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Sarah Holland back next the poet Sarah Holland is a writer, poet and meditation teacher living in rural England. She's a regular at the writing groups and open mics held by the Poetry Pharmacy , where she also teaches mindful writing practices. This is the very first time Sarah's poems have been published. the poems Unseen 00:00 / 00:43 The sly smile of flesh knows its own beauty. Somewhere, a naked body is screaming, sweating, still. It howls when uncapped by sleeves, cold slicing bone, shocked by its own need to be covered. Now a lonely, lost landscape, blindly eroded. Tiny streams in rivulets you won’t remember weren’t always there. Your care of my nakedness is all I will ever know of love. When I’m next uncovered, I’ll no longer witness myself being seen. Dress in Stars 00:00 / 02:06 The dress is clustered with flowers join the lines between the nodes to find her stories in the eyes of the stars. Virgo Here I trace a girl standing proud in new folds of fabric paid for by her own wreath-weaving hands. The hem is hitched to her waist in a teenage tryst the stars hold her heart when broken. Draco The dress becomes lazy, lounging in corners forgotten for pyjamas and red-tipped hair and freedom and pint-size laughter. Notes are absent, margins full of rhyme. Aquarius The fabric sprawls dazed with travel on a bugged bunk-bed. See here, a map of islands, an elephant’s wrinkled ear, the currency of symbols smoke singing from the folds. The Bears Here is a woman now, buying new dresses from markets, city-chic, following rivers to return to the ring where the bear was tied to steps and she will sometimes wait. Gemini The straps sting like cuts on reddened shoulders muddied by festival swamps. Friends fade to twin with pole stars. Behind a closed door, the dress hangs limp and worn. Leo The dress has been lifted from sun-striped skin a tigress released again and again and again she curls alone into her warmth and swims the wide water. Hercules Hold the dress as carefully as that first love hang from a hook that drags the door but remember to hope. There is still space in its starred sky amongst the moss-worn patches. Gargoyles 00:00 / 01:53 I had remembered you wrong with a hoop in your ear but the curls were real that uncoiled from a cap another woman pressed to your scalp. Coffee from a market stall instantly chilled as the wind whipped the steam to the gargoyles who supped it like breath. We chose a face for each of us and perhaps that was a gift, seeing how we would soon jeer across the distance, bitterness spitting the air. I wanted you to ease me down the river on a boat you had made, wade with me across the brown water. I thought it would be glassy, our faces two stars reflected there. But we were just tourists, disappointed by the churn of the silt and the slime and the mud, a memory punishing itself again and again. The bridge suspended us over floods that might have carried us to fences, flowers. We didn’t know we’d be sucked under, crushed by the wheels of a tour bus as a gargoyle cackled, ringing from a city’s tall tower. I scratch into stone with my nail I don’t want to write these poems anymore but my blood obscures the words. I want to cup you in my palm feel your breath mist my skin. We played house in a home I thought had two beds. I still feel the warmth in our current as I flick fragments of stone into the ripples, sneers etched over smiles, but even though I’ve been here before, we are forever gargoyles. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Mariam Saeed Khan back next the poet Mariam Saeed Khan is a poet, writer, journalist and digital storyteller. Her poems have appeared in Pandemonium Journal and Daily Times , and she’s given a masterclass as guest speaker on The Desi Collective (The Writers' Block Party) , as well on Virtual Camp PK. Mariam was featured on Badass.gal as part of a Young Creative Council UK project marking International Women’s Day. She also appeared alongside other international poets in read poetry ’s National Poetry Month video, ‘What does poetry mean to you?’ In December 2020, Mariam took part in Columbia University School of the Arts' Digital Storytelling Lab Program. She is currently at work on her debut collection. the poems Skyline and Sealed Envelope 00:00 / 01:19 Packed the stars in an envelope. Stamped and left it at the lamp post. Just like a message in the bottle. Unlearned all that I learnt. Waiting to relearn in the sealed envelope, of what was said and not. The symphony skyline had my Nani’s heart of her yaadein – that’s what we say to our memories in Urdu. It gives us apaniat – that she’s still here. I never got to say her my final goodbye. For it was too sudden – death is. The last of my mother’s legacy from family tree. For whatever was, is gone. The last candle to blow; like the airport’s last airplane that left without one passenger. That missed the flight and the silence of it, within the terminal. I closed my eyes. Listening to my heart beat and thinking, the souls might be on the other side, floating in the times to come. When we least expect, they might show up in our unconscious sleeping zone. Turtle and Frog 00:00 / 02:38 Look at how far you have come. From oceans, beside the chamber of passages. From hells, where the fire burnt in the