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Hear poet Holly Bars read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Holly Bars wave 24 winter 2025 back next the poet Known for her work on surviving CSA, Leeds poet Holly Bars has been published in The Moth , Stand , The London Magazine , Ink, Sweat & Tears and elsewhere. She was one of six New Northern Poets in 2024, as chosen by the Ilkley Literature Festival , and published her debut, Dirty , with Yaffle Press. She holds an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Leeds. the poems Rewriting my Mother’s Death 00:00 / 00:59 The Moon kissed my mother, came in through the front door, to her room, to her bed, and it fitted perfectly; the Moon was all cream and sugar that night, and my mother was coffee. Moon kissed my mother like mercy: the awaited home after a journey; smoke in the chimney; the warm teacup. Kissed my mother, and I can see how the Moon filled the room with the opposite of alone. Moon kissed my mother when my mother could barely hold herself up; the longest night. The Moon kissed my mother, Alicia, and she kissed back. Breathing in stardom 00:00 / 01:32 with all the glamour of a maisonette in Bramley. Our coke is cut with crystals of Persil, paracetamol, gunpowder. Someone’s mum’s kitchen is our dressing room whilst she’s sectioned. Someone else fetches a mirror, CD cases, rolls up five pound notes which probe our nostrils, fills them fat till our amethyst veins crack. We stream onto the red carpet of the living room, clamour in 60-watt light, and not even beetling mould can dampen this. Everyone wants us. Someone plays bassline and it beats down our arms, pulses in our nipples and clits and cocks. And we hang off fire, white and obvious, lips releasing, talking the rabbit off the moon. Even our blood is noisy, itching with wishes and achievement because we’re seventeen, bright and brilliant in this beautiful snow blanket we dress ourselves in for a night; kiss and talk, fuck forever. Before morning dusts us, sun steals our starlight and blood becomes black. The Magic Circle 00:00 / 01:11 Magicians keep their methods in a ring, wear ordinary clothes, ordinary faces, have ordinary jobs. Some people tell you that magicians are old men with a pension and no hobbies: this is a trick. Magicians love tricks, especially that one; it helps them, makes them mythic. Magicians love getting away with it. They love their stage and apparatus, their wands, pulling a rabbit out of a hat. Magicians pick their assistants carefully. But most of all, they love the hoodwink. Magicians love showmanship, to flaunt. They love the awe of the audience, the round of applause. Magicians love the climax; the white dove disappearing; a body sawn in half. They live for the wonder in a child’s eyes. A good magician never tells their secrets. Publishing credits Rewriting my Mother ’s Death : Black Nore Review (Nov 28th 2024) Breathing in Stardom / The Magic Circle: Dirty (Yaffle Press)

Hear poet Steve Denehan read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Steve Denehan wave 1 winter 2020 back next the poet Steve Denehan lives in Ireland with his wife Eimear and daughter Robin. A widely published, award-winning poet, he's the author of two chapbooks and two collections (one of which is forthcoming from Salmon Press). He's been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and Best New Poet. the poems Fists 00:00 / 02:01 Jesus or Rasputin 00:00 / 00:46 Plastic Bag 00:00 / 01:03 Publishing credits Fists: The Irish Times (February 2019) – a Hennessy New Irish Writing 2019 winner Jesus or Rasputin: Miles of Sky Above Us, Miles of Earth Below (Cajun Mutt Press) Plastic Bag: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Laura Warner read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Laura Warner wave 24 winter 2025 back next the poet Laura Warner (she/her) is a poet, teacher and researcher. She grew up in Luton but lives now in Devon, where she's a PhD student at the University of Exeter. Her creative writing thesis, Menstrual Poetics , looks at the impact of menstrual culture and politics on unwell menstrual bodies. Her poetry has appeared in Dear Reader , Poetry Wales , The Moth , Acropolis Journal , and Lucy Writers Platform . the poems After Watching The Craft 00:00 / 01:53 We are a teenage coven, cross-legged around our brown bottled brew, that we, with our spells, our bewitchment, our camisole tops, charmed a man into buying from the Happy Shopper. Nice man. We are going-on fourteen, we are going out tonight, we are tasting beer for the very first time. I am the dark-haired witch. I have the biggest pentagram and the thickest rings of eyeliner. I am the one they will blame when our bottles are found slung behind the period bins; I am the one Zoe’s mum will corner, saying, you’ve ruined her 13th birthday. That’s what they say: you are the ring-leader – you are the one who needs reining in – you are the liability, the wildchild, the