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Poet Jean Atkin reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jean Atkin back next the poet Jean Atkin's latest collection is How Time is in Fields , in which there’s a lot of walking and witnessing of place and the natural world. Her work has featured on BBC Radio 4’s Ramblings with Claire Balding, and appeared recently in The Rialto, The Moth, Agenda, Lighthouse and Magma. In 2019, Jean was Troubadour of the Hills for Ledbury Poetry Festival, as well as BBC National Poetry Day Poet for Shropshire . She works as a poet in education and the community. the poems The not seen sea 00:00 / 01:54 Under cliff, under white chalk, Under Hooken we walk down the throat of the harts tongue and talk. Our boots are glossed with clever ivy. Overgrown, overhead and soft under old man’s beard, bosomy June leans down on us, up close to cyclical drift, centimetre shift of earth. While, sunk in its cage of feathers, a blackbird rots, deflates into the flint step down to the beach. Shingle rumbles in our ears. It hisses, passes, as we wind the path between the cliffs, and only now and then we catch the hill-high lurch of chalk in mist. Keen in the nose, the salt and fret of sea. All the while we twist a flint descent by rungs of ivy root, and all the while a thrush repeats repeats its song to coil to coil inside our ears. And another blackbird sings, so blackbird answers it in audible waves. By our feet a chasm of ash and fog. Low in our bones, not visible, churrs the sea. The tattoo'd man 00:00 / 01:26 has had a skinful, to go only by what shows. His bull neck’s chained, a padlock swings above its own hatched shadow. In scrolling calligraphic script, his knife arm pledges faith in love, and brags his unsurrendered soul. His other arm is tidal. On the backswell of a bicep lolls a mermaid, tits like limpets, eyes like stones. An anchor lodges in the flesh above his wrist: its taut rope twists across his sturdy, sandy bones. But much of him’s of land, for deep in the humus of his cheek a splitting acorn roots. An oak leaf grows towards his mouth on sappy, pliant shoots. With men, it’s never easy to be sure, but here’s one who’s tried to take the outside in. He’s shifty as gulls and bitter as bark. Every night he reads that skin: his library of pain and virtue, bright and thin. The snow moon 00:00 / 01:18 On the night the snowfields above the cottage became bright maps of somewhere else, we climbed up in the crump of each others’ boots. Capstones of walls charcoaled the white. The hawthorns prickled it. And a leaping trace below a dyke was slots of ghost deer gone into the fells. There were rags of sheep’s wool freezing on the barbs and lean clouds dragged the roundness of the moon. Jupiter shone steady to the south. It was so cold. And the children threw snowballs, all the time. My old coat took the muffled thump of them. Night snow shirred our mittens with silk. We turned for home, left our shouts hung out in the glittery dark. Publishing credits All poems: How Time is in Fields (Indigo Dreams Press) Share

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

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

Poet Elizabeth McGeown reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Elizabeth McGeown back next the poet Elizabeth McGeown is from Belfast, Northern Ireland, and is the current All-Ulster Slam Champion. Winner of the 2019 Cúirt International Festival of Literature Spoken Word Platform, Elizabeth has been a finalist in the All-Ireland Poetry Slam and represented Northern Ireland at the Hammer & Tongue UK Slam Finals 2019 in the Royal Albert Hall. She has received funding from Arts Council of NI and The National Lottery to work on her first full-length spoken word show. Her poetry has featured most recently in Banshee, Abridged and Riggwelter. the poems SUFTUM 00:00 / 03:06 Ulster Rugby have a slogan: Stand. Up. For. The. Ulster. Men. Stand up in court. Stand up for 8 days detailing, and detailing, and detailing their triumphs while they get half a day each, in their delicacy, for their delicacy. You are a delicacy, not-so-gently roasted over an open fire. Liar! Stand up as underwear is passed around – yours – while they hmm and haah and examine: 'These are a bit showy, aren't they, Jennifer? Almost as if you wanted someone to see them, Sadie.' Stand up and explain VPL spoiling an outfit and dressing for yourself from the inside out. Sarah/Lynn/Sue cries. Classic victim! Stand up while they debate the merits of certain bloodstains, the consistency of menstrual blood versus trauma blood and stand up while they tell you you don't know the difference. Don't know the difference between a lot of things. All fingers and thumbs. Just fingers and thumbs. No harm done. Stand up. Stand up explaining why you wanted to go to a party, why anybody wants to go to a party, why parties exist and the evolution of humans gathering for friendship and celebration. It seems they have never heard of parties before, not met a woman who seeks out company for conversation. Stand up when they accept the party, grudgingly, other middle-class girls were at the party but aren't sure why you went as you're not middle class, aren't sure why you went into the room. The room! Theroomth eroomt herooooooooom thero ooooo oooooooooo m Stand up while there's a giggling babble from