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Read 45 poems from 15 emerging and established poets – and hear their authors read them too. Welcome to wave 17 of iamb. wave seventeen spring 2024 Carol J Forrester David Pecotić Eilín de Paor Helen Kay Ilisha Thiru Purcell Iris Anne Lewis Jonathan Humble Lesley Curwen Margaret Dennehy Nina Parmenter Sarah Holland Steve Smart Sue Spiers Thomas McColl Tracey Rhys

Read 45 poems from 15 emerging and established poets – and hear their authors read them too. Welcome to wave 10 of iamb. wave ten summer 2022 Annick Yerem Bill Sutton Elisabeth Kelly Elizabeth M Castillo Emma Kemp Gerry Stewart Jay Whittaker Ken Cockburn Kitty Donnelly Michael McGill Penelope Shuttle Richard Jeffrey Newman Ruth Taaffe Shiksha S Dheda Simon Middleton

Hear poet Carl Alexandersson read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Carl Alexandersson back next the poet the poems The cows on the ice 00:00 / 01:44 on clear winter days we'd ice skate on Sjöatorpssjön our breaths were condensed precise fast-paced as we'd circle the patch of ice we were told was safe safety is a decision others make * on this frozen-over lake decades ago Dad's childhood friend poured hot cocoa into his ice skates to warm his feet which worked briefly before backfiring nothing is as cold as heat fading * once, I fell through slipped from the pier and had to get draped in a tablecloth the colour of snödroppar in Swedish we have this saying det är ingen ko på isen there is no cow on the ice it means no danger everything's fine * once I poured hot cocoa onto the ice thinking it'd melt but it just stained * Dad always told me if I ever go further out on the ice I'd need to bring ice picks in case I fell in on Sjöatorpssjön I learned how to listen for cracks under skates for spring to break for danger * last summer, in the dark Dad and I heard our neighbours shout there were cows in the lake having escaped their farm for the cooling bliss of a summer night swim we stood and listened as they brought them ashore like we'd listen for the ice to crack * I'd like to not stain this ice this lake this life if I can * in the end the cows on the ice were saved safety is a decision others make. Wind-bent trees still grow 00:00 / 01:44 in a city centre park in Bilbao, my best friend reaches out and touches the trees we pass says man-made things are too smooth, too flat; unnatural. I think of things I have lost: laying down on grass, jumping from one rock to the next, picking wildflowers bringing them home which brings me back to summer days with farmor and farfar by Sjöatorpssjön reading Kalle Anka comics in the shade of an oak tree, holding the ground with my body; breathing it in. when did I stop going for forest runs, stop walking into the kitchen with grass-stained feet, carrying wild strawberries from the edge of the greenery? such sweetness in such small bodies. I read somewhere that twigs don’t always break at their weakest point; that it is more of a chain reaction of small breakages – and that rings out like my first phone. later on, my best friend leans back onto a patch of grass on a hill overlooking the city, closes her eyes, exhales deeply, feels ground against skin, and still, I don’t. instead, I look out at what’s been built below. but also further at the hills in the distance, overlapping each other, wild waves of green – And I do breathe it in. Skummeslövsstrand’s shoreline 00:00 / 01:44 At 5 / at the shores of Skummeslövsstrand / we would collect the washed-up jellyfish / and place them in piles / I don't remember / why. Generally / I think the why-nots are more important / why not build a tower of jellyfish / reaching all the way to the candy floss clouds? See / at 5 / that made perfect sense /... / I want nonsense to make sense again / pick up shiny things from the ground and keep them / draw badly with crayons / so as to grace the fridge / with this representative testament of my nonsensical existence! And then / I want to munch on snow / and feel the water melt / into me / hold your hand and not question it / ask you what your favourite colour is / and your top 5 animals / and if you remember / how quickly we could exit a building / for recess? It was a question of seconds / holding each other / so close /... / Once / we went there in winter / holding plastic shovels close to our chests / stomping through the snow / in order to reach the shoreline / finding that oceans don't freeze the way lakes do / the waves stay warm by moving Mom says / and we run / all the way home / empty handed / convinced / the holes we dug in the snow / will still be there tomorrow /... / In Cornwall, I am told / collecting trinkets from the shore / is common practice. The belief / that whatever the sea washes up is yours / to keep / washed clean / of any claims / belonging to the sea and the shore and the clouds and you all / at /... / Once, my brother got stung by a lion's mane jellyfish / so badly / we had to scrape his entire back / with Dad's credit card. During the car ride / home / Dad explained why / that works / and his words made sense /... / We had asked the sea to play / with us / and it had said no / there is nothing left / to collect. Don’t ask me / again . Publishing credits

