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Read 60 poems from 20 emerging and established poets – and hear their authors read them too. Welcome to wave 4 of iamb. wave four autumn 2020 Amelia Loulli Angela Dye Carolyn Jess-Cooke Christina Strigas Christina Thatcher Claudia Gary Elizabeth McGeown Heather Quinn Helen Ivory Jean Atkin Jo Bratten Jonaki Ray Lloyd Schwartz Leah Umansky Martin Figura Matt Merritt Melita White Mona Dash Rachael de Moravia Rennie Parker

Poet Briony Collins reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Briony Collins back next the poet Briony Collins is a writer, artist, and performer based in North Wales. Her career began when she won the 2016 Exeter Novel Prize. Since then, she has published numerous poems and stories, produced plays, and received the 2018 Under-25s Literature Wales Bursary. Briony enjoys illustrating her own work and performing on stage. She is represented by DHH Literary Agency. the poems taid taught me 00:00 / 00:41 how to open corked wine bottles: twisting a fusilli knife deep and prying the bone from a long, green spine until the tetric body pops. whenever i drink i remember this, meaning we will always be merry past when he’s gone and we can pretend that the darkness won’t come for us even though it is coming all the time. Newborn 00:00 / 00:11 Petals of your fingers around mine; Hibiscus closing around moonlight. Liberty based on William Sidney Mount’s painting, The Power of Music (1847) 00:00 / 00:41 Violin strings mark mayflower fingers while mine blister. We smile together and smoke our pipes down to embers. Toes tap the same southern rhythm: them, in the stables, me, outside with the horses, whistling intimations of liberty. Publishing credits taid taught me: exclusive first publication by iamb Newborn: Black Bough Poetry (Issue 1) Liberty: Agenda Magazine (Vol. 52 Nos. 3-4) Share

Poet Ankh Spice reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Ankh Spice back next the poet Ankh Spice is a sea-obsessed poet from Aotearoa (New Zealand). His poetry has appeared in a number of online and printed publications internationally. He often uses natural imagery, myth and strong derealisation to explore the personal and shared traumas that keep us unsettled, environmental issues, and the drive to persist against our odds. Two of his poems were nominated for the 2020 Pushcart Prize courtesy of Rhythm & Bones and Black Bough Poetry. the poems Have mercy Written following Hurricane Dorian, September 2019 00:00 / 01:44 This island opens the iris of her day, calm curve of bay all visioning glass deepsight clear to the seabed stones, each a distinct sharp note, becalmed in unstirring kelps oh yes here the huge animal of the world is all lull but I turn where the trail ends in a groan the road inhaled by her winter heaving and on your side of her body that same skin murmuring wet nothings down there where the road was is tearing holes in itself right this second and if we are any kind of people we know what to do with an animal struggling just to breathe when did we close our eyes so tightly we forgot that desperate creatures fight hard and close more eyes as they go down gasping So from me running caught between breaths to you caught in her throat I can’t say anything except oh god you know you know she never wanted this New cloth 00:00 / 01:27 Your pattern pinned itself to the fray of me the first day. Not yet stitched, aligning fragile tissue, judging bias – the wounded cut carefully always holding their breath. When they remade you, I slept on a hospital couch with your dress, bundled like a woollen heart, to my nose. Five hours inhaling-exhaling bargains a short time to outfit a whole woman into her own dear self. We tied knots with every colour we could find. Understand, love always gets down to the wisp beyond fabric, to stroke the finest thread of a person – our making looms us legacies of holes – you fear cutting yourself short, me born running with scissors, and all of us rippling fast towards the great unravelling Yet the great thumping treadle of a heart can still say now you’re mending – billow with the wind. This poem did not stand a chance 00:00 / 02:03 Begotten, I failed to thrive, all at once and for years after, perhaps this poem will be rejected before it can speak from spite. I learned young that every strand and bead of us is base, self- interested only in making more of itself this poem will know it can never be good enough Here is a sore-tooth socket of a truth for a tongue to test – we persist by errors in our replication, success for this whole bolt of shivering animal fabric is in the dropped stitches, in failing to be perfect this poem will blame itself for signalling predators this also describes a number of fathers selfish patterns unstrung, then unshuttled, without any binding, so this poem will unravel red threads into the sea this poem will fail to finish even that I have stopped you going on. I did not beget, I have not made anything at all of myself this poem was stillborn I pick up this small body of work, headed for the coffin-drawer, and it is still warm and so blameless a great rack-and-rattle shakes the mistake of it from my hands, even despite resurrecting you, it begins to speak: This poem was still born Publishing credits Have mercy: Kissing Dynamite (Issue 10) New cloth: Rhythm & Bones (Issue 6) This poem did not stand a chance: The Failure Baler (Issue 1) Share

Poet Aaron Kent reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Aaron Kent back next the poet Aaron Kent is a working-class poet and publisher born and raised in Cornwall. He runs Broken Sleep Books and has had several pamphlets published. J H Prynne called his poetry 'unicorn flavoured'. How do you top that? the poems Ice Skating, Garden of Eden, 1998 00:00 / 01:31 When the floods erred over the pyre, the ice caps were still ideas – a convergence of crystal starlings invoking themselves to a hemisphere. My father still spoke in Rather, comparing potential to outcome and living through the theoretical choices of a coin flip. (Nothing would prepare him for a side, a continuum never considered ad infinitum). In evening’s grubby light we married mushroom while he sung broken harmonica for an orchestra of junction – the tip forms; mistakes we promised to make, a space to take. You, I was told when we returned from the registry office, sledded down Wollaton hill in the first stretch of snow; your first instinct to battle and claim each sheet like condensation racing to the bottom, engorging itself on itself. I piled snow against the door of a man you never met, a cleansed soul burdened with a front he couldn’t