the gallery, faint sounds of popcorn munching. Stand up check your phone *new messages* because word gets around. This is why you don't go to court. Lie low, hide, be proud, be honest, just the facts, you're lying This is why you don't report. STAND UP. Stand up and explain that a room can just mean a kiss, a room can often mean a kiss, in the past a room was a kiss on its own merits. A room is not a promise and a kiss is just a kiss. Stand up and explain you didn't know you were going into a room with a top shagger, with suemepaddy. You didn't know it wasn't a room but a merry-go-round. You just thought you were going into a normal room with a normal person. Singular, not plural. It's hard to stand up when the whole room is spinning and you are a carousel horse. But stand up. Stand up for the Ulster ... women? Everything You Could Ever Need i.m. Comfort, Praise-Emmanuel and Gabriel Diya (d. December 24th 2019) 00:00 / 03:17 We have everything you could ever need. Welcome to your home away from home! We provide you with luxury, we are full board, we are an undisputed hotspot, we are whatever you want us to be. A romantic getaway? Our beds are the best beds, the finest, you will sleep on feathers and dream away. You will watch beach sunsets with panoramic views, you will dine by candlelight. Explore, please, our lush tropical gardens. A family break? We have daytrips: visit Malaga – the home of Pablo Picasso. We have golf! Your children can come with us SCUBA diving, or painting, or to the fun fair. Our complex boasts twenty-one swimming pools and of all the pools in all the world, she had to d i v e i n t o ours. I know an old woman who swallowed a fly, who swallowed a spider to swallow the fly, who swallowed a rat to swallow the spider, who swallowed a cat to swallow the rat all the way up to a horse. She's dead, of course. A girl is drowning. There are no lifeguards but we offer such luxury here! Such candlelight, such silk sheets, such a wondrous buffet, no lifeguards. Children struggle in water all the time. An older brother sighs. In the absence of a lifeguard, he will fix this. Pauses his game, puts down his tablet and gets wet. A boy is drowning, trying to swallow-save his sister-fly but it is just a coincidence. We have tested the water and examined the drainage system. We boast twenty-one pools in our complex! We know how to pool safely. An increasingly concerned father tries and tries his best as he has done his whole life; to protect his children, to open large embracing arms, to be the horse, to swallow the cat to catch the rat to catch the spider to catch the daughter-fly. His wife and other child, dry child, still breathing child pray loudly, pray screaming as defibrillators are employed to no avail on girl, brother, father. We have everything you could ever need! We have retrieved her swimming hat from the filtration unit. After the investigation was declared complete, we reopened the twenty-first pool. We need no lifeguards, we have twenty-one pools, we know how to pool. We are so delighted you chose to spend your Christmas Eve with us. Flesh 00:00 / 01:47 These sacks, these bags of flesh we live in; they expand, beyond what one could ever comprehend. Would you sit and eat chocolate naked watching your nudity grow? Thinking about what you used to be: whip-thin. A boy laughs and tells you you are both sticks; rub together would create fire, would burn out. You find this romantic. Hip bones crash flintily, sheets appear, on next day examination, to be scorched. But what is this compared with whale? Glorious whale. So many curves of you that you have lost track of which island your hands rest on. Is this breast or stomach one or stomach two (lesser stomach) or a buttock or a back roll? It all forms a melange and you know you could create more of it and yet more (no intellect needed for this creation; to simply eat with gluttonous abandon). Skate fingers across the pink-coloured more of you, twisting and turning to admire the new excesses. Thigh dimples smile and wink at you. Tiny purple cracked lines of lightning express your power. Raise hips and thighs and thunder them in time to the music. You are all weather conditions. Droplets of moisture gather between mounds as you consider your next move. It will be colossal. Publishing credits SUFTUM / Everything You Could Ever Need: exclusive first publication by iamb Flesh: Abridged (0–58 Kassandra) Share

Poet Reshma Ruia reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Reshma Ruia back next the poet Reshma's poems and short stories have appeared in various British and international anthologies and magazines, and have been commissioned for BBC Radio 4. Her debut poetry collection, A Dinner Party in the Home Counties , won Word Masala's First Collection Publication Award 2019. Co-founder of The Whole Kahani-a – a British South-Asian writers collective – Reshma was born in India and raised in Italy. As a result of such a heritage, her writing portrays the preoccupations of those who possess a multiple sense of belonging. the poems Pomology 00:00 / 01:10 Being a woman can be fun at times. To be called a shape – a pear or a plum. A fruit salad deconstructed daily. Your breasts are ripe mangoes. Your hips have a melon’s flair. Your mouth – a strawberry ripe for the picking. A lifelong lesson in pomology it is. To be classified by the shape of your limbs. Being a woman is fun up to a point. One day it’s over. The harvest is ripe, ready to rot. In your sleep, while you’re not watching, the seed goes sour, the juice runs dry. No glances. No whistles. All funeral quiet. You tiptoe down the street. You still have your fruit. But it’s no longer the season. 