Hear poet Ian McMillan read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Ian McMillan © Adrian Mealing back next the poet Presenter of BBC Radio 3's The Verb, compère of the annual T S Eliot Prize Readings, writer, broadcaster and recent recipient of The Freedom of Barnsley, Ian McMillan is a renowned British poet who's been everywhere and done more. He's already written a verse autobiography (Talking Myself Home: My Life in Verses ), and now a memoir of childhood and the sea – My Sand Life, My Pebble Life . Ian’s been a castaway on Desert Island Discs , resident poet for English National Opera, and a contestant on BBC 1's Pointless Celebrities. His most recent collection is To Fold The Evening Star: New and Selected Poems . the poems Half a Minute Before the Start of the World 00:00 / 01:00 There was an idea. Well, more of the ghost Of an idea. And the idea/ghost idea was The idea of a tree. Somewhere (remember, There was no somewhere yet) The ghost of an idea of a tree waited To become an idea of a tree and then A tree. On the day before your first day At school you are full of possibilities In your little socks. Maybe you hold A crayon close to a blank sheet That almost collapses under metaphor’s Incalculable weight. It is, look, look, Half a minute before the start of the world And that (insert blankness here) of a tree Has no idea what the world has in store for it But it dreams its leaves are burning. Try Knocking on Your Own Door and Opening it 00:00 / 00:40 Your shadow Either side. Lit by possibility. This is like Walking and sitting down At the same time. This is like Being the past and the future At the same time. Knock now. Knock. Both sides of the door at once. Hearing the knock And being the one who knocks. Gaze through The letterbox At yourself, Knocking and listening. Listen. This is like Writing and reading At the same time. The Last Speaker of the Language 00:00 / 00:59 The last speaker of the language said this: ‘My words fall unnoticed; snow in a wood. No one to talk to’s like no one to kiss.’ Nobody answered. No one understood. The last speaker of the language lay down On the grass only he had the words for And felt his dry mind beginning to drown In the sound of old sounds closed like a door. The last speaker of the language looked up At what he called something I call the sun I passed him a drink. I call it a cup: His word for that thing is over and done. The untitled moon set fire to the night. When languages die, who says the last rites? Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Moira Walsh read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Moira Walsh back next the poet Originally from Michigan, USA, Moira Walsh now calls southern Germany home – her poetry finding homes in a variety of Austrian and German journals. She's the author of Earthrise , and with Wilfried Schubert, Do Try This at Home . A founding member of Kollektief Dellgart, Moira has co-translated contemporary poets such as Olja Alvir, Ken Mikolowski, Halyna Petrosaniak, Maë Schwinghammer and others. the poems White noise, they say 00:00 / 00:22 as if it’s all one color. But then there’s the Lake: a rainbow of sushing and loshing and ashing and flishing and sething and hayshing Apology to local vegetables 00:00 / 00:36 Sweet corn – hours old, stalk to table! Oak-leaf lettuce, garlic scapes! Beet greens, basil, cucumbers! I’m sorry. On days like these nothing can squeeze down my throat except, after dark, some good cheese and a weird combination of transportation starches. Removed 00:00 / 01:09 Small room, only the right twin bed mine, half the bookshelf, half the table and one chair so half time chair sitting I miss those tranquilisers sometimes wish I’d kept the ones they slipped in a small paper envelope for my test night at home when the ward went up in smoke someone set a bed on fire and I missed it Two weeks later the next arsonist nurses changed the sheets too soon fine ash everywhere home again for a night I missed that too If I were still delusional seeking connections at all costs I would feel responsible for incendiary absence Publishing credits White noise, they say / Apology to local vegetables: exclusive first publication by iamb Removed: [kon] (Issue 10)

