looking for something?

Caitlin Stobie back next the poet Born in South Africa, Caitlin Stobie holds a PhD from the University of Leeds where she lectures in Creative Writing. She's won both the Douglas Livingstone Creative Writing Competition, and the Heather Drummond Memorial Prize for Poetry. South African literary journal New Contrast named Caitlin one of the country’s ‘rising stars’ in poetry. Her debut collection Thin Slices appeared in November 2022 – the manuscript of which was shortlisted for the Melita Hume Poetry Prize. An earlier version was also shortlisted for the RædLeaf International Poetry Award. the poems Five Ways of Looking at a Period 00:00 / 01:48 I A ruined pool party. Cat-scratch in the pants. Thighs tight and plastic-wrapped. Luxury cotton towel sex. Soggy apologies like I’m-on-my . II Peach’s pit-flesh. Cherryburst anemone. Pomegranate plasma. Beet-cloaked clover. Hibiscus nimbus. III Brings muddy sleep, long as gumtrees. Quenches anxiety with slippy lip sap. Approves full-bellied foods, potatoes, ginger root. Pulls distraction’s tubers and unearths certainty. Teaches how to stand being lonely. IV When eggs crack jokes about coming first. When proteins drag blush over queenly cheeks. When lipids birth another month’s dead doulas. When sickle cells group under coven moons. Hello, capillaries. Hello again, iron age friends. V Cramping coloured like conception’s twinge. Craving the ever-ready chocolate advent. Carving papayas with turmeric fingers. Wishing for its mercurochrome tinge. Then, sudden puddle of thank-fuck . Ngiyakuthanda 00:00 / 00:36 In Zulu there is no difference between like and love. Between 'I want to hold your hand' and 'Can I see your ring finger?' Between wanting to know where you stand and wanting a one-night stand. Between the sheets, between two lives, just one phrase makes it come together. I’m still not sure whether open interpretation makes love easier, or just lost in translation. Even Birds For Faith 00:00 / 01:12 We arrive in Cambridge after a long night’s flight: eighteen twenty-somethings with a hangover of Africa. What really matters, the man says, is everyone’s comfort. We wouldn’t want anyone to be out of place. Don’t ask and don’t confess potential transgressions. This is a tour, after all. So I keep clear of the line, sick, tight with my truth. Faith is still too but later that night she knocks on my door and cries for skin she’s never been in. These queer constructs: towers cut on ancestors’ backs. We discuss spectrums of shame. Late dawn is lilac phosphorescence crossed with migrating shadows. There’s no snow, just white ash. Surely the others see; they must sense our bent. Even birds know silence is also an answer. Publishing credits Five Ways of Looking at a Period: Banshee (No. 12) Even Birds: The Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Anthology Vol. VI (Jacana Media) Ngiyakuthanda: uHlanga Issue 1 (uHlanga Press)

April Yee back next the poet April Yee is a writer and translator of power and postcolonialism. A Harvard and Tin House alumna, she reported in more than a dozen countries before moving to the UK. April reads for Triquarterly , contributes to Ploughshares online, and mentors for University of the Arts London’s Refugee Journalism Project. the poems Kopachi / Pripyat / Vilcha 00:00 / 02:07 In the cloud that drifts online, I discover an image of myself, notebooked, remember I toured Ukrainian villages in April, the anniversary of their before and after, the date they understood dirty and clean , touched new energies released into air. My recollection floats ungraspable as air. The high-res photograph does not recover dead actions to the hippocampus, now clean as a blank notebook sheet. I remember the detailed email from my father after I said I’d go to Chernobyl that April. He cited a scientific study: Dear April, Mushrooms, exposed to soil and air, can remain radioactive for years after. For breakfast, the local hotel covered pasta in mayonnaise and dismembered hot dogs. I also half-recall the clean white shirt of an engineer. He’d keep clean our air in a then-future, now-past April with a steel sarcophagus to stop the embers from dispersing particles in global air. His metal tonnes could fully cover the Statue of Liberty, he intoned, after a meal of many courses. I marvelled, after, how he kept his white shirt so pristine clean. A visiting Japanese mother, face covered, gripped two Geiger counters an April and a half since Fukushima blew the air. She earthquaked her body to remember. Actually, I use records to pretend-remember. I Google articles I must have written after that trip, read emails maybe sent from air- craft raining pollutants over unclean nimbuses. I trigger cruellest April, places where every root was covered in irradiated air and nuclear embers. After, I wash my consciousness clean, allow the cover to contain all of April. Listening to Lola Flores 00:00 / 01:03 In your ghost berry house, you screw the leg still tighter in its wooden frame, the hoof suspended, question mark. Botanists peg the mulberry to man, their shots at life quick decades. No estás más, corazón. Silkworms spin threads from fruit before it spoils. You shear off fat, locate shrunk flesh. Off bone it falls. He plumps the fruit your maid slow boils to blood-gelled jam. In your arguileh’s crown, his coals burn orange hot, each breath you take cremation. Hide your father’s jamón bone in the slingshot shadow of the lamp you break, below the mulberries, their blinded lobes seen too in cemeteries of my home. West / East 00:00 / 01:53 My eyes are the hammered edge of a Chinatown butcher’s cleaver, heavy and heaved with momentum, not sharp. There’s enough sharpness in sheared bottles, wires embroidered with barbs, paid bills that slip inside the flesh. I heave