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Courtenay Schembri Gray back next the poet Born and raised in the North of England, Courtenay Schembri Gray reared her head as a budding poet with a penchant for the macabre. Since finding kinship in the rich verse of Sylvia Plath, Courtenay has amassed a large amount of publishing credits. Her poetry collection, The Maggot on Maple Street , was published in 2023. the poems Charlie 00:00 / 01:18 His stubby fingers grope me, and I scream only air. I am a huntress, yet I despise the taste of flesh and blood. With his half-dead slant, the man buries my despair. Muddy waters slough the sin off my back while I violate my pear. Daddy’s belt loops around schoolboy errors, threatening to flood. His stubby fingers grope me, and I scream only air. Upon the eve of moonstruck men, I open my cervical lair. You heave rare meat onto the table, harder than you should. I am a huntress, yet I despise the taste of flesh and blood. You swaddle her like a baby, leaving only shoes for her to wear. When we first met, I don’t think you understood. His fingers grope me, and I scream only air. We stand on porcelain cracks, silent, with nothing to declare Somehow, despite it all, you found me like an earring stud. I am a huntress, yet I despise the taste of flesh and blood. You have turned me into a woman, but I will not share. Let’s leave the world with a gift, richer than others would. His fingers grope me, and I scream only air. I am a huntress, yet I despise the taste of flesh and blood. June Bug 00:00 / 01:19 With Bambi eyes all aflutter, I drink from the well of men. A paper lantern hangs from every bloody coat hanger. Under the cloak of 6 am, I am to be born again. Lost in a June bug cocktail, I fall for a Parisienne. He bought me roses, and I threw them in anger. With Bambi eyes all aflutter, I drink from the well of men. You know, I think about you every now and then. For a red-blooded man, you were placid in manner. Under the cloak of 6 am, I am to be born again. To my dirty photographs, you would say très bien . Rubbing coconut rum into skin, I would yammer. With Bambi eyes all aflutter, I drink from the well of men. Darling, I need you like I need goddamn medicine. Inside a chrysalis, I preach grief-stricken slander. Under the cloak of 6 am, I am to be born again. You left me with echoes of Non, je ne regrette rien . With starry thighs and coal miner skies, I languor. With Bambi eyes all aflutter, I drink from the well of men. Under the cloak of 6 am, I am to be born again. The Maggot on Maple Street 00:00 / 00:55 Shaken from my sleep by yellow taxi dreams; toothpaste is my cork, stopping the wine from sloshing around the great caboose that is I, way off the wagon, face down in the sludge. Moontime butter shoots me in the eye, hot syrup; that sticky pudding, fat with guilt and irony. O’ how I fabricate the lowest despair, the deadliest joy, finer than lace, as impure as rendition. Swear me a fishwife, an earwig, a flotsam woodlouse with but a cube of cheese to stay afloat. I must get back to the desk, to the coffee rings and grassy knolls. To the looking glass, without delay. Publishing credits Charlie: The Book of Korinethians (Pink Plastic Press) June Bug: Idle Ink (March 2022) The Maggot on Maple Street: Roi Fainéant Press (Oct 2022)

Mary Ford Neal back next the poet A writer and legal academic from Glasgow, Scotland, Mary Ford Neal is the author of poetry collections Dawning and Relativism , as well as an assistant editor of Nine Pens Press . Mary's poetry has appeared online and in print in a wide span of journals that includes Bad Lilies , After… , One Hand Clapping , The Interpreter’s House , Atrium , Long Poem Magazine , The Shore and Janus Literary . Her work has been nominated for both The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. the poems Mammina proves the existence of God 00:00 / 01:42 The day is on its hands and knees. Mammina basks on the balcony in great-grandmother dignity in all the quiet of a woman who has outlived her daughter, collarbones glistening, little cross flashing pink and gold among rivulets of August evening sweat as the sun finally loses its grip and goes down fighting, painting the duomo in eyeshadow colours. The whole horizon is made of churches. An ambulance squeals along an unseen street, not the smooth wail of the ambulances back home, but a desperate, discombobulated sound like the cry of a confused animal. Mammina makes the sign of the cross, lets loose a fast prayer. Her words are a string of small, round beads, tumbling one after the other. How can you be so sure anyone is listening? I ask in her bubbling tongue. My head is dusky with the sweetness the city gives off at the height of summer, and with all my days and nights at university. Mammina opens one eye, closes it, smiles back in her chair, takes a fat medjool date between leathery thumb and forefinger, squeezes it lightly, and says This perfect thing does not exist by accident. O California After Danez Smith 00:00 / 01:18 California’s an empty page, but scented like a candle so you have to write over someone’s idea of loveliness. No matter how delicate the fragrance, I could write a fist. I could write a