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Sharon Phillips back next the poet Bristolian by birth and upbringing, now living in Otley, West Yorkshire, Sharon Phillips began writing poetry when she retired from a career in education. Her poems have since been published, online and in print, in anthologies and journals ranging from The Bridport Prize Anthology 2019 , Under the Radar and The Dawn Treader to Ink Sweat & Tears and The High Window . Her first pamphlet, Liven Yourself Up , appeared in 2024. the poems Prelapsarian 00:00 / 00:44 He is at his most beautiful. Motown is behind him, he’s too strong to be beaten, his cheekbones are sharp, acne scars all healed. At last he feels good about his face. He looks up with a grin, snaps his fingers to the bass line, pushes off the wall with his foot, leaps, moonwalks, spins, slides. He sings, easy, unforced, the songs that mark a decade. There’s no stopping him now, you’d like to think. The hardest thing about hospital 00:00 / 00:45 it’s not the obs trolley rattling me awake not the overhead light blink-blinking not the bleep of stalled infusion pumps not Rachel in the next bed howling whenever she pisses herself not the weary nurse who tells me these ladies are all quite confused not the maggot in my mind worrying why they’ve put me on this ward not cannulas dreadlocking my arms not the steroids prowling my nerves not my mouth gaping for words not the blotches on my brain scan it’s wanting my mum. Consider After Kim Moore 00:00 / 00:59 the early morning cleaners, who rise at five, who dress in the dark for fear of waking their children, who eat cold toast at the bus stop, who lug buckets and hoovers through empty offices, who wipe fingerprints from photos and neaten toys and mascots, who scrub piss and shit from toilet seats and floors, who fear their hours will be cut, who are desperate for money for food and rent and the gas bill, who wonder what it would be like to have a cushy office job, who sweat under sky blue polyester tabards, whose backs ache, feet throb, whose ankles are swollen, who worry they won’t be home when the kids wake up, who'll do it all again tomorrow. Publishing credits Prelapsarian: exclusive first publication by iamb The Hardest Thing About Hospital: Liven Yourself Up (Yaffle’s Nest)  Consider: Black Nore Review (August 26th 2024)

Radka Thea Otípková back next the poet Though her first language is Czech, Radka Thea Otípková fell in love with English as a young adult. Her poetry has been featured in B O D Y , The North , Moria and Tears in the Fence . In 2017, her pamphlet The Edge of Anything was shortlisted in the Poetry Business International Book and Pamphlet Competition. Her poem Coup de grâce was shortlisted in the Oxford Brookes International Poetry Competition that same year. Thea won the Waltham Forest Poetry Competition in 2019, and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize and the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem. the poems Tut’s Tomb Talks 00:00 / 01:17 I am waiting for you. Part of my wall will need to go to get you in. It will never heal, this is how they'll find me, small, perfunctory, unfit for a king, but I'll hold it all: chariots, thrones, trumpets, perfumes, precious oils, lapis and gold, and apricots, oh, apricots, I'll often imagine them perishing in the dark long after they have gone, I'll recall the odour of lamb changing in strength, from a mere waft to a putrid punch – who'd ever think in cessation there is so much life – no, no eternity's resins and balms can stop the bustle of dying in the jars housing your liver and lungs, or in the muffled echo of your anatomy's final sarcophagus. I'll never miss you. You will never not be with me and when even the deaths have died and there's nothing left but desiccated time, I shall still keep the breathing riddle of you inside your missing heart. Marble 00:00 / 00:45 Trace its veins and swirls. Speak of impurities. Say clay, silt, sand. Say chert. Say guilt. Forgive me. Send the light unstonily deep, let it spill onto its ashen wax. Mramor, marmor, marmo, marmori, go, look for it, find it in any language, any it, any us, any you, any torpor, any suspended hope, close its cold graceful finger in your warm, wet, mortal mouth and wait for it to prune. Coup de grâce 00:00 / 01:08 In the end his body puked him out as if it were only a stomach and a mouth. It didn't let him just slip away. But maybe it matters less than we think. Look at his mother. There she is. No longer tearing at the meat of what remains, but opening the window. The night is there. What can you do but make a simple gesture that might mean anything. Hand on chest. Fingertips on lips. Or just stand however gravity wants you to. The night is launching a skin boat. No prayers are heard. If you lean out a little, you’ll see it too. The night. The moon. The overflowing eye of a fish cooking. Publishing credits Tut's Tomb Talks / Coup de grâce: B O D Y Marble: Tears in the Fence