total fucking nightmare. We are a teenage coven in lace tights, black boots, and pink fluffy pigtails, wearing each other’s clothes – hot-pants, tie-tops, we are thrown out, bringing the party to the carpark. I am the one who downs the whole beer, though it tastes like gone-off pop from grandma’s coal barn, because I want to say, yes, I drank the whole fucking thing. Watch me hold the empty glass above my head, the warm foam curdling in my hair mascara, dripping down the front of my crop top – watch me single-out a friend to push my body against – spreading knees wide, thrusting hips low, working the beat, the strap of my cami slipping off my shoulder as I loll on the bonnet of Zoe’s dad’s car – Zoe’s dad’s eyes glued to the tarmac as he fumbles for his keys – I said watch me. Just watch me. First Full Day of Bleeding 00:00 / 02:10 Change your knickers within thirty minutes of putting them on. Answer your daughter’s questions. Let her see the brown blood in the cup. Point out the lumps. Make an insufficient amount of porridge. Leave it to clot in the pan. Cut the bread poorly. Talk into the wrong phone. Put on clothes that resemble pyjamas, dark at the crotch. Let a friend pick you up and take you for coffee in a café she can park right outside. Cry because they’re out of their vegan chocolate spread. Stare into space. Feel your legs fizz as you climb the stairs to the exit. Lean against a doorframe on the main road. This is you, typical you, imagining yourself exhausted. Lay your head down on the passenger seat. Follow your friend around M&S clutching a pot of coconut yoghurt that is too expensive, readying yourself for the feeling of blood spilling. Buy the yoghurt. Eat it in bed with a heat pack in your knickers. Another pair of knickers. Wipe blood from the toilet seat/lino/sink. Call yourself a lazy prick because you know you should write this but don’t know how to make yourself start. Read instead. Call yourself a stupid lazy prick because you can’t follow the words in the book you are trying to read about menstrual cycles. Look at the pictures instead. Call yourself a self-obsessed stupid lazy prick because you keep thinking about how bad you feel when you’re meant to be studying the diagrams. Wish your heat pack was still hot. Get teary. Text your partner that you miss him. Find an episode of Escape to the Country hosted by Alistair Appleton. Enjoy his woollen waistcoat. His beard. The way he has aged and rounded with you. Fall asleep before he reveals the mystery property. How to Fish 00:00 / 01:36 It’s not my job to teach you how to fish. You can’t keep splashing around in rockpools with a cane-handled net declaring yourself a fisherman, sitting in your beach hut, boasting state-of-the-art binoculars. Oh, you’ve identified a buoy? Bobbing far out? You've photographed it, considered it, and can report the outlook to be ‘as benign as dimpled buttocks’? This is not fishing! ‘Boning up,’ you call it: online tutorials, squeezing ships into bottles, boasting your dexterity tugging those tiny strings. Slow. Hand. Clap. Just saying, I hate your personalized logbook: You’re a reel catch isn’t funny, and what do you have to record? You spend days admiring your arse in your yellow bib and brace. Where are your bait fish? Where is your tackle? You’ve no pots, no spear, not even a sharpened stick. Meanwhile, here I am, night after night, paddling in the shallows, feet all snared up in your ghost nets. Imagine: they’ve never caught as much as a crab, but somehow, I’m entangled. Now, the tide’s coming in, it’s as dark as an ultrasound, and where the hell are you? Occupied reciting the shipping forecast, grilling fishfingers, combing your beard. Dock-talker! Cock-walker! Aye-aye, Captain Bird’s-Eye View – pedlar of bycatch and discard. Publishing credits After Watching The Craft / How to Fish: exclusive first publication by iamb First Full Day of Bleeding: The Moth (Issue 51, Winter 2022)

Hear poet Barnaby Harsent read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Barnaby Harsent wave 23 autumn 2025 back next the poet Placing third in The Rosemary McLeish Poetry Prize 2024 , and with poems in 14 magazine and Propel Magazine , Barnaby Harsent has work forthcoming in the 2025 Black Bough Poetry Christmas/Winter anthology. His three poems for iamb form part of a sequence of short narratives he's currently working on. the poems Wormwood – speaking to spirits 00:00 / 00:37 The air is thin, the sky just beginning to bruise. She gathers wormwood to burn under the sycamore tree. The smoke curls low and slow like breath in winter, she closes her eyes to amplify any whisper. Light fades, crows settle like thoughts in bare boughs, a leaf in the ash still green – as if it has secrets left to share. Mandrake – hallucination 00:00 / 00:46 Lie still. Let the room grow distant. Let the walls forget you. Let the straw, heavy with the stench of piss, disappear from under you. Men’s faith in what you’re not has made you what you are. Fall upwards. Do not cry out. Do not return. Refuse to bring yourself back to bone. Move with weather, find a wind to hold you. And leave your root, that knotted thing, bleeding its shape into air. Valerian – rest 00:00 / 00:53 She doesn’t ask for comfort, just the calm of quiet seclusion, a slowing of the pulse. Still they turn their heads and spit, weigh her worth out loud. She lays plants out on a rack, the sun pulling moisture from the root. Still her nights are restless, sleep as thin as frost on slate. There’s a gate where the treeline thins. It opens and she walks until the path forgets her name. Still the milk sours, still the crops fail, still the children of the village cry at shadows. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Lisa Tulfer read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Lisa Tulfer wave 11 autumn 2022 back next the poet Dutch-to-English translator Lisa Tulfer is a UK-based writer of non-fiction articles, poetry and reviews (as well as an occasional blogger ). Her work has appeared in The Pilgrim , The Cardiff Review , the Earth Pathways Diary , Redemptorist Press , Green Ink Poetry and as part of The Poetry Archive's Poetry Archive NOW . Lisa is also a poetry submissions editor at Full House Literary Magazine . Exploring ideas of identity, belonging and home, Lisa is currently working on her first book. the poems Telling the bees 00:00 / 00:54 We told them because we knew it was something that had to be done. Trying to speak the words out loud our voices broke, fragments swept away on our tears, so instead we whispered the words, standing by the hives holding hands, the ‘she is dead’ barely louder than the buzzy breath. Did we imagine that the bees paused for a moment in their vibrating lives? Afterwards, it felt not better, but that the worst was behind us. We had told the bees, said the words, made it real. The average human body is 60 percent water After We’re All Water an art installation by Yoko Ono 00:00 / 01:30 we’re all water and DNA and cells, dividing shared genes and history we’re all blank canvasses and memory intuition and reflexes synapses and electricity we’re all cruelty and pain, potential unrealised or twisted energy discharged in violence against ourselves or others we’re all creative makers of bread, words, art love or babies makers of mischief, belief war, peace we’re all alive, dead fear, hope past, future we’re all strong, weak holding hands and killing clinging to life and dreaming nightmares and visions we’re all hate, fear and othering we’re all love, surprised, consumed we’re all water Blue 00:00 / 01:53 There is a certain kind of blue that happens at six o’clock on a February evening, when the sun has slipped off the edge of a clear day, trailing strands of candyfloss clouds – improbably pink – leaving behind a grey dullness that feels like a bereavement. Then paradoxically the sky begins to brighten, gains a depth not only of colour but of dimension, and as the colour shifts from grey to blue it begins to glow, luminous, greenish at the horizon, indigo overhead, striped with lines of cloud now darkest midnight against the cerulean blue. The bluest blue, bluer than a Cornish bay, bluer than the skylark-thrilling sky of summer, lying in the grass, squinting sunwards, bluer even than my lover’s eyes. Backlit blue, achingly fleeting, the blueness reaching a climax, unbearably intense and then suddenly dying, fading, becoming flat, two-dimensional. Now Prussian, darkening, dark. And into the darkest blue a sickle of silver rising, cold and clean, scything across the stars to gather the last blueness and leave the sky black. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Aysegul Yildirim read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Aysegul Yildirim wave 14 summer 2023 back next the poet Aysegul Yildirim's poetry has appeared in various international magazines. Most recently, she contributed to Anne-thology: Poems Re-presenting Anne Shakespeare . An academic working at the intersection of environmental humanities and sociology, Aysegul has published a poetry pamphlet titled Plants Beyond Desire . the poems uproot 00:00 / 01:10 Her only childhood memory about plants is picking up flowers. Dahlias from grandmother’s garden; a tiny medley of purple dead nettles, camomiles, vervains, brought home from park visits with mum. By the end of the day, they’d always be in the rubbish bin. Years later, she got put in a tiny medley of humans packed in an aeroplane, never to come back. Those left behind are still tired from grief, even though the plane has not crashed yet. By the time the purple on the hands was cleared, dead nettles flourished. Nobody had cried for them, ever. Later, the idea of home has gone for us all, tiny corruptions magnified. Except for the roots. The Long Stay 00:00 / 01:52 I follow the threads of the dark grey carpet for some time. ‘Fix it before moving out,’ I answer myself. Something creeps through. I start measuring