my eyes on discards, cleaving past from present: Who touched this can, and can it buy my lunch? My butcher heaves his cleaver through a duck’s shiny body, and I see the X-ray of its bones, perfect whites circling congealed purple cores. The rice: free, my butcher’s Buddha plea. I swallow slowly, seeing with my tongue for paddy stones that seek to crack my teeth. I picked one time a book, heavy with large font: The Geography of Thought. A man inside theorised mankind’s mind cleaved in the age of the ancient Greeks, each fisherman hauling his solo catch while Chinese strewed rice across collective fields. West sees the thing; East sees the place the thing sits in. I can see I am now West: sifting, sorting, seeing the trash, and not the street the trash sits in. Someone saw this book as trash. Were I East, I’d be the rice, the duck, and the butcher, whole in every grain. Publishing credits Kopachi / Pripyat / Vilcha: Commended in the Ambit Poetry Competition 2020 Listening to Lola Flores: Ware Poets 22nd Competition Anthology 2020 (Ware Poets) West / East: Live Canon Anthology 2020 (Live Canon)

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

Annick Yerem Barbara Dietl back next the poet Annick Yerem is a Scottish/German poet who lives and works in Berlin. She's been published by River Mouth Review , Anti-Heroin-Chic , 192 Magazine , Green Ink Poetry , Sledgehammer Lit and more. Annick has also been a guest reader on Eat The Storms and Open Collab . Her first chapbook, St. Eisenberg & The Sunshine Bus , is due out in 2022. the poems St. Eisenberg & The Sunshine Bus 00:00 / 01:10 I am sure now that you were sending me signs Heavens opened and closed, heat blazed through me. The smell of freshly poured tar on the motorway, turbines, sunflowers, left right centre We stopped for a break near parched woods, found raspberry gifts, barley spikelets, wispy and gleaming like fairy hair The damp, green quiet after a big rain, fog hanging low in the mountains, blurred brake lights Midway, I lay down in a parking lot, crying on my dog's blanket, trying to make sense of what we were doing You were sending me signs: robins, rainbows, star fish trails That day, we drove towards your body, to that uncluttered, bright space which enclosed your darkness in those last, long years That room where, when you left, someone opened the vast window, so that your soul could find its way out Belonging After Brené Brown | For Ankh and Cate 00:00 / 00:45 You wordful mindsmiths, you seawitch patterned beauty along cat-eared shores. You fill cars with music, You send love over thousands of miles (I imagine) the air around you smells of sandalwood You are who you are, no need to feed those unkind fires You belong here, stand your ground, will a forest of breath and light into being. Then steady its roots with your ways, your wonders. When you call me six times at 1am, I think of One Art 00:00 / 01:06 I've made a science out of listening to the space between books, the silence between songs, tiny increments of time suspended mid-word I bring songs to this fight, make mountains of lingering doubt disappear, send arrows into apple trees. Say windfalls , say what you see, what you don't. Forgetting is so hard to master. It is not purpose, not spite, but years of fights and fears pulled to the surface of an unquiet lake. A code for your memories, how was your day, your breakfast/lunch/dinner, the last book you read? Tell me, what can I do to make this better? I offer sugarcoated words: take a pick, pick three. Say I love you . Mean it. Publishing credits St. Eisenberg & The Sunshine Bus / When you call me six times at 1am, I think of One Art: exclusive first publication by iamb Belonging: Bale of Joy (The Failure Baler)

Mari Ellis Dunning back next the poet Mari Ellis Dunning is an award-winning poet living and writing on the coast of West Wales. Mari’s debut poetry collection, Salacia , was published by Parthian Books in 2018, and was shortlisted for the Wales Book of the Year award in 2019. Mari is a Hay Festival Writer at Work and PhD candidate at Aberystwyth University, where she's studying the relationship between witch-hunts and reproduction/fertility. Her work has featured on The Crunch Poetry Podcast and the BBC. the poems Lingering for Catherine 00:00 / 00:57 I couldn’t stand the cedarwood stench that grew in your absence, so I migrated to the smaller back bedroom. Each night, I hear your shallow breath seeping through the thin wall, picture you, one leg cocked, reaching for me through darkness. I found your keyring under the sofa, gathering dust, forgotten, and on it – that photo of us, of you, a bearded stranger, and me, girlish and unsure, cloaked in a vintage dress awaiting assurance of my beauty. With oversized marigolds and an old tea towel, I bleached your skin cells from the skirting, swabbed your residue from the foundations. You clung like smoke to the wallpaper. The Bees Part i. The Queen 00:00 / 00:46 When I couldn’t recover the self that flaked like dust from paper-thin wings, my children turned against me, they pummelled my body like ash, suffocated by song. Face first, my daughter waxed from her peanut-hollow cell, crawling through its open hinges, a ghost, a crook, I saw her coming, that tiresome usurper; the virgin Queen, swift as an intruder at my mantel, honey-sweet and baby-eyed, her allure so strong, they let me wilt, let me starve – matricide on the edge of a comb. relapse 00:00 / 00:55 i wake to your emaciated form, your smile smug and self-sure even as you pale and weep, your serpent’s hair maps the pillow, body quivering, rocked by sticky tentacles. i could have sworn i’d shaken you off years before, dislodged you with a hard gulp and a strapped wrist, nevertheless – here you are again, the same dead form, the same shirking shoulders, damp with river-water, lemur eyed, splintering bone, your features a mirror of mine even as your ragged breath sucks air into rotting lungs. You roll smoke around your tongue, lean back – the mattress hollows for you, an old lover welcomes you home. Publishing credits All poems: Salacia (Parthian Books) which won the Terry Hetherington Young Writers' Award and was shortlisted for Wales Book of the Year 2019 Share