forecast. The cat determined to hide in his arms, the whistle of his harmonica drowned out by a meow stretched thin across the enveloping mist. I broke my arms in a race to the finish, I snapped my tendons to calm the light. Portmanteau 00:00 / 01:41 All of us; you, Aaron Kent, and I spread ourselves across the mattress where we read ergodic fiction to each other – where she lay the golden chariot, alchemy by alchemist, unenviable task of poisoning the dinner party. We bought a simile, like we had bought a mouse – petted, fed, hygienic born to serve a different purpose. We, all Aaron, carried him in our arms, our wasted arms in nuclear unrest, and dug lead into turf as we pressed its aching body into a shoebox and begged each other for entropy. The tone of conversation had changed and the split had guaranteed doubt. I’ve seen myself against a foreign backdrop like the breast of a white swan paralysed by the lines and ripples elegantly stamped on water’s canopy, where the drinks are quaffed before the bruschetta stuffed. Three of us, the inheritance of each other, like buds snatching for the sun, sent to follow a slope so weak so long so dark against the paleness that eats the very best of every silver lining etched in the folds of heavy cloth / case. I still hear them, us, myself in every quaint out-dated piano solo of a rehearsed broken moonlight sonata, like a sober actor playing drunk – the chimes jangling somewhere in absentia, the simile sleeping on the crook of midnight, a desperation becoming faint. I overcame and landed with tender spring between the three of us there, between the Godlessness of uncertainty. Reasons to Take Part In a Treasure Hunt 00:00 / 01:03 Time consumption is mindlessness, you are the waste of water, there are stars in the back rooms of your neighbour’s houses how will you ever know about them if you don’t search? The cats tell us how to move, the world is shaped like an egg, every part of your face tells a lie you tried to keep, I have eaten both of your novels; neither tasted like paper. Your sanity has fallen into the wrong hands, your mouth is open too wide for your feet, there are more ostriches than mistakes, you don’t know to use a full stop. Properly. If at all there is a no better time than the present tense, Kanye West is waiting, the whole town is waiting, why do you keep us waiting? Just find it already. The clues are there. Publishing credits Ice Skating, Garden of Eden, 1998: originally appeared in an altered form in The Rink (Dostoyevsky Wannabe X) Portmanteau / Reasons to Take Part In a Treasure Hunt: exclusive first publication by iamb Share

Poet Carolyn Jess-Cooke reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Carolyn Jess-Cooke back next the poet Carolyn Jess-Cooke lives in Glasgow with her husband and four children. Her prize wins include an Eric Gregory Award, a Tyrone Guthrie Prize, and a Northern Writers' Award. Her third poetry collection will be published by Seren in 2021, and her fiction has appeared in 23 languages. Carolyn's most recent novel (published as C J Cooke) is The Nesting . the poems Hare 00:00 / 01:31 I kept you in bed with me so many nights, certain I could hold the life into you, certain that the life in you wanted to leap out, hare-like, go bobbing off into some night-field. For want of more eyes, more arms I strapped you to me while I did the dishes, cooked, typed, your little legs frogging against the deflating dune of your first home. Nested you in a car seat while I showered, dressed, and when you breastfed for hours and hours I learned how to manoeuvre the cup and book around you. Time and friends and attitudes, too. We moved breakables a height, no glass tables. Fitted locks to the kitchen cupboards, door jammers, argued about screws and pills someone left within reach. I’ll not tell you how my breath left me, how my heart stopped at your stillness in the cot, and who I became when at last you moved. There is no telling what skins of me have dropped and shed in the fears I’ve entered. The day beyond these blankets, beyond our door, is known to me now, fragile as moth-scurf, its long ears twitching, alert, white tail winking across the night-field. Yesterday, I Failed 00:00 / 02:31 I failed, and the failing was great thereof. I failed all the way to the sulphur cliffs of cynicism, then bungee-jumped. I shot a hole in one in failure. I failed and changed the course of history. I failed admirably, catastrophically, unremittingly, relentlessly, perspicaciously, deliciously, spaciously, and with the dexterity of the common impala. I did not merely stall, pause, or change my mind – I failed, like any serious attempt at oil painting in a wind machine. I failed, but the crops did not. I failed in a field, and filed as I fooled. I walked right up to failure, kicked it in the shins, and insulted its mother. I fell in love with failure. We got married and raised a family of failures. I failed to the sum of the square roots of any two sides of an isosceles triangle. I failed in the key of D flat. I failed my heart out, I failed until my lungs burned, my brain rattled, my skin flapped like a rag against my bones and my tongue uttered only ‘failure’... I failed, much to the regret of the management. I went scuba-diving in failure, I camped under failure, I hiked to the summit of failure, I painted the floor with superglue while failure was sleeping and when it woke up ... I laughed. I failed in several languages. I added failure on Facebook. I failed from caveman to Homo Sapiens. I failed stupendously, outlandishly, biblically, savagely, juicily, Byzantinely, heroically, intergalactically. I failed in hard copy, fax, text, email, Skype and podcast. I failed to the soundtrack of James Bond. I failed as magnesium is to water, as the Apocalypse is to a Saturday morning lie-in, as Godzilla is to the streets of Tokyo. I failed, and I failed, but at least I tried. Newborn 00:00 / 01:17 What are you like? A minute old, you’re a sky-blue candle quarried from the fire, beeswax on my belly, then a nub of warm dough and in the basket by my bed you’re a bag of ripe peaches, soap-bubble fragile, a slow-waving field fattening with wheat and at the breast you’re a zoo of verbs mewling, snuffling, pecking, wolfing, then coiling into sleep, where you’re a water-wheel churning ancestral reflections in the journeys of your face until it’s morning and you’re unleashed light, a pinking pearl, a key turning in the lock of clocked breath filling our house with hows – how did the soul arrive there? like a stitched wish or the way the wind winds itself into the sea’s receiving skin or did life find you, invite you to climb to the nib of the wick and, if so, what flame set you alight? Publishing credits Hare: 2013 National Poetry Competition anthology (The Poetry Society) Yesterday, I Failed: The Stinging Fly (Issue 13, Vol. 2) Newborn: Inroads (Seren Books) Share