forest. When all else went north; a cup of tea, biscuits, and a melody of silences in our conversation was all the solace. I referred to us as, 'Turtle and Frog'; as once, I mistakenly brought a turtle instead of a frog because the green makes it everything serene. The hand of God with the fragile times, took you along the way. He heard you praying in the drawings of hidden tales of unspoken words. Your faith kept the journey. Struggling, healing, dying and fighting to keep alive. I heard you saying in a distant miles away in a dream: 'Your trials are not stronger than you. You outlast them anyway.' Who held her home and made it alive? The Divine rhythm rewired in our lives and friendships. In the cushion of surprises and birthdays, graduations and your wedding bells. With the acceptance, to stand up front and to kick the football when is the time to do so. After all, a wasted kick is a missed chance. So why not let the turtle save that and use it later. After all, the frog jumped from one leaf to another. Looking back to see where the turtle is now. We may be circling in stories of different eras and phases; but our eyes speak, whenever we talk and communicate in unsaid times. People talk about everything except the friendships that live it up too – but as with everything, they too need water and supply of trust, love and humanity. All in all, the turtle and frog took a detour under that tree of a ground that had the auditoriums next to it. To be asked, 'Till we meet again.' For no one is one man army and there is a backstory; times and hourglass of the comforting fire that keeps the cold away. I smiled and narrated this tale of friendship and sisterhood to my niece when asked to talk about, 'Once upon a time' – and here we are still going. Snowflakes and Cotton Candy 00:00 / 01:47 The one thing that our poets have been writing since eternity? Love. A four-letter word that got a universe within. But each coating of it, looks different on an individual. The sky gets its meaning from moods of our selves; whether we know it or not, the colors changes with time; our feelings flip over like dripping sound. Sometimes it is blue, other times very whitish and red-orangish. Yet, it is what it is – a ceiling full of bulbs with snowflakes. Over a long period of distance, it keeps us alive. It doesn’t make us homeless even without any home. I stretch my hand and watch the palm lines. Wondering where’s the line of cotton candy in it? Would the life experiences all about baggage of fluffy memories that one leaves in past? I put my hand over my other hand, the small cottage that makes the sweet candies is at work. Love is what the inner thermostat of the person is. Which is why some bridges leave you; other cross you by. While the rest are stationed in the mighty mountains, with its inner calling. Now I skateboard with the walls that got no name. A pattern of ladders is a mystery. Between the valleys, there lies within, me and you. The world was asleep. And we were just getting our first snow of the season. For me, that is love. Publishing credits All poems: written exclusively for iamb

Liam Bates back next the poet Originally from the Black Country and now living in Lancashire, Liam Bates is a poet whose work has appeared in Ambit , Bath Magg , Magma and elsewhere. His poems have been translated into Spanish and Latvian, and in 2023 he won a Northern Writers’ Award for ongoing work. Liam's first two pamphlets, Monomaniac and Working Animals , are available from Broken Sleep Books , as is his debut collection, Human Townsperson . the poems The Agency 00:00 / 01:20 I ate the mushroom growing on the wall of the downstairs toilet in the house we rent. I folded a thick slice of brown bread around it and gobbled the lot raw. They might try charging us extra at the end of our tenancy because the mushroom wasn’t meant for us. But in their assessment, what is? See what I have in my hands. It’s nothing. See it moving. Like devotees bowing round a colourful altar. They forbid us painting over the white but I painted anyway on the white of the sink with the rainbow of my vomit. I am thirteen again. I am hovering a foot above the ground like a god. They don’t want us skating on their office block steps as if the concrete isn’t there for us. Smooth as a dream of endless falling. Shouting watchmen emerging to shoo us off the premises. What are they thinking, that they can contain this? It’s only my folded arms holding me together. If I raise my hands towards the sky, so bright and boundless I ache, a thousand canaries will take flight. Understudy 00:00 / 00:37 This again—my student has crammed his pockets with gravel and cannonballed into the reservoir. Sopping, and cold as a milestone on the bank, I take his word this isn’t about suicidal thoughts, he saw the tell-tale green and gold of treasure blinking on the bed and isn’t that what we’re doing here? Sure, but wouldn’t growing gills be covered during induction if that was all it took? Tomorrow, I’ll pull him from a different waterbody. We’ll sit in the sun getting warmer. Open Wide, a Little Wider 00:00 / 01:09 We were misled by a sat nav quirk, the circle sun at an unexpected inclination. The country’s vestigial tail, you dubbed this snaking A road. Still inevitably a wealth of luxury cars on hand ready to elbow by, tinted window undertakers, cutting us up and getting a mouthful: cunt, do your indicators not work or are we invisible? The final word flashing in their rear-view. And then we turned a corner and on the hill opposite was a line of houses, a familiar-seeming close in a town we’d never been. You said, Who do you think lives there? and I knew then someone must, a street of someones, each with their own purposeful face. I had to chew on it in a lay-by: the abundance, it won’t all fit in my head. But that’s the thing, you said, it doesn’t have to. Publishing credits All poems: Human Townsperson (Broken Sleep Books)