Laura Wainwright back next the poet Laura Wainwright is from Newport, South Wales. Her poems have been published and are forthcoming in a range of magazines, journals and anthologies. Laura was shortlisted in the Bridport Prize poetry competition in 2013 and 2019, and awarded a Literature Wales Writers' Bursary in 2020 to finish her first collection. She's also the author of New Territories in Modernism: Anglophone Welsh Writing 1930-1949 . the poems Elephant Slide in the Exclusion Zone 00:00 / 01:39 To forgive can sometimes mean to think of them as a child: a wisped head turned in a wheaten basket. Soft fists. A bumblebee in a foxglove. Out walking, my son points, says glove-fox corrects, glove-box. The young buzzing slip of words. The first seeding questions in the dark about dying. Each step on an iron ladder up to the height of an animal comrade’s back would be a magnificent circus act under a sun-striped tent of maple branches a tight-chested pause between its huge futurist ears and then the slide, fast down the stretched scooping trunk – a mural of air, block and sky in a second. Abandoned minder of layering leaves, the corroded matriarch in the exclusion zone is the colour of broken crows’ eggs. A single corvid mother checks the silence with her Geiger-counted call, she forgives. Noctua 00:00 / 01:05 A laundry huff of air and then a weight kneading my shoulder, testing a left nest. An owl has shaken me from a long wakefulness; her wing sweeps my ear. I am floored, but follow the track with the assurance of a falconer. Trees are lithographs in the hollowing light. Last week’s snow is peeling on the hills like old paint. What has to die tonight? When, with ungainly grace, the owl has gone, brief as a flower, I scan the needled taupe. I miss her painfully, like birdsong. Though she left me a capsule of odd bones. Noctua is Latin for ‘night owl’. It's also the name of a constellation no longer recognised by astronomers. Post-truth 00:00 / 01:09 I only want to know I told them and tried again to see straight through the pane of glass to a reservoir of opaque depth with its own fickle climate and a bed (if it could be reached) of doors and roads, instead of silt, of pitched roofs and weathervanes. The wind changed. A fog blew in. A cormorant hanging its wings out to dry was Jesus on the water. On a sign, a stick-figure pleaded – wide-eyed, mouth round. Stay out. I plunged. I wrote down everything I thought I saw the complete picture. And it was utterly convincing Publishing credits Elephant Slide in the Exclusion Zone: Burning House Press 'Secrets and Lies' Noctua: Poetry Birmingham (Issue 2) Post-truth: Finished Creatures 'Balance' (Issue 3) Share

Kevin Grauke back next the poet With work in The Threepenny Review , The Southern Review , StoryQuarterly , Fiction , and Quarterly West , Kevin Grauke is the author of short story collection Shadows of Men . He's also the winner of the Steven Turner Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Kevin teaches at La Salle University, and lives in Philadelphia. His next collection, Bullies & Cowards , arrives in 2026 from Cornerstone Press. the poems The Secret of Tornadoes 00:00 / 01:07 Tornadoes, I knew at age four, were dragons spun to furious life from sickly spring skies. Watch meant be careful. Warning meant hide. Born in the Alley’s south, I learned this quick. Let’s make a fort in the tub! Mommy once shouted much too loudly, wrestling a mattress past the toilet. Houses could become like weeds pulled up and flung. Cradles landed in trees, sometimes still with babies. But then an older girl, already in school, told me the secret: Touch the sidewalk, honey. If it’s warm, one’s coming. A whisper—wisdom meant only for me. Honored, I stayed quiet. Pretending to tie a shoe I couldn’t yet knot, I pressed my palms to the sun-shot sidewalk, dirtying them in the unicorn dust of her hopscotch chalk. Frightened but grateful, I flew home fast to warn Mommy, my pink hands aflame with a May day’s false prophecy. Ant 00:00 / 01:00 I hope to capture this moment exactly, how the late afternoon sun on this sixth day of May is shining now on this journal page so perfectly, casting a shadow of my pen that looks like nothing if not a hummingbird darting its bill into and out of the flower of yet another attempt at something good. Soon, the sun’s gold will sink below the trees, but for now it holds steady, content to give me a little more time to try to capture its likeness. Onto the glare of this still empty page an ant wanders. Nothing more than a dark speck, it meanders about, a mobile period in search of a true sentence to end. I watch it move from here to there and there to there until it finally disappears over the edge, headed elsewhere, but not before leaving me a path to follow with the words of this very poem, now finished and named in its honor. First Lesson 00:00 / 02:06 Two houses down, a young man, a little girl, and a bicycle. Behind them, in the grass, training wheels tossed aside. Way down and far back, I feel both dad’s stooped patience and the mettle of his daughter’s courage. But what I feel most: the unspoken swirl of their fears—of spills and scrapes, of tears and pain. And it’s almost a more aching beauty, even as clumsy and raw as it is, than I, remembering my own once-tiny girl now grown, can bear on my own. I watch him, the father, so