Poet Martin Figura reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Martin Figura back next © Dave Guttridge the poet Martin Figura’s collection and show Whistle was shortlisted for the Ted Hughes Award, and won the 2013 Saboteur Award for Best Spoken Word Show. His books Shed and Dr Zeeman’s Catastrophe Machine were published in 2016 – the spoken word show to accompany the latter earning Martin a shortlisting in the 2018 Saboteur Awards. That same year saw a new edition of Whistle . Martin had hoped to showcase his theatre show Shed in 2020. He lives in Norwich with the poet Helen Ivory, and sciatica. the poems Land of Opportunity ‘This is a new start for everyone in the UK … so let's get going.' Michael Gove, July 2020 00:00 / 01:00 Here we are then, huddled on the exhausted stained mattress in the seaside boarding house of state. Rusty springs squeak out Rule Britannia whilst we make love to ourselves. The bed, digging its heels into a tidemark carpet that’s shrinking away from the chipped gloss of the skirting boards and the terrifying flora of the wallpaper. Thin rayon curtains spill yellow light onto our gilt-framed Boots the Chemist reproduction of Constable’s The Hay Wain, picks out the greyed varnish craquelure of the wardrobe quietly looming in the corner containing who knows what – a little shoebox of secrets perhaps? Suitcases sticky with dust sit atop – their handles ripped off. Failure after Gillian Wearing's 2 into 1 (1997) 00:00 / 01:22 He loves me I suppose. I am a failure, there's a better way of doing things. I am a dramatic woman. I know I think too much of myself and I should be submissive – a proper wife. He's very caring really. He says I like to be dominated. When he's jealous he's abusive towards me. I'm afraid I won't grow old – I sometimes tell him that. He's beautiful looking. He will try and tell me about love, but hate is something he needs and I don’t. He says I am a failure and I don’t. He says I am a failure but hate is something he needs. Try and tell me about love. He's beautiful looking, he will grow old. I sometimes tell him that he's abusive towards me. I'm afraid I won't be dominated when he's jealous. He's very caring – Really? He says I like to be submissive – a proper wife. I think too much of myself and I should. I am a dramatic woman! I know there's a better way of doing things. I suppose I am a failure, he loves me. Harold Wilson Rows Towards Bishop Rock 00:00 / 01:10 Harold, knees like little moons, bends his back, puffs through the clamouring halyards of the bay. Always six moves ahead of the other buggers, be they Old Etonians or fellow grammar grubbers. And where else to escape serious concerns, but these Scilly Isles. The cormorant is attentive company at the blunt end of the boat, kinked wings hung out to dry, Harold’s words gulped down like slippery fish. The oars are worn soft in their locks, while he rows he recalls himself a boy in a school cap, at the steps of Number Ten. On the slipway, Mary diminishes to the red dot of her coat. The lighthouse lays down her path, tugs the glow of Gannex mac and pipe smoke through the net curtain of mizzle. Mary turns, heads up the slope towards the archipelago’s clustered lights and their ugly little bungalow. Publishing credits Land of Opportunity: The New European Failure: Dr Zeeman's Catastrophe Machine (Cinnamon Press) Originally commissioned in 2011 for the Norwich Castle Museum Family Matters Exhibition Harold Wilson Rows Towards Bishop Rock: The Rialto (Issue 89) Placed second in the 2017 Rialto/RSPB Nature Poetry Competition Share

Poet Sarra Culleno reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Sarra Culleno back next © Sonya Smith the poet Sarra Culleno is a British writer, mother and English teacher. Author of Bonds: A Short Story Collection , Sarra has had her fiction and poetry published widely in print, as well as performed in audio-dramas, podcasts and on radio. Longlisted for the Cinnamon Press Pamphlet Prize and the 2020 Nightingale and Sparrow Full Collections competition, Sarra was also nominated by iamb for Best of the Net in 2020. She's a frequent contributor to Fevers of the Mind , Alternative Stories and Fake Realities , and co-hosts Write Out Loud at Waterside Arts. Sarra also performs as both a guest and a featured poet at numerous literary festivals. the poems Eidolon Tolling 00:00 / 01:03 The running tap might pour pounding froths of furor over your divested protests, drown your clamour. I cannot help but imagine your loud discord. Yet, when I check in, you're sleeping sound, mi amor. There's always your call-to-arms from another room. Conjecture presumes your disinherited roar, for fear your alarm may be sucked up by vacuum, your tumult aches covered with crackling hiss of chores. When hurly-burly bubbles from kettle rise up, under din, your siren alerts. It's like sad cats. If the rumble lasts too long for either of us, I hallucinate pealing cries bringing me back to small, smarting pangs of your dissonant phrases, vibrating dispossession, under white noises. Paradise Found 00:00 / 01:50 A spot in her garden is perfect for placing my face, so it's under her fig tree’s shading. On terracotta tiles my legs are sunning, as busying bugs buzz to jasmines, unstopping, while gusts from honeysuckle perfumes are puffing sugary breezes somehow, to me reaching. Persepolis’ Paradise, here a patch cultivating, by medlar and quince trees of home she is growing in the changing climate of England’s permitting. As if in the East, are passion fruits clinging over her washing-line leisurely draping under which we sit, her mint-teas a-sipping. On the horizon, Wembley’s Arch is bridging. On Harrow’s Hill, St. Mary’s spire’s soaring. Zooming Heathrow planes are low-flying. Bakerloo Line tubes behind bushes are swooshing like waves on an island resort softly washing rhythms ebbing, breaking, to-ing, fro-ing. I don’t know names of the colourings bursting through her lush greens, first hiding then popping, but I know how to keep from missing by blinking, printing the strobes of my camera’s shuttering each butterfly’s poised cameo fit-for-Vogue-ing, saving frame by frame my memory’s capturing, for when in the future my dementia’s time-hopping my infirm finale laps here will be looping. I hold it, the moment clear for reliving, rooting in her happy blooms, I’m promising. Burst 00:00 / 01:08 We enjoy our surface soapy membrane. Here, it is right and just to rove our sights over silky swirls of coiling spectrum hues, distance what’s inevitable, beneath and above, of happy's precarious precipice: on this bubble's thin skin. We breath honey scents from where the detergent's aroma is most perfumed. In big aeroplanes we wave stamped passports. Cornucopia shelves thrive shops and sweet spots. We gulp manna's syrupy foremilk till full to rest. Tête-à-tête, we eskimo-nose loved freckles close enough to see with bare eyes, then we sleep like babies. At this lucky alignment the satin sheets are slippery. The layer in-between is rendered in fragile-gifts, so one touch is the end. Publishing credits Eidolon Tolling / Burst: exclusive first publication by iamb Paradise Found: Places of Poetry Share