swollen eye. I could write a lie. Perhaps a little blasphemy is okay. Bruises are not okay in California. Perhaps I bother about bruises but don’t even notice my snapped neck. Whatever you do, don’t move me. I’m resting on the lip of an ocean, and I want the ocean badly, but not this one. This one spits cold. I need the one so vast its edges are always gentle. I’ve told them that by evening I’ll be on a plane. I know if I could get to California it would sand me smooth. I know if I could get to California I could die big, die pacific, melt into the horizon like a god. We all fell silent except for the men 00:00 / 01:03 their solemn mahogany baritones closing around a keening гармошка, deepening, swelling, snaking between us, causing our skins to shed, winding around the hissing braziers, and it was as though all the longing in the earth’s bones sprouted, serpentine, charmed from sleep by Russian chords, and I decided just to dissolve into this longing, this sinuous lament, this отравление, uncoil myself from the hold of home, of language, of all my loves, and from now on my home would be this poison-apple moment, my language a dirge rich with consonants, and my only loves would be милый, любимый, Ангел мой. гармошка: a Russian accordion отравление: intoxication or poisoning милый: darling любимый: beloved Ангел мой: my angel Publishing credits Mammina proves the existence of God: Amethyst Review O California: The Shore (Issue 15) We all fell silent except for the men: Dust Poetry Magazine (Issue 7: Connection )

Sue Butler back next the poet Reflecting, towards the end of her career as a General Practitioner, on the gift and the burden of intimate connection with so many lives, Sue Butler took up walking and creative writing, considering these unpredictable forms of meditation on life in all its grace, pain and peculiarity. Sue's poems have appeared in One Hand Clapping , Spelt Magazine , Poetry and Covid , the Hippocrates Prize Anthology, and the Whirlagust series from Yaffle Press – publisher of her pamphlet, Learning from the Body . the poems Equality for Boys 00:00 / 01:25 Did his mother make him up, brush and pinch his cheeks and lips, paint him, rosy, healthy, hearty as the other boys at parties? Did they ask him if he knew his underwear was on display to girls with hormones all askew, did his armpits need a shave? Did they tell him if he tried he might just get in to medicine. Men needed to be qualified to study beside the women. Did his patients call him nurse and his seniors call him dear? Did they say 'What a waste' when he married and then, when he carried on, suggest a nice little job – family planning or child health – should suffice Obstetrics wasn’t for men. Did they check who would take his calls at night? Did school phone him to say his child was sick? Or they were looking for an extra for the history trip? When he came home in time to lift his bath-warm son to drip on his knee, discuss how yellow ducks floated and real ones flew, and heard the work phone ring, did he begin to see their point of view? After cataract surgery 00:00 / 01:24 Daily she wakes to the infinite variations clouds play on the sun, the sliver of light between blind and wall no longer a slur of soft pastel but sharp as a quartz vein through a cobble, bright as the bowl of the half scallop she picked from the beach in Clachtoll. She sees the jut of the light switch, its small hooked shadow, the unblinking screws on either side, how it has the look of an owl, how when someone crosses the landing, the door flaps, briefly supplies wings. She tests the bad eye, the nicotine sheen that persists, remembers their first home, smoke-stained cupboards that even three scrubbings could not make clean, closes that eye to make all bright again. A three millimetre incision, narrow as a baby tooth. Her vision become falls of sari silk, surf breaking turquoise in the sun, light splintered, gathering, soft and precise as hoar frost. The work of women 00:00 / 01:54 The doctor keeps the stitches small and even as she was taught in school by the sisters, working by hand down the long length of a skirt, and back to make the French seam. A single lamp lights her work. The cone of starch white light picks up the smallest pucker, every crooked stitch, standing at her shoulder as Sister did, pushing her wire rimmed glasses down her nose. She stitches the slow completion of the birth, the return of the mother from the inundation that swept through her. Beyond the light, mother and baby begin to learn their separation – the breathy warmth and chill of mouth rooting for nipple, clutching, letting fall; the cushiony curves of cheek and breast; the astonishing, instant fit of fist and finger. Voices spill from the corridor, calm the havoc of other births, transform parents into grandparents, fade unnoticed beneath the absorbing catch on skin of needle, lips, fingers. Nearly done. The doctor thinks of the nuns as she cuts the last stitch, how they prayed together for each other. Beneath her gown, too small yet to tent the flesh, her baby stretches, rolls, settles back into dreams. Publishing credits Equality for Boys: Learning from the Body (Yaffle Press) After cataract surgery: One Hand Clapping The work of women: 2020 Hippocrates Prize Anthology (The Hippocrates Press)

