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Hear poet Dale Booton read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Dale Booton wave 13 spring 2023 back next the poet Dale Booton (he/him) is a queer poet from Birmingham whose poetry has been published variously by Verve Poetry Press, Young Poets Network, Queerlings , The North and Muswell Press. He has work forthcoming with Magma , and recently hosted the Young Poets Takeover at Verve Poetry Festival. Dale's debut poetry pamphlet, Walking Contagions , is available to pre-order from Polari Press. the poems Church 00:00 / 01:05 when told that God is not meant to be understood I crumbled felt the weight of expectation as it dragged my body below the floor and held it there if knowledge is power then why can I not know why I am so powerful is it that my voice can be used as a weapon that my thoughts can soar beyond these four walls I’ve heard it said captivity is a state of mind I’ve been told theologists are the wisest of all well I beat Pastor at chess at pool broke out of the cage he put me in little child the Lord moves in mysterious ways but is never wrong so you tell me why you tried to darken my heart denied my being why the spirit of someone can only be what you say it is Classroom 00:00 / 00:54 how strange that want to preserve what is so obvious I have heard parents speak how they don’t want their children to know of people like me just like I don’t want my classes and colleagues to know how alone I feel we erase what we fear what we cannot understand drive it into the shadows in the hope it will never make it to light again here my voice is foreign this place where sexuality is a question-and-answer session each one a stone’s throw further from purpose no room for growth no stature that can define a willingness to teach those whose kin would want you dead Nightclub 00:00 / 00:52 I have heard the music speak to me it was the bodies of friends and strangers that introduced us kindred arms wrapped around the uncomfortable relax we move as one there is strength in physicality there is softness in letting go that not-so-sober shove onto the dancefloor that not-so-innocent rush to be close to some other proximity is breath a closely guarded secret here my breath is not foreign this place where love and lust are two words that begin with l like living Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Louise McStravick read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Louise McStravick wave 12 winter 2022 back next the poet Birmingham-based writer, poet and educator Louise McStravick says her writing is concerned mostly with extracting the extraordinary from the ordinary. Her recent work can be found in Popshot , Ink Sweat & Tears , Dear Damsels , Aphelion, Porridge Magazine and several other respected publications. Louise's debut poetry collection, How to Make Curry Goat , was published in 2020. the poems My sister was born a sunset 00:00 / 00:44 When children come out healthy, they are pink. Or the bit when pink meets red like that point in the sky when the sun reminds of its power to make us forget everything that came before it. Even if only a minute. This blood spilled sky an ending. Children are not yellow like a fully baked sun. They said she must have jaundice. My mother tells them her father’s skin holds the burnt ochres of a Caribbean sunset. They do not say sorry when they hand her over. A daughter’s guide to poaching an egg 00:00 / 01:17 Make the water rearrange its insides, shift shape as it is told, steam rise drip drip vinegar, sour the water to not let things stick. Watch it fight its way to the surface. It is not an easy process, such transformation, if not careful it can erupt, break onto skin that has already learned this is too hot, but does it again anyway. Turn the heat down. Don’t hold the egg too high or it will spread itself open, reveal itself, some things should be left to the imagination. Wand a whirlpool and crack it in watch it bring itself together, composed, despite itself. Let the bubbles teach it how to mature, push it to the surface, fully fledged yolk whole, unbroken, ready for charred bread. In one move, let the knife cut it open watch it pour itself out, ready for hungry tongues. Bake yourself some unicorns After Rishi Dastidar 00:00 / 01:19 Start your day with a cheese board; wear lycra to work; decorate your eyelids with glitter made from reclaimed rainbow tears; slay your greetings—wink with both eyes—say goodbye instead of hello; only consume things that are the yellow of the midday sun; defy winter, wear a bikini, manifest warmth; yoga yourself to a luxury holiday at least 8 times a day—the more you do it the more the universe receives; eat squirty cream for lunch straight from the can and inhale the gas after; go on a 24-hour lunch break—if your boss asks why tell her to read your daily horoscope; stop your thoughts at the click of a notification; order yourself a slice of knowledge; you’re owning it babes you’re shitting out that deposit with every reusable cup. You can do this! Start a petition to ban white bread; teach the bacteria in your stomach to recycle plastic; don’t eat anything that could look sound or feel like it could have been crawled on by anything that can be named. Keep going! You know you’re winning when you wake up and it isn’t raining. Publishing credits My sister was born a sunset: How to Make Curry Goat (Fly on the Wall Press) A daughter's guide to poaching an egg: Porridge Magazine Bake yourself some unicorns: Ink, Sweat & Tears