Emma Lee back next the poet Poet and reviewer Emma Lee is the author of The Significance of a Dress and Ghosts in the Desert . She was Reviews Editor for The Blue Nib , and the co-editor of Over Land, Over Sea : an anthology of poems expressing solidarity with refugees crossing the Mediterranean on small boats and rafts. Emma's poetry has featured in many print and online journals including Fevers of the Mind , Ink, Sweat & Tears , Clear Poetry and more. the poems The Bridal Dresses in Beirut 00:00 / 00:41 Each dress hangs from a noose. One is plain satin with scalloped lace, another an orgy of tulle, dreamy organza with appliqué flowers hanging from wire strung between palm trees. One is short, a shift with a tulip skirt, the sort of dress picked in a hurry to satisfy a shotgun or Article 522. The breeze breathes through them, bullies the dresses into ghosts, brides with no substance, angels bereft of their voices. What the Dust Left Uncovered After art installation The Fading Afterglow of Creation by Dave Briggs and Jack Squires 00:00 / 01:10 A screen sculpts a crumpled mass in an empty house, a 3-D image that takes the shape of what could be a heart. A sci-fi trope: machines outliving us. We all hope what will survive of us is not the pile of admin, worthless warranties, the embarrassing tweet, the spilt coffee, but our Insta life, our filtered wishes. The sculpture is not the easy outline of an emoji, but the complexity of valves, veins, a possibility of an organ, a human's engine. Here, what's left is our digital footprint, the avatar we taught to fight, scavenge, collect. Playerless it repeats the same responses, contact only from bots, a drift of binary lint. It's the unedited part of us that decided who we touched. The digital heart waits for us to breathe emotion into it, sculpting the memory of what it most wanted. The Wrapped Hedges 00:00 / 01:26 It looks as if a fog has whirled around the hedges, wrapping them in a swirl of candy floss like a fleece protecting them from frost. The implication is the hedges will be unwrapped to show a healthy growth, firm stems, perfectly green leaves, branches stretched in welcome. The covering takes on the texture of a regular weave, as if a team of spiders had worked solidly for months, but the structure is too crude to be natural, too regular to constructed by anything but a programmed machine. It reflects a grid of lines running from left to right with rectangular holes. If laid flat, it would represent a map of a housing estate, plans made by those seeking to enrich themselves on the grounds councils cannot demonstrate they have an adequate housing supply, that somehow executive, four bedroom homes, beyond the pockets of those on waiting lists, will meet and it’s fine to build in the country out of reach of public transport and amenities but it’s just these birds who will prevent building during the nesting season that are the problem. So man-made webs are their suggested solution; mimic nature to prevent it. Publishing credits The Wedding Dresses in Beruit: The Significance of a Dress (Arachne Press) What the Dust Left Uncovered: After... (December 8th 2022) The Wrapped Hedges: exclusive first publication by iamb

Daragh Fleming back next the poet Daragh Fleming, a writer from Cork, Ireland, has work appearing in several literary magazines – from The Ogham Stone to Gutter Magazine . He's also read his poems for the Eat The Storms poetry podcast. His pamphlet, The Hole , was highly commended in both the Patrick Kavanagh Poetry Award and the Fool for Poetry International Chapbook Competition. Daragh was shortlisted for the prestigious Alpine Fellowship Poetry Prize. the poems The Hole For Max Porter 00:00 / 01:37 This is fine, there’s a hole here, did you make it? Did you? Better fill it up, fill it up quick, anything will do, what do you like? Do you like anything? Just fill it up, fill it up, fill it up. Oh you like girls? You like them enough, go-on-dates-go-on-dates-go-on-dates, this is fine, everybody does this, three different women, four nights a week, five weeks a month, more months than you can count, just go-on-dates, this is how it’s done, never settle in, fill that hole with sex, sex with everyone, everything’s okay, you’re just having fun. The hole is getting bigger. Time to put the shovel down. Thick nights, empty texts, wet sheets, wits end, this isn’t enough, this is getting worse, oh you like to drink, better drink it up, fill that hole with beer, maybe that’ll help, now you’re doing both, whiskey with a fuck, you can’t get it up, no you can’t get it up. The hole is getting bigger, the hole is getting bigger, time to put the shovel down, enough is enough, flirt online with strangers, kiss her like you mean it, hope to