all grinning pigtailed girls, the rope just out of shot. Aid was still a child, his burnt limbs blurred. The photo marked the start of the end for my mum’s lungs. She asked me, ‘Please put this to an end.’ I froze: her bedside lamp pushing back the dark and her yellow eyes turning me into a trembling child. She pointed to her bag. Its leather was cracked like time, the photo in a pocket made for girls to zip secrets. ‘They lynched him. He was just a boy. Call me Mamma Bundren!’ His smirk was boyish. Then tears trickled, the room’s heat endless. I gazed at the creased photo like a girl infected by its terror and its darkness. A date was scrawled: 12/7/41. I heard time grind. Mum’s face looked faint as she lay childlike: ‘This photo gave me nightmares throughout my childhood. Your gran made me date a Ugandan boy out of guilt!’ Asleep, my mum’s scent seemed beyond time like my Tewkesbury gran whose words had soft endings and a Kentucky twang that twirled round her darkroom – a place that held more magic than Kodak girls. In the airport’s hotel room I dreamt Aid’s White girlfriend (a tall, sweet 16 who fled west with her child) and my first Skype with Kai: my, ‘Sorry,’ sounded bitter and dark. Us made my heart leap and leap like a boy. In the shower, I prayed that our meeting wouldn’t be the end. In the cab, my neck pulsed in panicked time. ‘My Nikon’s my life,’ I told Kai, the shore dark, Kai’s boy and girl chasing the sun’s end. We raced the children, smiling wide as time. Leila 00:00 / 03:37 In the shadows of a Royal Gwent ward, God called time on my DNR. My once sassy inner girl sobbed with envy. Undressing at shift’s end I recalled how I’d act like a spoilt child when my wife preened for work. I’d call her, ‘Ladyboy!’ and let her grab my arms, our kisses rum dark. Most afternoons I hide in the curtained dark re-watching The Wire to kill time. Like a toffee in the mouth of a doleful boy, noise dissolves to ‘Walk on By’ sung by my girl. When I found her, her bathwater was red as childbirth, a Bloody Mary staining her life’s end. God’s cruel game began in the West End. The DKNY fitting room was dark and I was there with black jeans – a child mourning her dead Jamaican dad. A knock halted time. I opened the door to see a shy shop girl. She asked to change the bulb, her cheeks boyish. Her accent? Cape Town. Her freckles? Oh boy! Her badge said Sabrina. That night in Crouch End we laughed and sank shots. A week later, like schoolgirls, we snuggled up and watched Luther in the dark. Sunday nights were our enchanted ice-cream time. I’d watch her sleep while scenes from my childhood churned my gut. I knew I was being childish but her Cape Town accent recalled school’s skinhead boys and PW Botha – his voice the vile sound of apartheid time. When our first kiss came to its sweet, breathy end hate invaded my lungs and made the world feel dark. I tried to talk about it but I’m a reticent girl; I clammed up and Sabrina became a good-time girl who held each Bloody Mary like a newborn child. ‘It's my accent?’ she’d ask in our bedroom’s dark, ‘No!’ I’d snap and she’d run to one of her Tinder boys. We decided to elope one June weekend, our hearts cartoon bombs ticking, ticking time. During anaesthetists’ dark, empty time, the sound of Sabrina’s, ‘Walk on By’ hugs me like a child. She’s still my buoy, my girl, my wife: her voice endless. Publishing credits All poems: Primers: Volume Two (Nine Arches Press) Share

Audition to be part of quarterly poetry journal iamb between the 20th and 27th of September 2025. audition for iamb record send wait Record yourself reading an original poem (published or unpublished) by you in English. Save it as MP3, M4A or WAV. Your poem doesn't have to be one you'd like to appear in iamb – you'll get to choose which three poems you'd like published if your audition is successful. Please don't choose an 'edgy' poem that has offensive or hateful language or imagery. This will be rejected. Submit your details in Step 1 (below). Then upload and submit your recording AND your poem's text file in Step 2 – using Word, TXT or PDF only please. Both your recording AND your text's filenames MUST include your full name plus your poem's title. Check for an on-screen confirmation message after Steps 1 and 2. If you see an error message, try again. If you don't get an invite to iamb by Nov 30th 2025 , please audition again in September 2027. If you accept a place in iamb, your invite email will explain everything. If you accept one of 12 places on the reserves list, please note that you could be asked to submit work at short notice at any time in 2026/27. who can audition for iamb? iamb is a journal – but it's also a directory of poets, their work and their voices. To give as many poets as possible a chance to be part of iamb, each poet can appear only once. how to audition Step 1 Send your details Send details Your details have been sent Step 2 Send your poem Your recording Filename MUST include your full name and poem's title Your poem's text Filename MUST include your full name and poem's title Send poem Your poem has been sent ** Please submit both audio and text **