Hear poet Marie Little read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Marie Little wave 21 spring 2025 back next the poet Living near fields and dreaming of the sea, Marie Little has published poetry and flash fiction with Acumen , Ink Sweat & Tears , Black Bough Poetry , Retreat West and many others. She enjoys unpretentious poems, twisty flash and the challenge of a writing prompt. Marie is co-creator of The Swadlincote Festival of Words , and runs writing groups for adults and children. She's best known for her children’s poetry as Attie Lime, and her debut children’s collection is Blue Jelly and Strawberries . the poems In the Sunday Garden Club Hut with Dad 00:00 / 00:44 Underarmed up onto the bench beside you pondering your bad back, too much flesh above my knees I absorb the morning like a dry seed. You chat easy with customers most already friends hand them smiles in paper bags forget the price of things. I play shop with the black iron weighing scales, palming the cold weights, testing the brass bowls for honesty. You hand me boiled sweets, tidy jars, curl twine, lift the stink on the fish, blood and bone bin to make us squirm, laughing. I measure myself carefully in scoops. Dusk 00:00 / 00:42 Six o'clock draws its curtains, twists the dial on chemicals keeping me sunny. The mood over the field is indigo blue, heavy with sooty clouds in waiting. I have no need of litmus paper. I know my score. Bottles in rows wink at me, each emptied to a different level, each a slightly different chime in the tune of dusk. I shun them all, flick the kettle on. Slide something herby, caffeine-free from a purple box, steep it so long it might understand. Drink it in sips, watch the soot spread. Later the bottles will sing. Parents, 1982 00:00 / 00:26 She is milk of magnesia, camphorated oil (warm to the touch). She is petroleum jelly, sodium bicarbonate, cream of tartar. He is the berry-stained wooden spoon as long as my arm, the sticky muslin, dripping. He is the jam-saucer, nestled in the ice box. He is pectin, like quiet magic. Publishing credits In the Sunday Garden Club Hut with Dad: Ink, Sweat & Tears (March 2022) Dusk: Acumen (No. 103) Parents, 1982: Molecules Unlimited Anthology

Hear poet Pratibha Castle read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Pratibha Castle wave 24 winter 2025 back next the poet Much of Pratibha Castle's poetry reflects on her childhood growing up in England in the 1950s and 60s as the daughter of working-class Irish parents. Her poetry has been published in Under the Radar , Lighthouse , Southword , The Honest Ulsterman , Tears in the Fence , One Hand Clapping , Words for the Wild and elsewhere. Pratibha followed her award-winning debut pamphlet A Triptych of Birds & A Few Loose Feathers with Miniskirts in The Waste Land – a winter 2023 Poetry Book Society selection. In 2025, she was a finalist in the Fool for Poetry Chapbook Competition , highly commended in the McLellan English Poetry Competition , and shortlisted for The Fish Poetry Prize . the poems Loving 00:00 / 01:24 A convention of china dolls / on a shelf beside the window / heartless as Delft /neat feet / bound in black bombazine / poking out / beneath satin strict skirts / thoughts / tight lipped / behind pink-pout smirks / corpsed eyes / promise little / of warmth / though a child / frowning over fractions / under Sister Brendan’s codfish glare might / ache / to gussy tresses / chestnut arctic gold liquorice gloss curls to / cosset / covet / coil / about a mayfly finger / dream of ice-tulip cheeks / lace edged pantaloons / frothy petticoats of / cradling chilly porcelain into her chest / contrite enough / to birth a purple bloom / hopeful / to blush chalky skin / for crockery eyes to weep / cherry blossom petals The New Neighbour Introduces Himself 00:00 / 01:21 holds out his hand and though cat sense cautions do not touch I freeze. That same cat caught grubbing in a bed of broccoli, that leveret on Windmill Hill, thralled in enchantment of a ferret. My throat seizes so I cannot utter handshakes not my thing . Puppet to his will jerking its string, my arm lifts, hand – crushed in his – flaccid as a bludgeoned fish. I snap out of this trance, mumble must get dinner stumble to the house scrub passive fingers to a laundry girl flush, purge the clammy imprint of his intuited intent. One more blot to bloat the image of a boy’s tobacco touch improvising on my ten year old fanny as if it was a junk yard flute. Hug 00:00 / 02:15 My mother’s heart was a lake, its frozen surface cracked, when I was young, with insults hurled her way, and I hurled many, wounding like rocks, till her cool glaze became a starburst of splintered love. Even her delight in daffodils, withered, since the bunch of yellow bells she gave me on my 15th birthday, whose whole heads I bit off, mad for some imagined slight and in an acid spritz of blame, spat her way. At which my mother, murmuring to herself, sure the poor girl’s tired , patted my arm, our only physical exchange: we never hugged. Having learnt, years later, how an infant monkey languishes if deprived of its mother’s touch, I subjected her to a lingering clinch. Not just a brief ooh-la-la peck on either cheek, stay two feet away from-one-another sort of hug, but a bellytobelly chesttochest squeeze, palming up and down her back as though grooming the silk-eyed Persian hunkered on the couch, glaring. On a normal day, the only flesh my mother or myself would handle. And when my mother tried to edge away, I fastened my grip like now I’ve got you ma, you’re going nowhere. The way, when small, I ached for her to hold me, limpet tight. Publishing credits Loving: Stand Magazine (Vol. 21 No. 4) – originally appearing in a different form and titled A Child's Dream of Love The New Neighbour Introduces Himself: finalist in the McLellan Poetry Competition 2025 Hug: London Grip (Winter 2021)

Hear poet Warrick Wynne read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Warrick Wynne wave 18 summer 2024 back next the poet With three published books to his name, Australian poet Warrick Wynne has had his poetry featured in various Australian and international magazines and journals, including Walleah Press and Varuna, The Writers House Blog . Warrick lives and writes on the Mornington Peninsula, south of Melbourne. His most recent collection is The State of the Rivers and Streams . the poems Hands 00:00 / 00:39 Level 3 is 'Hands': the swathed palm, the unhinged fist, the fingers fractured black or twisted, suspended in slings wrapped in gauze. We all face each other mute as moons. This is what happens when pressure is applied against the grain, this is the flaw in the great architecture what a piece of work ... how easy it is to break this hold we have on things, we can hardly grasp it. Spider Crab 00:00 / 01:08 Above the Victorian Fish poster, (vivid illustrations of the edible denizens of the deep) a white spider crab mounted on a wooden board pinned to the wall as it was in my childhood. I mean, this exact crab, legs now blackening with age was in a (different) fish and chip shop of my youth, brought here, no doubt, with the goods and chattels from some former enterprise, and I recognise it: one giant claw open wide to snap, the other retracted shy, evasive punch and counter-punch. At Hector's Seafood now, the staff wear light blue tops emblazoned with a yellow marlin rising from a vividly tropical sea. I wait for my flake below fading ivory claws, one outrageously enlarged, one curled inward gently like an invitation, or an imploring gesture to the past. At the edge For Harriet 00:00 / 00:27 We walk to the edge of the bay drawn, it seems, to this great dish where you played and swam and now, stand here, with your own baby strapped to you. Could anything be stranger? the three of us beside the sea, the submerged beach where you played a stone wall, the city in the distance whatever next? Publishing credits Hands: The Best Australian Poems 2013 (Black Inc.) Spider Crab: exclusive first publication by iamb At the edge: Love the Words Anthology 2022 (Infinity Books)