Poet Rachael de Moravia reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Rachael de Moravia back next the poet Rachael de Moravia is a writer, journalist and university lecturer whose arts, culture, travel and business features have appeared in UK and international publications. She's been a magazine editor, broadcast journalist and radio news presenter, and her essays, fiction and poetry have been published widely – both in print and online. Rachael was granted an Authors’ Foundation Award from the Society of Authors in 2019. the poems The Topography of War Home 00:00 / 03:36 By the window, a grandmother sits, grey eyes on the jagged edges of buildings, a no- longer city of disorder and dust, powdered to destruction, the ashes of white marble. Precious ancient city, my ash-Shahbaa, living, breathing, marble {white} veined with porphyry {red} and diorite {green}, cracked and broken, open-veined, bleeding into dust, emptiness and substance bleeding out together on the margins of the streets. In dreams she hears {impact} the sound of one glass edge against another glass edge almost like a whisper; in waking she sits with splintered glass in her lap like jewels embroidered in the folds of black fabric, here in the frame of the once-window. Framed as in a painting, and, if looking up from the streets, caught in a moment, the moment a painter imprisons his seated subject looking elsewhere towards an imagined horizon, eternal gaze falling into the distance, she sits. Ancient city of calcined bone-ash, powdered minarets, ash-drift alleys, souqs submerged. {annihilate} They leave, they return. They burn, they destroy. They come to hide, shelter, rebuild; dredging, sifting, dreading, shifting. She doesn’t recognise the map laid out beyond the window now, the chart in the frame. Cartographer of disorder, she scans the ruins of the city. She tries to trace the arches of the caravanserai, delineate the rooves of the hammam. The walls of the citadel lay in ruins in the scarred landscape of her memory. Streets cede to dust cede to twisted steel, twisted like the limbs of pistachio trees in the orchards she knew as a girl. She is in the orchards and at home, past and present eviscerated, past and present forming a continuous loop as she sits in the window of the horizonless city. The grey city suffocates its past in a toxic fog of dust, and, sitting by the window, she recalls fragments of childhood; technicolour days and vivid past-lives preserved in black and white on glossy paper in the unsealing peeling plastic film of dry albums in dusty boxes. Former adhesions unstick in the present; mortar crumbles, families fragment, half-lives corrode. Mortars fall, mortar disintegrates. What holds together is torn apart, coherence to chaos. {mortar // mortar} For millennia we spoke this language of binding and building — now the words crumble in our mouths like broken teeth in bad dreams and we spit out destruction. {mort // morte} Steel shell-fragments pierce the words of a poem daubed on the lime-mortared citadel walls. City of learning, here is the lesson: lessen, lessen. Hospital 00:00 / 03:32 The evening sun gives the city a golden aura, hushed and hallowed, phoenix-feather clouds the colour of fire. It lays itself across the white façades like the yellowing photos in dry albums, a sepia city. {sepia // sepsis} Yellowbrown, sulfur mustard, toxic halo. A pause in the bombardment and the smoky city tries to catch its breath, but its lungs fill with weaponised air, bronchial alleyways and arches {inhale} grilles // gills {breathe} balconies, lintels {breathe} vaults, cupolas {breathe} the vapour penetrating tunnels and passageways, and deep into the alveoli of filigree windows and lattice-work shutters. Porous structures exhale their dead. A father carries his child through the scorched streets. The shattered concrete of the hospital climbs to eat the sky and spits out shell-casings caught between its teeth. He sits by the bed, fingers pulling at the thin white sheet, fingers flexing and tensing against the fabric the way he once gripped bedsheets in ecstasy. Now he rents in agony. His child lays, dustgrey skin, ashes to ashes to ashes, the hell of this skindust, fleshwounding red. Doctors shout to be heard but despair is louder. Louder still are eyes {clawed} and throats {raw}. Strip-lights flicker — doctors pause — flicker again and go out. The hospital is lit only by the evening, by the dark greyscape of trauma, and in the dark, bodies {pupils fixed} still writhing and convulsing. The blind acrid air scavenges in the dark for verbs: to choke, to vomit, to curdle. Powerless, the ventilators and monitors are silent, dead as the back-up generator in the basement where the dead used to lay. Now they lay in the dust. Treating the just-living, doctors scratch the cupboards bare for antidote, for atropine, for alkaloid. Running through corridors {bloodstream} labyrinthine in the dark, they go hunting for liquid relief, for release. Desperate to stay awake, exhausted, a father {don’t leave me} drifts bodily to the halfworld of dream-state where he walks between the planted lines of pistachio trees, the lines he walked a thousand times with brothers and uncles at harvest time. In the dark of his sleep the lines of trees become lines running into bodies, the lines of hospital drips and tubes, the bodies dissolving into sheets on beds, threadbare sheets becoming brittle sheets of paper, lines drawn on paper like careless borders drawn on maps, terrible and stained and perishing maps, scrawled with places he once knew, pock-marked and blood-flecked like bulletholes in walls, and all his life-lines written on the {palimpsest} landscape. In the black night, a father sits in the hospital. Over his heart a shirt pocket, and within it a photo. Hollow 00:00 / 04:55 Not far from the border, a mother sits in a hollow of earth, sheltering from the snow. Navigating by