1947 The year India gained independence from Britain, and the country became divided into India and Pakistan, with the largest migration of people in modern history. 00:00 / 01:42 1947. Say it quickly – it’s a number. Say it slowly – it becomes a code. Opening doors no one can see. My father, small as a hummingbird, sits in his chair, frail of body and brain. He’s made up of medicines and memory. There’s a train running somewhere behind his eyelids. He is gambolling through a field of wheat where a pink turbaned scarecrow stands, arms stretched rigidly. His father’s callused hand lets go of his own. Is that his mother’s voice calling? Quick! Run! We have to catch the train. She gifts him a single boiled egg for the journey. Books, slingshot, the red striped ball by the Tulsi plant in the courtyard – he remembers them all. His grandchildren crowd round him. The girl is doing a PhD on borders and dividing lines. 'Tell me about 1947, Nana', she says, tapping his shoulder, her laptop buzzing like a bee. He stirs. He smiles. Scratches his chin. ‘My ball. My red striped ball – I must have left it behind.' Soft Peaches 00:00 / 00:40 They are soft peaches left in the sun too long. They bruise easily. Their milk teeth grow old within their cheeks, fall by the roadside. Become dentures. Their heart is an umbrella stand on which they hang rosaries of petty disappointments and dreads. Medical prescriptions and utility bills. Death is a salesman who rings every night, keeping them awake. Publishing credits All poems: A Dinner Party in the Home Counties (Skylark Publications UK) Share

Poet Rishi Dastidar reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Rishi Dastidar back next the poet A poem from Rishi Dastidar’s debut Ticker-tape was included in The Forward Book of Poetry 2018 . A pamphlet, the break of a wave , was published by Offord Road Books in 2019, and in the same year, Rishi edited The Craft: A Guide to Making Poetry Happen in the 21st Century for Nine Arches Press. His second collection, Saffron Jack , will be published in the UK in March 2020, also by Nine Arches Press. the poems A leopard parses his concern 00:00 / 01:57 1. I am concerned about Claudia Cardinale. 2. By ‘concerned’ I mean ‘in lust with’. 3. By ‘in lust with’ I mean ‘I sigh for’. 4. By ‘I sigh for’ I mean ‘my eyes are hungry for her when she appears on screen’. 5. By ‘hungry’ I mean ‘revel in her’. 6. By ‘revel’ I mean ‘enjoy’. 7. By ‘enjoy’ I mean ‘endure’. 8. By ‘endure’ I mean ‘wait in the hope that she might, like a god, pick me out to be noticed, even though I have done nothing noticeable’. 9. By ‘pick me out’ I mean ‘not actually come near me lest my reserves of charm desert me at a highly inopportune moment’. 10. By ‘not actually come near me’ I mean ‘actually come near me, preferably in a darkened Neapolitan hotel room’. 11. By ‘darkened’ I mean ‘the presence of Lampedusa will be evident; he will be sitting in a green damask armchair, his walking stick tapping out the beat of a fugue’. 12. By ‘fugue’ I mean ‘a Morse code translation of his most famous quote’. 13. By ‘quote’ I mean ‘the only appropriate approach to living’. 14. By ‘living’ I mean ‘love’. In my pocket 00:00 / 00:26 In my pocket is the moment I woke up with you stroking my left bicep, gentle alarm clock; a well-practiced image of intimacy from a red-eye’s soon-again stranger. But it isn’t; time and touch leave nothing apart from a memory. Neptune's concrete crash helmet 00:00 / 01:26 I rest my head for a moment on the cool concrete wall of the art gallery and in its undulations I can feel the past trying to break out of its unexpected vertical tomb. I could rub the back of my head into one of the grooves, wear it away, erode it imperceptibly over a day’s eon until I could place my head right back into the crevasse, a temporary sarcophagus, an extra heavy duty crash helmet. This of course might be an over-reaction to the images I’ve just seen: a world melting, gangsters wearing dresses and razor’d scars of silver stars, lakes of petrol waiting for paper boats to be sailed upon them, as if Neptune had said yes to a sponsorship deal from [insert oil company name here] but only lately realised that the proposed replacement for a rapidly-drying Aral Sea might not have been everything promised in the brochure. Caveat emptor, as we all should have said in 1764 when Hargreaves spun Jenny, but how could any of us know that coal + steam would equal not just movement but the end? I might stay in here, it keeps my head cool. Publishing credits A leopard parses his concern: The Compass In my pocket: the break of a wave (Offord Road Books) Neptune’s concrete crash helmet: Magma Issue 72 Share