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

Helen Calcutt back next the poet Helen Calcutt is the author of two volumes of poetry. Her first, Sudden rainfall (2014), was a Poetry Book Society Pamphlet Choice. Helen's second work, Unable Mother , described by Robert Peake as ‘a violent and tender grapple with our cosy notions of motherhood’, appeared in 2018. Helen's poetry, journalism and critical writing have been published widely, and she is the creator and editor of acclaimed poetry anthology Eighty-Four – published in aid of leading suicide prevention charity CALM. Her newest pamphlet will be published in 2020. the poems Pale deer, soft-footed 00:00 / 01:33 The water is silk. She sings to me. The cold wind, the streets, the people flicker and shut off when the water falls, and I am naked within – singing of my dirt, how to know it. My eyes close ... in these few sacred moments when my daughters sleep and my loved one reads about Vikings and flayed skin. The water is like a pattering of milk. I want to stoop, and lick, and taste life again. I ask, did I give too easily today? was I good? baring my throat to the sky, the lit tiles reflect a deer, pale, and soft-footed. I run my fingers down my hair in St Water – I pray to her, choose me flow over, and over, and over me, touch me, heal heal until I am no longer meek or mild and I can run with my sins again. Grief is like a miracle 00:00 / 01:02 like opening your mouth for water, and finding rain. You stand for days outside the body of a silent church. Snow touches the stillness of the windows and you long for their acceptance, a few tears. You tell yourself the door isn’t closed: it’s open and weeping. Like the orange rose that never bloomed all spring then one day in autumn opened atriums of colour. Now all the roses gather and the door is open-armed. People think I am strange touching my lips to the wood, but ice is thawing to love inside my body: I don’t know how else to show my gratitude. Mytilini 00:00 / 01:12 Oldest of Seas, old friend, no one hears you slink back no one hears his own music anymore. Morning, soft heart, warm and unstartable expands from her threads at the earth's edge, unfaithful at last, brushing the ferns the anemone flowers. Light is longing to come home. In other worlds women tie knots in their bodice strings, sing songs, hang flycatchers from the moon. But here, where the sun hums in her socket where searoot and bloodroot insist on their comforting where the fire in the mountain wall torches our hands – like a bead of clear light the sea revolves through morning wind, and recognises us. Publishing credits Pale deer, soft-footed: The London Magazine Grief is like a miracle: Wild Court Mytilini: Sudden rainfall (Perdika Editions) Share

Steve Denehan back next the poet Steve Denehan lives in Ireland with his wife Eimear and daughter Robin. A widely published, award-winning poet, he's the author of two chapbooks and two collections (one of which is forthcoming from Salmon Press). He's been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and Best New Poet. the poems Fists 00:00 / 02:01 It took me forty thousand punches to realise forty thousand too many sure, I landed a few, enough to take me to this ring but he is quick as light and made of iron and his punches his punches come again, and again, and again the fists of my father, my mother, my schoolmates, of God himself the glancing blows, the blows of the children I saw for half an hour last Christmas eve I am winded from two body shots unseen I disguise it but he knows, I look in his eyes, he knows he comes for me and though the ring is an infinite thing I can find no place to hide then, an opening, a tunnel for my right hand and I watch my fist blur toward him and feel the contact rock the columns of his temple and he is dazed and he is mine and his eyes look through me and I call upon that old right hand one last time the hand that signed my title deeds, my wedding certificate my divorce papers the hand that held my babies, that held your face before that first kiss my sledgehammer, my bomb but, it is so heavy now and the fuse won’t light, and then, I know two seconds pass two seconds that will stretch over all my days two seconds when it was all there, another world two seconds when I betray myself, as I always do and so, I wait, with nothing left to get what I deserve and when he comes I do not run, and I am baptised in a flood of fists I fall through the roar of the crowd and am caught by the blanket of childhood the lights above are so bright, and so pure, and just beyond my reach I lie on my back and watch dozens of moths in frenzied compulsion flying head first into the lights again and again, and again Jesus or Rasputin 00:00 / 00:46 I wonder how many times these raindrops have fallen they land on the attic window loud and heavy reminding us that eventually they will win I wonder what these raindrops have fallen on spitfires and lollipops brides and widows endings, beginnings, endings