day away from smokedrifts over the city {remains}, at night she rests. She walks the limestone massif through the Dead Cities of antiquity. Beyond these forgotten cities, farmlands to the north and west where the olive and nut trees grow, orchards abandoned, the earth heavy and pregnant with unharvested fallen yields. Hungry, hollow-cheeked and skull-thin, she moves the tip of her tongue across the velvet bone of her lower jaw to feel the space where her wisdom teeth once buried their roots. Enamel may be the strongest substance in the body, but even teeth rot. These roots are not so firm that they can’t be displaced by metal. The doctor said bone would grow back over time, and each passing month the gumflesh swallows the void, little by little. Flesh grows back with healthy blood-flow. Flesh grows back unless you’re dead. She tongues the root-hollows and tastes the air — acid that carries for miles with the wind. She tastes metal on bone, metal on flesh. Her body, too, hollow after bearing a child, born still, and her whole hollow body cries into the cold of the night, unheard. In the silence of the hollow {in the stillness of her womb} echoes of voices, anisotropic, immeasurable, like the echoes of shells falling in the city where a grandmother sits in grey dust // where shrieking echoes of mortars bounce off the carcasses of buildings // where the shrieks of children echo in the streets where bombs fall indiscriminate // where the children feel it in their eyes and throats and lungs before they even know it is raining at all. In the silence of the hollow, a memory of her brothers’ voices in the rows of pistachio trees, seeds closed-mouthed and ripening, shells splitting, an ecstasy of dehiscence. She recalls the orchard arteries, trees planted in parallel avenues, rooted deep like teeth, lines of gnarly trunks, rough-ridged grey bark, twisted limbs {like the children falling in the streets} waxy-leaved, canopy-dense, fruit-heavy. She recalls the changing colour of ripening drupes, the soft grey-green smooth nut inside, soft like the velvet gums against her tongue inside her hungry mouth which waters when she thinks of the harvest. She swallows the saliva, unsated. She thinks of the harvest, of sorting the nuts, open-mouthed shells here, closed-mouthed shells here, the abrupt splitting apart, the audible pop of hundreds of ripening, opening seeds in the fertile orchards like rapid joyous gun-fire. She cannot forget how the shells fall — in the orchards, in the city, on the hospital. She cannot forget the cracks in the citadel walls, or the crack of nutshells underfoot at harvesttime. From her shelter in the hollow she draws lines in the softly falling snow on the frozen ground, rudimentary map-making, marking out cities, coastlines and borders. The snow melts to her touch. She draws slowly, a lover running her fingers across another body, tracing blood rivers and sinew paths and flesh hollows. Mapping her thoughts, she finds some lines are organic: natural forms like rivers and plateaus and mountain ranges. Others are territorial, made by man, deliberately drawn and visible, like train tracks and roads and borders. But the best sort of lines are invisible to the eye: ley lines and desire lines and the shortcut she took through the trees to play with her sisters in the orchard —drawn by intuition, by routine, by heart— and how these undrawn lines seemed to her the most human topographical feature of all. Not far from the border, a mother sits in a hollow of earth, sheltering from the snow. It is night, and the land is nothing more than a colourless spectrum that spreads itself out between the black and the white. Publishing credits All poems: FELT: Aesthetics of Grey (ZenoPress) Share

Poet Sarah Fletcher reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Sarah Fletcher back next the poet Sarah Fletcher is an American-British poet whose poems have appeared in The White Review, The Rialto and Poetry London. Her most recent pamphlet, Typhoid August was published in 2018 by The Poetry Business. She is currently working on the full-length collection, PLUS ULTRA. the poems Capitulation 00:00 / 01:42 i. Feigning the playfulness of Mother-May-I he asks for a days-of-the-cane throwback I refuse Back then I tendered my touch more dearly I lived in his kiss for so long I was born in it Now anechoic and him a guerrillista of nettles and wit I can give him what he came for and what he now resists ii. The decapitated photograph of a torso Sexless in the high contrast tender in the anonymous lust-trade is constant as static to my mind like my friend describing the sting her boyfriend draws from her heels tied and does she feel like a present as he tightens the ribbons so tell me what is your luxury and who delivers it iii. All the milkmaids inconsequential as achoo have jostled into wakefulness at his arrival they are burning their hems legs rising like the vim of popped champagne he says Thank You but I did not mean to revive him you fucking dirty pigeon of a man The Garden of Love's Sleep After Messian’s Turangalila 00:00 / 02:48 Dinner is poured Then: his hand on mine — Instead of sensation I receive The dream Of two green peacocks Pouring smooth grails of touch Each across the other Necks arched in extravagant, Romantic love. * Insomnia swells a congealing city Congests each head with phrases: “A horse called Horus or just Birdy” “A wine press named War on Earth”: Those haute couture contraptions from the ancién French regime * Áwake Who is with me? Whó Will unhook The colours’ ruffles from sunrise Each by each? When we talk about Manifestos I feel white Doves sprung from a Magician’s Sleeves on sleeves Release In this state And at this event * On open caboose On train to Vladivostok Mosquitoes are breeding quickly in the dark Clouds’ petticoats uncross Cross again Flashing the sun from which we cannot hide Which catches us Spoiled and sticky Like Love’s Sunday * The emperor’s clothes are very beautiful and they Are very real I remember them like the song That climbs back to me in snatches: Harbouring The antiseptic beauty ` Harpooning the August moon Haranguing the something something something Noon * Have we slept? I’ve found us Flabberghastly Clean and glamorose Like the courtesan who appears here And all other places in a new state age dress civility Having forgot the crashing sound of a beating door The stench of a night closing in Endarkening O Carrion! * At last Something beautiful arrives! The equal weightéd phrase That leaves your mouth and the sky At the same time The Judgment 00:00 / 01:37 ‘It’s not supposed to be like that’ he said and then accused me of embellishing it all. But I swore I told him nothing more or less than how it really felt. ‘Embellishing’s for dresses’ I explained, holding my ground. ‘Dresses,’ he repeated, looking down, ‘then what are you?’ I told him how I felt like rotting fruit, which is to say too sticky and browned-over at the edges; how my lips became a pith to be peeled off. And how we moved like we were drowning, but in the way a horse might drown, which is to say, showing resistance. Which is to say, still looking for some ground, some anything, something to stand on and start galloping. He sighed, and said that I sounded all wrong; it should be different, that with him, it would be different. ‘How’s it supposed to feel then, sir?’ I asked. He smirked and pulled me in, administering the Bible-black conviction of his kiss, the hands-in-hair pulp of his love. I felt my body pull; my legs go weightless once again. He whispered in my ear ‘like this.’ Publishing credits The Judgment: The Rialto and Kissing Angles (Dead Ink Books) Capitulation: Typhoid August (Poetry Business) The Garden of Love's Sleep: The White Review Share

Poet Claire Trévien reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Claire Trévien back next © Sophie Davidson the poet Claire Trévien is a Breton-British writer currently living in Brittany, France. The author of The Shipwrecked House and Astéronymes (both from Penned in the Margins), she has most recently published her pamphlet Brain Fugue with Verve Poetry Press. Claire founded Sabotage Reviews , and now co-runs the unique Verse Kraken writing retreats in Brittany. the poems Daytime Drinking Brain 00:00 / 01:17 I hope it doesn’t end up in one of your poems, he says. Give me a coaster and I will create strange confetti, a dagger. Rape is so cliché. Oh I had a bad experience and now it fills all my words with paralysis and smoke and the trauma of it Yes, I agree, quite enough already from other … The pub is intricate like a chocolate box – and just as lacquered and you came back wrong. [end] [your poems] [he says] [give me] [I will create] [a dagger] [so cliché] [experience] [my words] [smoke] [of it] [quite enough] [from others] [like] [a box] [lacking] [and] [wrong] That was the summer that slates fell off my body like dandruff 00:00 / 01:59 every brick of me dismantled and scattered, I found my arm in the roof of a church. The neighbours collected my fingernails and brought them to me in a glass jar “for when the time is right”. That summer exploded my insides out, was I the city? I felt myself in every street, but nowhere either. My blood was draining down the pavements with the rain. Each bullet in the wall echoed back into my skin. I poked my bones. All of us haunted down the streets looking for our missing limbs. The weather grew so angry with us, we started spitting hail. Every Tuesday to the market, we gull-gathered from stall to stall. It was a miracle the way our legs could carry us from place to place. Our wings clipped and useless. We opened our mouth to speak and only rain came out, dull, grey, roof-like. We are forgetting the names of colours, the way they used to bubble out of our bodies and wriggle through the windows. Our footprints leave ash if anything at all. We must press ourselves into the very walls, hide our feathers from them. A flash of red and all is lost. There is still so much to lose. Sick or Sad? 00:00 / 01:27 Since we cannot speak of the landscape of the crowd, how it turns from hot to cold in a blink, drains my veins dry, makes my body a ghost of itself, you ask me if my absence was due to being ‘sick or sad’? I use the euphemism ‘not well’ to blanket over the trees, the hills, the path that stops being a path, the carpet of burned leaves catching the wheels of trains, the snow duvet that protects the flowers, or kills them (I can never remember which it is). My sadness is sick, my sickness is sad. My sadness has been unplugged from triggers you could relate to and lives in a different city now. My sickness is so connected to my sadness that I cannot tell you which is the chicken, which is the egg. Here is an ankle sprained after it gave way on a flat surface like plastic lit by a lighter. See how it sent my sadness flying and cracked its screen. Here is my stomach full of rams fighting about fleeing. Publishing credits Daytime Drinking Brain / Sick or Sad?: Brain Fugue (Verve Poetry Press) That was the summer that slates fell off my body like dandruff: exclusive first publication by iamb Share

Poet Lloyd Schwartz reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Lloyd Schwartz back next the poet Lloyd Schwartz is the author of five collections, including the forthcoming Who’s on First? New and Selected Poems. His work has been chosen for a Pushcart Prize, The Best American Poetry, and The Best of the Best American Poetry. His other publications include Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose & Letters , and the centennial edition of Bishop’s Prose . Lloyd is the Frederick S. Troy Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, and Somerville Massachusetts' Poet Laureate. He was awarded the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, and a 2019 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in poetry. the poems Nostalgia (The Lake at Night) 00:00 / 03:10 The black water. Lights dotting the entire perimeter. Their shaky reflections. The dark tree line. The plap-plapping of water around the pier. Creaking boats. The creaking pier. Voices in conversation, in discussion—two men, adults—serious inflections (the words themselves just out of reach). A rusty screen-door spring, then the door swinging shut. Footsteps on a porch, the scrape of a wooden chair. Footsteps shuffling through sand, animated youthful voices (how many?) —distinct, disappearing. A sudden guffaw; some giggles; a woman’s—no, a young girl’s—sarcastic reply; someone’s assertion; a high-pitched male cackle. Somewhere else a child laughing. Bug-zappers. Tires whirring along a pavement ... not stopping ... receding. Shadows from passing headlights. A cat’s eyes caught in a headlight. No moon. Connect-the-dot constellations filling the black sky—the ladle of the Big Dipper not quite directly overhead. The radio tower across the lake, signaling. Muffled quacking near the shore; a frog belching; crickets, cicadas, katydids, etc. —their relentless sexual messages. A sudden gust of wind. Branches brushing against each other—pine, beech. A fiberglass hull tapping against the dock. A sudden chill. The smell of smoke, woodstove fires. A light going out. A dog barking; then more barking from another part of the lake. A burst of quiet laughter. Someone in the distance