Hear poet Daljit Nagra read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Daljit Nagra wave 7 autumn 2021 back next the poet Chair of the Royal Society of Literature, Daljit Nagra has pubished four collections of poetry with Faber & Faber. He has scooped the Forward Prizes for Best Individual Poem and Best First Collection, the South Bank Show Decibel Award, and the Cholmondeley Award. Daljit's writing has also been shortlisted for the Costa Prize, and twice for the T S Eliot Prize. A Poetry Book Society New Generation Poet, Daljit has had his poems published by The New Yorker , the London Review of Books and the Times Literary Supplement . He is the inaugural poet-in-residence for Radio 4 and Radio 4 Extra, presenting the weekly Poetry Extra programme. Daljit serves on the Council of the Royal Society of Literature, and teaches at Brunel University London. the poems Letter to Professor Walcott 00:00 / 04:48 Hardly worth calling them out , the old masters. Each time a cause gains ground, should their estate become glass house to alleged misdemeanours? Their body of rhyme can be felt, it propagates its own lineage. Should we read poems from a cave, half-witted by the missing forefather? I stand before the compressed volumes of verse across my shelves: who covered their tracks, who’ll outlive their flaws? Who’d topple the marble of some national bard, or gulag their name and the chela guarding them? How many writers, the world over, are behind bars for crossing a border of taste? It seems natural to harm art and the artist. Consider Larkin whose private views were amiss, who, if akin to his father’s brown shirt, who, if published by Old Possum's who laid rats on Jews … and I’ve lost myself, and the Work is no longer the work. If influence imparts bad genes, who to weigh in the scales of my nurture? Weigh Chaucer who forced a minor into raptus? Weigh Milton mastering tongues to bate his women like a whip? Weigh Coleridge pairing the horror of Othello’s wedded stares to those of a black mastiff? Weigh Whitman and Tennyson who’d cleanse by skin? If Kipling says we’re devils, may I weigh the man of If ? How do I edit the Frost-like swamp I’ve swilled – so many poets to recycle either side of this fireplace before sweetness and light. Before I’m woke, in tune with the differentiated rainbow and its crying flames. Should I calmly cease their leasehold if they’ve abused the canonical fortress? Or ride a kangaroo court on its flood of Likes? Take down each Renaissance Man to his manhood? But I hear the poems breathe: We can’t be judged by our birth, or judge our birth as Parnassian. And you, dear Derek. Your Adam-songs for an island sparked paradise from sanderling, breadfruit. Your spade dug the manor and bones fell up. The senate columns fanfared your arrival. They donned a black male and colour was virtue. You opened my mouth and verse came out. Your advocates cleaned your mess, their arms held down the age, as though gods roamed the earth to graduate girls. As though rape were the father of art. You were 'Dutch, n____', Brit, you were my Everyman! Why take on Caliban’s revenge? Your moustache a broom wedging its stanza of nightmare – in how many Helens? Did you lust after lines inspired by whiplash, taunted by sirens for your Homeric song? Intellectual finger-jabbing seems off the mark: in the papers Korean Ko Un’s erased, and who’d fly to a terminal if it was named for a serial pervert, Pablo Neruda? I bet they hunt the dark man, Derek, in pantheon death. Haunted or wreathed – how should you be honoured at Inniskilling? Well, it seems fitting you fall in the West where you carried 'our' burden. Beside the foul spot, I’d test my love again. You are in me: I’d never lose you, if I tried. I’d begin with these, your old books, anew. Now where on my shelves are you, travelling through the old world? Where’s your dog-eared Don Juan ? 00:00 / 01:44 00:00 / 01:44 Publishing credits A Letter to Professor Walcott: Times Literary Supplement (No. 6147) Author photo: © Martin Figura

Hear poet Lesley James read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Lesley James wave 15 autumn 2023 back next the poet Lesley James is a writer from Wales whose debut poetry chapbook is A Walk With Scissors . She's been published in a range of literary magazines and anthologies, including BOLD , The Broken Spine , Full House Literary Mag and Spelt Magazine . She was shortlisted for a UK Very Short Story award by LoveReadingUK, and won Cardiff Writers’ Poetry, Flash and Article prizes in 2022-23. Lesley's words have also earned her two 2023 Best of the Net nominations. the poems Ways in which a cortado can prompt existentialism (No. 3) 00:00 / 01:09 In the pastel Caffè Nero that used to be my bank, a man nudges a scuffed skirting board with his toe as he moves a chair. It falls off. I realise they’re all fake. Held on by silicone or No More Nails. What’s important is the impression. Never mind the feeling of concealment and being duped. The Doric pillars rise. But not very far. What sits above the lowered ceiling, I ask a barista? Beyond the replicated coving? He shrugs and shakes his head behind the Perspex screen. Bank clerks, no doubt. In a stately two-tone world. Greying and cobwebby. You Don’t Know What I’ve Done With thanks to Rachel Long, Caroline Bird and Arda Collins 00:00 / 01:02 And they say that Polar bears are under threat, but I saw them – one grey one beige – shopping in Cardiff City Centre yesterday. I did one of Harry Styles’ tattoos – and they threw me out of art class aged thirteen. Lizzo chose me to be one of her Big Gurrl Dancers, and I said ‘No, bitch.’ You don’t know what I’ve done. YOU DON'T KNOW WHAT I'VE DONE. I invented squissors, scissory tongs to squeeze the slop from cat food pouches so you don’t get gunk all on your hands. And you know that gunk, the cat food stuff that drips all on your hands … I’ve licked that. I chose an elderly guy – seventy-five – to fuck to end my marriage – Yeah! I stole the cat – that cat, the one who lives with me – from his perfectly good home and made friends with his real mother. And I write it. I write it all. Like I’m writing us. Now. In The Drag Queen Vegan Café Ways in which a cortado can prompt existentialism (No. 5) 00:00 / 02:05 To unsheathe September’s lunaria seed from their waxy shields, you should first lick your fingertips. Take a single flat seed head between two fingers and a thumb, and make to snap your fingers. It falls apart. The crispy ovals flutter down. Catch the falling seeds. Some will jump away, and found the Honesty of two years’ time. Pearl lantern moons remain. On vanilla feet with toffee apple fur, the cat forgets we do this every year. He chases the papery housings like they are secrets I’ve been keeping from him, or his own free will. In darkness he practises sleeping round corners for when winter comes. But for now, everything is drag-queen vegan café, Banksy in Port Talbot, Frida Kahlo on blue brick. The buddleia points tourmaline fingers at pigeon-blood cosmos wearing bee earrings (clip-ons). The wingbeats of overhead sparrows purr like flicked open fans. Last night’s massive bedroom moth (critch-critch) has laid eggs from her orange furry bum, and left the building. Everything is voluminous, daubed-on, lipstick smeared, waiting to die. An apple drops. The astilbe is still. Publishing credits Ways in Which a Cortado Can Prompt Existentialism (No. 3): A Walk With Scissors (Infinity Books UK) You Don’t Know What I’ve Done: exclusive first publication by iamb In The Drag Queen Vegan Café: Full House Literary Magazine (Issue 2)

Hear poet Morag Smith read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Morag Smith wave 24 winter 2025 back next the poet Morag Smith's work has featured in the Scottish Poetry Library’s Best Scottish Poems of 2023 , Poetry Ireland Review , Crannóg Magazine , The Scotsman , Gutter and Ink, Sweat and Tears . Winner of the Paisley Book Festival's 2021 Janet Coats Memorial Prize, Morag has also been highly commended in the Ginkgo Prize , and shortlisted twice for the Bridport Poetry Prize. Her debut pamphlet, Background Noises , examines the re-wilding and human history of the partly abandoned Dykebar Hospital . She's currently working on a pamphlet of visual poetry about semi-derelict hospital buildings, due out in 2026, with her first full collection set to appear in 2027. the poems Bog 00:00 / 01:27 Her lessons are ankle deep at the edge, tannic brown spilling over my shoes she sprawls patient in her hive of lost things, poisoned monarch of sedge and rush always knowing her place in the world the air above her thick with pollen microscopic debris remnants of murmurations that settle like nets on hedgerow rise and fall again with the exhalation of millennia scant summer whitethroats search for crane flies in the shift and flow of permanence find instead blister packs molars sharp moraines of mouse bones a barbed wire torque gleams on the bank ready for the flood plains where Cala Bellway Persimmon wait with their diggers unable to let things be the plash of her whispers tells me I am also a queen of sedimented clay the more I twist the more I sink a quilt of benzodiazepine wraps and transmutes anger breath memory to ancient carbon spores of Mesozoic ferns drifting to the Day Room it would be best not to build here Background Noises 1. Extraneous sound which can be heard while listening to or monitoring something else; 2. A person or thing considered to be irrelevant or incidental 00:00 / 02:23 Every breath thick with mycelium and brick dust, ornate fences rusted down. Hollow knocking on a smeared window, jumble of prosthetic limbs, tangled with the rustling chokehold of ivy’s betrayal. We propose removal from the greenbelt . Whump, whump of trees falling. Hawthorn and Sycamore thrash through the night’s storms, gone by morning. Removal vans, engines running, porters calling, matches struck, smoke exhaled, sound of a wren, like a fire alarm. Pine cones skitter dry on tarmac, shouts of wind-swung signs DANGER ASBESTOS NO ENTRY, copper coins nestle deep in oak burrs. Buildings shift shoulders, moan to scratch, flap, groan of rafters heavy with crow. From the new block, consultants’ cars purr, locks buzz, monitors beep; the sound of a wren, though rare, is occasionally heard. What the old asylum says is unreliable; scratched letters, doctors’ notes on yellow paper in manilla folders, closed archive shelves. Commendations in the Paisley Gazette describe palatial dwelling houses for lucky staff and patients, where a nurse sobs for her lost fiancé and a joiner cries for his mother while a young lieutenant learns to walk with a crutch, spends his afternoons flicking through collected works of Shakespeare; pages whir through fingers, The isle is full of noises … Concert parties sing of rowan trees that creak and stretch into sun-quiet summer, bees on cabbage flowers, lunchtime bells and dinner gongs; sound of a wren, tic, tic, trill. Two Storms 00:00 / 02:17 The Glasgow Hurricane Once in 1968, our neighbourhood made the news when December gales peeled a tenement gable end. We gathered to gape at dolls' house rooms, furnished with G-plan sideboards, cocktail cabinets, suicidal mattresses, teetering. I remember the cracked eyes of television sets gazing down, my voice asking, Where are the people? That year at Christmas I got a bungalow with detachable roof, fold down walls, and the Newtown Home Set – parents with teenage daughter and monozygotic twins. Their jointed limbs let them sit for dinner. There was a rocking horse, badged school blazers, savings in the bank, unwrinkled plastic smiles of vigilance, always ready for sudden hands descending through the ceiling or random soldiers at the breakfast table. They knew one day the cataclysm would come, so tumbled uncomplaining into their graves at the council tip. Now, in my sleep, the whole