the cold surface of the confined space with my flesh, at once, and wear it. Fits me perfectly, I think, except for the spiders who want to escape. They breathe surprisingly loud. I spoil their fantasies by staying fat and awake. The love-hate relationship. Includes giving space and pesticides. I need to go out. Putting on my coat, doing up the windows, on the doorstep I calculate: if I leave now, the performance. Unforeseen contacts. Time is kaleidoscopic in this stone-built body. I have the eyes of a housefly. The carpet’s cleaning will be reduced from my deposit. My only connection with the anthropocene. My solitude is my image. If vision requires distance, I must have been doing it all wrong. Let’s start again: I need my coat when it rains. I need water too. I can’t unlearn the language of solitude, I can’t speak two languages at a time. It’s real. And it’s dark. I take off my coat. Feel the soft feel of the carpet. The grubby, quiet softness. re-root 00:00 / 00:46 Someone told me to burn sage indoors but the true magic is that no two leaves are identical. And the fact that I took a dry leaf from where it waits for me in the mud. It was the beginning of winter in Falmouth and sometimes you need that moment of acknowledgement of your image by the assemblage of the holy cliff. I’m not able to speak their language. I was receding endlessly. The leaf stayed with me nevertheless. He just fell down, he thinks. But he only had to leave himself gently to the ground. No two fallings are identical. Some- times you need to root faster than you can fall. Publishing credits uproot / re-root: Plants Beyond Desire (Broken Sleep Books) The Long Stay: exclusive first publication by iamb .

Hear poet Shiksha S Dheda read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Shiksha S Dheda wave 10 summer 2022 back next the poet South African of Indian descent, Shiksha Dheda uses writing to express her rollercoaster ride of OCD and depression – but mostly, to avoid working on her Master's. Sometimes dabbling in photography, painting or the baking of lopsided layered cakes, Shiksha has had her writing featured in Brittle Paper , The Daily Drunk , Door is a Jar and Epoch Press . She's also The Pushcart Prize nominated author of Washed Away . the poems When I think about writing about flowers 00:00 / 01:32 The world is falling apart. Tearing itself into pieces. Then breaking those pieces into tinier pieces. It’s chewing itself up. Crunchingly. Crunch. Chew. Crunch. Chew. Spitting itself out. Vomiting. Convulsing. Should I be writing about flowers at this time? Should I be getting lost in a garden? In a beautiful world of growth and beauty when war rages around me? Should I write about flowers when the weeds of negativity, of malice, of suspicion, of anger, of desolation are fed by the never-faltering winds of my pessimism? Carried on the backs of minute ants – too small to comprehend that the salty sugar pieces that they carry will create a sculpture of paranoia – of nervous frustration – in some abandoned corner of my mind. Should I be writing about flowers when the anxious caterpillars of my obsessions burrow into my hands – eating them from the inside out, leaving behind beautiful wretched blood butterflies – bared, naked for all to see – to marvel, to mock: my insanity; a kaleidoscope of my helpless, vulnerable, aggressive, disappointing scars. Should I really be writing about flowers? Come, eat. Come, drink. 00:00 / 01:18 Come, eat. Come, drink. It’s my party – everyone’s invited. Eat this bread. Made daily – from the labours of my love – from the frustrations of my bored hours. Drink this punch. Perfected now – after months of trying different concoctions – after days of crying on the floor in defeat. Sit at my table. Worn out now – from days spent trying to be productive – from nights struggling to sleep, laughing at endless memes. Lay your hands next to mine. Cracked and raw now – from washing and washing, and washing – from waiting and waiting, and waiting. Speak. Let me hear your voice. I yearn for it now – after months of sobriety – after months of starvation, let your champagne voice flood my home, let your streamer hair flow across my table, let your confetti gaze lock eyes with my parched stare. Come, eat. Come, drink. It's my party – everyone’s invited. You’re invited. Martyr 00:00 / 01:21 I remember the war – intense, bloody – I fought for what I thought was right. Fought for what I thought would make a better country; a better home. For me. For all of us. For you. Wanting to be courageous, reluctantly so at points, wanting to carry you; even if I had to bear you upon my own weary back. I thought we had won the war. I thought it would be worth it at the end. Stumbling back home, I see the native flag. Torn. Battered. I see my home. Torn (apart). Divided. I see you. Embarrassed – by my wounds – – my scars – I cannot bear your silence – your reluctance – – your evading line of vision. Your disdain. Your shame. I yearn now for the sound of bullets, long for the uncertainty of spontaneous explosions, thirst for the imminent possibility of mangled death, – the opportunity to die a martyr. A celebrated hero. Not live as a burden. Fighting – daily – – embattled – – at war – within me. Against this civil society. Against you. Against myself. Publishing credits Come, eat. Come, drink.: Stanchion (Issue Seven) When I think about writing about flowers: Paranoid Tree (Vol. 8) Martyr: Washed Away (Alien Buddha Press)