Poet Tara Skurtu reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Tara Skurtu back next the poet Tara Skurtu is an American poet, writing coach, and speaker. A two-time U.S. Fulbright grantee and recipient of two Academy of American Poets prizes, a Marcia Keach Poetry Prize, and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, she is the author of the chapbook Skurtu, Romania and the full poetry collection The Amoeba Game . Tara is based in Bucharest and leads creativity seminars and writing workshops internationally. the poems Hum for Indrė 00:00 / 01:13 Are you aching? The poet held my hand at the edge of the world’s smallest village. Think of pain as a plane. She wanted me to forgive what I couldn’t forgive. Only the side door to the Assumption of Mary was unlocked—she knelt at the Virgin’s painted feet and prayed, and I took pictures of a crucified Jesus in a fishbowl under the alter table. She wanted me to love the man I couldn’t love. It may take a year. Outside, she translated, word for word, a Lithuanian saying: “When you fall down drunk, the ground will catch you.” My god is no god but the God of Human Will. I needed the poet’s prayer, I wanted her to will my forgiveness to bloom. A bruise is a plane: I fell, the ground caught me, I got up. Writing Poetry is Like Fielding Ground Balls 00:00 / 01:47 Someone is smoking in the lavatory and one of the flight attendants says shit and she gets on the mic and says whoever this is will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law upon landing while I’m writing I hate ballpoint pens with a ballpoint pen because they don’t spray my period-brown ink all over the white designer jeans of the gorgeous Miami woman to my right—which was how I learned not to write poems in a metal box in the sky with a 1930s Sheaffer fountain pen—and I was the one waiting at the lavatory door when we all smelled the smoke and didn’t know what to do and I’d already been between two bombs at a bombing, so after being ordered back to my seat with a full bladder of wine, I order a whiskey, and this turns the Romanian flight attendant on, who winks and gives me nuts and olives on the house, and by now I know again we aren’t about to explode this time, and swallow my nip and eat my snacks and continue, with this ballpoint pen I hate, working on what will, nineteen days short of two years from now, become a poem, and we land in Bucharest and everyone but me claps in perfect post-communist unison and the smoking man gets away with it. Penance 00:00 / 01:58 But it was I who held your arm as the three gravediggers hammered your father’s narrow coffin shut. It was I who drank every pour of your mother’s vișinată, sucked the liquored meat of each sour cherry from its pit, swallowed even the floating worms. But it was also I who disobeyed the two saggy-breasted, callous- handed babas in headscarves, who, after asking if I knew anyone at the funeral, scolded me in Romanian for placing twelve marvelous white roses on the grave and not in the village church, where they’d live longer, be admired by the living. It was I who wiped the vișinată vomit from your face, wiped it from your arms and hands with my hands in the back of the backyard before dark. Daily I wipe everyone else’s piss from public toilet seats. And daily I let traitors kiss my cheeks in public—but tonight, in my sleep, I’m finally arriving in outer space. I’m in orbit with my husband, whom I’m leaving for no one. We’re breathing air that’s just air and I want to go back to our speck on the sliver of earth out the window, but this is now and I am here, so tonight we’re in space for years, and this may shorten my life—but what a view! Publishing credits Hum: Poetry Wales Writing Poetry is Like Fielding Ground Balls: AGNI Penance: The Baffler Share