family floats in the South Pacific Garbage Patch, though recently they've been swimming back to me like old friends. Arms and legs pump furiously. I cry out loud, You haven’t aged a bit! Ciara, 2020 The Bridge Guest House is peeled open, walls still hung with summer landscapes. They gave the tempest its chosen name and showed on TV the bedroom doors still hung above a landscape filled with floating debris of two hundred years. My bedroom doors are closed tight against winds and rivers, too strong, too high, the swells that excavate my sleep and peeled the Bridge Guest House. They are brutal and constant as old friends. Now we give them names. In spring 2020, half of the 200 year old Bridge Guest House in Hawick was washed into the River Teviot by a storm. Publishing credits Bog / Background Noises: Background Noises (Red Squirrel Press) Two Storms: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Deborah Finding read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Deborah Finding wave 14 summer 2023 back next the poet Originally from North-East England and now living in London, Deborah Finding is a queer feminist writer with a background in academia and activism. Her poetry has featured in fourteen poems , The Alchemy Spoon , The Friday Poem and anthologies from Live Canon, Renard Press, Victorina and Fly on the Wall Press. She came first in the poetry category of the Write By The Sea Literary Festival Writing Competition 2022, and was commended in the Troubadour International Poetry Prize 2022. Her debut pamphlet vigils for dead and dying girls is forthcoming from Nine Pens. the poems amortisation 00:00 / 01:34 you explained to me that amortisation is the depreciation of non-tangible assets which are things like goodwill and loyalty and relationships you can depend on it’s a complex calculation to figure out what these things are worth, the factors that add to or detract from their value and how quickly they can be lost but I want to try, I always did I can show my workings out, in your spread sheets, under which we did, to an advanced level, excel … I write this as addictive additive, also when you said you would love me all of the days. like infinity plus one but plus one was the problem which leads us to the minus column your creative accounting of her to me, to her of me, every evasion a reduction of your credit score and now we disagree on the answer I show you a number in the red you tell me of future investments and paint me a unicorn valuation but it turns out amortisation is just the process of slowly writing off a debt on paper at least. so consider it done, books balanced, no net gain loving you was a zero-sum game dear ______ 00:00 / 03:24 My therapist told me to picture you as a scorpion in a guided meditation, in which she had me imagine – in a very visceral way – crushing you to death with my foot, till you were nothing but shit and dust. Now, I know what you are thinking: surely a real therapist would never suggest such a thing! but to be totally honest with you she is somewhat unconventional in her methods and only the week before this she had asked me to imagine finding a grave and looking down to see your lifeless body in the deep and open dirt – the knowledge of your death giving me back my own breath which I'd been holding all these months terrified that I could see you on every corner your dark hair swinging behind you in front of me a kind of ponytail PTSD. I wish I was joking. Anyway, back to you as a scorpion, did you know it’s said they're viciously venomous for no reason? Have you heard that fable about the frog and the scorpion, that ends with the scorpion saying, it’s in my nature ? Well, I don’t believe that shit. I don’t believe you were born like that to sting for the sake of it. But it doesn’t matter because you are that now and you should be approached with extreme caution and protective clothing, if at all and I learned the hard way that anyone who would keep a scorpion for a pet is a fool. There’s an urban myth that if you light a circle of fire around a scorpion it will sting itself to death horribly … for a long time I thought about how I could set your world on fire: trap you in a prison with only your own poison for company, and glass walls and spotlights for all to see who you really are. I texted your name so often that my phone still wants to gift it to me in autocorrect whenever I type the first three letters but this is progress, because for a while just the E would do it. One day I hope I can look at your name in black and white or even meet someone else with it, and not hate them on sight and though today is not that day I know it must be coming. I don’t think of you so much now and I wear a scorpion earring. Not every day but on those mornings where I wake up shaking or when the offence of an injustice is simply overwhelming. It helps remind me that it’s ok if a battle is too bloody to fight, that self-care sometimes means you don’t get to win even when you’re right and the day I grew up is the day I understood that the sun shines just the same on evil and good. Ah, scorpion … despite all I learned about you it’s not in my nature to claim you have no path to salvation but it does bring me comfort to know that at any moment any enemy can be crushed if only in imagination. distracted 00:00 / 00:42 today I did not want to write about desire I had loftier plans for worthier topics some notes about injustices and a page already half-baked with an idea about a town but you walked me home last night after dinner and before you took a cab so now my hands are your hands thinking dextrously of the five delicious minutes spent kissing you in the rain, our cold wet faces in refreshing contrast to our hot wet mouths tongues tasting intoxicatingly of our desserts and of not having kissed each other for a week Publishing credits amortisation: Live Canon Anthology 2022 (Live Canon) dear ______: exclusive first publication by iamb distracted: Hearth & Coffin Literary Journal (Vol. 2, Issue 1)