Hear poet Caleb Parkin read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Caleb Parkin wave 3 summer 2020 back next the poet Caleb Parkin is a day-glo queero techno eco poet and facilitator based in Bristol. He won second prize in the National Poetry Competition 2016, came first in the Winchester Poetry Prize 2017 and has placed in various other competition shortlists. Caleb's poetry has appeared in The Rialto, Poetry Review, Butcher’s Dog, Under the Radar, Magma, Envoi and elsewhere. He tutors for the Poetry Society, Poetry School, First Story and others, and holds an MSc in Creative Writing for Therapeutic Purposes. He’s now at work on his first collection, with ACE Developing Your Creative Practice support – and from October 2020-2022, Caleb will be the Bristol City Poet . the poems Minotaur at the Soft Play Centre 00:00 / 01:30 Chromatophores ‘ … organs that are present in the skin of many cephalopods, such as squids, cuttlefish and octopuses, which contain pigment sacs that become more visible as small radial muscles pull the sac open making the pigment expand under the skin.’ from nature.com 00:00 / 01:53 Kind Words About Darkness 00:00 / 01:30 Publishing credits Minotaur at the Soft Play Centre: exclusive first publication by iamb Chromatophores: Envoi (No. 184) Kind Words About Darkness: The Rialto (Issue 88)

Hear poet Nichola Deane read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Nichola Deane wave 11 autumn 2022 back next the poet Nichola Deane’s first collection, Cuckoo , followed on from her pamphlets Trieste , a Laureate’s Choice, and My Moriarty , which won the 2012 Flarestack Poetry Pamphlet Prize, and was The Poetry Book Society’s Autumn Pamphlet Choice for 2012. Nichola’s poems have appeared in Poetry London , Archipelago , Magma , Oxford Poetry, The North and elsewhere. Michael Mackmin describes her work as ‘amazing’, while Carol Ann Duffy says Nichola is a poet who is ‘sophisticated and lyrically charged, precise and daring.’ Douglas Dunn goes further, calling Nichola ‘a future English Elizabeth Bishop.’ the poems ‘Hotel de la mer’, ‘Hotel de l’Etoile’ After Joseph Cornell 00:00 / 00:44 I have arrived here with my suitcase, full of the sea wind. I am unpacking, laying out on the bed, Black Rock, Port Madoc, Rhos Neigr, Caldey: small hotels of my childhood, rickety static caravans, the last pinks and purples in the west, the tracing of lines and faces and first names in darkening sand. I am looking at all that I made with mere pebble and shell in those fading oases. I am looking at my hopes and can smell salt. Cuckoo 00:00 / 00:34 When the buds on the birch disappear I appear so spooked, het-up, heaven-fretted, bejesused, souped up with all the may- bees in May, the new plight of the new ( Cuckoo , Cuccu ) to haunt us back, to the sleeping greenwood ( like that? how so? ) with a – wake for a voice, my loopy echo, a bit of locus pocus Anubis January, 2015 00:00 / 00:22 The heart will weigh – what after all its watching? Less than a sparrow’s, and then, then nothing at all: heart-in-the-branches, heart-in-the-split-bark, heart-in-the-nodding-wind. Publishing credits 'Hôtel de la Mer', 'Hôtel de L'Étoile': The Rialto (No. 84) Cuckoo / Anubis: Cuckoo (V. Press)

Hear poet Ben Ray read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Ben Ray wave 6 summer 2021 back next the poet Poet, reviewer and workshopper Ben Ray is a patron of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival, and a winner of the 2019 New Poets Prize. His most recent collection is The Kindness of the Eel , and his writing has appeared in a wide range of publications including Poetry Wales and The Oxford Review of Books . the poems Epska pjesma for a new millennium 00:00 / 01:19 You wanted to be an epic poem in the drafting to sit with Marko, Branković, Crnojević but our palimpsest homeland had forgotten poetry gifting us only hoarse voices, bloody footprints. We stayed at your house, frustrated we could not make history: but you had inherited from a vanished world distant stories, new borders that tightened round the neck and a rusted can of tear gas from some atrocity. Like good citizens we shut the doors, pierced the cap and inflicted our country upon ourselves pushing / staring / turning / running / choking / children vaulting over chintz sofas in desperation then outside, gasping laughing – you tore your chest open found three hearts: around the third, the snake was still sleeping In October 2000 huge protests