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

Suchi Govindarajan back next the poet Writer, poet and photographer Suchi Govindarajan lives in Bengaluru, India. Her poetry has appeared in publications ranging from IceFloe Press and Cordite Poetry Review to perhappened magazine and Usawa Literary Review . Her poems have also been included in two anthologies. Poetry is Suchi's first love – fiction is her newest. the poems Of blood and war 00:00 / 02:10 The first time it happens, you are barely twelve. So much blood must mean either wound or war, s o you run to your mother and ask if you are dying. This is not death, she says, this is existence — just the basic bloodshed of being woman. There will be a celebration next week, she says with silks and jaggery, turmeric and gold. But don't be swayed by such fleeting love; the real gift is an unwritten book, stitched with rope, bound with tradition, its pages ornate and yet so sharp with rules, they only slice the fingers of women. Because you are a child, you take this gift, and you come to believe in this unquestioning dark, the flowers that will wilt, the milk that will spoil, the men and other fragile beings that will take ill. Everything, she says, that can be defiled by you. Last April you helped your aunt make mango pickles. This month, even your touch will spoil them — all that careful soaking in brine and spice — all that ageing in the home's coldest corners where you will now sit for days every month, muffling the many mouths of your pain. You cannot go to temples now, says your mother. You cannot worship the goddess I named you after. You are still a child, she says, but you are enough woman You are still a child, but you are already too much woman for anyone to bear, not the men, not the priests. They must pray to save all their gods from you. You told me once that he loved you 00:00 / 01:29 You told me once that he loved you because you were simple. I wondered then if he had seen your bookshelf or your bathroom. Did he see that small callus at the base of your palm? Does he know the weight of your gaze as you look out the window? Even on cold nights, you never cover your feet with a blanket, yet you show me these socks he bought for you to wear. They are the exact shade of purple that you hate and call violet. You told me once that he loved you even if you weren't beautiful. I wondered then if he had seen you speak about justice or poetry. Has he seen how you hesitate before you burst into laughter? Does he know you have your grandfather's hooded eyes? You told me once, under the yellow light of a station, of your surprise at his love and his existence. It was a windy night, your wild hair was held in a bun. You were wearing a sweater that billowed like a storm. You told me then you would try and love him back. I smiled, and felt a new grief in my limbs. Current affairs 00:00 / 02:05 My teacher told me my poems should be more current, should celebrate things in the news like the breaking of sports records, like the eradication of diseases, new machines in our libraries, or how a child, just six years old, sang like he was born of birds. Don't just write about flowers he said, or philosophy or these clouds of unrequited love that billow about your youth. Until we broke the mosque, I did not follow his advice. Until then, nothing in the world had touched my cocooned life: I had touched nothing in the world. But now I felt like it was my chariot wheels that crayoned dried blood into the tar. I watched my parents turn to wolves at orange moons, cheering for men with pickaxes, waving their fists at a box they could not turn off. But when I went to my teacher my words now a raw torment my pen now moving hard enough to leave round bruises on the page behind (at last, I thought, a poem he would praise) he grew narrow and cold. In a play last year, he had painted my face blue, draped me in shawls of gold and Raamar green. I had broken a bow for him. Now he whispered mantrams to protect his gods, and flung my poem back and told me to stick to love and clouds and flowers. Something that would dissolve and disperse easily. Something that would not leave marks even on the back of a page. Publishing credits Of blood and war: Usawa Literary Review (Issue 2) You told me once that he loved you / Current affairs: exclusive first publication by iamb

David Pecotić back next the poet Born a poet nearly five decades ago, David Pecotić has had many adventures in the years between then and now: as seeker after truth, academic, partner, public servant, father and counsellor. Recently, tragedy reawoke in David a need to express himself in poetry. His poems have so far appeared in the Australian Poetry Collaboration and The Canberra Times . David lives in Australia, where he's in a complicated relationship with his daimon. the poems There are Days You Cross Hunted 00:00 / 01:08 There are days you cross hunted in rivers, shaded and breezed. Foot after sucked foot, this little can be a lot if it’s yours in the solid dark. Where you stand, others barely there move slightly unseen and you see to live is to live around yourself closer and finer and doesn’t