catch a feeling, everything’s gone numb, the hole is now inside you, maybe always was, the hole is everything now, eating it all up, edges are collapsing, emptiness engulfs, this isn’t a good thing, why can’t you fucking stop? There’s an empty person here – did you make him up? Better fill it up, better fill it up, anything will do, enough is enough. Prescience 00:00 / 00:48 My mind is the radio you forgot to turn off – broadcasting noise throughout the dark silent house we no longer occupy. I dream in sentences I’m afraid to whisper. I write them down and tell the world I came up with them on my own. But they were delivered in the night – hungover takeaway bags glazed with grease. They cure me for a while but I always text you back. I always rise from another nap taken in a half-baked, half-attempted afternoon. I turn myself off so the cosmos can send me phrases that sound like temporary comfort. Stockpiling words, selecting the shiniest ones to build my nest. birthday poem 00:00 / 01:34 At some point, maybe around the age of fourteen, they stop putting the exact number of candles in your cake and replace them with a couple that just signify the number. I suppose it makes sense because the idea of placing fifteen or more individual candles into a cake and lighting them feels tedious. And as the years pass you’ll reflect on all the ground you covered yourself, how you spread your life out, each year a single candle on the surface of your time spent here. You’ll remember all the times you ate cake, all the times you allowed your heart to break. You’ll struggle to remember each and every one of the faces that have made you smile, but you’ll try. You’ll grow older and more grey and more grateful. Your circle will get smaller but it will feel more full. You’ll wonder where the time went, and you’ll cautiously consider how much of it you've left. You’ll think about all the things you’ve done, and all the things still left to do. It could be any day, it’s just a day after all. But on this day you’ll feel it all, reflect upon what you’ve become, what you’re inevitably becoming. Adding a candle each year, your light growing a little bit more each time, because although you may mourn the loss of your youth with every birthday that comes, growing older isn’t a privilege everyone gets to experience. Publishing credits The Hole: ROPES Literary Journal 2024 (Issue 32) Prescience / birthday poem: exclusive first publication by iamb

Peter A back next the poet Published widely in such places as Laldy , Spindrift, Poems for Grenfell Tower, A Kist of Thistles, A Kind of Stupidity and Bridges or Walls? , Peter A won first prize at the 2016 Paisley Spree Fringe Poetry Competition. During 2020, his work was anthologised in Words from Battlefield, Poets Against Trump , Surfing , The Angry Manifesto and Black Lives Matter – Poems for a New World . Peter's debut chapbook, Art of Insomnia , was published by Hedgehog Poetry Press in 2021. the poems Found in France 00:00 / 02:30 Though you would have to concede its picture perfect rural beauty here for the record are the things you wouldn’t like about the place. The middle of the countryside such a distance from anywhere. The crowded transport transferring from the airport. The open windows to keep the place cool inviting houseflies. The doorway dogs, the ever-darting omnipresent lizards. The lack of television. The steps, useful for others, which would be impossible for you. Around those steps the lavender which at home would aid your sleeping but here for you a nightmare, attracting wasps and bees. The spider’s improbably small body, impossibly spindly long legs, waiting in the shower room, patiently. Also the tiny white spider – I bet you never saw an entirely white spider! The mosquitoes, the hornets. The blood-sucking horseflies almost certainly lining up to feast upon you in particular. The bats awaiting the chance to be entangled in your lush long hair. The swimming pool that would be out of bounds for you. The conversation in which you would not wish to speak. The revelation before bedtime concerning the cleaner’s cat, its trophy mice and the minor flea infestation – successfully eradicated we think but let us know if you get bitten . As for me, the only aspect of the French place I do not appreciate is you not being here. After 00:00 / 00:54 After words their last have spoken and from here gone Afterwards it is said cockroaches will make the earth their own Do you see already some may be working to inherit behind the scenes planning preparing strategies awaiting the endgame from which all cockroach-types are due to benefit after the black rainfall/after the slaughter of words and laughter After Late night teardrop 00:00 / 00:40 I should certainly stop viewing old home movies, not because of their patchiness or participants’ awkwardness – that’s all part of their charm. Not because of their faded definition – I always liked the Impressionists. Not because they are silent cinema, recorded with the cheapest camera, but because they leave my heart haunted. Publishing credits Found in France: Art of Insomnia (The Hedgehog Poetry Press) After: Sci-Fi (Dreich Themes) Late night teardrop: The Wee Book of Wee Poems (Dreich Wee Books)