proud, how he claps and shouts while jogging alongside as close as he can manage without jostling an arm or handlebar. He sends out so much encouragement: Go! You’re doing it! Keep pedalling! When the inevitable comes, it’s no surprise. It is, after all, inevitable. The front wheel wobbles, turns too much to the left, to the right, to the left again. The end then happens so slowly—the flailing, the toppling, the falling over— almost if it were taking place in a series of stages (Duchamp’s bicycle descending the stairs) as she moves from upright to tilted to tilted still more to crashed to now splayed on the sidewalk like the insides of a dropped egg. Not unlike a hand-cranked siren from days even before my own, the two wheels spin two cries into the neighborhood silence: one the girl’s, one the father’s. Together, they braid a thin rope that each hopes the other will snatch to save the day’s grace. It swings between them, back and forth, then stops. Each is so certain they’ve let the other down. Except for the crickets, it’s silent now. She’ll learn, of course, and he will have taught her. Of this I’m sure. For now, though, failure. But in memory this will glow like treasure. Publishing credits The Secret of Tornadoes: The Minnesota Review (Issue 101) Ant: Alabama Literary Review (Vol. 32) First Lesson: Poet Lore (Vol. 118)

Hilary Menos back next the poet Hilary Menos won The 2010 Forward Prize for Best First Collection with Berg , and was a winner in The Poetry Business International Book & Pamphlet Competition 2019/20 with her pamphlet Human Tissue . Her second collection is Red Devon , while her most recent pamphlet is Fear of Forks . After reading Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Oxford, Hilary took an MA in poetry at Manchester Metropolitan University. She's worked as a student organiser, journalist, food reviewer, organic farmer, dramaturge and builder’s mate, is married with four sons, and now lives in France. Hilary is the editor of weekly online poetry journal, The Friday Poem . the poems Ivory Viking Queen The Lewis chessmen are a group of medieval chess pieces carved from walrus ivory and whale teeth, discovered in 1831 in the Outer Hebrides. There is some debate over their origin. 00:00 / 01:11 What has she seen, what has she seen, this sombre little Viking queen, hunched and brooding on her ivory throne, one hand to her cheek, one clutching a drinking horn. Is she mourning the battle-dead, the lost pawns, the cost of revenge, the endless cycle of harm? Beside her, the king is implacable, bearded. Her berserker is biting his shield. There is mystery, too, in her making — was she carved in the workshops of Trondheim or Jelling, or by Margret the Adroit, the best in Iceland with tusk and tooth and bone? From the cast resin face of this British Museum fridge magnet her maker winks at me. My money’s on Margret. Queen Esther’s Makeover ' ... Esther was brought also unto the king’s house, to the custody of Hegai, keeper of the women.' ~ Esther, 2:8 ~ 00:00 / 01:14 The verb form used is passive: they were gathered, they were prepared, they were made ready, and after a twelve-month beauty treatment — six months with oil of myrrh, six months with sweet perfumes (of all the Biblical oils, myrrh is top of the list) — each one was taken in to the bachelor king and would not be taken in again, unless he delighted in her and summoned her again by name. The words for ‘beauty treatment’ translate as ‘scour, polish’ (read more here about skin care in the Bible, Psalms, 104:15. Oil makes a person’s face shine. Vigorous scrubbing with ash imparts a natural glow.) But no mention of what happened to the other queen, the one who refused, who spoke back, using the active voice. Ruby Woo 00:00 / 01:43 All I ever needed to know about lipstick I learned from Emily Fox. Influencer, queen of the haul and swatch, she has fifty shades of MAC and she’s applying them, now, on her YouTube channel, working her way through the nudes, the pinks, the corals like a pedagogue, like a pro, as if she’d been gifted a Girl’s World Styling Head at birth. She slicks on Daddy’s Girl, then Sin, then Ruby Woo and I can’t stop watching, transfixed by her technique (two notches on her top lip, then four elegant strokes) and by the way she turns to camera when she’s done and smiles, and pauses. Smiles wider. Main beam! Emily taught me the power of a wet, red mouth. Now crowds of men in pubs part like the Red Sea and a dozen barmen fall over each other to serve me. O Emily, what goes on when the camera goes off? Do your cheek muscles ache? Does your fridge magnet say: ‘Lipstick is the red badge of courage’ — Man Ray? I’m more of a John Keats fan. Beauty is truth, truth, beauty. That’s all you know on earth, all you need to know. Don’t ask me what I know. I’m coming to a bar near you, coming for you. Me and Daddy’s Girl and Sin and Ruby Woo. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Graham Clifford © Martin Juhasz back next the poet CEO of a large Multi Academy Trust and author of five poetry collections – published, variously, by Seren Books, Against the Grain and The Black Light Engine Room – Graham Clifford is the author of The Hitting Game . He's seen his work chiselled into paving slabs in Walthamstow, translated into Romanian and German, and featured in the UK's Poetry Archive . He's had poems in Poetry Wales , The Rialto , Magma , Ink, Sweat & Tears and The London Magazine , been anthologised by Faber & Faber and Broken Sleep Books, and rejected by The New Yorker. the poems No Alternative Now 00:00 / 01:06 Let’s grow a forest and hide in it. We will stay there for years, our clothes dropping from us in leaf shapes in the dim crunchiness where we copulate quickly like foxes, and crap standing, ready to run. After a while, reporters