Poet Sarra Culleno reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Vismai Rao back next the poet Vismai Rao's poems have appeared in several journals, including Salamander, RHINO, Indianapolis Review, Rust + Moth, Glass: A Journal of Poetry and SWWIM. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Orison Anthology. She lives in India. the poems Pursuits 00:00 / 01:55 Mother says she hasn’t found herself yet and there’s little time. She holds an old ceramic mug in one hand a drill bit in the other and is intently watching a man on YouTube put holes into things: it’s how you make vessels suitable for saplings, apparently. Her windowsill is a long row of wine bottles with no wine, all sorts of ivies and ferns pouring out her bathroom mirror a bay of newly acquired post-its with little messages to self— beyond is where she looks to put on her day cream. Afternoons she trades sleep to sit with her sketch sheets & HB pencils bent over houses and fruit, hillsides stark with shadow & light, drawing herself out of a canvas of abstraction. From old photographs she copies faces & hands, draws tall vases with still dahlias, seashores and roads— miles & miles of roads, it’s how she masters perspective— all her roads pointing to dimensionless dots at their respective horizons: here on paper, how easily they reach their ends— Roots 00:00 / 01:30 When I think of you I think of a goat tethered to a pole, you inside your cubicle leashed to the spiralling end of a long chain of events. Hello you say, day after day. How may I help you? On Sundays I bake and philosophize on how breath trapped inside a reed sings when freed. And we deconstruct freedom on the kitchen counter, on the three-seater couch, on bright satin bedspreads— down to its last molecule. A pinprick in a dream— is what we conclude it is. And you wake into another dream with arms covered in pinches. My yoga instructor says Exhale and Release while I knot myself into impossible poses. And then unknot. In December the flamingos fly down from north and drop anchor until the rains. Wings too, can only take you so far. Banyan trees alone are free, going where they will, making bridges out of roots. Constellations 00:00 / 01:23 All night we try to pluck out constellations from our feeble knowledge of astronomy. There is no moon but there is light enough— The sky: black the mountains, blacker. I am certain this isn’t a dream, even though you can no longer corroborate this memory. Even though I’m left too many uncorroborated memories— I don’t recall a single word we spoke. My neurons are firing things at me now: interstellar travel, our latest loves, maya: the mother of illusions, but I know these are from other nights— Of this one I remember close to nothing. Stars jigsawed against the night. And us, acutely aware of them— Publishing credits Pursuits: The Shore Roots: Salamander Constellations: Parentheses Journal (Issue 8) Share

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

Poet Eleanor Hooker reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Eleanor Hooker back next the poet Eleanor has published two books with Dedalus Press: A Tug of Blue and The Shadow Owner’s Companion . Her third collection, Mending the Light, is forthcoming. She holds an MPhil (Distinction) in Creative Writing from Trinity College, Dublin. Currently collaborating on two new poetry chapbooks, Eleanor has recently been published by Poetry magazine, Poetry Ireland Review, Agenda. Eleanor is a Fellow of the Linnean Society of London, and a helm and press officer for Lough Derg RNLI lifeboat. She lives in Tipperary, Ireland. the poems Nailing Wings to the Dead 00:00 / 01:37 Since we nail wings to the dead, she calls ravens from the sky to inspect our work. 'For flight,' they say, 'first remove their boots.' She leans in, inspects a fresh hex behind my eyes, takes my feet and lays them on the fire, to burn it out, roots first. We're the last, babička and me. We've survived on chance and bread baked from the last store of grain. And as we're out of both, we will die soon. They are gathering in the well. We disrobe. She hums whilst I nail her wings, she tells me a tale, her last gift — 'This dark stain, passed kiss to kiss-stained fevered mouth, blights love, is pulsed by death-watch beetle's tick, timing our decay. They know this. They wait by water, gulping despair. The ravens keep watch, they say the contagion's here, they promise to take us first.' Her tale done, we go winged and naked to the well. We hear them climbing the walls, caterwauling, but ravens are swift, and swoop. Guardian Angel after Guy Denning 00:00 / 01:21 Mine is perpetually undressed, though not ingloriously so. He's illustrated too, yet I can tell his new tattoo, Paradis Est Ici, does not improve his spirits. When he splays his charcoaled wings, the wrench of skin, feather and bone makes a sound like splintering wood, I hear him mutter, 'fuck that hurts'. He shaved his head when I shaved mine aged twenty-two, and though my hair's grown back, still he calls me 'baldylocks'. I've been called worse. With a devoted sense of wickedness he feeds rosemary to lambs, 'pre-seasoning', he winks, 'no salvation for the lamb'. He's at his most morose in a boat; it reminds him of biblical times and fishing trips that brought him little cheer. He gets cantankerous at my dithering, Tells me I need a 'swift kick up the arse'. 'You must rid yourself of your demons' he chides. 