Poet Claire Trévien reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Claire Trévien back next © Sophie Davidson the poet Claire Trévien is a Breton-British writer currently living in Brittany, France. The author of The Shipwrecked House and Astéronymes (both from Penned in the Margins), she has most recently published her pamphlet Brain Fugue with Verve Poetry Press. Claire founded Sabotage Reviews , and now co-runs the unique Verse Kraken writing retreats in Brittany. the poems Daytime Drinking Brain 00:00 / 01:17 I hope it doesn’t end up in one of your poems, he says. Give me a coaster and I will create strange confetti, a dagger. Rape is so cliché. Oh I had a bad experience and now it fills all my words with paralysis and smoke and the trauma of it Yes, I agree, quite enough already from other … The pub is intricate like a chocolate box – and just as lacquered and you came back wrong. [end] [your poems] [he says] [give me] [I will create] [a dagger] [so cliché] [experience] [my words] [smoke] [of it] [quite enough] [from others] [like] [a box] [lacking] [and] [wrong] That was the summer that slates fell off my body like dandruff 00:00 / 01:59 every brick of me dismantled and scattered, I found my arm in the roof of a church. The neighbours collected my fingernails and brought them to me in a glass jar “for when the time is right”. That summer exploded my insides out, was I the city? I felt myself in every street, but nowhere either. My blood was draining down the pavements with the rain. Each bullet in the wall echoed back into my skin. I poked my bones. All of us haunted down the streets looking for our missing limbs. The weather grew so angry with us, we started spitting hail. Every Tuesday to the market, we gull-gathered from stall to stall. It was a miracle the way our legs could carry us from place to place. Our wings clipped and useless. We opened our mouth to speak and only rain came out, dull, grey, roof-like. We are forgetting the names of colours, the way they used to bubble out of our bodies and wriggle through the windows. Our footprints leave ash if anything at all. We must press ourselves into the very walls, hide our feathers from them. A flash of red and all is lost. There is still so much to lose. Sick or Sad? 00:00 / 01:27 Since we cannot speak of the landscape of the crowd, how it turns from hot to cold in a blink, drains my veins dry, makes my body a ghost of itself, you ask me if my absence was due to being ‘sick or sad’? I use the euphemism ‘not well’ to blanket over the trees, the hills, the path that stops being a path, the carpet of burned leaves catching the wheels of trains, the snow duvet that protects the flowers, or kills them (I can never remember which it is). My sadness is sick, my sickness is sad. My sadness has been unplugged from triggers you could relate to and lives in a different city now. My sickness is so connected to my sadness that I cannot tell you which is the chicken, which is the egg. Here is an ankle sprained after it gave way on a flat surface like plastic lit by a lighter. See how it sent my sadness flying and cracked its screen. Here is my stomach full of rams fighting about fleeing. Publishing credits Daytime Drinking Brain / Sick or Sad?: Brain Fugue (Verve Poetry Press) That was the summer that slates fell off my body like dandruff: exclusive first publication by iamb Share

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

Poet Geraldine Clarkson reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Geraldine Clarkson back next the poet Geraldine Clarkson lives and works in Warwickshire. Her various occupations have included teaching English to refugees and migrants, working in warehouses, care homes, libraries, churches, offices and a call centre, and living in a silent monastic order for some years in South America. She has published poetry pamphlets with Smith|Doorstop and Shearsman Books. Her debut collection, Monica's Overcoat of Flesh , was published by Nine Arches Press in 2020. the poems winding down 00:00 / 01:04 maybe a tree falls or a bear keels maybe all the creatures of song are brought low and the grasshopper drags itself along and the moon fails clearly a light has left the earth bleeding slowly while the waters stopped clapping their hands it’s the end of lilies and liver-freckled butterflies the last flew off this summer the wind is tired now has petit mal is going home shutting up shop just a few scarlet leaves spin in its sigh as it boards up the door Muzzy McIntyre 