Seanín Hughes back next the poet Seanín was first published on Poethead and featured on the inaugural Poetry Jukebox, based at the Crescent Arts Centre in Belfast, in 2017. Her work has been published widely online and in print – everywhere from Banshee and The Stinging Fly to Abridged. Seanín was shortlisted for the 2018 Seamus Heaney Award for New Writing, and published her debut chapbook, Little Deaths , with Smithereens Press in 2019. She's currently studying literature at University of Ulster and working on her first full collection. the poems I Want You To Know That You Are Alive 00:00 / 01:43 The natural law is that sometimes, this must hurt. You will find yourself hurled headlong into a mound of salt, skin raw, inside out. And you will know, then, what it means to be the wound— what it means to learn how to breathe through it all. Know that it is a bravery to live at full capacity; fill each lung with equal measure of dark and light. Drink every cup dry. Know that nothing is ordinary, and all things are temporary— we can never outrun this bittersweet truth. But here’s the secret: we can stop, for a moment, and taste it, unafraid of the sting. It’s easier when you know it’s coming; when you lean into the fall, go limp, and let the cushion of your knowing absorb the impact. You will heal again and again, until. You will. The Long Bones 00:00 / 01:15 Bring to us your blackest dog, your tightrope mania, your voices and visions; lay them on the table lengthways. We'll measure your madness, convert it to voltage. Be still. Bite down. Listen when we tell you, we’ve come a long way from fractured femurs, cracked vertebrae. Here. This holds the chemistry to heavyweight your limbs from within; no restraint necessary. Bite down, now. Be a good girl. Slight risk of trauma to teeth or tongue while you sleep, but we promise, this will eat the pain. Yes— on waking, you may forget your name, the year, or how you came to be here— but your bones will remain intact. They’ll hold you together safely until the world comes back. The Birds Are Silent 00:00 / 00:45 & then the lights go up to reveal it all— the beat of fist-deep purple in every chest a tremolo, each knot of bone wet with blood, bodies upon bodies sharing the same wild shake, a writhe of hot molecules. We know the truth now on this godless tilted spin around the sun, dancing ourselves into frenzied circles: the end is here, and all the birds are silent. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb Share

Jim Newcombe back next the poet Born and raised in Derby in the heart of the English Midlands, Jim Newcombe moved to London in 2006. Since then, he's lived in every quarter of the capital – enjoying an active cultural life of concerts and visits to theatre productions, museums, galleries and taverns. Jim's writing has appeared in numerous publications, and was shortlisted for the prestigious Bridport Prize, as well as for the Pendle Prize for elegies commemorating the First World War. the poems Eight Owls for Hieronymus Bosch 00:00 / 01:43 I Between the inward and outward wave upon the shore a rhythm in feathers that wasn’t here before called into being its substance and its law. II Between the masculine and feminine, between the how of her and why of him, came one with wings who shamed the seraphim. III Out from opposing poles that brought us here with eyes of sun and moon that knew no tear a tremulous presence maintained the biosphere. IV Between one nation’s customs and the next a primal entity that left the scholars vexed denied in its descent the doctrine of each text. V In the skewed trajectories of time and space it roosted aloof and in the darkest place rotated the clock of its expressionless face. VI The wood has ears, the field has eyes, and dawn reveals the eyes in every ear of corn that scans our thoughts, their verdict full of scorn. VII It is the decoy to all you think is true, to everything you ever thought you knew; the one note in its voice asks Who-are-you? VIII Both the signal to a secret and a lure, it hears the silence of a spider on the floor and sees most clearly when it’s most obscure. The House 00:00 / 02:16 Boundaries were defined by harsh words and bolted doors, yet by night I snuck past sleeping sentinels, the dark air pregnant with unanswered prayers, the page of each wall scripted with shadow, seeming to swell with pressure, as though something passed through it. Rain tapped at each window where the gloating stars peered in like patient voyeurs, the rhubarb blanched in moonlight as the clematis loomed, scaling the house, rending foundations I could not fortify. Spiders were hatched from cracked corners. I searched for clues, listened at keyholes for conspiracies, my memory mapped with creaking floorboards that betrayed my presence. I would spend hours in prayer and soliloquy trying to subsume the guilt I had inherited. Before they could be caught or killed the spiders would scuttle back to their dark dimension, as though a gash could suck up its own blood. Somewhere in hiding was the eight-legged mother of them all, her deftly strung web a grid of carcasses; wings, shells, corrupted husks mauled and festering. I couldn’t sleep for fear of it. Sometimes I would try the cellar door: deep and forbidding, that underground lair, where steps descend into a darkness that writhed with apprehensions. I couldn’t reach the light switch to dispel my suspicions which grew like rumours of a secret