'What', I snap, 'and lose you?' Well Worn Wings after Jeanie Tomanek 00:00 / 01:52 That cabinet in my mind, where I put things I'd rather not consider, is almost full. Row upon row of stones stacked behind its vast yew doors, collapse in on themselves daily – like bones in a graveyard. The cabinet sits above high water in a backroom named, Unutterable. I didn't name the room, and don't know who did, but I'm conversant with its synonyms. The creature that guards the room is not an eel or a terrible fish, it just is … and occasionally, is not. Where I trace the damp blue walls, a soft mould chalks the paint with my impressions. This room is a dark and broken sea, where disturbed waters drown time. I catch sight of my well worn wings – their hooked vanes patched blue and green – old wounds. With effort, they wrench me from the waters pull, settle me on a rusty puckane, protruding from the wall. Nearby, all my birds, obsidian and raven, caw – what, what, what-what, at the question of my unsettling. I unfeather, back to the rachis, I pluck quills from my shoulder-bones until, dismantled, I am back at source – flightless, woman, and unutterably sad. Publishing credits Nailing Wings to the Dead: POETRY (October 2015) Guardian Angel: Southword (Issue 30) Well Worn Wings: first broadcast on Evelyn Grant's Poetry File Share

Poet Angela T Carr reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Angela T Carr back next the poet Angela T Carr is a poet, editor and creative writing facilitator. Winner of the iYeats International Poetry Competition 2019 and The Poetry Business 2018 Laureate's Prize, Angela's had work placed or shortlisted in over 40 national and international literary competitions. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The North, The Lonely Crowd, The London Magazine, Poetry Birmingham, Strix, Mslexia and elsewhere. Originally from Glasgow, Angela now lives in Dublin. the poems Girl with Child on a Swan's Wing Grave 8: Mesolithic Cemetery at Vedbaek, Denmark 00:00 / 03:24 I was a girl when my father brought me to him – my dowry, the tawny-sheened hide of a buck, twenty bright strings of the teeth of a roe – I came, the tremble of a small wild thing. I came, a creature caught – a hunger, a heart, its string the beat of the forest. Strangers stripped me, braided shells in my hair, said my sons would be warriors, a chief’s kin: And my daughters, I thought, what of them? Men killed boars to roast and feast, the night air thick with smoke, their flesh, a drum and burning stars – they writhed about his head as he took me. In time, my belly grew a boy, a fawn – he kicked and quickened, my nearly child – I hunted him across three starless nights and, blooded, fell. Women washed my corpse, wreathed me in ivory, daubed me blue – my wedding fine, a pillow. They wept as they bore us out through the grasswood huts, past the hummocks of the elder dead, to the shade of the trees, laid out where the black earth bared and the sun, a bone knife, speared the charging sea. A tithe of red ochre, blown from a bowl drifted down, clotting where the birth-tide flowed. We were put to ground in the lope of the wolf's moon, my breathless boy in the cuff of a swan's wing – flint blade at his belly – and I, ringed in teeth, all the beasts of the forest at my throat. The Truth About Figs 00:00 / 01:40 Each ripe fig has at its heart a devoured wasp: a solitary female, to pollinate the fruit's inverted blossom; she crawls in at the meeting of the bracts, the ostiole: a hole so small it rips her antennae, splits the tectonic opacity of skeletal wings; sky-bereft and undone, she nonetheless tends the fig's dark garden, its minute inflorescence – strokes stigma, seeds stamen, tucks her eggs into the styles of ovule florets – and settles into death: the enzymatic gall of her own deflowering. Sink your tongue into the burst of purple skin; mouthful of fleshy sweetness, born of a sting. Quadratic Love Song 00:00 / 01:27 So many things will sit inside a square – a book, a bell, a tooth, a cup, a bone – but who would look and think to find them there? Who’d ink their shape in light when there was none? I think about the square that is a house, a room, where footsteps creak the wooden boards – the one that’s empty of the two of us – I’d name the sound if I could find a word. Though you were never one to fit a tongue or root equations as are graphed by hand – you’d lay your shadow as your sun demands and slip through pauses tighter than a drum. My arms have learned to love the weight of air, to circle what won’t linger in a square. Publishing credits Girl with Child on a Swan's Wing: The North (No. 62) Winner of The Poetry Business 2018 Laureate’s Prize The Truth About Figs: The London Magazine Placed third in The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2016 Quadratic Love Song: The Lonely Crowd (No. 10) Share

Poet Scott Elder reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Scott Elder back next the poet Scott Elder’s work has been widely published in the UK, Ireland and elsewhere – his poetry having been placed or commended in numerous competitions in England since 2016. Breaking Away , his debut pamphlet, was published by Poetry Salzburg, while his collection Part of the Dark was published by Dempsey & Windle. A second collection, My Hotel, is due out from Salmon Poetry in 2023. the poems Dieppe 00:00 / 00:36 A quarter past two and you wondered if your body were a breeze or a breath of moonlight, if your children drew on the tide in the harbour or the dew-covered garden in their dream work. They lay like feathers in a single bed. And you, at once the lady in the window and the woman moving down the cobblestone