00:00 / 01:35 Muzzy McIntyre brushed her bangs and went pell-mell down the staircase. The banisters pulled her palms back with their waxy residue and the ball at the bottom looked grey-black with grease. This place has gone downhill, she thought, descending. But she went out onto the front step and the mahogany door was flaming—it was that time of day—and the brass lion knocker, brilliant, was shooting out gold spears. All around, the red brick of the houses was deepening. For the sake of these twelve minutes or so, perhaps, one could tolerate the blanched mornings and the puny electric nights; the dust; and critters; the drunken singing of the wind in the passage; the pious crooning of the neighbours. The waiting. Her other self, the slow Muzzy, ambled out to take the air. She looked up and down the street, laid the flat of her hand to her forehead, against the slanting light. Another fine day tomorrow, she drawled, headlocking a memory. Brood 00:00 / 01:59 After two unhappy marriages, my sister settled on a man who marked their mid-life union by retraining as a vermin operative, the neon strips in his kitchen having turned caramel with cockroaches. He mastered the mechanics and theory of quenching little lives that flickered briefly in strange environs. And noted, for instance, that when roaches infested a disused cooker, it was always the babies who emerged first when you ignited the gas. The gas was, that if you left it burning, little roarers kept on coming, and in increasing sizes, till the fat daddy-roaches finally left the ship. He studied weevils which flourished in flour. And silver fish that slivered at human approach. Rat-trapping was daunting at first, then a thrill. I heard that housewives would call him out to halt fledgling tits which had flown into summer kitchens, twitching behind fridges; pigeons plumped in chimneys; squirrels nesting in lofts, all high hiss and spit. He used to say, my sister’s husband, as he polished his leather belt on a Saturday, ready for church (the belt had a fine silver buckle which shone and jingled), that pests are only creatures who happen to have strayed into alien territory. It made me hope my sister pleased him, and fitted in; was protective of her brood. Publishing credits winding down: POEM (Summer 2017) Muzzy McIntyre: No. 25 (Shearsman Books) Brood: Infinite Rust Share

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

Poet Mat Riches reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Mat Riches back next the poet Mat Riches, ITV’s poet-in-residence (they don’t know this yet) has had poetry appear in Dream Catcher, Firth, London Grip, Poetry Salzburg, Under The Radar, South, Orbis, Finished Creatures, Obsessed With Pipework and several other journals. He co-runs the Rogue Strands poetry evenings, and his debut pamphlet with Red Squirrel Press is due in 2023. the poems Clearing My Dad's Shed 00:00 / 01:00 Tobacco tins of tacks and screws cover every surface and shelf, a hatchet is Excalibured in a chopping block by the door. The spiders have been working hard to lash together oiled chisels, cables and caulking guns. His words linger in curls of shavings. I haul out offcuts for burning in the old brazier, the ash settling where he's scattered. G-clamps ask questions about the future for the boxes of random tools piled beneath hand-built workbenches. Knowing I’m all gear, no idea, each box is transferred to the car to gather new dust in my loft. The drive home is spent blaming him for not explaining their uses, and myself for not asking. Icebergs When icebergs scrape against each other it’s like running your finger around the rim of a wine glass. from an article in Atlas Obscura 00:00 / 00:57 An ambient soundbed for stressful times, whales’ noises fill relaxation CDs, open seas and icebergs on the covers. The most sensitive devices will capture this chatter on the wires, to be misheard like Chinese whispers or tales after school, but listen, you’ll sense the cetacean fury in songs about growlers, glacier-surfing, ice-calving and splashes of bergy bits. Our hydrophones are recording the sound of break-up songs, pulses and beats repeated over a bassline of bloops to form this soundtrack to the end of days that plays while we run freshly-licked fingers round the wine-glass rim of the earth. Goliath 00:00 / 00:47 You find you’re carrying a cairn in your pocket. You’ve been to some hard places before and found yourself looking down on the rocks you stole as talismans. A bespoke quarrying, they were transported home in a pocket and turned over and over, flipped through fingers like gymnasts looping round balance beams. Before you pick your point short of the horizon, consider more than just saving trouser linings. Take careful aim, winding up and back, then release to watch each brief puncture and skip away lightly. Publishing credits Clearing My Dad's Shed: Dream Catcher (Issue 39) Icebergs: Fenland Poetry Journal (Issue 2) Goliath: The Poetry Shed Share