take the eyes in a face. Where they narrow, they blow in. Where they long, they draw out. Such small round things slip through the net strings. Even at the last strung at the estuary’s edge. Inheritance 00:00 / 02:00 Out of time, I am become what I was: a fisherman off & on a black goddess island, where the fish that make dreams school their poison. Back on shore, I tell the bees the names of every gutted vision earned. A million glass wings beat sweetness in return. Further inland, I am the goat man, hoofed hard-on chasing every woody piece of arse, even my own. Up on the mountain, I’m his father, equally erect but frozen, the holy thief whose hungry mouth made the music. A dead ringer for shades who wings for tricks. Only in the forest dark can I reach down my throat to pull myself out, a vukodlach , wolf-skin turned inside-out, drum-like and ruddy. Village monster I kept down for so long, I had cut my hams, pricked my whole body with pins to prevent this: I cannot pretend after this operation I won’t walk about forcing your submission. Strigun —human by day, demon by night; held in check by my krsnik : the warlock gift with his hawthorn stick, that takes away, gives peace by piercing, the heart again. Hoarfrost Future 00:00 / 01:02 Winter is always colder half-broken— the frost bleeds out as a sacrifice to what comes. Today is as hard and cold, sparkling a sharp wet razor. So many melting facets, so much hoarfrost future. Glass candy hard on a ground we can’t feel getting warmer, so subtle the seasoning. I flow out the same, rhyming the solid ebb-tide— wounded words and eyes swallow unsatiated spongey beds of loved leaves. What does the sun-warmed wind mean to their delicate rise and fall? They tell me to my autumn and spring I don’t owe anything at all. Publishing credits There are Days You Cross Hunted: Australian Poetry Collaboration (Issue 34) Inheritance: Australian Poetry Collaboration (Issue 30) Hoarfrost Future: The Canberra Times (February 2021)

Cora Dessalines back next the poet Cora Dessalines is a queer, London-based freelance writer. They were former assistant editor of their university’s creative writing magazine ~FACTORY~ and editorial assistant at Guts, an independent publisher of memoirs and short-story anthologies. Cora has had their work published in Lacuna, a literary magazine that showcases the writing of young women and non-binary people of colour. They are a lover of fashion, space and anything colourful, and are currently at work on their first afrofuturist science-fiction novel for adults. the poems takotsubo cardiomyopathy 00:00 / 01:53 they say it feels like s i n k i n g that tectonic plates shift and create fissures wide enough to swallow you whole quite the opposite, in fact it isn’t quicksand nor an overlap of scrambling hands and clawing fingers craving to drag you under no, it is a rupture in the laws of physics a losing battle between mass and energy where gravity knows no bounds— it is the feeling of your feet g n i t f i l and your body capsizing gnizispac to mould with this wretched world in which you rise, climbing the clouds, your head facing the ground all the way they say it feels like a cavernous well but the devil is a liar that chilly water is the fluid in your lungs, sib the build-up from elevating to such high altitudes where dew droplets crystallise on your eyelashes and your oxygen is slowly snatched while you ascend them six layers as punishment by this, a most wicked cosmos to be honest, you should’ve guarded your rassclart heart instead of looking up and thanking the universe for blessing you with syrup and silver and steadfast loyalty that love was on loan, little horror and the night sky tricked you into thinking those were jewels stitched onto a dark tapestry instead of black sheets stuck on using a roller and wheat paste i wish i could’ve warned you the light you saw are just bullet holes we call stars. so this is love 00:00 / 01:35 i want it to be glorious. i want us to douse ourselves in it to take a match in each hand light them and set ourselves on fire! our mixed ashes must ripple and rumble until we, two phoenixes, rise birthed from the pyre of our own making— it needs to be … ravenous. and make us forsake all earthly foods save the tongue-plucked cherries that grow above our inner thighs, swallowed and savoured a sempiternal reminder that we are the fruits of a supernova, dual spheres of magma. we will steal matter from each other like two thieves in the night gorging in tandem lava— combust we until i only want it if it’s going to bring me beyond the brink of destruction and make astronomers believe planets will form from we, these dead stars’ disk. stars above, it must be r a p t u r o u s! and so fucking consuming that my lungs become your air becomes my lungs fill faster than what my breath can catch. trust, we best be willing to lean over balconies sever our bloodlines and make a pact that our hearts may only beat at the same time as each other or else, leave us permanently breathless. … i want it to leave us breathless. because to us that is love. love in reverse 00:00 / 02:38 legend has it our meeting made flowers blossom in the gloom of winter, spurred leaves into elevating back to