Hear poet Phil Vernon read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Phil Vernon back next the poet Trained originally as a forester, Phil Vernon has done international humanitarian and peacebuilding work since 1985. His third collection, Guerrilla Country – forthcoming from Flight of the Dragonfly Press in 2024 – draws together his interest in landscape, peace and conflict. Phil's two previous collections, Poetry After Auschwitz and Watching the Moon Landing , are complemented by his version of the mediaeval hymn Stabat Mater (with music by Nicola Burnett Smith), which has been performed internationally. the poems The command ‘An order is heavier than a stone.’ 00:00 / 01:23 The magistrate, for fear his fear will come to pass, sends formal notes to regiments. The chief of police, sure they wish bloodshed over peace, calls out the words that make it so. The soldier puts in play his plan to teach these people what he understands. *** A simple mark, a sound or gesture sets in motion—everything. Block exit gates with bayonets. Cut through the crowd. Fire tear gas, baton, then live rounds above their heads— then lower. Aim at where the densest groupings are. Don’t shrink—redouble your resolve when they begin to flee. Send in the tanks. *** Inside, the image of the golden sanctum barely shimmers, pilgrims walk in silent circles, heel to toe, around the sarovar . *** How certain must they be, who utter these commands, the stage they stand upon and laud and idolise is crumbling in the sea? Where do their shadows go? And where do ours, who fail to prevent their words? The King’s Peace 00:00 / 00:57 To keep his peace, our king built temples, courts and palaces, and scarred the land he’d won, with ditches, ports and roads; determined how we die; and blessed us with his enmities. To teach us irony, he named his cousins lords and justices. Apprised of God’s mistake by priests and clerks, on pain of punishment he made us speak a single tongue. His word was written, maps were drawn. But laws and maps and roadways lengthened distances, and when he sailed, he left no instrument through which to see, but a kaleidoscope. We turn and turn its wheels but cannot make the fractured picture whole. Dereliction 00:00 / 01:14 We learned the forest long before we learned our books: heard woodlarks, cuckoos, jays, watched roebucks, martens, wolves, each in its place and in our secret places— hillsides, hilltops, streams and dips. We learned that trees brought down become a space for sunlight, seedlings, tillers, scents and sounds; that canopies of beech and oak and angled beams of dancing light make way for vistas, brambles, willow, birch, then beech and oak and angled beams of dancing light; that a loved and loving land is always moving tirelessly from sun and sound to quiet shade, from quiet shade to sun and sound. Our land’s become a hungry, dull-eyed fox made ragged and thin by mange and hunched in the edges hearing and seeing nothing; limping to nowhere, too tired to be afraid or unafraid. Publishing credits The command / The King's Peace: Flights (Issue 4) Dereliction: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Elisabeth Kelly read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Elisabeth Kelly back next the poet Elisabeth Kelly lives on a hill farm with her family and too many animals. She's been published in numerous anthologies and journals both online and in print, and she's authored three poetry pamphlets: Carbon , Mind Mathematics and Wild Chamomile . Her first children's book is due out in 2022 from Stairwell Books. Among Elisabeth's favourite things are puddings, and the changing of the seasons. the poems Otzi and the Giant’s Eye 00:00 / 00:31 Sometimes, I feel I am curled up in the eye of a giant, light glints makes an iris out of sunbeams that wink from the depths of this ice sea. I forget for a moment, that suffocating pressure keeps me still as bonded molecules suspend me in a sphere of solid fluid. And I wonder, if I tap a finger against this lens would my world fracture into crystal tears and cry me out from the depths of this ice sea. Tiny Bird Heart 00:00 / 00:15 Light whispers at the window, blue burrows through nudges the dark away. Quietly I uncurl, the nest gives way, as your tiny bird heart beats through the sound of your feet dabbling across the floor. Wild Chamomile 00:00 / 00:40 It smells of pineapple when your crush it, I didn’t know that was the smell, until later. It is the smell of summer, concrete cracks where engine oil pooled, rainbows on slurry puddles, afternoon trips across fields to find an old milking carriage eroding in dens of nettles, the corrugated roof calling like Sleeping Beauty’s turrets full of promise, drizzling reality across the rotting wooden floors. It is scars created by rusted metal treasure, submerged in bogs, or broken bottles used on flat stones to cut berries, it is long days alone. Publishing credits Otzi and the Giant's Eye: Dodging The Rain (This Ice Sea) Tiny Bird Heart: Green Ink Poetry (Discovery Part 2) Wild Chamomile: Wild Chamomile (Selcouth Station)