lane to a pier beyond the bulwarks and pilings, blending, step upon step, your own colour and form into that nightscape. Here and Again After the song The Here And After by Jun Miyake 00:00 / 00:52 Half-sliced a lily on the table petals burning white on white there’s no saying who’s under that skin salt spray spindrift a taste of rust a drop of blood just name it it’s there a knife-slit away not waiting for someone to whisper come alive come alive instinctively twisting back to spawn to begin again the incantation the ragged waltz half-here half-gone you touch your lips to a lily’s wound this is sorrow it murmurs the pain is gone The Man 00:00 / 00:53 It’s only a dream but keeps coming back a highway ticking off concrete slabs the man steps in three saplings in his fist four thousand miles from Casablanca banyan trees a forest in his sack he hasn’t smiled for a decade do you know the way to Casablanca I ask he tries to speak he rounds his lips then something heavy falls this way I crumble to earth snowflakes cover my broken limbs he tells me to listen to the motor’s hum: toora loora looral snowflakes cover my eyes toora loora looral I try to smile Publishing credits Dieppe: Coffee-House Poetry Runner-up in the 2016 Troubadour Poetry Prize Here and Again / The Man: High Window Journal (Issue 12) Share

Poet Natalie Ann Holborow reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Natalie Ann Holborow back next the poet Natalie Ann Holborow is a writer, digital content specialist and marathon-runner. She won both the Terry Hetherington Award and Robin Reeves Prize in 2015, and has been shortlisted and commended for various other awards including the Bridport Prize, The Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition, and the Gregory O'Donoghue International Poetry Prize. Her debut collection, And Suddenly You Find Yourself (Parthian, 2017) was launched at the Kolkata International Book Festival and was listed as one of Wales Arts Review's Best of 2017. Her second collection, Small, will be published by Parthian in 2020. the poems Andromache 00:00 / 01:30 Assume I am wearing black. Assume I have swathed myself in the hollow shades of his bruised knees, dust-clogged and sticky, assume I am leaching away with him. The tracks of his belly scar the dirt. Does anyone ask for his wife, hair dripping over the Trojan walls, towering ten feet over the beetled men below, gleaming up and blinking through her? Assume the wind blew me over the edge of the wall, quiet and pale as salt. Hear me say nothing at all. See these living hands. Hear the smack of my palms against stone, blood coiling its way to my heart, bind me tough as a horseman’s rope. Blow my bones to polished pipes they play when great men fall. For me, no tune at all if I should choose to stagger up, sway on broken toes, burst my lungs screaming for the dead man’s bones with our only child tumbling over crumbling stone in a gasp of blood and milk. When Hector cracked his back behind the chariot, when the bruises flowered blue, when our only baby spiralled like sycamore, the Gods, I felt it too – I called Astayanax, I called Hector. Who called Andromache? Who? Black Dog I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top. ~ John Keats ~ 00:00 / 01:31 He woke me just this morning, nose pushed to my sleepy cheek, breath shuttling down my cool neck: my faithful black dog. His tail clubbed me all shades of violet. The sun sawed me in half. He follows me to the kitchen. Here he comes, his canine shape gleaming like polished jet. I stoop over my coffee, hiss at him to go. My mouth lands on his drooping ear but the stupid dog is deaf; his dumb tongue a dripping slab searching my hand like a rodent. When milk won’t do, he loves the sting of salt. He nuzzles the lid of my eye. Wherever I go, he follows. At office desks, restaurant booths, hunched in the seat of a taxi, my faithful dog sniffs out my bones. When lovers come, he turns possessive. I wriggle free from their fingers, stop them kissing the sides of my jaw. They leave when I talk to the papered wall. I grieve when their footsteps have died. I go to bed at odd hours to watch the small pulse of blue time. When sleep stands me up for the zero moon, the dog strikes me down with his paw. Smoke Signals 00:00 / 00:55 We grew apart in inches, not miles. The house hummed, an empty theatre, our mother pushing the vacuum between our silence. Hacking clots of broken words, your lungs drained themselves into your pillows, fists thumping softly until you sucked in again, stained your breath from a chilly window. Where are you – I knuckled the question into the wall which dragged on between us, searched with my palms for your warmth. A blank inch pulled you away, and I listened to those hisses, those furious sobs, heard the weight of them bending your spine. The vacuum tumbled to a stop. You stopped hissing, opened your window, blew quiet smoke across mine. Publishing credits Andromache: Southword Journal Black Dog and Smoke Signals: And Suddenly You Find Yourself (Parthian Books) Black Dog also appeared in The Stinging Fly Share