their branches as they shifted from red yellow to green again with every day we spoke we, two divergents, formed our own timeline and while everyone else’s nights came quicker the sun would spread its arms just for us, purposely setting when the rest of the world rose for work this was back when i thought my love for you shattered laws when i believed the night we met caused mangoes to grow in the north pole like a unity of contradiction sprouted from life’s continual war of opposites instead of lying in that field of tension i made my love for you alter the meaning of cause and effect in the hope i could understand how the imprint of your head on my shoulder was there before i even knew you see, i used to think we would be infinite to spite the general line, that even though we’d submitted to the logic of change, pledged our lives to nada hay absoluto y todo revoluciona me and you would stay the same but this was back before i knew my honesty would have me barred indefinitely, would have my words chewed up and spat back to me at a later date, with the mushy remnants of them laid on my palm like a spoiled crop you told me afterwards you didn’t want us to end like this but i’d already washed my hands i only wish you hadn’t waved the wrong red flag, my love it was better when whatever we were was an unspoken thing, curved into your left cheek like a tiny sickle it is said our meeting unravelled the rules of the cosmos, burned the cool red stars so hot we made one another tremble, as proof that in the last analysis we could’ve won this world together if either of us just had some compassion now the thought of you reminds me that we are in the time of monsters, running parallel to each other so that our contradictions never overlap, never reveal that me and you were in the bloom of life, from a planet where you don’t refuse to see me even after i beg the politburo for a meeting Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Fiona Sampson © Ekaterina Voskresenskaya back next the poet Leading British poet Fiona Sampson has been published in 38 languages and received a number of international awards. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the English Association and the Wordsworth Trust, Fiona has 29 books to her name, and was awarded an MBE for Services to Literature. She is Emeritus Professor of Poetry, University of Roehampton, has served on the Council of the Royal Society of Literature, and is a Trustee of the Royal Literary Fund. Other honours include the Cholmondeley Award and Hawthornden Fellowship, as well as various national Book of the Year selections. Most recently, Fiona's Come Down was awarded Wales Poetry Book of the Year 2021. Fiona has also been a broadcaster and critic, editor of Poetry Review , and acclaimed biographer of both Mary Shelley and Elizabeth Barrett Browning . the poems At Lechlade 00:00 / 01:41 The church was full of dead bees somehow a swarm had gathered high inside a transept window back and forth the bees flew through the crossing their too low wrong note like a moan the building held as if holding itself moaning as it held the condemned bees passing to and fro in air that hung sacred etcetera between pillars but could not save them bees are angels too who will save us if we let them but now they flew uselessly offering themselves brown gifts in air above our heads and dead in the house of death on pews and on the red tiles of the aisle at the welcome table the steward refused to let us call the bee man we must wait till they’re all dead she said and I’ve always wondered why she wanted to deal death to the living bees in the gold church what fury or what loss would make you kill the life-givers the velvet singers in plain sight knowing no-one quite would dare stop you knowing we are obedient and that she could close the church against the life that comes flying in by accident as words do sometimes or a truth glimpsed in the high evening air Coming Of Age 00:00 / 01:08 In the beginning the waters covered the earth but before that earth was fire surely the air made fire turn to water air made water-fire like the Northern Lights flaming green and gold and blue through your iris in the beginning was like a game of scissors paper stone and I could not decide which to trust cold fists poking from anorak sleeves or paper blowing against the chain-link fence long mornings when maybe our teachers were bored too but we were igneous then we must have been cooling already for steam covered the sky the sea the sun when it settled on the window glass and still the sea was always at the foot of our day like a beginning like coming into language like God in the hymn books setting breakers of blue fire across the horizon At Mukito For Jaan Kaplinski 00:00 / 01:13 What’s here now when I come like Jaan’s sheep like Sappho’s lamb stepping down into the valley as the bright evening light slips and pools beside a wall along the water with the gnats and water-skimmers bright and dark falling across the stepping shoulders of the careful beast so quiet so inevitable little lamb of death calling the poet home although he called you first into the clearing with the pond the long-armed well the barn swallows and in the dark the nightingales