will arrive but we will be up a tree, bearded and matted. Puffballs come up in the areas where we urinate: they are delicately luminescent, buzz in the dark like candle-lit, drizzly planets. Shivering, curled together, one night I smell death about to bloom in you – next thing, you don’t want your hazelnuts, can’t pull yourself up onto our branch. From then on, until it happens, every night I dream we drive sharp cars and eat from tins. We will never get this life out of our system. Why He was Chosen 00:00 / 00:50 The man whose body accepted the pig’s heart had a violent past and worked with a machine that de-beaked chicks. The heart lasted three years partly because of immunosuppressant drugs. The night before the transplant he watched a YouTube video of a black and white Russian experiment where a dog’s head was severed, reattached and had its nose tickled and it reacted. It is reported the man mostly stayed alive because he studied calm and practised identifying and eradicating stress with the fidelity of a bear goring salmon full of semen and roe from a terrifyingly cold river in the dark. The Best Poem Ever Written 00:00 / 01:45 I write a poem that is the best. Massive. Not just long, but huge intellectually and although it is book length reading is like freefalling, each line greased with two genius thoughts. The poem makes me famous. I wander oxygen-depleted nights down city streets and hear lines of my poem bartered between sticky lovers. On the train, I peek over the top of a hardback book about me at a man in a suit nodding off and recognise the words he’s mouthing in his swoon. All front pages, every day, showcase stanzas of my poem – bombings and murders get tucked inside. The new novelist pays well to get my poem printed as an introduction: she knows her work makes no sense without it. Everyone I have ever known rings me to ask how I did it. I say I don’t know and that’s the truth. After a year the fuss hasn’t died away. I sit at my computer and hear downstairs turn the TV on. I put my ear to a gap in the floorboards. It’s an actor, and he’s reading my poem. It’s a good version: I’ve heard it before. He has a Shakespearean voice doing justice to what the introducer called The Best Poem Ever Written. I listen to it all, I travel where the poem takes me, then get back in my chair and write a better one. Publishing credits No Alternative Now: The Hitting Game (Seren Books) Why He was Chosen: The Rialto (No. 100) The Best Poem Ever Written: Obsessed with Pipework (No. 24)

Polly Walshe back next the poet Polly Walshe is a poet and painter, whose pamphlet, Silver Fold , was published in November 2024. Her poetry has appeared in PN Review , The London Magazine , 14 Magazine , Shearsman Magazine and The Spectator , and has been longlisted three times in the UK's National Poetry Competition. In 2019, a selection of Polly's poetry featured alongside Melissa Ruben’s paintings in Night Vision(s) at the Atlantic Gallery, New York. That same year, Polly won The Frogmore Poetry Prize . She also scooped a Betty Trask Prize in 1995 for her novel, The Latecomer . the poems One Small Case Only 00:00 / 01:11 Have you ever packed your bag before a war, Grabbing a few things hurriedly, Paperwork, some underwear? What, you wonder, will you really need? Will it even be possible to change your shirt During the war while on the road With nowhere to stay? You throw In a hairbrush, lipstick, evening shoes But who will have time for these? You know That in a day or two you’ll be laughing Dryly at choices you’ve made, At your ridiculous ideas. As if anything Will be normal! As if washing in clean Water might occur, or going to bed At a predictable hour after a meal. Something inside you knows this dance As if by memory, the need to thrift And thrift to pay a slave’s remittances And how there’s always someone more Forced out of you, a hedgerow poet Or a hidden priest, a conjuror To heal those wounded by their shame, Uncover words that fit when hope expires And cold stars offer no grace. Brand Sharpening Section A: Core Concepts (i) Now 00:00 / 00:49 Now is your only home And will make you authentic Across all platforms Not franchised to the future Or the past As many operators are. The progress of shadows Cuts up the hour But Now – and who knows how? – Has seamless power. All representatives and strategists Must beware of actioning Precise time terminology When Now is always streaming Perfectly, Licence up-to-date. Our Now is flashier, A great deal more Kardashian, Than tomorrow, Next week, Or the endless wait. Extraordinary Rendition 00:00 / 01:43 There was a woman who turned into a shadow, You could pass your hand through her quite easily. It was her desires, she could not overrule them, They chaperoned her everywhere and wore a hollow In her and the hollow grew into the whole of her. Mostly she longed for random retail objects, Heart-breaker shoes or a small Norwegian table, But her longings also looked for unprotected people Who lacked the strength to pull against the pull of her. This person drifted round a little spitefully and yet You pitied her. She was so small, so guinea grey, And getting greyer, more transparent, every day, While the hollow in her grew insatiable, hanging Out of her like Bonnie Parker to suck the strangers in Who stopped to talk to her. The hollow Would swallow her too, eventually, her nose, Her rings, her smile and her broken-brimmed fedora, Closing its portal to the human world and shooing Its desires back to their dark stable For refurbishment, but not before enticing several More unguarded strangers, showing them the charm In her and dragging them to the far side of her Where they remained, lost in a modish purple fog, Not understanding where they were and dreaming That they still lived modern independent lives, Following the news, et cetera. Publishing credits One Small Case Only: Pennine Platform (No. 95)  Brand Sharpening: Shearsman Magazine (Nos. 131 & 132)  Extraordinary Rendition: PN Review 269 (Vol. 49, No. 3)