Poet Briony Collins reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Briony Collins back next the poet Briony Collins is a writer, artist, and performer based in North Wales. Her career began when she won the 2016 Exeter Novel Prize. Since then, she has published numerous poems and stories, produced plays, and received the 2018 Under-25s Literature Wales Bursary. Briony enjoys illustrating her own work and performing on stage. She is represented by DHH Literary Agency. the poems taid taught me 00:00 / 00:41 how to open corked wine bottles: twisting a fusilli knife deep and prying the bone from a long, green spine until the tetric body pops. whenever i drink i remember this, meaning we will always be merry past when he’s gone and we can pretend that the darkness won’t come for us even though it is coming all the time. Newborn 00:00 / 00:11 Petals of your fingers around mine; Hibiscus closing around moonlight. Liberty based on William Sidney Mount’s painting, The Power of Music (1847) 00:00 / 00:41 Violin strings mark mayflower fingers while mine blister. We smile together and smoke our pipes down to embers. Toes tap the same southern rhythm: them, in the stables, me, outside with the horses, whistling intimations of liberty. Publishing credits taid taught me: exclusive first publication by iamb Newborn: Black Bough Poetry (Issue 1) Liberty: Agenda Magazine (Vol. 52 Nos. 3-4) Share

Poet Sascha Akhtar reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Sascha Akhtar back next © Christa Holka the poet Sascha Aurora Akhtar is a poet of the liminal – someone for whom all is magic. She considers herself a 'Pakistani-British-American: something reflected in the linguistic registers in her work. Her six poetry collections have been published by Salt, Shearsman, Contraband, The Emma Press, Knives, Forks & Spoons Press and ZimZalla. Her first short story collection, Of Necessity And Wanting, is due out from The 87 Press in October 2020, while Oxford University Press (India) will publish her first book of translations in 2021. Sascha's Poems For Eliot , from the book #LoveLikeBlood , was named number one poem of the past five years by Poetry Wales in the summer of 2019. the poems Space dies for it 00:00 / 01:43 I am pure possibility drinking with both heads out of wishing wells geegaws to dust off, Dionysius That remind me of me picking manes are you catching water I give you wands imagine I need to get out there with a vengeance where is it I sit on a doll's platform you do not marvel at the wonder of things. Semi-state hands smell like chicken more words to give the mouth chosen worlds Send messages sometimes I seek sometimes, not beaded colors remind of another turn some reality if I don't write them down, will they disappear. I might close you off I am losing sunshine there is plenty for you to get stars twisted & still, blessed be you are edgewise, edgewise I would like to wrap my head in the salt of you who knows how many near misses you've had. The sky is majestic otherwise oven gloves people worried about library fines being on their record nothing impending words spoken go off I met someone undeniable how is one supposed to keep track of days I stepped on your pile of nails. Aethyrs Restoration of temperature 00:00 / 02:03 Magnets collide, poles pushing each other apart, each half of the brain doing the same, crashing the front of a car, red, burning into a wall rhythmic & repeated Ramming into the bricks bleeding at the joints, the car is redder now, my medulla love oblongata tending the sails aloft & blossoming outwards in a kiss-filled driving wind; Will, shining phallus of a female reading portents in the moonscape of a cloudy night Rising like death in a gas chamber ambles with six legs of an arachnid, the carver of slumber into nightmarish waltzes with familials Jaws yawning & you reflected in the epi-glottis hanging in the cavern of the throat where words ring pealing like awakenings. Under this heat-maddened sky of language & commerce, donkeys rot next to pye-dogs that rule the streets of days & night howling into forms that manifest suspended over above our beds like rain frozen in a pause a blink, each moment flows in a circuitous emblem designed to signify this immersion of senses, a vice grip keeping the head down, breath is all you can take, the mercury falling, your abdomen a lilting cadence the beginning song rustling through imaginary leaves on trees festooned with glowing cups ripe swords, sun-kissed winds & lush pentacles. Chaos Totem 00:00 / 01:45 If it is, condors in the night sky a gilded wooing eruption in the empress way of stars, I hear each bar of the xylophone beaten by their wings battling the atmosphere. A wish to pass behind the firewall, you. If it is, fire-starters in the dim in the cavernous, in the ruins of the day a pacing, piercing undulation rippling under the skin, I feel each dig of the claws of the panther puncturing my lungs to a paler, slivered shadow of breath. Your smile glowing in the tint of a nuclear sun; the dream of red letters every night, new. If it is, angels of mercy unfurling ragged wings on runny skies I see Sophia’s paintings dripping on my head & each prayer wheel spins in the temples of Kathmandu furiously, yellow-bellied pigeons fall over from lack of oxygen, eggs are fried on the bonnets of cars & I hear the Noctiluca roaring of its hunger. If it is, I draw the line. I choke the hold on time & supply runs short. Shoals of unborns playing tantras with wooden legs on tankers carrying oil explode & melt the very tarsoul of the road & you you must run for your very, very life. Publishing credits Space dies for it: Astra Inclinant (Contraband Books) Aethyrs: The Whimsy Of Dank Ju-Ju (The Emma Press) Chaos Totem: Poetry International Share