calling someone too loud. Steps on a creaking porch. A screen-door spring, the door banging shut. Another light going out (you must have just undressed for bed). My bare feet on the splintery pier turning away from the water. Crossword For David 00:00 / 00:49 You’re doing a crossword. I’m working on a puzzle. Do you love me enough? What’s the missing word? Do I love you enough? Where’s the missing piece? Yesterday I was cross with you. You weren’t paying enough attention. You were cross with me. I wasn’t paying enough attention. Our words crossed. Where are the missing pieces? What are the missing words? Yet last night we fit together like words in a crossword. Pieces of a puzzle. A True Poem 00:00 / 01:18 I’m working on a poem that’s so true, I can’t show it to anyone. I could never show it to anyone. Because it says exactly what I think, and what I think scares me. Sometimes it pleases me. Usually it brings misery. And this poem says exactly what I think. What I think of myself, what I think of my friends, what I think about my lover. Exactly. Parts of it might please them, some of it might scare them. Some of it might bring misery. And I don’t want to hurt them, I don’t want to hurt them. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I want everyone to love me. Still, I keep working on it. Why? Why do I keep working on it? Nobody will ever see it. Nobody will ever see it. I keep working on it even though I can never show it to anybody. I keep working on it even though someone might get hurt. Publishing credits Nostalgia (The Lake at Night) / A True Poem: Cairo Traffic (University of Chicago Press) Crossword: Little Kisses (University of Chicago Press) Share

Poet Kim Harvey reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Kim Harvey back next the poet Kim Harvey is a San Francisco Bay Area poet and Associate Editor at Palette Poetry. Her poems have been nominated for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. You can find her work in Poets Reading the News, Rattle, Radar, Barren Magazine, 3Elements Review, Wraparound South, Black Bough Poetry, Kissing Dynamite and elsewhere. She won The Comstock Review’s Muriel Craft Bailey Memorial Award 2019, and placed third in the Barren Press Poetry Contest in the same year. the poems Standard Credibility Inquiry for Displaced Plant Life 00:00 / 02:23 Are you now or have you ever been considered an invasive species? How long can you survive in the desert without water? Have you ever lied to the U.S. government? Are you lying now? You let me know if you need something to drink. To what fungi have you been exposed? Are you infectious? Do you carry contagions? Are you viable? How much attention do you require? Are you wild? Tell me why you are afraid of fire. What is your country of origin? Do you seek the shade of others? Do you plan to uproot established trees? How far back can you trace your seed? Are you a clone? Are you barren? Are you a weed? Will you reproduce incessantly and choke the perennials? Why were you harmed? When were you harmed? So you were witness to a violence. Are you damaged at the cellular level? Under what conditions will you wilt or wither? How did you escape? And where have you been since? On whom or what do you depend? Are you a hallucinogen? Are you medicinal? Are you lethal to domestic animals or people? Can you be bought and sold? Are you illegal? And the Plant Answers Back [Redacted]: (muffled, inaudible) …my sister was burned part of me died too I don’t know how I got out I will tell you I flew I was a samara on the wind I can still feel her like a phantom limb [ ] I could [ ] smell her [ ] singed skin [ ] raining down around me [ -------- ] Even now I hear her howling Light & Shadow The best way to know God is to love many things. ~ Vincent Van Gogh ~ 00:00 / 02:17 A hawk takes a snake in its talons, flies to the top of the trees, aspens I think, above the canyon. Can we agree the snake is dead now? Your words, shards from a broken vase I turn over in my hands, crush fine like millet into the fallen leaves. Stop brooding on the form of things. Think of Van Gogh. Modest blue room. Towel hung on a nail by the door, bowl and pitcher, water if you’re thirsty – absinthe green spilling in through paned glass like a sickness. Loss, a lamp lit long ago. Wasn’t it you who told me blue was the last color to be named in every language? Show me again in moonlight the hollows of you – the places where your body starts and stops. I remember you told me about Van Gogh, how he ate yellow paint to try to get the light inside him. How when he died his body was laid out alongside easels and brushes in a room full of yellow dahlias and sunflowers. How, in the end, it wasn’t just the light he was after. What he wanted was to drink turpentine, to choke on black cadmium and lead. What he really wanted was to die eating his paints, breathing them in, every color, all of them – orange, sienna, crimson, ochre, gypsum, lapis, gold, cobalt blue. Winter Solstice Incantation 00:00 / 01:00 Snapdragon petals, pink and yellow, rose hips, gold paint chips tossed over my shoulder. Hellebore and phlox, candles to burn through the long pitch-black. This spell’s being cast at last light and you’ll come back through the mirror’s crack like Lazarus from the dead tonight if I can just find the right words. Close and closed, what you were to me and a door slammed shut between this world and the next. Outside, a wild wind whips through the trees, whispering its warning—what’s done cannot be undone. Slippery as winter ice, you’re gone. Publishing credits Standard Credibility Inquiry for Displaced Plant Life: Poets Reading the News Light & Shadow: The Comstock Review (Fall/Winter 2019) Winner of the Muriel Craft Bailey Poetry Contest 2019 Winter Solstice Incantation: Black Bough Poetry Share