Hear poet Nicholas McGaughey read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Nicholas McGaughey back next the poet Nicholas McGaughey lives in Wales. He has new work in Lighthouse , Poetry Wales , And Other Poems , Bad Lilies , Stand and The London Magazine , as well as in Like Flyering for the Revolution: The VERVE Anthology of Protest Poems . the poems The Ring 00:00 / 01:14 The old ring was lost or stolen, bought on the never-never on the eve of our empty chapel. This new band has been forged out of many declarations, spilling from a box of old commitments to be smelted in a crucible of clasp and chain: one eternity, a keepsake that lost its charm and the uncoupled links of a gold wristwatch. Tokens given at font and altar, that glowed on clutched pillow and sheet, chucked or soaped-off by morticians … All the muck of life is veined there in the circle of surname and children. A century of unions, paper, silver, ruby or gold. I twist its weight from my finger, another ring is left: a transparent tattoo, which heals, then disappears too. der Stollen 00:00 / 01:02 A town has slept in a hillside for a century. Men who left their livings for the Kaiser: butchers, teachers, a clerk of works; some two and a half hundred stooped in feldgrau , where blue firs have canopied the craters and spoil that tombed them. There have been looters here bent on old coins and trench-art, on watches that looped on a week after the air expired. Deep in the dug-outs, pictures of kinder , they never saw marry, watch over tables set with benches, tin steins and chargers for a meal. A strop hangs under the mirror in the latrine, where a bone razor brush set and a nub of soap anticipate a morning. Anthem 00:00 / 01:00 They stand for Wales in wind and rain, impervious to elements that might conspire to quell them. He, strumming his lyre, she, sturdy, plaited, our Lady of Verse. In a town renowned for its bridge and song, these monuments are springtime flocked with daffodil and druid. In black bronze, they wait for The Prophesied Son, on the green acre of Ynysangharad, churned now like a battlefield, limbed with trees, where something dear was almost drowned. After the flood, a nation stirs in a park. Publishing credits The Ring: Scintilla Magazine (No. 23) der Stollen: And Other Poems (Issue One) Anthem: The London Magazine (March 1st 2023)

Hear poet Dominic Leonard read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Dominic Leonard back next the poet Dominic Leonard’s writing can be found in PN Review , Poetry London , the TLS , Pain and elsewhere, with two of his poems featuring in the spring edition of The Poetry Review . In 2019, he received an Eric Gregory Award. His pamphlet, Antimasque , will be published by Broken Sleep Books in 2021. He lives and teaches in London. the poems Seven Birds Passed Through a Great Building 00:00 / 01:00 Seven birds passed through A great building—I cannot Remember you always but I have been finding ways to Remember you enough. I have Loved only from a safe distance, Staring into sinks long enough To know the sense of spillage That comes with every act of Honesty. Seven birds passed Through a house of spectacle Through the light that lounged Around each of the great stupid Bells and I thought about how Profound it felt, hands thick And heavy on my stupid knees. When I say that once I dreamt You were a taxi on fire plunging Down every country road in England I am not being facetious I am testing my immensity. I am trying to manage my fear, Which is to say I cannot risk Heaven, or any attempt at heaven I Have made so far, not when each Line I find is a room gone dark just As I leave it and always the birds are Flown and I’ve missed it just, just. What is the wind, what is it After Gertrude Stein 00:00 / 00:53 An egg – lithe beast that could crack with any pressure, That gets yellower towards its centre, that hangs between The fingers. A ghost-vision, serenely bovine. Incubated, Stratified. A correct language of where it was, where it Went, how are we anchored by it. But, to wander with it – How the wind knocks my ham-fisted breath from me, Makes a pelt of it. And wedged is the wind, trickling Into and out of all my little compartments and rooms, A fawn in a field seen blurred through the rain at nearly Seven in the evening after stumbling from the house. Something to consider when deciding on materials to Rebuild the world from after testing its capacity for grief, Which is all this was. On forgetting the anniversary of a death 00:00 / 00:13 If that’s you hearing – out on the roof, astride your miscreant echo – you made this of me, didn’t you. Publishing credits Seven Birds Passed Through a Great Building / On forgetting the anniversary of a death: exclusive first publication by iamb What is the wind, what is it: Stand (Issue 223, Volume 17 No. 3)