sin. One day I would confront whatever was down there and return victorious (if return at all) to where another, like me, would dare to descend along the cellar’s corpse-cold walls, dank and mildewed, the treacherous gloom now bristling, bristling and black with all that is unassumed. The Moon and The Sea From A Shake of the Riddle 00:00 / 01:00 VIII The moon and the sea – are they in harmony or at war? The martial marriage of the pale satellite and the brisk lush rasp of breakers – their sickly scurf and slosh, the weft and warp of crawling froth, and the pendulum tide like a nag gone berserk in its bridle, while the blind pupil of the milky moon dumb and vacuous, dimpled with craters, barren as the soul of an atheist. Holding dominion over the toiling water, that wormy, comet-scuffed wafer, that shrunken bauble of colourless light, still separate despite its travelled distance, its clean light of clinical intellect frozen from shadow, whose oblique brilliance does not illumine, but only reflect. Publishing credits Eight Owls for Hieronymus Bosch / The Moon and The Sea: exclusive first publication by iamb The House: Eunoia Review

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

JP Seabright back next the poet JP Seabright is a queer disabled writer living in London. They have four solo pamphlets published: Fragments from Before the Fall , No Holds Barred , The Insomniac’s Almanac , Traum/A and the collaborative works GenderFux and MACHINATIONS . They have been published in journals such as The Rialto , One Hand Clapping , Fourteen Poems , Culture Matters , Under the Radar and 14 Magazine , as well as nominated for Best of the Net, The Pushcart Prize and The Forward Prizes. the poems Dungeness 00:00 / 01:04 The shingle glistens suggesting buried treasure under a bleached whale of a sky, grey smoke mingles with ashtray clouds, a nuclear desert crunches underfoot. The hum of the reactors is silent now, the world's contracted thus, blue-feathered birds curl and call over a dilapidated corrugated shack. Time stands still. Cronus and Chroma collide where stone solicits sky, the air itself imbued with solace and the metallic taste of sea. Stories of those who sought a living as scattered flotsam on a desolate shoreline, are lost in the rags of time. Dungeness is less a place and more a state of mind. Clothe the Night with Stars, My Love 00:00 / 01:43 in the sunshine. your horse. the forest. hungry and frail. the woods are washed. with the orb of broad waves. eyes disdain the world. and the cough of the poet sings of flowers in the stream. the autumn of the west. the splendour of the moon. this wilderness of death. so vast and beautiful. dust strobes. the self is still. our faith has dispersed. peacefully. noiseless and few. a gap in the clouds. an impossible sun. its curtain hangs with the heavens. abandon those who rest in the shade. wear the storms of men and brides. acrid in the stream. rainbow shadows. like a birthday. heavy and decorous. starlight wanders at the threshold. feeble yet found. clothing the night with stars. the calm of the sun. a servant of the past. a bright steed mingles in the water. streaming of stars. your screeching. eyes of the sea. winged with the bursting. overwrought and mournful. felicitas seeking the sun. one life of a day. a garden flower. the sound. and sometimes the heavens. murky and white. lovefull. Nocturnal Omissions 00:00 / 02:56 : I am a ghost of a chance : a weeping husk of a human : scattered remnants of once-functional behaviour : barely grasped : longed for : no longer attainable : I am my own undoing : an unravelling : this unbelongingness : this : this unwarranted fuckering bliss : this sickening lurch : I play paper scissors stone with my memories : each trauma crushing : cancelling out the next : the act of obliteration : a removal of meaning : how joyous! : a negation and a revelation : a quivering flatline : cut down to the quick and the dead of our own true selves : whatever that is : this : skeletal kiss : embryonic kick : fuck the shame away : in the dark : on your own : your phone’s flickering hiss : a faithful companion : outside : the city is on heat : your body a hot flush of mistaken identities : mixed media on rye : the city is a hex : your body a burnt match : fire flares the streets : your body stains the sheets : with thoughts of filth : nightmare ejaculate : lick your bones clean : and yet : it is darkest before the dawn : this : is a lie : sometimes the dawn never comes : sometimes the darkness is within us : some have darkness thrust upon them : the city is a hellscape : life is hard : don’t let anyone tell you otherwise : the utter aliveness of it all : this : this relentless existence : sometimes I think about dying : peace for our time : go home and get a nice quiet sleep : looking back on this half-century : a battlefield : these scars : wars fought : sometimes won : mostly lost : losing : still : the slow decline to senility : I ask for pity : as I age : for despite all best intentions : I come to closely resemble : the man I most despise : tomorrow never dies : but this darkness before the dawn : this what if this is all there is : and yet : lighter days are coming : is a lie : I tell myself : Publishing credits Dungeness / Clothe the Night with Stars, My Love: exclusive first publication by iamb Nocturnal Omissions: Impossible Archetype (Issue 11)