Poet Erik Kennedy reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Erik Kennedy back next the poet Erik Kennedy is the author of There's No Place Like the Internet in Springtime . He's co-editing a book of climate change poetry from New Zealand and the Pacific which will be published by Auckland University Press in 2021. His poems and criticism have recently appeared in The Moth, Poetry, Poetry Ireland Review, the TLS and Western Humanities Review. Originally from New Jersey, Erik now lives in Christchurch, New Zealand. the poems The Night Before the Barn-Raising 00:00 / 02:04 It was the night before the barn-raising and our son told us that he wasn’t going to be participating. He no longer believed, he told us. I asked him if he meant that he didn’t believe in barns, and I pointed impatiently to the wall and a print of a lovely old barn in DeKalb County. It wasn’t like that, he said. He no longer believed in community, in cooperation. And I said oh, wasn’t that convenient for him to give up on community just when the Flowerdews needed his help with their barn. And I asked if he didn’t remember when Mrs Flowerdew bought a subscription to Pigeon Fancy Magazine when he was fundraising for his school choir trip to Paraguay. And I asked if he thought that Mrs Flowerdew gave an everloving faff about pigeons. The woman is allergic to birds. Allergic. She did it to help him, and I said that I shouldn’t wonder that she’d do it again even if he’d become a thankless heartbreak to his dear mother and a disappointment to the town and a threat to a cohesive society. He said he was sorry but that’s just how it was, and we needed to respect his beliefs, and he was going outside to get some air and he hoped we’d understand some day. So I told his little sister to wait ten minutes then go upstairs and cut all his shoelaces with the kitchen scissors. Georgics 00:00 / 02:45 A lambent light it is that fills the pasture, but it’s too dark to read. The wise farmer rises early to get the best broadband speed. As shepherds watch their fleecy care, they see claggy-arsed, beady-eyed billows of wool. A full house is a pair of Cheviots and three of a kind of Karakuls. ‘Pneumatic nipple suck-fest’ is a quaint term for the morning milking! Gervase Markham writes of a cow that filled sixty buckets. You can ride a tractor from, as the Italians say, the stable to the stars. The tractor’s GPS is more powerful than the computer on the ship that, some day, will take men to Mars. Fifty miles south of here it’s green-yellow. Fifty miles north it’s green. Here, brown trout are scooped from the drying river in nets and trucked to the sea. They wrap hay in plastic now, another processed food. ‘They’ are the farmers. Making hay is a pleasant interlude. The last lightning-strike fire was put out by passing farmer Alan MacHugh. The superstitious among us say that he threw the lightning himself. I’ve asked, and my duty is not to protect the weak. It is to make the weak strong. May they use that strength to make their own peace. At night, from a car, sheep’s eyes look like the ghosts of snooker balls. The dew falls in orbs and rises in a vaporous pyramid. That’s the water cycle, kid. The half-sun on the evening hill is a great aunt’s hairy kiss. Around the manger the animals sing ‘What Version of Pastoral Is This?’ Where the glow-worm creepeth in the night, no adder will go in the day. The ways things are going now, it’s cheaper to throw the crops out than to give them away. Annual Self-Evaluation 00:00 / 02:40 I misunderstood what the gig economy is. It is not, in fact, driving people around in a gig, a light, two-wheeled sprung cart pulled by a single horse. My mistake! And now I suspect that I don’t know what ride-sharing is, either— not if it means something other than budging up in the carriage so another lady or gentleman in muslin and starch can share the seat with you. It makes so much sense now that no one ever mentions horses in relation to the gig economy or ride-sharing. They’re big animals—can’t miss the neighing— and if they were involved you’d think they’d come up. But I do know that cars are part of the conversation, and I think to myself, Now we’re getting somewhere. Like the golden car of Helios drawing the sun across the sky, these are the vehicles of our lives, bringing light and wisdom and clarity to both the meek and the proud so we may realise mutually our destiny to be one people, bound together imperfectly but happily in struggle and earthly love! But no, I’ve got that wrong, too, that is not what a car is, and I suddenly grasp that I am three hundred years old, my ideas are as fashionable as falling down the stairs, as relevant as the social contract or nostrums for scurvy, and I apologise humbly for not bettering myself in the last year, or in other years, and for taking a place in the economy that might be better used by an eager unit, an operative of the now who would privatise the past and mortgage the future for the right to say ‘I am here today’ and who wouldn’t waste your time with self-accusations like mine. Publishing credits The Night Before the Barn-Raising: Minarets (Issue 10) Georgics: Landfall (No. 230) Annual Self-Evaluation: exclusive first publication by iamb Share