Mariah Whelan back next the poet Mariah is a poet from Oxford, UK. She is the author of the love i do to you (Eyewear, 2019), while the rafters are still burning is forthcoming from Dancing Girl Press. She is currently based in the Centre for New Writing at the University of Manchester where she is completing a PhD and teaches creative writing. Mariah has been shortlisted for the Bridport Prize, the PBS Student Poetry Prize and won the AM Heath Prize. She also co-edits online poetry journal, bath magg . the poems Hefted 00:00 / 01:24 One by one the black-faced ewes file through the gate. Up and out of the field over the burned heather to lamb where their mothers lambed them. I try to pull a map around the stories: I know here is where my father was happiest— if I sit on this rock and let the same cold enter my body can I say I’m part of it? Plates of ice across the mud crack under weight, catch light like the light is something good enough to frame and hang in a hall where guests first enter. His maps were always like that— half an advertisement of character, half a mirror to hold the face that looked square in its white mount. On and on, the hundred or so ewes file through hefted to the particular slope that bore them. Muscle memory, DNA, where do their bodies hold the bone-hunger that leads them back, precise as a compass point finding its way through layers of tracing paper and folded map to hold its beam-arm straight, making the distance between them measurable. In the Archive The Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford 00:00 / 02:05 When the door closes we let the quiet of the archive settle around us. The chilled air from bales of frozen film comes to a stop and the room begins to fill with the hum of the corner unit rinsing air clean of contaminant on our clothes, proteins in our breath. The curator lays the album on the foam cradle. We stand shy of each other like friends at a christening unsure of where to stand or what to do with our arms, not letting our voices drop to break the silence. The curator begins with the facts: Mr Phillips reported how the Juju City reeked of human blood. Sir Harry mustered a force of 1200 marines, Mr Bacon had reason to believe enough ivory would be found to pay all expenses removing the King from his stool. I have come to understand there are various kinds of violence. A boot in the mouth, a ring of bruises around an upper arm, the way that inside this archive each fact slips so prettily beside the next like a horse’s bit lies across its tongue. History is the things that have happened, the facts of a body and its breath that come to us through the records and lists, the photographs and their captions curling in neat, even script. In the silence of the archive, all I can hear is the hum of the corner unit rinsing air clean of the dust and acid I bring on my skin, my hair, and the white space, page after page of it— the absences still bearing the administrator’s mark. The Coach Station, St James Boulevard, Newcastle upon Tyne 00:00 / 01:05 Bright station and all around soft dark. Toothpaste and sleep, coffee and the white crunch of salt on the concourse. The headlamps snorting – boarding as the first gull caws began to ricochet. That’s how it was the morning I left, too cold for snow, hills thick with February sloped black-backed and low to where the Tyne bloomed in the wake of a boat. I was less going somewhere than getting out, away from the terraces and rain, tower blocks – the yellow Metro stops that took me in loops, out into the waking-up day. But mostly I was getting away from you, the river below breathing as all rivers do. Publishing credits Hefted: the love i do to you (Eyewear Publishing) In the Archive: exclusive first publication by iamb The Coach Station, St James Boulevard, Newcastle upon Tyne: Best New British and Irish Poets 2018 (Eyewear Publishing) Share

Darren J Beaney back next the poet Darren J Beaney cuts his own hair and loves punk rock and Marmite. He's one half of Flight of the Dragonfly , which hosts regular spoken word evenings on Zoom and in Brighton, produces the Flights e-journal, and recently expanded into independent publishing. Darren is the author of three poetry pamphlets: The Fortune Teller's Yarn , The Machinery of Life and Honey Dew . His newest chapbooks – The Fall of the Repetitive Mix Tape (Back Room Poetry) and Citizenship (Scumbag Press) – will be published in spring and summer 2023. the poems I was created without innocence 00:00 / 01:03 the philosopher named me lazy love child of tyranny. Conceived of invasion and rage. At my birth historic dreamers clustered around the womb only to wince at the struggle. A foolish cleric anointed my brow with sorrow, branded me radioactive and resistant. Nurture came with provocation and accusation as infancy turned battlefield. Playful years were slaughter and I grew into travesty. Indignation matured, associations curdled, I lived life wretched. I am little more than chronic, my own enemy. I look to scald the preposterous, denounce the bastard, punish false evidence, destroy the offensive. Now unbound I seek a new heart. I am not acquainted with angels, but I believe I am here to be loved. Love 00:00 / 00:30 on acid tastes like it looks vivid chaos blinding shimmering like sherbet overwhelming with glycerin whispers which vibrate the air as touch becomes hyperactive and the world smells demerara senses on acid in love warp and wrap each other into playful cat’s cradles knotting until rice paper lips eventually find a way I like this place 00:00 / 01:48 and could willingly