broke out in Serbia's capital, Belgrade, against the perceived authoritarianism of the Serbian government, resulting in the overthrow of President Slobodan Milošević. The protests saw a high level of youth engagement. Sinning with Captain Birdseye 00:00 / 01:04 It really wasn’t necessary. They were just two fish fingers left sulking in soggy packaging. But that was the point. An act of Antoinette extravagance, a hubristic vote of confidence in modern society. Was there ever a better expression of disaster capitalism than turning on a whole fridge freezer just for them? No shame: only God can judge their private fishy palace for two, heated with North Sea oil to help them feel at home (Even Anthropocene bad boys have a heart). Then, of course, the breathless question on the crowd’s lips: to eat one and leave the other alone in that icy void? The act of a maniac the act of a daredevil. But look at them now. So settled. So happy. Do you not believe in redemption? Joke’s on you I have a tiramisu in my chest freezer I am a market square after everyone has left 00:00 / 01:16 I am a market square after everyone has left all made of loose veg and plastic wrapping, that pervasive pioneer of untouched spaces. My breath invigorates paper bags across slabs rustles drain-locked receipts into chorus: I am the one who pulls up the cobbles to trip the cyclists. The heart of a lettuce has never looked so lonely nor the leaves of an artichoke so fragile than when I wear them, dressing down in casual wear that would melt your heart. If carrots had eyes, they would be Disney-round and doleful as they roll down the orphanages of roadsides fulfilling tragic character arcs as they’re pulped underfoot. I am a market square after everyone has left grand words like desolation and loss are too big for my ordinary leftover onion-skin self, this paper-bag floor-level life – where dashed organic-grown hopes are swept up by street cleaners and next Sunday always seems so far away Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Emma Kemp read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Emma Kemp wave 10 summer 2022 back next the poet Emma Kemp is from Coventry, where she runs the local Stanza of the Poetry Society. Her work has been published in journals including Transpositions , Ekstasis and The Rialto , as well as in anthologies such as the forthcoming Looking Out, Peering In from The Hedgehog Poetry Press. the poems A warning to myself not to entertain your preliminary advances 00:00 / 02:13 I buckle on the edge of myself, my virtue, your passenger seat. Some unholy unknown, taut between us. Your skin is ash. The thin blue off the instrument panel. My cheeks flushed in the dark, keyed up. You tell me that you are hard as regards rejection, given to press on in the face of defeat. I can believe that. I can believe you would impress yourself upon me. I can believe you leave a mark. Think back: you smothered your self in plastic irony. Admit you are untrue as Coventry blue. Admit inside that plastic shell you are spring loaded, a nichrome coil pressed hard to a twelve-volt socket. On charge, not blue but blaze red. You must know by now I am bone dry as summer brush, as tinder. Would you like me to tear you out of yourself so you can enjoy us destroy each other? I wonder. How much fire it would take to separate you into your fractions. Not a lot, my dear, not while I am feeling all prodigal. I could insist upon you, light you up, draw down bitumen from your contempt and naphtha from your audacity. Perhaps we would get high on what was left. I imagine that I can distil you and live happily alongside some residual fragile goodness. You say I want better . I say you want to forget yourself. I suspect you already have. I cannot take part in your remembering. Know this: you do not want me the way you think you do. See here. I can unbuckle. I can exit. I can take my dry bones elsewhere. I can wish you very well. A nichrome coil/twelve-volt socket was used as a cigarette lighter in older cars. Rovings 00:00 / 00:47 Tell me, love, why we addle ourselves in our search for truth, when we know that all there is is a heap of hastily shorn fleece from which all the time we are spinning? Fumble in the wool and pull some out, rove between your hands to form loose strands. I will do the same. We will spin from these rovings, at times alone, at times together. And then we knit. See how what takes form is neither yours nor mine but defines us? Forgive my dropped stitches; you may have dropped a few, too. Please do not hide yourself away and try to knit from your own pattern. I am in it. Render 00:00 / 01:27 You have seen that image of Thích Quảng Đức burning to death at a crossroads in Saigon and wondered at it. A mixture of knowing and incomprehension. That the human spirit can achieve self-mastery to the point of self-destruction. You have longed to sit cross-legged by the vast ocean, have it lick at you and carry you away; you have longed to become a symbol. A soup of sorrow and raging self-pity. That the human spirit can flare and burn out is a given, but you must pour water on the altar. You have stationed yourself on shingle and felt the insistent pain of every stone. You have waited for the tide to come in, and the tide has come. Every tide refusing to send you to the sea floor. The sea buoys you, dismisses you, light as flotsam returns you to the shore. You have felt the pang of the anticlimax. There is no one here watching; nothing has gathered around you. Your clothes are heavy with salt shame, streaming from you as you walk on, chilled, not shivering. To find what is next. You are rendered to yourself. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Rebecca Goss read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Rebecca Goss wave 16 winter 2023 back next the poet A poet, tutor and mentor who lives in Suffolk, Rebecca Goss is the author of four full-length poetry collections and two pamphlets. Her second collection, Her Birth , was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection 2013 – while in 2015, she was shortlisted for both the Warwick Prize for Writing and the Portico Prize for Literature. Rebecca is the 2022 winner of the Sylvia Plath Prize, and her newest collection, Latch , was published by Carcanet in 2023. the poems The Hounds 00:00 / 00:48 It’s as if something calamitous is coming. Their lament rising across fields, its claim on the dawn keeping all the birds silent. I want to know what stirs them, the force of this pack. What causes them to stand, muscled frames trembling, throats full of baleful song. I am wakeful, rapt and disrupted, their bays sonorous against glass. Should I slide the thin pane, push my upper body into emerging light let them scent out my sex, and tell them we are all afraid. O this night, this bidding, claws at the latch, pure thunder of them running, my mouth opening to the cool and agitated air. At the Party I Shadowed Susie 00:00 / 01:02 who was happy to slip away walk with me into the back field where I drank her 17-year-old wisdom could look at her hair the opposite colour of mine her blue jeans convincing myself my twelve years were not an issue both of us plucking at grasses when we got almost to the oak we ventured back to the adults neither of us missed I lost Susie in the drunken stir of my parents’ garden until night got ready to flood the party I thought I might go in search of her or the cats so went to the furthest barn and in the black that had rolled inside I saw Susie being held by Richard the boy I’d ignored because his punky clothes confused me now his left hand inside Susie’s back pocket as they sought each other’s mouths air urgent unfamiliar standing there considering myself betrayed waiting until breakfast to utter it the sudden turn of my parents’ heads curious to know what I saw my mother sensing something flicker staring at her daughter so full of heat and blood and questions Gate 00:00 / 00:27 Here she comes, hair a stream, path home, dog’s ears pricked to the latch, and I’m in the garden, pear tree spilling, day of poems behind me, hiding my stored dark, thinking I must look old and not extraordinary, her skin the truest surface wanting to kiss her as she drops her bag, turns, every atom of her near me, and I make my slight gesture, feel the quickening. Publishing credits All poems: Latch (reproduced with gratitude to Carcanet Press for its kind permission) Author photo: © Natalie J Watts

Hear poet Radka Thea Otípková read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Radka Thea Otípková wave 9 spring 2022 back next the poet Though her first language is Czech, Radka Thea Otípková fell in love with English as a young adult. Her poetry has been featured in B O D Y , The North , Moria and Tears in the Fence . In 2017, her pamphlet The Edge of Anything was shortlisted in the Poetry Business International Book and Pamphlet Competition. Her poem Coup de grâce was shortlisted in the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition that same year. Thea won the Waltham Forest Poetry Competition in 2019, and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. the poems Tut’s Tomb Talks 00:00 / 01:17 I am waiting for you. Part of my wall will need to go to get you in. It will never heal, this is how they'll find me, small, perfunctory, unfit for a king, but I'll hold it all: chariots, thrones, trumpets, perfumes, precious oils, lapis and gold, and apricots, oh, apricots, I'll often imagine them perishing in the dark long after they have gone, I'll recall the odour of lamb changing in strength, from a mere waft to a putrid punch – who'd ever think in cessation there is so much life – no, no eternity's resins and balms can stop the bustle of dying in the jars housing your liver and lungs, or in the muffled echo of your anatomy's final sarcophagus. I'll never miss you. You will never not be with me and when even the deaths have died and there's nothing left but