Rennie Parker back next the poet Born in West Yorkshire, Rennie Parker now lives and works in the East Midlands. Her first collection Secret Villages was published by Flambard Press in 2001 and featured in the 2002 Forward Prizes anthology. Since then, Rennie has published two collections with Shoestring Press: Candleshoe (2014) and The Complete Electric Artisan (2017). She's also published reviews and literary history, including The Georgian Poets (Northcote House/British Council, 1999). the poems The Original Captain Boomerang's Death-Defying Stunts 00:00 / 02:16 Ladies and gentlemen: it's not the escape which sets me free but the entire surrender. As always there is no body double and no apparatus, the lumber and chock which keep you rooted there will vanish, in a trice. Released into that forgetfulness holding my breath for another count of ten I work my strategy out. You see, in practice when engaged with any airtight fiendish device it's no different to the Nailed-In- Packing-Crate Mystery or the Upside Down Barrel Plunge. It's a hard one this time. Sir, you are amazed I should survive these incredible feats. Let me tell you it takes a special kind of person to become a genuine fake. The simple fact is I cannot be killed – the crowd believes it's impossible but I know everything is true. We are always conjuring on the edge of death, ladies and gentlemen. I have studied my subject and I know its ways. There's no exit from that sealed casket. I do not enter this compact lightly and you have every reason to be afraid, not on my account but for yourselves, for wanting to see such blood. You await the wrong turn, the failure of my dextrous digits, the mistaken breath that loses me. Perhaps it will happen tonight and you were there when the great illusionist never returned and you yourselves became history. Well, we'll see. Ladies and gentlemen, I stand before you as clean as a shelled egg. There's nothing up my sleeves. Let me show you how it's done: one two three ... dreaming about the plenitude 00:00 / 01:38 a lifetime of holidays is killing them perfect with the beautiful children, their artless arrangement: their mothers, honed down like bone flutes, that strain – or there, poised quite like rare ikebana in the classical style with five types of olives or delicate at the piano perhaps or stuffing pimientos with hand-reared lemongrass straight from a double-page spread about interiors or careless with artisan bread, the rich delivery promised: a husband ironic with stubble and rough linen cool at his infinite desk, the blond wood and the textiles. You know they're only pretending but it's so good at the grandstand window in a trendy cafe or crunching across wet pebbles as if in the moment windswept thinking of lighthouses yanking their dogs back and striding, the world mastered, a flint-stuck cottage where everything happens each startled blue summer, those indigo nightfalls of laughter-echoing parties the trug encrusted with warm earth a descending line of wellingtons in their honey-dappled hallway, matted with sea-grass and on-point architectural salvage. ‘we will all sing hallelujah in the river of time’ 00:00 / 01:57 and we race past collections of backyard hens the unadopted roads and spilled walls those awkward bridges of blue-toned brick each one with its engineer's number: and how we smack underneath them one after another as down the carriages heads are moving in rhythm and polystyrene cups jog slightly on the bolted-down granite-look tables – oh unison and perfect synchronicity I am riding with you on the train of all our hopes the passion behind your newspapers and your sweet contained heads – you do not know where this pleasure is aimed or what sent it flying, only that the calm people are waiting flipping their cards back and pages or scrolling down to the next track placing their new chestnut boots on the stained utility carpet, turning over their books like heroes safe in the knowledge that someone is waiting for them and their clean shopping bags are being touched, slid, with goods they've been looking for all year and this was their afternoon even here in the middle of November in the rain as our train jinks leftright like an animal with an itch on its shoulder as we swat into midlands cities and out the other side with loose fields running away from us, charred hedges scribbling into the distance and the pinpoint lights coming on. Publishing credits The Original Captain Boomerang's Death-Defying Stunts: The Complete Electric Artisan (Shoestring Press) dreaming about the plenitude / ‘we will all sing hallelujah in the river of time': exclusive first publication by iamb Share

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