Poet Mariah Whelan reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Mariah Whelan back next the poet Mariah is a poet from Oxford, UK. She is the author of the love i do to you (Eyewear, 2019), while the rafters are still burning is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. She is currently based in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester where she is completing a PhD and teaches creative writing. Mariah has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, the PBS Student Poetry Prize and won the AM Heath Prize. She also co-edits online poetry journal, bath magg . the poems Hefted 00:00 / 01:24 One by one the black-faced ewes file through the gate. Up and out of the field over the burned heather to lamb where their mothers lambed them. I try to pull a map around the stories: I know here is where my father was happiest— if I sit on this rock and let the same cold enter my body can I say I’m part of it? Plates of ice across the mud crack under weight, catch light like the light is something good enough to frame and hang in a hall where guests first enter. His maps were always like that— half an advertisement of character, half a mirror to hold the face that looked square in its white mount. On and on, the hundred or so ewes file through hefted to the particular slope that bore them. Muscle memory, DNA, where do their bodies hold the bone-hunger that leads them back, precise as a compass point finding its way through layers of tracing paper and folded map to hold its beam-arm straight, making the distance between them measurable. In the Archive The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford 00:00 / 02:05 When the door closes we let the quiet of the archive settle around us. The chilled air from bales of frozen film comes to a stop and the room begins to fill with the hum of the corner unit rinsing air clean of contaminant on our clothes, proteins in our breath. The curator lays the album on the foam cradle. We stand shy of each other like friends at a christening unsure of where to stand or what to do with our arms, not letting our voices drop to break the silence. The curator begins with the facts: Mr Phillips reported how the Juju City reeked of human blood. Sir Harry mustered a force of 1200 marines, Mr Bacon had reason to believe enough ivory would be found to pay all expenses removing the King from his stool. I have come to understand there are various kinds of violence. A boot in the mouth, a ring of bruises around an upper arm, the way that inside this archive each fact slips so prettily beside the next like a horse’s bit lies across its tongue. History is the things that have happened, the facts of a body and its breath that come to us through the records and lists, the photographs and their captions curling in neat, even script. In the silence of the archive, all I can hear is the hum of the corner unit rinsing air clean of the dust and acid I bring on my skin, my hair, and the white space, page after page of it— the absences still bearing the administrator’s mark. The Coach Station, St James Boulevard, Newcastle upon Tyne 00:00 / 01:05 Bright station and all around soft dark. Toothpaste and sleep, coffee and the white crunch of salt on the concourse. The headlamps snorting – boarding as the first gull caws began to ricochet. That’s how it was the morning I left, too cold for snow, hills thick with February sloped black-backed and low to where the Tyne bloomed in the wake of a boat. I was less going somewhere than getting out, away from the terraces and rain, tower blocks – the yellow Metro stops that took me in loops, out into the waking-up day. But mostly I was getting away from you, the river below breathing as all rivers do. Publishing credits Hefted: the love i do to you (Eyewear Publishing) In the Archive: exclusive first publication by iamb The Coach Station, St James Boulevard, Newcastle upon Tyne: Best New British and Irish Poets 2018 (Eyewear Publishing) Share