desiccated time, I shall still keep the breathing riddle of you inside your missing heart. Marble 00:00 / 00:45 Trace its veins and swirls. Speak of impurities. Say clay, silt, sand. Say chert. Say guilt. Forgive me. Send the light unstonily deep, let it spill onto its ashen wax. Mramor, marmor, marmo, marmori, go, look for it, find it in any language, any it, any us, any you, any torpor, any suspended hope, close its cold graceful finger in your warm, wet, mortal mouth and wait for it to prune. Coup de grâce 00:00 / 01:08 In the end his body puked him out as if it were only a stomach and a mouth. It didn't let him just slip away. But maybe it matters less than we think. Look at his mother. There she is. No longer tearing at the meat of what remains, but opening the window. The night is there. What can you do but make a simple gesture that might mean anything. Hand on chest. Fingertips on lips. Or just stand however gravity wants you to. The night is launching a skin boat. No prayers are heard. If you lean out a little, you’ll see it too. The night. The moon. The overflowing eye of a fish cooking. Publishing credits Tut's Tomb Talks / Coup de grâce: B O D Y Marble: Tears in the Fence

Hear poet Kerry Darbishire read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Kerry Darbishire wave 19 autumn 2024 back next the poet Living in the English Lake District and writing most days, Kerry Darbishire is inspired by her wild surroundings. Her poems have won – and been placed in – many competitions, and her work has appeared widely in anthologies and magazines. Kerry's three poetry collections are A Lift of Wings , Distance Sweet on my Tongue and Jardiniѐre . There are also her pamphlets A Window of Passing Light , Glory Days (in collaboration with Kelly Davis) and River Talk . the poems River Talk After Raymond Carver 00:00 / 01:21 I’d slip across mossy rocks to catch your intonations clear as glass splintering morning air, accents you taught me before the scent of pine lifted from your tongue, before blackbirds and traffic spilled over the bridge. Come autumn you’d growl open-mouthed through the woods towards me louder than a stream, faster than a beck, bold as a heron, I’d wait on the brim. Sometimes a rush of hungry dippers murmured through marigold edges like angels, but I didn’t need saving. I learned to measure the highs and lows of your voice even in winter when your lips barely moved, and you held me like a mother in a perfume of breathy lullabies sinking deep into my pillow and I clung as if I was your child to every word you whispered, like fog shifting from your skin. All night I’d lie awake listening to the sound the water made until I was fluent. Jardinière 00:00 / 01:43 When I lift the lid, I let go the ghosts of kings and queens tombed in their paper-dry beds – buds and petals still clothed in the palest dawn, bonfire-grey, evening-sky-pink, thunder-cloud-yellow, honesty’s sheen like rainstorms that often sent us back inside with the smell of drenched earth in our hair. When I lift the lid, I could turn a field into a garden, work all day, become Vita Sackville-West or Gertrude Jekyll using her painterly approach to colour. Season after planted season I grew, cut and gathered aquiligea, rosa rugosa, alchemilla, poppies, larkspur; honoured their brief blooms in vases until they threw themselves down like confetti. When I lift the lid, forty summers rise and wake from slumber: lapsang souchong and cake, birdsong, afternoons fading in deck chairs, slow-scented evenings folded in the wings of moths; my daughter’s tenth birthday, the spring she broke her arm, the autumn she left home and my mother fell ill. It is a thing to leave your soil. When I go I’ll take my garden with me. Song of the Fell 00:00 / 01:40 When you say fellside a woodpecker drums spring into the ghyll, curlews turn their tune inland on salt clouds scudding west to east fast as a fox crossing high slopes where runnels of earth slip from lairs and whins begin to yellow the air. When you say fellside an evening in summer swims out of my children’s eyes as they race to the beck where lizards soak up warmth from boulders, foxgloves guard sheep trods, firm as stone, where reeds lean in like old friends and distance spreads a blue cloth. When you say fellside owls haunt low light, the first frost snaps at hedges of hazel and thorn, snow steals boundaries without a second thought from high intakes at rest, hollow nests, berries shrivel and all evidence of life before is squirrelled under white. When you say fellside celandines must be opening, a half-moon floating in a lake-blue sky lifting sun, swallows and flights of geese over Whinfell; our bright steps climbing a new path to find water-mint, frog spawn, primroses waiting for rain. Publishing credits River Talk: Flights (Issue Five) Jardiniere: Jardiniere (The Hedgehog Poetry Press) Song of the Fell: Finished Creatures (Issue 5, 'Surface')

wave eighteen summer 2024 A R Williams Deborah Harvey