sing inexhaustibly about the forest going on forever beyond the fence rail as poets do singing in darkness up among the wooden beams of habitation while the lamb comes to lie down at the threshold comes gently to your feet Jaan I didn’t call him here Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Harula Ladd back next the poet Poet, performer and facilitator Harula Ladd is based in the South West and is the current Exeter Slam Champion. She's also the founder of the Postal Poetry Library , and loves writing on-the-spot poems for the public. Fascinated by the power of the imagination, Harula is passionate about the way creativity connects us. She gathers ideas for her writing while out walking. the poems Skin 00:00 / 01:40 is hard to put back on at a moment’s notice, when someone knocks on your door to offer a piece of their mother’s Christmas cake. You wipe wetness from your cheeks, demand your skin quickly swallow you in again and keep the hand where the skin is cracked behind your back. Reach out with the other to receive perfect Christmas cake, complete with miniature marzipan holly. You make eye contact with this new mother, pushed to the edge of her own skin until she’s shining. She’s beautiful. *** The skin you live in is tight, thin, bulging with broken that just wants to breathe. At night you pin your skin to the edges of your room, to the curtains, hook it over the door handle, trap a corner under the weight of a table leg so at least you can be free while you sleep. When you wake, skin won’t shrink to fit. You wonder if you should give up your free feeling dreams where skin is so big you can swim in it, inside it, exploring it from underneath like swimming underwater looking up at the surface not wanting to break it yet. It’s quiet and fascinating down here. People can’t knock on the surface of the sea. They’d have to wade in and get wet to reach you, so swim swim swim The girl who brought the world home 00:00 / 01:38 She brought the world home like an injured bird found by the road, shrunk to one metre across to hang safely from her ceiling like a breathing glitter ball behind closed curtains. She lay on the field of her carpet to watch the living world above twirl cobwebs in miniaturised hurricanes. That first night, she couldn’t sleep. Got up to warm some milk and heard the oceans burst. 'What’s wrong?' she asked. The world replied, 'To shrink is no protection. I cannot give life like this. 'You deny my power, hanging me here behind closed curtains. I need to be!' 'But I only … ' 'You don’t even know you haven’t met freedom yet.' Forests inhaled. Exhaled. 'To live is to be willing to die. 'Look. You are taller than me now. Is that what you wanted? To make me small and you big? 'In order to control something beyond your understanding you have to shrink it for it to make sense. 'For it to be safe. You shrink what is vast only to grow more of what has no importance.' What's inside 00:00 / 01:15 I roll myself out flat, squeeze all you don’t need to know from me and fold over seven times, until I’m the size of an envelope. I slide in to send myself to you. Once sealed it’s too late to take back bits added to me since we last met. It’s fine. I can deny them or cross them out before you open me. At the weigh in the lady working the Post Office counter raises an eyebrow. 'May I ask what’s inside?' 'Skin. No guts.' I ask for second class. Gives me more time. I land on your doormat stiff and sore. You soak me in a bath like those teas that bloom in a mug, and the little I’d been prepared to say dissolves, and goes the way of the bathwater. Once dry, I dress, all fresh and empty. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

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Ankh Spice 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) Share

Grace Uitterdijk back next the poet Counsellor and occasional musician Grace Uitterdijk from Northern Ireland enjoys writing poetry and short stories as a creative outlet. Her inspiration stems from a love of trees, the sea and all things wild. She's also interested in the lives of those she meets through her counselling work. Published in A New Ulster and Bent Ear Review , Grace loves to swing in her hammock, drink tea and read when she's not exploring Ireland's natural beauty. the poems In the middle of her ‘Dieu est au milieu d’elle: elle n’est pas étranlée…’ God is in the middle of her, she will not be moved Psaume 46:5 00:00 / 01:37 If I cut myself in half what would I find? What’s in the middle of me? Would it be a treacle sadness puddling round my feet? Or maybe I have a ball of glass in there. Hard, smooth, breakable. Would it be cosy in there? Could I cuddle up beside my heart or would it turn its back? What would it feel like to sit inside myself? Would it be like crawling into a hollow tree? Dark and wet and alive. Ancient. A womb of sorts. Would it be comfortable? If I could pull back my skin and let my heart fall into my hands, would it just be a throbbing organ or would I really see God there? Funny how that verse uses the pronoun ‘her’. God is in her. Not you, not me. Her. I would like to find her. If I did, I would run up to her and take her hands in mine And look in her eyes and shout, ‘Do you know what is in the middle of you? Do you know? Look, it’s God! Right there in the middle of you.’ Maybe she wouldn’t believe me. Maybe she’d turn her head, avert her eyes embarrassed by my spectacle. Maybe she would miss God because she didn’t even look. I would still tell her. Who knows when curiosity might catch her looking. Empty Space 00:00 / 02:06 Are you the man you dreamed you’d be? That’s a line from a song my friend wrote and that night it was floating round my head like it had nowhere else to go. I was driving home with loneliness in the passenger seat, and I remember thinking this feels like déjà vu, am I just stuck on repeat? The country roads were quiet, it was just a random night. Who knew space could ever feel this tight. Tears are a sort of currency but that night I didn’t know what I was buying. Maybe the desire to live even if just to do more dying. I had to stop in a car park, the tears were clouding my vision. Alone in a car in an empty space I was that space So empty I could just be replaced. For some reason I shouted ‘fuck off’ to a God I wasn’t even sure was real. I felt like my layers of skin were peeled to reveal the shreds of my humanity. Blood and water, water and blood. Is that all I am? Water and blood? I thought you promised there wouldn’t be another flood but what if every day is a flood and I am not the one being saved. Maybe I am just enslaved to this loneliness that follows me. Maybe my whole life is just one long damn fight to be free. If I’m not alone then why do I feel so fucking alone? When the noise is gone I sit there in the car park in the dark no longer even sure if I have a watermark to distinguish me from all the other lonely people in other car parks. I sat there crying until all the water in my body had seeped out of my eyes. Now I was left with blood. Life is in the blood, not the water. My tears had bought me one more day to live. Maybe tomorrow I would cry blood. I started my engine, reversed back out, drove home and got into bed. I’m not even close to who I dreamed I’d be, but I’m alive. Sometimes you feel alone in your own body 00:00 / 01:28 You are there and I am here. One letter difference and yet Can you see the insurmountable distance between us because I can? People say, ‘oh we are united, humans are all one’. Yeah, I've had moments like that, but can you not hear the story of humanity? You are there and I am here, and here is not there. There are two different words for it. I'm trying to be there, with you and yet you don't feel my nearness because the distance between those words remain. I'll try again. Talk to me and I won't understand but touch me and I'll know because touch is more visceral than words And wrapped in my arms here and there seem a little closer together. I know you feel alone. I feel it when our bodies collide, Slide to the left, away from your body, away from your pain. You can't bear to remain because you despise being here. It's ok; I'm alone too. I'm learning how to be here. I'll hold you tight until you feel safe again. Until your body is your own, until my body is my home, draining the distance between here and there. Press your body against mine, hold your head in my hands. Maybe we are less alone when we are alone together. Publishing credits In the middle of her: exclusive first publication by iamb Empty Space / Sometimes you feel alone in your own body: A New Ulster (Issue 99)

Lisa Kelly back next the poet Lisa Kelly has single-sided deafness. She is also half Danish. Her first collection, A Map Towards Fluency , was published by Carcanet in 2019. Her poems have appeared in Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches Press) and Carcanet’s New Poetries VII. Her pamphlets are Philip Levine’s Good Ear (Stonewood Press) and Bloodhound (Hearing Eye). She sometimes hosts poetry evenings at the Torriano Meeting House in London, and is the Chair of Magma Poetry. the poems from The IKEA Back Catalogue Delivery to ASPELUND 00:00 / 00:58 Don’t lose your way in the snow to ASPELUND like being trapped in a white wardrobe, ARVINN. Arrive intact at this Norwegian Arctic city, reveal yourself, like a folding chair, to the city. Hey presto! Like magic, you appear in ASPELUND no longer up against the wall. Out of the wardrobe, ARVINN, you can shrug off the ward robe of white, which gapes like the wide roads of this city, and take up space. ARVINN, this city is not ASPELUND, ASPELUND is a stub, as a toe strikes against a wardrobe in a city. Aphid Reproduction as Unpunctuated White Noise 00:00 / 01:22 . a full stop is an aphid not a comma nor an embryo an aphid is a full stop is a nymph not a womb holding a comma nor a question mark asks nothing of a slash or a backslash bulges with parentheses bears afterthought after afterthought as a full stop parthenogenetic filled with full stops without stopping without comma without pausing full stop after full stop never comma not a comma until all the space is taken with full stop upon full stop not a comma and a full stop develops wings flies off ! an exclamation mark is an aphid on the wing not a full stop not a comma nor an embryo an aphid is an exclamation mark not a womb holding a comma nor a question mark asks nothing