Steve Smart back next the poet Poet and poetry filmmaker Steve Smart is based in Angus, Scotland. His poems have appeared in Atrium , Firth , The Poetry Shed , The Writer's Café , Ink, Sweat & Tears , Poetry Scotland , Gallus , Consilience and elsewhere. Recent collaborations have meant Steve's poetry has featured in anthologies published in New Zealand, Canada and Scotland – while his poetry films have been screened at various international festivals and exhibitions. In 2023, funding from Creative Scotland helped Steve and Irish poetry filmmaker Colm Scully deliver a new poetry film workshop for the Scottish Poetry Library. the poems luminous without being fierce 'Light in Scotland has a quality I have not met elsewhere. It is luminous without being fierce, penetrating to immense distances with an effortless intensity.' Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain 00:00 / 01:20 We meet were ridge meets sky – your kin are only here, above a rising contour of warmth, an unrequested flood shrinking your island tundras, stranding you upward, a feathered bellwether. You switch from being, to being unseeable – lichen-hill-skin you’ll speckle-wait me away, hunker into arctic whites – if the high corrie snows hesitate, else doubtful greys for spring. I forget so much, but remember each of all our meeting places. The map knows their names – I recall stones and land and the rise and fall, where you were, were not, and were again. I saw your presence shimmer, while I gazed breathless – while you waited, while I was not too much, while you were still. entrenched 00:00 / 24:07:02 Mine hunters with doll-sized trowels, flense the russet soils with caution. Is that slight discolouration the circumference of a wooden post? That line a distant season's burning? Stratigraphy layers the plot, yields the story. Circumstantial evidence – is that scrape a street number, a mason’s strike, or just more tumbledown sandstone subtext? The palm gifted a stone tool finds an easy accommodation, caresses as if to cup a cheek – to retouch, re-dress familiar bodies, in more than a change of clothes. How much for ten minutes chat? Of different days and other treasures – of how children always fight, of what the sky says in the dark, of one mind horde to another. sidelong From the United States Library of Congress details of the first photographic portrait image of a human produced in America: Robert Cornelius, head-and-shoulders self-portrait, facing front, with arms crossed. (Daguerreotype, 1839.) 00:00 / 00:59 Robert Cornelius remains sceptical. He does not trust that it will work, or that a specific future develops when this image will be visible. He does not pause to comb his hair or consider us, but guards himself against the possible exposure, against the theft, of unmarshalled spirit. Slow counting silent hesitation, he glances sidelong from 1839, doubtful of our existence, his focus on what he next intends. Publishing credits luminous without being fierce: Alchemy and Miracles (Gilbert and Hall Press) entrenched / sidelong: exclusive first publication by iamb , though sidelong was previously blogged by the author

Paul Brookes back next the poet Poet and shop assistant Paul Brookes lives and writes in a cat house full of teddy bears. He's published numerous volumes of poetry, including The Fabulous Invention Of Barnsley (Dearne Community Arts), The Headpoke and Firewedding (Alien Buddha Press), and A World Where and She Needs That Edge (Nixes Mate Press). He's also collaborated with other artists – on Stubborn Sod (Alien Buddha Press) with Marcel Herms in 2019, and on the forthcoming Khoshhali with Hiva Moazed. Paul is a contributing writer of Literati Magazine and editor of the Wombwell Rainbow Interviews . the poems R Ash Wednesday 00:00 / 00:30 Thas gonna mucky me forehead wi old codgers ashes what we burned yonks since as if it could remove our guilt and sinfulness for doing so. As tha finger paints a cross on me bonce al see our ancestor crinkle and pop Like it were fireworks and watch all harshness and fret go up in smoke. Al have to go mi sen a wesh afore a sees our lass else it'll get her all wonderin' an we don't want that. Don't want folk pryin'. No need. The Gent 00:00 / 00:35 The regular gent as I beep the barcode of his white bread, I take correct change from his held out palm. He struggles to put his purchase into his thin plastic bag. I open the bag wider and drop the bread into it. My wife is cremated, he says She'll be buried Thursday. I say I'm sorry to hear that as my till queue gets longer he lingers, a heavy silence. I say hello to the next customer. The heavy silence moves towards the door. We Wait For Sick Sunblaze To 00:00 / 01:22 go. Too long in the barren teeth of glare, lustre is death, see this wrinkled skin, cancerous blotches, blinded by this sharp, dry lucence. The soft, sodden darkness will give us life. Make us young once more. Rub out these wrinkled laugh lines. Smile again in the night. Blood unclenches without light, opens nightscented warm inside thighs and playful inside fragrant mouths tastes a sweetlife of shadows. Darkness outside reflects the firedark between your thighs, welcoming wild cave of your mouth. Our tongues play together in the juicednight. What has come into being in us is life, life that is tenebrous; eyes use what sunless gives, dark shines in lightness, and lightness cannot overpower it. Aphotic. Listen, words bear witness to dark, so that everyone might believe through them. Words out of warm, wet atramentous mouths. Words are not the dark, they bear witness to the dark. Real dark that gives dark to everyone; it is coming into the world. Publishing credits R Ash Wednesday: Stubborn Sod (Alien Buddha Press) The Gent: Please Take Change (Cyberwit) We Wait For Sick Sunblaze To: A World Where (Nixes Mate Books) Share

Lisa Tulfer 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