Hear poet Kathryn Bevis read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Kathryn Bevis wave 6 summer 2021 back next the poet Hampshire Poet 2020-21 and founder of The Writing School , Kathryn Bevis won several awards, including first prizes in poetry competitions run by Poets & Players and Against the Grain Press. Shortlisted for the Nine Arches Press Primers scheme, Kathryn was longlisted for the National Poetry Competition. Her poems appeared in print and online, and were broadcast on BBC Radio 4. Kathryn also designed and delivered ACE and county council-funded Poetry for Wellbeing projects for adults in mental health and substance misuse recovery settings, as well as in prisons. Her debut collection was The Butterfly House . the poems starlings 00:00 / 01:50 in the beginning is the skydeep and the skydeep is shapeless and hollow and blankness dwells there and the bodyus broods over the belly of the horizon clinging to skeletons of trees and we say let there be wavetrail and there is wavetrail and we divide the wavetrail from the skydeep and the outpour from the inshrink and we call the wavetrail WE ARE and we call the skydeep IT IS and we say let there be curlsmoke in the midst of the skyswim and let it divide the WE ARE from the IT IS and we fashion the curlsmoke from the skyswim and it is so and we call the curlsmoke ONE and the skyswim we call MANY and we say let the breakwave be heard among the MANY and the pebblerush also and we call the breakwave FLESH and the pebblerush we call SPIRIT and thus it is then we say let the SPIRIT be divided into the skybright we will call LIGHT and the outsnuff we will call DARKNESS and let DARKNESS bring about a great shitting upon the earth and we say let DARKNESS herald the downpull and the stenchsweet, the dirtroost and the clutchheart and so it goes glory be to the skydeep and the bodyus the curlsmoke and the skyswim glory be to the breakwave and the pebblerush the dirtroost and the outsnuff for we are the MANY we are the ONE Tidal Race For Ollie 00:00 / 01:29 This morning found you capsized and sinking in the campsite kitchen, bloodless, clammy, haunted by the world and all its doubles. They hauled you off in their blue-light bus and I rode beside, squeezed your shoulder tight, willed you back to yesterday. Drowning here, the reflected twin of everything swims in your eyes, pulls you far from reach. They wheel you out and in, from scan to scan, pump dye around your veins and brain to find the chink that let the shadows seep inside. Hours slide behind this green curtain and still you get your sums wrong, still believe in clones of fingers, faces, clocks that press at the corners of your eyes, maintaining they exist, insisting on their right to be here. Come back. We’ll grip the cliff edge while the seal’s sleek head lifts above the water’s surface, melts to gloss again. Gannets will plunge, gold-hooded, into the tidal race and splash to scoop out cloud-marked mackerel, flaring silver in the sun. Matryoshka 00:00 / 01:20 We’re all in the family way. Full of ourselves. In the pudding club, my dear. On our shelf, we gather dust like dandruff and listen to the sound of human children growing. Their girls – once born – are great squishy, smelly things that pule and puke and shit the sodding bed. Not ours. We are a nest with all our pretty chicks inside. We are the hatchling and the egg. Each of us is mother to a daughter who is pregnant with the next in line. Our bodies rhyme, like the faces of the moon. All except our smallest. We don’t talk about it but let me say it softly: she was born with no space inside. That’s right. She’s wood all the way through. It’s not that we judge her, understand, but we know (as only mothers can) she’ll never get to split herself in two, she’ll never have to bear the others as we do. Publishing credits starlings: winner of the 2019 Against the Grain Press Poem Competition / Fenland Poetry Journal (Issue 4) Tidal Race: shortlisted in the 2020 Live Canon Single Poem Competition / Live Canon Anthology 2020 (Live Canon) Matryoshka: commended in the 2021 International Hippocrates Prize for Poetry and Medicine / 2021 Hippocrates Prize Anthology (Hippocrates Initiative)

Hear poet James Giddings read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. James Giddings wave 9 spring 2022 back next the poet Born in Johannesburg and now living in Sheffield in the north of England, James Giddings is the author of Everything is Scripted , published in 2016 by Templar Poetry. the poems Look inside 00:00 / 01:00 At the base of the back of my neck is the button you press to get a look inside. One firm push with your thumb and FWIP! my head pops back like the top of a kettle and a noise strikes the same tone as a microwave casserole when it’s cooked, a mushroom cloud of steam ballooning from the neck hole of my thin cigarette body. Once you’ve released all that hot air, take a peek, you’ll see there’s not much there: no gold elements, no dial tone of great intellect, just a feeling, as if staring down a deep ravine. There seems as if there’s no end to it, until you throw something down and a sound calls back from the bottom. There are versions of us in alternate universes 00:00 / 01:37 One where we’re partners on a buddy cop show who stand back-to-back with our guns raised as our theme tune swells to a crescendo and the screen detonates, our names exploding out of picture. Another where we bloom on trees like bright fruit and our lives are spent waiting for the great fall. Then there’s the one where I am your father and you are my son, and you are crying because you’re hungry and I am crying because I can’t get the car seat to bloody fit, but we stop, for a few seconds, each of us near silent when we catch the eyes of the other. One where we are giant glass shards reflecting. Another where we are bank robbers, our ears pressed against a safe door like expectant fathers listening for a heartbeat. Another where we wait in a long line for the entrance to Hell and both complain about how long it’s taking. And even though I know there are worse universes than ours, I can’t shake the one in which each night you tell me all the unextraordinary words you know like spam , hardcopy and telemarketer, then right before you leave, say a couple of extraordinary ones, which are only so because of how rarely I’ve heard you utter them in this world. No requests 00:00 / 01:55 I’m working on my vanishing act, an homage to my father. To learn more I attend a show where the magician starts by sawing a ladle in half. To further subvert the genre he pulls a hat out of a rabbit, places the rabbit on his head like a toupee and shaves it into oblivion with a set of clippers, leaving the cue ball of his bald head shining. Do