of a slash or a backslash bulges with parentheses bears afterthought after afterthought as a full stop parthenogenetic not an exclamation mark not a comma but a full stop filled with exclamation marks filled with full stops bears exclamation marks filled with full stops until summer heat has happened and love is in the air . an aphid is a male on the wing not a full stop is an exclamation mark and an aphid is a female on the wing not a full stop is an exclamation mark gives birth to a full stop without wings mates with an exclamation mark and lays a full stop a full stop is an egg not an aphid but an egg and the egg it is dormant is a full stop not a pause not a comma nor an embryo but a full stop in the winter without wings an egg is a full stop until spring and it hatches a full stop is an aphid not a full stop Sea Wall 00:00 / 01:20 The sea is maddening, cannot be calmed. I have tried throwing life buoys, rafts, all manner of rope. Once I crushed sleeping pills and slipped them overboard, but it cried for more salt. I have to build a wall to save the sea from itself – constantly crashing, destroying castles, leaking into the land, festering in pools of its own brine. Loss of sediment and sense. I have to hold the line. Others argue about options. Option one, do nothing. Option two, rock groynes and beach recharge. Option three, fishtail rock groynes, rock revetment and beach recharge. Once a wall is in mind, it must be built. Norwegian rock is best, cut from mountains with diamond saws, never blasted. It is cut strong in strong blocks. The wall is on its way from the Larvik Quarry. The sea knows what to expect. Publishing credits Delivery to ASPELUND: Anthropocene Sea Wall: The New European Aphid Reproduction as Unpunctuated White Noise: A Map Toward Fluency (Carcanet) Share

Lesley Curwen back next the poet Plymouth-based poet, broadcaster, sailor and winner of the inaugural Molecules Unlimited poetry competition , Lesley Curwen writes about loss in the natural world – loss she saw inflicted by the global capitalism she used to report on. Together with Jane R Rogers and Tahmina Maula, she collaborated on the pamphlet Invisible Continents . Lesley's solo work, Rescue Lines , was published by The Hedgehog Poetry Press in July 2024. A Wales Poetry Award finalist in 2022, Lesley has found homes for her poems with journals and publishers including Black Bough Poetry , Broken Sleep Books , After... , Atrium , Spelt Magazine , The Alchemy Spoon and Ice Floe Press . the poems Running free 00:00 / 00:59 rippled mane spits white beads sun gifts endless diamond flash on stippled flow sheets pulled iron taut a cloud-line shadows Plymouth slides south to Spain my boat tips and yaws I ride her like a gaucho rockinghorsebronco through seas finite but giant a cornflowerblue bling robe to cool a planet my boat and I plough through plastic, oil slicks, submarines shit, bodies, melted ice fleets of sardine, shark whale and cell-wide life in celebration, grief, what you will A parent never known 00:00 / 00:42 In the gym, mirrors meet at a dark seam where body is apprehended but face is half a line of flesh, a ghosting, nothing real. Impossible to see whose breath is misting glass. In this fashion, the unmet father/mother is present and concealed. The solid whole that lies beyond the join feels close, a step away, just missed. Faceless, the kin we lost and lose again. Ocean City 00:00 / 02:52 We are on the edge of the world. Always the draw of water’s tinselled margin, urgent roar. Tattered pigeons bleach bronze heads of mariners who left Mayflower steps flush with gold and hard tack. Spattered eyes look to ocean’s light its crooning, sweet unknown. Monuments to the infinite spivvery of seizing new worlds not new to inhabitants not worlds at all same planet, same air, same cursed seas. We are on the edge of everywhere at stone steps beyond pasty ‘n’ fudge shops decorated by a dozen plaques copperplate or fat capital. A toxic pink sprayed across the globe from here this nub and den of chancers, rogues astride their wooden barkys aching to leap over the edge. It is not the ocean’s fault. It skitters in morning sun without intent, tides swung by moon’s slide at gravity’s dictate. Blameless it sighs, waves rainbow-flashed by diesel meniscus sucking at particled air. No launches now from Mayflower steps though exploits persist. Three frigates anchored in the Sound, tankers hauling fossil juice, dark fin of nuclear sub. A multi-storied cruise ship squats the bay its orange shiplets bound for pirate shops. The ocean is not what it was. Neoprene swimmers lash arms through green soup herbed with heavy metals from dead mines fine solution of faeces from overflows swarms of plastic iotas rinsed and smashed by diurnal tides. In the dusty Minster clouds of purple fish swim sunlit glass. A creation window hurls scarlet atoms on cobalt sea. Harbourside, loud horns call. Another vessel docks in Plymouth’s endless back-and-forth. The swell licks iron ring in weathered stone, blurs a rusty edge. Publishing credits Running Free: Invisible Continents (Nine Pens Press) A parent never known / Ocean City: exclusive first publication by iamb

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