waste my time here even though it smells of hospital corridors and the walls are balding as paint decays and plaster peels and the brickwork reveals clay intestines. Derisory light pinches though a ceiling sprayed with holes crafting a dingy prospect, somewhere suitable to commit crimes. Window frames nurse broken panes and a latch scalped from a swinging door lies like a fake island in a lagoon of impossible to dredge grime covering floorboards all but conquered by rot. The air has a taste resembling a cave, the description clings to my tongue as my mouth waters like it’s a dripping acid bath tap. I scrunch my eyes closed and catch a smeared breath to stop me taking a bite. I perch, painted into a corner by cobweb tusks. I purge with primeval ivy, flagellate with waning lost feathers. I whistle like an uncomfortable outsider looking for a sign to relax in damage. I imagine … and the obscurity of my thinking invokes an alternative picture, a chamber, a cell, a byre, a stable. An uninhabited room in a tower fit for young princes. I perceive possibility and space. I tell myself I make hollow history as I waste each minute, but I snub my meaningless words and sing to the shadows 'fuck off with your time'. I consider one more squandered hour as I unwind. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Mona Dash back next the poet Mona Dash is the author of the memoir A Roll of the Dice: a story of loss, love and genetics , the novel Untamed Heart , and poetry collections A Certain Way and Dawn-drops. She holds a Masters in Creative Writing (with distinction), and her work has been both long and shortlisted in leading competitions such as Novel London 2020, SI Leeds Literary Award, Leicester Writes Short Story Prize and The Asian Writer Short Story Prize. Her short story collection, Let us look elsewhere, is due out in 2021 from Dahlia Publishing. Mona has an MBA and an engineering degree, works for a global tech firm, and lives in London. the poems Implications 00:00 / 01:10 Born and raised an Indian; not living in India now British, not born in Britain a mother, working full time a sales manager, a mother a woman, a mother a writer, a technocrat an engineer, an artist a businessperson, a poet becoming more than I was meant to Venn-diagram like I seek finding intersectionality implied: not Indian implied: not British implied: not a mother implied: not a sales manager implied: not a woman implied: not a writer implied: not an engineer implied: not a businessperson implied: a sense of erosion implied: commonalities implied: a pinpoint Unsaid, Unwritten 00:00 / 00:59 Unseeing, unthinking piece words unrelated like flowers in a vase on the kitchen table lark, larkspur, lavender When the night calls answer in words swallowed in a past forgotten eels, egalitarian, eccentric then it is morning slicing sun through clouds unopened eyes, sleepy sex a day to use, misuse harvest, hyacinth, harbour a month is over the thought still shattered ravaged and unformed the words meant to disappear in bloodstreams vapid, victory, vilify like Rodin’s Thinker count words on fingers the tongue struggling still to form the unformed the pen curling, curling to write the unwritten For Plath, for Love 00:00 / 01:25 Let us then recite Plath Let us wear white bikinis and smile up at the sky, blue in our hearts as in the heavens Let us sing mad-girl love songs and in its rhymes search for a thunderbird, hold the bird close dip into its heart, tasting its blood, mine, yours Let us find these Hughes-like men who love deeply, amorously, thick-honey words that choke so well, filling us, filling us with still, deep water, cleansing and drowning who twist deep into us, severing every self-belief, every little hope we have burning away the mind-body-soul chain Let us write, write crazily into the night and let our words howl in the still dawn and let us then open the oven door and lay ourselves in, breathing in purist like a single strain of air, lying still, lying while our children lie in their beds, dreaming, dreaming Publishing credits Implications: May We Borrow Your Country (Linen Press UK) Unsaid, Unwritten: Sarasvati 057 (Indigo Dreams Publishing) For Plath, for Love: exclusive first publication by iamb Share

Maggs Vibo back next the poet Maggs Vibo – pen name of veteran, military spouse and visual poet Margaret Viboolsittiseri – is the author of ash poetry booklet Ashes to Ashes . She’s contributed to anthologies from Poem Atlas, Penteract Press, Steel Incisors, IceFloe Press, Coven Poetry, Fevers of the Mind, AngelHousePress and Oxford Brookes University Poetry Centre. Published widely in the US, UK, Canada, Europe and South Asia, Maggs showed pieces in 2022 with L'Air Arts in Atelier 11 of Cité Falguière in Paris, and at The Library of Congress in Washington DC. the poems The Year of the Ox 00:00 / 01:01 Try not to box or blow up Chuck Dem-ah CRAZ EEEEE SAW Free DUMB Oh Fragil-egos and the Gods … k-NO-w science criminal enterprises drilling-in-digenous wears a Cape Fear full of shit bags of waste lands of carn age everything harnesses the power of the sun, winds, dust, rainmaker of all powerful Holy rolling phony and traitorous bologna sand Which way did they go? Storm In red and CAP-IT-ALL Off fences didn’t stop and neither could a WALL STREET of protestors (zip) ties mouth Shut the F. up You’re dis – loyal and royally F.U.C.KKKed up! Up! UP and A-way Through this maze of trickery The Year of the Rat 00:00 / 01:57 I don't find inspiration In a rat. Not that Creature scurrying along the floorboards looking forward to theft I'm bereft when looking at that tail, that long gruesome nose sniffing whiffing for the smell of death. Of plague. of Misfortune The Year of the Rat. Fat politicians told us that we’d be free of this virus when in fact or