Poet Sarra Culleno reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Vismai Rao back next the poet Vismai Rao's poems have appeared in several journals, including Salamander, RHINO, Indianapolis Review, Rust + Moth, Glass: A Journal of Poetry and SWWIM. Her work has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize and the Orison Anthology. She lives in India. the poems Pursuits 00:00 / 01:55 Mother says she hasn’t found herself yet and there’s little time. She holds an old ceramic mug in one hand a drill bit in the other and is intently watching a man on YouTube put holes into things: it’s how you make vessels suitable for saplings, apparently. Her windowsill is a long row of wine bottles with no wine, all sorts of ivies and ferns pouring out her bathroom mirror a bay of newly acquired post-its with little messages to self— beyond is where she looks to put on her day cream. Afternoons she trades sleep to sit with her sketch sheets & HB pencils bent over houses and fruit, hillsides stark with shadow & light, drawing herself out of a canvas of abstraction. From old photographs she copies faces & hands, draws tall vases with still dahlias, seashores and roads— miles & miles of roads, it’s how she masters perspective— all her roads pointing to dimensionless dots at their respective horizons: here on paper, how easily they reach their ends— Roots 00:00 / 01:30 When I think of you I think of a goat tethered to a pole, you inside your cubicle leashed to the spiralling end of a long chain of events. Hello you say, day after day. How may I help you? On Sundays I bake and philosophize on how breath trapped inside a reed sings when freed. And we deconstruct freedom on the kitchen counter, on the three-seater couch, on bright satin bedspreads— down to its last molecule. A pinprick in a dream— is what we conclude it is. And you wake into another dream with arms covered in pinches. My yoga instructor says Exhale and Release while I knot myself into impossible poses. And then unknot. In December the flamingos fly down from north and drop anchor until the rains. Wings too, can only take you so far. Banyan trees alone are free, going where they will, making bridges out of roots. Constellations 00:00 / 01:23 All night we try to pluck out constellations from our feeble knowledge of astronomy. There is no moon but there is light enough— The sky: black the mountains, blacker. I am certain this isn’t a dream, even though you can no longer corroborate this memory. Even though I’m left too many uncorroborated memories— I don’t recall a single word we spoke. My neurons are firing things at me now: interstellar travel, our latest loves, maya: the mother of illusions, but I know these are from other nights— Of this one I remember close to nothing. Stars jigsawed against the night. And us, acutely aware of them— Publishing credits Pursuits: The Shore Roots: Salamander Constellations: Parentheses Journal (Issue 8) Share

Poet Aki Schilz reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Aki Schilz back next the poet Aki's poetry and short stories have been published online and in print in Popshot Magazine, Synaesthesia, Ink, Sweat & Tears, And Other Poems, Mnemoscape, Birdbook: Saltwater and Shore, CHEAP POP and An Unreliable Guide to London. She was chosen by Roxanne Gay to feature in the Wigleaf Top 50 (2015), was a Queen's Ferry Press Finalist (Best Small Fictions), and won both the inaugural Visual Verse Prize (2013) and the Bare Fiction Magazine Flash Fiction Prize (2014). With Kit Caless, she founded the LossLit digital literature project and co-edits LossLit Magazine . the poems If he asks 00:00 / 00:57 A mouth full of applause Wedding bells stretched between two hands Rush of silk as traffic At midnight all the trains hover over the water in silence: love as a sixpence or a moon, there’s no difference when you turn them clouds have no meaning here or a single orange flower growing out of the platform (he left you, hang up the phone before he returns to kiss your mouth shut) Knucklebone pressed into the small of my back Step over the unsaid things If he asks say nothing say [circle] yes/no The Fall 00:00 / 01:20 I have clasped your edges so hard they leave grooves in my palms, deep as the grooves of horse-reins beneath the bridges on towpaths wasted with bracken and buddleia. These, and mine, cut across lifelines: a geometric interruption. I cannot document dropping you on a sunlit day, startled by the sudden noise of a narrowboat any more than I can document losing you but the fall happens as if both were inevitable. The first: a drowning of lungs, the plosion of capillaries, a haemorrhage behind your eyelids like a summer storm. The second: a smaller drowning though no less significant, this arcing towards water of hard edges and palm-deep cuts: the only photograph I kept of you after your death. Did you dive in after it? she asks me when I tell her what has happened. I am at a loss to explain, when I shake my head, why I didn’t. It never occurred to me I might be able to save you this time. Flystrike 00:00 / 03:29 Tipping point, the cracked rim of a teacup, your spikes turned inside-out. In my cupped hands you curled, gently, despite your pain. I could sense something was wrong: you shouldn’t have been out in daylight, wobbling down the garden while the dog barked a warning into the rain. It echoed sharp into the bay, and you fell sideways onto the grass as if the sound had hit you. Starry moss, your toes curling, the mud caked around your neck: it looked like a noose. We took you in. You trusted me to hold you and I took you to my chest, brought you close. I could see a single fault-line, a wetted rim, thick with crust. No blood. What lay beneath was invisible to me, but I could smell it. It filled the car when we rushed you in, the dog in the back straining to look under the towel, whining as we punched the co-ordinates for the local vet into the sat nav. You snuffled, pushed all your strength through your soft snout to suckle from the pipette. ‘Drink, little one’ I said, and you did. Your teeth clacked against the plastic and hope surged like a current through my chest. We sped past lavender rocks, the sea blurring between them, silver slices glancing off the windscreen and birds looping ahead of us, clearing the way. The vet uncurled you, a little too roughly. ‘Look,’ he said, and showed me where the skin of you was coming away. The maggots twisted up into the light like strange white roots. ‘We can’t save him,’ he said. ‘Would you like to leave the room?’ ‘No,’ I said. ‘I want to stay.’ Something in my heart kicked out. I held it down, clamped my jaw shut. I wish he had been more gentle with you, wish the needle was not quite so big, that it could have been slipped into a spot that wasn’t under your chin, the whole thing in sight, right under your nose. Your nose, small wet thing that moments ago had sought me out, had tickled my palm as you took the water from me. I wished as the pink liquid flushed through your small body, I could touch you, stroke your spikes, curl you gently back into yourself. Instead, I clutched the towel to my chest. I said, ‘It’s OK little one.’ I said, ‘I’m sorry.’ The nurse snapped off her gloves. The smell was on my hands, in my mouth and ears, under my skin. In the waiting room, a naked dog was striking his cone against the wall. Publishing credits If he asks / Flystrike: written exclusively for iamb The Fall: And Other Poems Share

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