the one where the father disappears and you bring him back on stage! I heckle, but he doesn’t do requests. Next he does a card trick entirely with birthday cards, which, in a feat of anti-gravity, levitates the heart in my chest. With love , one reads, then his signature, a single kiss. Impressed, I shout, do the one where you bring back the father! But he still doesn’t do requests. Next he stretches a ten pence piece leaving the Queen’s face visibly frustrated. Then he solves a Rubik’s cube by throwing it behind his back; it is so convincing and easy, I hope a policeman might hand him a murder case. I rise from my seat, plead, please do the one where you bring back the father! He gestures off-stage theatrically, magics up security and I’m escorted out through a plain grey door. No traps. No secret panels. I never got to see the big finish, whether he did the trick, but I waited anyway, checking every face that left the auditorium, hopeful he had pulled it off. Publishing credits Look Inside: exclusive first publication by iamb There Are versions of Us in Alternate Universes: Poetry Wales (Vol. 56, No. 2) No Requests: Poetry London (Issue 97)

Hear poet Sascha Akhtar read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Sascha Akhtar wave 3 summer 2020 back next 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 Aethyrs Restoration of temperature 00:00 / 02:03 Chaos Totem 00:00 / 01:45 Publishing credits Space dies for it: Astra Inclinant (Contraband Books) Aethyrs: The Whimsy Of Dank Ju-Ju (The Emma Press) Chaos Totem: Poetry International (2012) Author photo: © Christa Holka

Hear poet C Daventry read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. C Daventry wave 15 autumn 2023 back next the poet A linguist, writer and poet living in Scotland, C Daventry has won several awards for her work. These include first place in the Bridport Prize for Poetry (her work appearing in its annual anthologies several times), winner of the 2019 Hippocrates Open Awards for Poetry and Medicine , and The John Ruskin Prize in its inaugural year. A finalist in the 2019 Moth Poetry Prize , she's also chalked up multiple shortlistings and nominations elsewhere. Her work has been published throughout the UK and beyond, and her solo poetry chapbook is titled, The Oligarch Loses His Patience . the poems Mother’s Ruin 00:00 / 01:38 She comes home and takes gin gin deadbeat, gin strayed-from-the-fold takes its own back again, robs families of fathers, rips the roof off terraces, shows off mould and wallpaper in flapping strips gets inside the cistern, the milk bottle, the baby’s bottle, filled up with gripe and mither to the neck with Dutch courage, gin-Jenever; make baby silver make her gold liquid witch, my juice of the juniper take with you my lumbago my gallstones my gout take with you his droop and ague gin swills in our gutters, our runnels, swirls down the drains and out through the grilles, up to the gunwales mammy’s boots go out slap-slap on slimy cobbles. Gin is the colour of her moon-clout her eyes her rouged knees her grey lips gin with lemon gin with lime gin will be damned gin laced with turpentine will take oranges to Scotland and pish on England gin will fackin rhyme if and when it likes gin and whey out of the teats of her into the mouths of babes stiff after three days in winding sheets gin from the ankles up, bad as brown apples in the bottom of the barrel soft ribs teeth like cheese maggots in the brain in every port be mine in the estuarine brine croons the seaman biting her tongue I’ll give you gin up your skirt for your pains dump the bairn come away to Mandalay to the East Indies to the straits so she gave him a dose of gin to take away for my Valentine in an fMRI scanner 00:00 / 00:57 Beloved, it’s because of the way your parahippocampal gyrus glows green under pressure. The way your parietal lobe (which, try as I might, I can’t see as inferior) shows hyperactivity when I whisper sweet nothings. For this alone I want to sail away to your bilateral insula in a precuneus coracle, drag it high on white sand, dance the cingulate cortex breathless and wild, then pull you close and do the fusiform gyrus as the fiery plate of the sun drops below the horizon. You are my frontal and limbic regions of interest. You alone are my dorsal hypoactive cluster. You have declared cerebellum on my own amygdala, o, stroll with me under the globus pallidus of the moon. I do not appear in photos 00:00 / 00:53 anymore. There was a time my face was green hills covered in buttercups, I walked with bees hovering above the clover of my hair which was perpetually ruffled by the light breeze of your breath, of anyone’s breath, of the breath of a man standing over me on the bus, his feet planted too near the saplings of my legs, the hive in my belly, the bird of heart in my feathery breast, us swaying a little; everything I owned slung over the waterfall of my shoulders. My bangles had the clink of pebbles in a burn, and me, averting my eyes – changing direction quick as a shoal of silver fish – from my own aristocracy, my neck a stalk of willow under the heavy crown none of us ever knew we wore. Publishing credits Mother's Ruin: MAGMA (No. 67) for my Valentine in an fMRI scanner: 2019 Hippocrates Prize Anthology (The Hippocrates Press) I do not appear in photos: shortlisted for the Moth Poetry Prize 2019

Hear poet Ankh Spice read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Ankh Spice wave 1 winter 2020 back next the poet Ankh Spice is a sea-obsessed poet from Aotearoa (New Zealand). His poetry has appeared in a number of online and printed publications internationally. He often uses natural imagery, myth and strong derealisation to explore the personal and shared traumas that keep us unsettled, environmental issues, and the drive to persist against our odds. Two of his poems were nominated for the 2020 Pushcart Prize courtesy of Rhythm & Bones and Black Bough Poetry. the poems Have mercy Written following Hurricane Dorian, September 2019 00:00 / 01:44 This island opens the iris of her day, calm curve of bay all visioning glass deepsight clear to the seabed stones, each a distinct sharp note, becalmed in unstirring kelps oh yes here the huge animal of the world is all lull but I turn where the trail ends in a groan the road inhaled by her winter heaving and on your side of her body that same skin murmuring