fiction (no contradiction) In our rat. He is the disease we wheeze and cough in his direction wherever he might go just know we wish he'd fall into the trap he laid for himself when he called all this a hoax just smoke and mirrors reflecting back a rat we loathe The rat serves no purpose and has no Make it Great claim to life Except through death, trenches and holes, Sewerbellies Of our globe. (Hold) The rat in a maze. It phases us How intelligent and how much they’re like us We hate the rat because: We Are the Rat And this is the year (we must endear) This creature who will represent All our selfish desires With ire we must take back (our rat) and Pet This debt … we make for generations In the future A suture to hold this geyser of blood We must mop to the corner and all over our Persistence and petulance Henceforth, This, POOOOR creature Is the Year of the Rat The Year of the Tiger 00:00 / 01:47 Lady Liberty Lingering threats January 6th Sense of Skipping rope With the reins of a Trojan horse Riding into the eye Yet do not see Your stripes A billion dollar Arsenal of logos, T-shirts, and Assaults A cache Of cash Yet, still you play the fiddle Down in Georgia Peaches Bragging and breaking skin Smash-n-grab’em By their special props In a Lone Star States Of oppression Against a mouse You taunt A community of trained Cops and Thieves who Claim supremacy You'll see We The People I am AMERICAN My hand raised to defend The Constitution You burned We The People We Are Cursed We Are Broken Our kindergardens Soaked in Coffins draped No playground Fallen grace Untenable and broken Lulla-byes Purring kittens Eyes too young to see Such tragedies Hiding Cowering Yet calling Out-stretched tails Sharpening nails Scratching A Cross And clawing Back We are Tigers Angry feoh-lions Roaring No longer silent Soaring Manticores Publishing credits The Year of the Ox: Visual Poetry (Fevers of the Mind) The Year of the Rat: Distanced 3.0 (ang(st)) / The Book of Penteract (Penteract Press) The Year of the Tiger: exclusive first publication by iamb

Samantha DeFlitch back next the poet Sam DeFlitch, author of Confluence , is a National Poetry Series finalist. Her work has appeared in The Missouri Review , Colorado Review , Iron Horse Literary Review , Appalachian Review and in On the Seawall , among others. Sam has received awards and fellowships from the Martha's Vineyard Institute of Creative Writing, The Massachusetts Poetry Festival, and the University of New Hampshire, where she completed her MFA. the poems Confessional 00:00 / 01:39 This is what happened: I found the wren frozen stuck to the ground and I kept on moving. The onion snow came too late this year; the hard freeze took out the plums. Some farmer kept the coal barrels burning through the night. Another lit half his land on fire to save the grapes. Some theologians think God gave us grapes— but not wine—so we, too, could find joy in creation. See: we make bread to be torn apart, hot. Hot and full of yanked-up wheatsheaf. We love the dog even though we know, we know— be it love or oats, we know it when we plant it— most things don't make it out alive. This is just to say: I'm not a theologian, or a farmer, or even the woman who scooped up the wren's body, tucked it in a plastic bag, and kept it in her freezer between the berries and winter greens, waiting patiently for the final thaw to bury it in soft earth. I'm just a girl with an emergent deer in her cupped palms; a girl saying: Look! This is what I have created with my grief. This is what love has made out of me. Garbage Night 00:00 / 01:54 It is Thursday night. It is garbage night. The trash is my old clothes and my old clothes are slipping through my hands. My hands are a box full of flies. The flies are taking off with my hair – look! I am bald. I am my mother’s truck engine. I am the space the deer left sleeping in the ferns. I am 7:52 in the evening. See, the sun has already set and the dog is crying to go out. Am I her, too? Her nose raised, twitching, into the evening air? My parents are getting old. I don’t like to say that out loud, but it’s true. The dog is old, too. I am rubbing the dog’s legs. I am a car full of empty coffee cups – see, I can’t bring myself to dump them. They remind me of yesterday. I am all the days that the sky has broken clear and cold, spilling oranges across the dawn-line. I am the Ohio line. I am West Side Road after all the tourists have left for the day I am laying myself down on the asphalt to watch the stars come out in real soaring spires above my head until the dog begins her howling. I am waking all the days. I am the ferns, and I keep space for you, for the coffee cups. I am peeling my long body off asphalt, and gone round back to feed the chickens. Final Thaw of Soft Earth 00:00 / 01:29 Something's not right with my river, my mother says. And it is Truth: each night the beavers pull apart saplings, pull them apart fresh and at the edge. The river gets blocked. The water stops and at night I hear howling in the east. In the year of the year of the plague — this the age I restring my mother's mother's Miraculous Medal and hang it from my dash — the days are long as a year. Ticks fall like spring melt from branches and cling to the legs of the moose calves. A great fir tree falls on a man as he sleeps. The mountain is angry, my mother says, and it is Truth. In the days after this, another surgeon would open me. There is never any good explanation for my pain, which is real. I must have it. Night after night, this racket in the woods; the re- building of the thaw-rushed dam which, this time around, might make a good home. This remarkable rumpus chirping hope. Publishing credits Confessional: Barren Magazine (Issue 19) Garbage Night: On the Seawall Final Thaw of Soft Earth: Moist Poetry Journal