Hear poet Jonathan Davidson read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jonathan Davidson © Lee Allen back next the poet Jonathan Davidson is a writer, poet and memoirist. He has been published widely, and his most recent book is A Commonplace: Apples, Bricks & Other People’s Poems , which appeared in 2020. Jonathan has also written audio drama for the BBC, and produced touring poetry theatre shows with Bloodaxe Books. He lives in the English Midlands. the poems A Letter to Johann Joachim Quantz Do not be sentimental or in your art ~ W S Graham ~ 00:00 / 01:15 Sir, You tutored me to not expect applause, and I was not disappointed. Though it was still chilblain weather, my fingers lifted like lapping water, letting and stopping the sounds, to make – I hardly reckoned how – one of your capriccios . So they stood me – my hands hard from hauling ropes, my face weather-reddened – in a sweating corner of a silk room and pretended to listen. What forced and servant music rippled through the chambers of the recently rich and along the canals! I was a carrier – as the barge, the smack, the wherry is – of freight or ballast, and out I went into The Baltic or The German Sea. So they kept me for this purpose only, and great service did I do them all, bearing away the frightening silence. Johann Joachim Quantz (1697–1773) was a flautist, composer and teacher, remembered mostly for his book On Playing the Flute. Father 00:00 / 00:49 I walked with my invisible father out into the fields on the edge of town. But they are gone now: new roads, new names, new people. Dad, stay here for a while, I said, and I’ll go and find out what has happened to our lives. He sat on the newly installed bench. And when I returned, furnished with stories of change, I found him utterly dead, his cold eyes on the cold world closed. So many years he had lived here and then this: his roads renamed, his fields built over, his people coming into view as strangers. A Quadratic Equation 00:00 / 01:17 A dad and a daughter are solving a quadratic equation. They are seeking the value of x using the appropriate process, beginning with factorisation. A solution is proving elusive; they are outside the problem looking in at curtained windows. Upstairs a son, who’s employed in the building trade, plays guitar unaware of the mathematical impossibility of ‘equal temperament’. And a mum is in the front room working out the likelihood of character a killing character b before the end of the episode. The daughter and the son cross on the stairs. She is fractious and has been sent to bed, while the dad puts in a couple more hours, but to no avail. Whatever the value of x they shan’t know tonight. And perhaps x has no value. Or perhaps it has many values. Perhaps it is discovered in the dissonant chords that the son untangles, or in the loaded silence between character a and character b before the gun goes off, or perhaps it is simply that which cannot be expressed although it is known to exist. Publishing credits All poems: A Commonplace: Apples, Bricks & Other People’s Poems (Smith|Doorstop)

Hear poet Judith Kingston read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Judith Kingston back next the poet Judith Kingston is a Dutch poet living in the UK. A teacher, translator and expert procrastinator, Judith writes best when she's meant to be doing something else. Her work has appeared in Barren Magazine , Fevers of the Mind , Twist in Time , Kissing Dynamite and Sledgehammer Lit . She's also had poems featutred in Persona Non Grata and Crossing Lines: An Anthology of Immigrant Poetry . Judith's micro-chap Mother is the Name for God appeared in summer 2020. the poems Holocaust Memorial Day 00:00 / 01:16 I'm asked to take off all my clothes in a cubicle and put on a thin robe. I awkwardly shed my layers, elbows knocking the walls, stuff everything in a locker. The door won’t shut. I push it shut – it opens – I push it shut. I give the tiny key and my glasses to the radiologist and walk blind to the trolley lined with foam. Mostly naked, they slide me into the machine. I am not sick – I feel sick – I am not sick. I am in this small chamber. It is just me here with this genetic timebomb, this potential for destruction, this uncertainty. Without a Jewish mother you are not a Jew. We escaped Auschwitz but carry this, we carry so much potential. I am alive – I am dead – I am alive. I am rolled back out, unplugged, re-robed, my glasses, I can see, the key, the locker, my clothes, a tiny plaster– A letter: everything is fine for now. I am fine – I am not fine – I am fine. Anne Frank House In which I discover many years later that I never did read my great-grandparents' names in the book of Jews killed in concentration camps 00:00 / 01:01 I came to put my hand on the book. I paid my entry fee and walked around, mainly to turn to that page and look at my name in a long list of names of Jews that Hitler put in the ground. Memory betrays you though, and later I found that no one had said that they were dead – they went but did not rot in that mound of nameless corpses; they returned on the train, shedding 'victim' and becoming survivors instead. I don't know what went wrong in my head: was the book about those deported, not killed, or did my eyes read things that were not really there? Whatever that book says: they were not spared. Their Theresienstadt graves were never filled, but there is more