wet nothings down there where the road was is tearing holes in itself right this second and if we are any kind of people we know what to do with an animal struggling just to breathe when did we close our eyes so tightly we forgot that desperate creatures fight hard and close more eyes as they go down gasping So from me running caught between breaths to you caught in her throat I can’t say anything except oh god you know you know she never wanted this New cloth 00:00 / 01:27 Your pattern pinned itself to the fray of me the first day. Not yet stitched, aligning fragile tissue, judging bias – the wounded cut carefully always holding their breath. When they remade you, I slept on a hospital couch with your dress, bundled like a woollen heart, to my nose. Five hours inhaling-exhaling bargains a short time to outfit a whole woman into her own dear self. We tied knots with every colour we could find. Understand, love always gets down to the wisp beyond fabric, to stroke the finest thread of a person – our making looms us legacies of holes – you fear cutting yourself short, me born running with scissors, and all of us rippling fast towards the great unravelling Yet the great thumping treadle of a heart can still say now you’re mending – billow with the wind. This poem did not stand a chance 00:00 / 02:03 Begotten, I failed to thrive, all at once and for years after, perhaps this poem will be rejected before it can speak from spite. I learned young that every strand and bead of us is base, self- interested only in making more of itself this poem will know it can never be good enough Here is a sore-tooth socket of a truth for a tongue to test – we persist by errors in our replication, success for this whole bolt of shivering animal fabric is in the dropped stitches, in failing to be perfect this poem will blame itself for signalling predators this also describes a number of fathers selfish patterns unstrung, then unshuttled, without any binding, so this poem will unravel red threads into the sea this poem will fail to finish even that I have stopped you going on. I did not beget, I have not made anything at all of myself this poem was stillborn I pick up this small body of work, headed for the coffin-drawer, and it is still warm and so blameless a great rack-and-rattle shakes the mistake of it from my hands, even despite resurrecting you, it begins to speak: This poem was still born Publishing credits Have mercy: Kissing Dynamite (Issue 10) New cloth: Rhythm & Bones (Issue 6) This poem did not stand a chance: The Failure Baler (Issue 1)

Hear poet Michele Grieve read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Michele Grieve wave 19 autumn 2024 back next the poet Michele Grieve was Poet in Residence for The Urban Tree Festival 2022/23, and a recipient of funds from Arts Council England's Developing Your Creative Practice. She graduated from the Faber Academy Advanced Poetry Course in 2023, and has had work published by WildFire Words , Obsessed With Pipework and Anthropocene . Currently collating her first poetry pamphlet, Michele can be found hugging trees, her five cats and her family in Hertfordshire, where she's also undertaking Bardic training. the poems Sunday Roast with My Family 00:00 / 00:57 At our faux Chippendale dining table, Marie Antoinette stabs her wig-mice with scarlet talons if they try for a morsel of her stuffing. Her head lolls to one side, we’re midway through my revolution. It wasn’t a clean strike. Plasma and cells sprint to flavour the gravy. To her right the shadow-man loiters, his wispy nervous edges flicker like the memory of remorse, unsure where they should end. He slices off each finger because he can. He cannot remember the last time he saw his own face. The brother who denies his blood lurks under the table, eating dog fur off the Axminster, trying to angle a view up my skirt. No one stops him. I say nothing. The cosplay mother calls me by my dog’s name then feeds him her breast. ACT TWO: ‘THE TWENTY-YEAR SCRIPT’ 00:00 / 02:20 GENRE: PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR CHARACTERS: MOTHER (54) SWAN-NECKED, HER SPINE CLINGS TO A MEMORY OF DIGNITY BUT NOW HAS CLOSED RANKS AROUND HER HEART. AN ECHO CAN BE HEARD OF A 'WELL-PUT-TOGETHER' WOMAN, YET BLOTCHY FOUNDATION REVEALS YESTERDAY’S FACE. THE ONCE 'ELIZABETH TAYLOR' HAIR NOW MATTED WITH ELNET, BATTLING TO RETAIN ORDER. DAUGHTER (20) A WEIGHTY PHYSIQUE OF A BODY WEARING ITS SHAME. BAREFACED, HER HAIR IS MID-LENGTH-LANKY WITH PREMATURE WHISPERS OF GREY. DESPITE THE CIMMERIAN SHADE, HER EYES HAVE A GLINT OF ÉLAN VITAL. NO ONE KNOWS HOW THIS IS POSSIBLE. SETTING: 1930s house, stands alone, held captive by two villages, each a mile away, both too far to seek help at 4am. The untamed garden to the front has a semicircular drive, allowing no one to ever truly arrive, or leave. A maternal willow tree reaches roots under the house, raising concrete and concern. The living room is coated with nicotine and anger. Everywhere is busy. Every room is loud. Faded school photographs offer a nostalgia for obedience. The red velour sofa is draped with lace antimacassars; once delicate and white, now tired and soiled. An anxious Axminister lay buried under decades of dander and despair. Sofa reclined; the mother catches up with friends on Coronation Street . An ashtray erupts beside her whisky, both work in unison to flavour the air. The daughter smokes her dummy. Mother: (peeling her eyes off the screen) Prefer your fringe to the side, it’s far more slimming. (Daughter drags on her fag to cauterize her wound. Mother sips whisky to anesthetize her everything.) Mother: (eyes glued back on the screen) I’ll make you a mango Slimfast for tea. The scene repeats ad infinitum without intermission. Gen P 00:00 / 00:44 We stay awake, just in case, like those 'poorly nights' when they were a babe, except so very not. The universe felled, they schooled themselves to swallow fear, breathing broken glass, no memory of air. 2020 liquified my children’s insides, and pain cannot leave without a name. I know of a woman who found her son hanging in his room. He used his school tie. So, we stay awake, just in case, longing for those 'poorly nights' when they could scream and cry. Publishing credits Sunday Roast with My Family / ACT TWO: 'THE TWENTY-YEAR SCRIPT': exclusive first publication by iamb Gen P: Obsessed With Pipework (No. 107)