than one way of ending up dead. Sostenuto 00:00 / 01:15 At the end of the war he did not look good, I have to tell you. People gave him the side eye on the train – the regular train now, with seats and suits and luggage racks. No meat on his bones, no papers, no passport, no stories, no tears, everything wrung out of him, desiccated, condensed, he had nothing but the will to live, to make it back to where he was known. Commuters hugged their bags and children closer, looking at the way his skeleton peered through translucent skin, worried they might catch his wasting, or his fleas, worried he might want things that were theirs. He was my father’s uncle dressed in the skin of a ghost, his wit muffled under the layers of horror, dulled by the headstones that were never placed on graves. Later, he would tell stories, but not now. Whenever I saw him he wore a suit – his own, but under his clothes lurked the bleached bones that rattled in time with the train he was still on, which could not take him from that place he never left. Publishing credits Holocaust Memorial Day: exclusive first publication by iamb Anne Frank House: Twist in Time Magazine Sostenuto: Persona non Grata (Fly on the Wall Press)

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

Hear poet Suyin Du Bois read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Suyin Du Bois back next the poet Suyin Du Bois (she/her) is a poet of mixed Chinese-Malaysian and Belgian heritage. She lives in London, and studied for her BA in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Warwick. In her most recent writing, Suyin has explored her multi-cultural heritage and life through food. Her poems have appeared in Propel Magazine , Freeze Ray Poetry , Zindabad and Stanzas , and she was anthologised in Fourteen Publishing's Bi+ Lines: An Anthology of Contemporary Bi+ Poets . When not obsessing over word choices, Suyin spends her time building an early-stage start-up that aims to give NHS hospital staff 24/7 access to nutritious, affordable food. the poems Ode to Kaya 00:00 / 01:45 Egg jam first on my young tongue, palm sugar sweet, coconut milk rich. Thick layers on charred toast, salted butter cubes between, melting in Penang sweat. My Goh Ee Poh stood for hours stirring you in that double-boiled heat. Exports to be swaddled, twisted into pink and green plastic bags, nestled amongst swimming costumes and sundresses, rituals to ward off mid-air leaks in the 14 hours from one home to the other. Back in England your layers thinned, our knives more sparing after each spread. After Goh Ee Poh grew too frail, aunties and uncles gifted us store-bought surrogates. You were labelled Kaya . Our cupboards filled with your empties, aides-mémoire of indulgence repurposed to house fragrant rice, Chinese mushrooms, our longing for Nonya flavours. By the time pandan leaves arrive in Chinatown, I am grown up, have my own kitchen where I can stand for hours. But Goh Ee Poh has long since condensed into photographs, so I sweeten my never-asked regret, trace down someone else’s heirloom recipe. You are needy, threaten lumps, failure, but I stir and stir like her, until my spoon draws the right depths of lineage. I lift a heap of you into my mouth, tongue your clotted grainy sweetness. The First Mouthful 00:00 / 01:41 In the back corner of Pulau Tikus market, tucked in behind uncles pressing fresh santan, trays of kueh steamed overnight, gutted fish, beside batik dresses and the energetic ladling of hawker sellers, I sit still– watch tiny bubbles on the surface of my koay teow th’ng. I’m not sure what’s woken me so early: jet lag or my stomach aching for hot soup in the heat, for kopi strong and Carnation-swirled, for the kinship of their steam. I pull fine white noodles from the broth’s well-oiled clarity, wind them into the flat base of my spoon, chopstick up: a slither of duck, crunchy pork lard, one wide-blinked iris of chilli padi to top the pile. Nudging the spoon back into the liquid so it wells up around this first mouthful, I catch the curious eye of the uncle at the next table. Where are you from? Wah eh mama si Penang lang. The words mis-intoned, or too unexpected from this face, he frowns. The rooster on the side of my bowl hasn’t yet crowed me fully awake, so I say London and we both smile. I turn back, slurp my spoonful down – feel the quick slip of the koay teow, the stock radiating through me, the chilli biting at my throat. On The First Cold Day of Winter, You Ask for Rusks 00:00 / 01:30 Tannie Noeline’s recipe calls for true boeremeisie quantities, so I adapt each measure by awkward fractions— still the batter laps the lip of my bowl as I wed flour to crushed bran to buttermilk. The last step says dry . I had to google it the first time, and even on the thirteenth I worry when to take them out of the oven, leave them in overnight. In the morning, our house smells of a hunger that’s spread wide since our last trip back to your childhood home, my windfall one. We don’t wait. We dunk rough chopped rusks into our coffee, and you tell me once more about your Ouma’s aniseed beskuit, so tall and arid, they’d absorb half a mug in one dip, hang sodden only long enough for your mouth to get under its fall. We reminisce about road trips between Hermanus and Bothaville, how I make us pause at every padstal, seek out the most tempting treats – banana and bran, pumpkin seed and apricot – how every homemade rusk tempts us. You remind me that mine are your favourite, and I reply Jy is my gunsteling . And we keep going until the bottom of our mugs is a beach of sunflower seeds and crumbs with the tide sucked out. Publishing credits Ode to Kaya: Propel Magazine (Issue One) The First Mouthful: Bi+ Lines: An Anthology of Contemporary Bi+ Poets (Fourteen Publishing) On The First Cold Day of Winter, You Ask for Rusks: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Jay Whittaker read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jay Whittaker back next the poet Jay Whittaker is an Edinburgh-based poet who grew up in Devon and Nottingham. She's published two collections to date: Sweet Anaesthetist and Wristwatch – the latter chosen as Scottish Poetry Book of the Year 2018 in the Saltire Society Literary Awards. Jay's widely published in journals that include The North , Butcher’s Dog and The Rialto , and has recently had work accepted by The Poetry Review . Two of her poems appear in Bloodaxe Books' anthology, Staying Human . the poems Egg case 00:00 / 05:33 My left ovary is smothered in seven centimetres of cyst. A risk to be reduced. ~ A beachcombed husk in my palm, multiple crumpled chambers deflated and dried, bereft of hatched whelks. A self-contained nodule of nothing, pod of naught. ~ Wobbling on a wooden stool in the school biology lab, I clench my sharpened pencil, transcribe the handbag and curved horns into my exercise book. I will keep practising until fluent, ready to reproduce constituent parts in cartoonish simplicity – a handbag and curved horns. I lay my transparent ruler across the paper and draw straight lines, and label (best handwriting): Ovaries, Ampulla, Endometrium, Fallopian Tubes. But I don’t know them. Not viscerally. ~ And how much less interesting than the febrile atmosphere in the school hall on the day one hundred twelve-year-olds are herded in to watch the childbirth video . At the crowning, commotion at the front. The boy who faints will be taunted for years. ~ Imagine: my abdomen crammed with congealed jelly babies. ~ Sometimes I looked up and my mother was watching me, as though wondering what she’d done. ~ My mother told me: It was the bloody ants’ fault. I was pregnant with you. Your father was away. You know how I hate ants in the house. ~ I am possible. ~ Inexorable ant-march across a kitchen floor. No one to talk her down or reassure. Scrubbing. Safe to use ant powder inside when pregnant? Not sure. Read and reread the packet. Relentless. Ants keep marching. Need to empty the cupboard under counter anyway, in case the ants find it, find the flour and sugar inside. Visions of a never-ending ant army carrying their sugar lumps aloft, victorious, back to their queen. Lifting and bending – getting up and down – panicking about ants and – wet in her knickers – a pooling. Blood – I am choosing A punishment for leaving it so late to have a child. For thinking, in their cleverness, with their science, they were above this. The thought of her mother’s told-you-so triumph. ~ The GP said his wife took these tablets too; I would never have taken anything when I was pregnant, I even stopped smoking, I was so careful but I thought I was miscarrying — A risk reduced. I am possible. ~ Alone in bed, sleepless, praying to the god her husband denies. ~ She tells me when I am eighteen, have left home for a university ninety miles north, It was in the Sunday Times a few years after you were born. All the cancers in the daughters are at puberty; you’re safe. She tells me now because of course maybe you shouldn’t go on the pill . I am already on the pill. She tells me in such a way that makes it clear we won’t talk about it again. ~ A hunt for the unknown, the untold, the unnamed. In the Science Library, I turn the handle on a microfilm reader, not too fast (nausea). Oestrogen. Estrogen. Diethylstilbestrol. Diethylstilboestrol. Stilbestrol. DES. Leading me to the long shelves of Index Medicus , metres of cloth-bound volumes, to rifle Bible-thin paper. I school myself in libraries, their tools, fiche readers, bibliographies, catalogues, all they contain. All that was withheld. All that was never vocalised. All the swallowed words. ~ My inheritance: Great grandfather – dies of sarcoma. Grandmother – dies of breast cancer. Mother – exposure to DES in pregnancy. Two breast cancers. Dies of ovarian cancer. Me – exposure to DES in utero . One breast cancer (and counting). I am choosing. ~ Buried deep in my pelvis and scheduled for excision: tissue, but more than tissue. My snail shells, my coiled snakes. Mysterious, seen on scans, analysed by faceless medics, discussed in front of me in medical language by my partner and my consultant, doctor to doctor – I have no clue, really. I am excising a possibility. ~ Absence is a poke of pain when I bend forward too quickly, a stabbing gyroscope, a whirligig of knife-ache when I lie on my left side. ~ A risk reduced. From the 1940s till the early 1970s, synthetic oestrogen diethylstilbestrol (DES) was given to at least 300,000 UK women whom doctors believed were at increased risk of miscarriage. A clinical study in 1953 found DES did nothing to reduce such risk, yet it was administered until 1971 – when it was discovered that daughters of women given the drug were at heightened risk of rare vaginal/cervical cancers. Later research linked DES to greater risk of breast cancer in both mothers and daughters. Clearly something was up 00:00 / 00:42 Every time I drove, plink and ricochet, stones on metal like popcorn in a lidded pan. I blamed the untarmacked track, recent resurfacing on the main road – until a warning light came on – under the bonnet, rats had stashed birdseed in every crevice, nestled pebbles into crannies, built a cairn of stones on the engine. The shock of rat shit on the camshaft. Chewed wires betrayed them, building a haven of warmth and food in the heart of a machine I thought was mine. Canopy (Day 20: First chemo cycle) 00:00 / 00:46 Do tree tips tingle, niggle like my scalp? Most people’s hair (I’m told) comes out on day eighteen. White hairs work loose first, waft down. This late summer evening, my scarfed skull as bald and vulnerable as a fledgling’s, I stand under the row of sycamore, my neck sore from looking up to the abundance of leaves. Whatever happens to me, the earth is turning. At the same hour in winter, haven’t I stood in this very spot, watching bare branches implore the sky for light? Publishing credits Egg case: Sweet Anaesthetist (Cinnamon Press) Clearly something was up: The Rialto (Issue 97) Canopy:Wristwatch (Cinnamon Press)

Hear poet Jeremy Wikeley read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jeremy Wikeley back next the poet Jeremy Wikeley is a writer and poet. His poems, essays and reviews have appeared online and in print in publications including New Welsh Review , The Observer , Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal and The Friday Poem . Jeremy's poems have also been anthologised in three collections from The Emma Press. Originally from Romsey in Hamsphire, Jeremy now lives in London, where he works in the arts. the poems Train to Cambridge After Louis MacNeice 00:00 / 00:48 Beyond the window the sky is turning pink and it’s more surprising than that song I wrote about how surprised I was that the sky was turning pink. It’s turning slowly, like it’s enjoying itself, as if there’s no hurry. The evening is encouraging the sky to follow it, and the sky is following, in its own time, pink and pacing itself while the train and I are racing to get ahead of the turning of the world only to find no matter how hard we try to push ourselves we are always a sleeper behind the evening as he strides along outside, crushing the sun under his thumb, mixing red dust with wet clouds and swiping dark streaks across the cheeks of the sky. The Vandals Remove the Ark of the Covenant (as told by the Ark) 00:00 / 00:33 Carnage! And then we were rocked across the Mediterranean – a box in a box in a box … over the chopping winter sea until a strange tongue told us we’d come to Carthage. And they plonked us down on the edge of the quay, as if we were any old package. Which we are! A box in a box in a box … under tarpaulin on African docks in Carthage. Poetry in Wartime 00:00 / 01:08 If this was a war I could be sad for myself. What bad luck (I’d say) to get caught up in this. So, the inevitable conscription into the most statistically dangerous wing of the armed forces (half the bombers didn’t make it back) would be more bad luck, like the hole in the kitchen ceiling. If this was a war, I would be worried about dying, not other people dying and the very possibility might make the uncertainty tolerable. If it were a war, every survivor would have a different set of stories, or at least there would be enough variation in our experiences for them to bear the repetition. As it is, nothing we do seems very important and because we don’t know what’s working, we don’t know what’s worth it, or what kind of world will come next. All I know is I will have to live in it. And it’s right, it’s right, it’s right. I’m not saying it’s not right. But like everything right, it is unbearable. Publishing credits Train to Cambridge: In Transit: Poems of Travel (The Emma Press) The Vandals Remove the Ark of the Covenant (as told by the Ark): exclusive first publication by iamb Poetry in Wartime: From the Silence of the Stacks, New Voices Rise, Vol. 1 (The London Library)