I wonder if these raindrops have fallen on Hitler or Harold Lloyd, Cleopatra or Elvis, you, Jesus or Rasputin the sky is a grey lake pouring itself upon us muddying the garden puddling the drive trapping us, again it is June Plastic Bag 00:00 / 01:03 We stood on the canal bank under a bruise of a sky she was full of questions questions that as usual I couldn’t answer we stared at the fish “What type of fish is that?” “How can you tell which fish are boys and which are girls?” “Why is a swarm of fish called a school?” “How many fish are there?” I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know she pointed at a plastic bag in the water near the far bank “Is that a jellyfish?” I did know I told her that she was a silly monkey that it was just a plastic bag that jellyfish would never be in a canal only in the sea in saltwater she was quiet for a moment “Would jellyfishes like canals?” “Why is there salt in the sea?” “Will there ever be salt in the canal?” “Who put that plastic bag there?” I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know Publishing credits Fists: The Irish Times Winner of the Hennessy New Irish Writing 2019 Jesus or Rasputin: Miles of Sky Above Us, Miles of Earth Below (Cajun Mutt Press) Plastic Bag: exclusive first publication by iamb Share

Marcelle Newbold back next the poet Winner of Cardiff's Poetry in the Arcades Competition 2020, Marcelle Newbold has had her poetry, with its themes and explorations of place and inheritance, published in various online and print magazines – most recently, anthologies from Black Bough Poetry and Indigo Dreams Publishing. Managing editor of Rare Swan Press, Marcelle is also poetry editor for Nightingale & Sparrow. the poems Weeping Willow 00:00 / 00:58 The boy wanted to know so they embraced. Her bark softened to his apples and knobbles, less agitated now her tendril jewels dripped. She did not answer. Although her roots sang again, again and a leaf, perfect in its death, kissed frigid ripples to life. They whispered soundless love: conceived sinew; osmosis; their thirst. Dreamt indigo sweet blooms, beds of white, held solace in their skins. He knew: the full moon flooded her, bled potential. Death score times score, now a feast for the roses, evidence of a scheme. She knew: memory as a trick, there’s only now. So they bathe, drink, exert, worship – keep not to themselves, and believe in divine cultivation. Wassailing Spirits 00:00 / 00:31 I idle under the apple tree – warped limbs, damp smell of green, dormant blooms. Eventually they come: spoon and saucepan clanks; grins and ciders, bright toes cajole, blunt fingers creak, sweet hearts enjoy the blush of dusk. And they greet me. They sing & dance & racket around, voices conjure bounty, enchant praise, nurture the new. Moving On 00:00 / 01:09 And that’s when I knew those seagulls had lied – my then-smooth face turned to the sea, breeze pulling wetness from the sky and our eyes, my summer frocked legs goose-pimpled — hand in family hand we sat on my father’s favourite gorse-cling bench, saying goodbye, as his urn carefully capsized. Those seagulls enjoyed the bleak lifting. Beaks yellow, blood spot. Bellies chip full. Sky blackened wing tips gleaming. They mocked: no return . For here, now, my daughter sits, serenely wrapped in orange lifejacket, cinnamon bun in willing chubby hand — licking icing streaks, selecting raisins, one by one, occasionally releasing a blown blond strand from sticky lips. The sea churns white crests, we heave and jolt, the boat cradled through mud-heavy waves, our sails sheeted tight. Publishing credits Wassailing Spirits: Black Bough Poetry (Christmas Edition 2021) Weeping willow: Dear Dylan: An anthology after Dylan Thomas (Indigo Dreams Publishing) Moving on: exclusive first publication by iamb

Jude Marr back next the poet The Pushcart Prize-nominated non-binary poet Jude Marr (they/them) is the author of the poetry collection We Know Each Other By Our Wounds . Their work has appeared in many magazines in the US, the UK and worldwide. After ten years of living, learning and teaching in the US, Jude is now back in Britain working as a freelance editor and writing coach. They're looking forward to expanding their horizons on the UK poetry scene. the poems Live from the Billionaire Philanthropists’ Banquet 00:00 / 02:06 at this false table appetite is not loss: love cocoons blame while self- proclaimed good servants shave bottom lines and spin kaleidoscopes before the famished (slivered glass as thought salad) as well-tended hands offer bread to shrinking, wrinkled bodies the would-be unhinge their hearts, still filthy from a dream of delights meanwhile children, graveyard wraiths, stuff restructured bread into unlined mouths: their hands hang angular: their eye-skeletons are sockets of birds who sing, featherless in the graveyard of power-hungry minds, dark famine eats air: rainfall’s undelivered: a mess of struts rises around barred gold— three meals feed expectations: a bountiful garden, bread without errors, heart-table dreams and we say, let’s eat expensive: grind night like we grind coffee: remind the pot that we are appetite: but what terror of the rambling heart, rock-fraught and filthy, empties a child’s hand without touching? graveyard children make our sold-out hearts raw: we draw our hands from their hunger: we make coffee without touching the world. Solitary 00:00 / 01:07 spider on a cold expanse of glass: your padded claws, tiny to the human eye, never misstep: your leg-hairs hear the beat of winter’s wings— find my window’s crack and crawl in: my home’s dark corners do not hide a broom: make my room your own: spin filaments as sanctuary, silk strong enough to catch the light— cold-blooded spider: I know you do not fear winter’s beak: nature has made you predator and prey: stay of execution is my offering: all I seek is fractal consolation from the corner of my eye. Silence Will Not Save Us 00:00 / 01:14 word-heat rises, carbon-oxidised, as oily lies combust: on city streets we are still breathing, just: our children trusted us— masks act as word-catchers, trapping holy lies as halitosis, drowning saviour fantasies in spit: still, the unmasked spew their shit— jugglers, jousters, clowns conjure witty lies to please a crowd: word games to distract: even mimes may misdirect— in my silent room, I pass my cup from one hand to the other: I am the loner I declaim, my wasted words already ash— in my room, silent, I smell smoke. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Elizabeth M Castillo back next the poet British-Mauritian poet Elizabeth M Castillo is a writer, indie press promoter, and two-time nominee for The Pushcart Prize. Her writing reflects the various countries and cultures she grew up in and with – exploring themes of race, ethnicity, woman/motherhood, language, love, loss and grief (often with a dash of magical realism). Published widely in the UK, USA, Australia, Mexico and the Middle East, Elizabeth has bilingual debut collection Cajoncito: Poems on Love, Loss, y Otras Locuras to her name. She'll add debut chapbook Not Quite an Ocean in December 2022. the poems Ghosts 00:00 / 00:45 I tell my children there are no ghosts in this house. I press a kiss into their cheeks and foreheads and leave them to the peaceable mercy of sleep. No ghosts, I say. Except the one that lives in the stain on the bathroom floor. The lady that swirls around the bottom of your mother’s teacup, in amongst the sediment. The ones you plastered into the walls. No ghosts, except the one that lies in bed between us. The one hidden beneath the flowers in the garden. The two I folded between the pages of my passport. The one that stares back at me from the bathroom mirror when I brush my teeth at night. Zot dir, or a short history of Mauritius 00:00 / 01:47 Ou koné ki zot dir? So many things mon tann zot dir they say / they say the dutchman came / he ate the dodo / curious bird / stupid bird / zot dir independence will be won by the wits of the indian / papi inn dir / nu bizin alé / nu bizin get out / zot dir Le Père de la Nation has the ear of the queen / they say / things are better in Australia / In UK / In SA they don’t say créole zot dir coloured / Mo matante inn allé last year / 65 / before the riots start / labas tou prop / she said / labas seulman ena bon dimoun / nice people / they say / zot inn met bann lekor / under the mountain / enba la ter / they say / Mauritius is still the star of the indian ocean / they say parti socialis pu sauv nu zile / zot dir / ten thousand rupees / c’est rien / they say / sorti la! / sorti la! / kifer Kaya pann res trankil ? / they say / the hungry tourist / come down / devoured our coastline / the south / the east / is all we have left / Ramgoolam / they say / has lined his own pockets / they say it once / they say / look to the horizon / thick and black / we blame Japan / zot dir / the island is retracting / inwards / they say / nu zil pé vinn bien gran / no more beaches / no fish / ban pecheur / zot disan / has pooled down by the river’s mouth / Jugnauth / zot dir / his hands live under the table / so bann kamrad / their coffers are full / faratha from six / to 25 rupees / they say / we have no language / they say if bis don’t kill you / hopital will / they say / pa kozé / stop saying all the things we saying / res trankil / dernié fwa kiken in kozé / so disan / his blood / it runs beneath the mountains / out beyond the reef / into the sea / that you left behind / The Other Woman 00:00 / 02:16 The sun has set, and at this hour, shadows hang between the daylight and the trees. There, the sudden scent of blood, scent of man , carries to me on the breeze, the wind howling through, falls silent at my feet: 'good hunting, milady,' it whispers, then retreats. There is a darkness in this forest, an end that rivals death itself, in the mist about my ankles. Even lizards know they would do well to hide inside their hovels, and underground. Dirt crunches beneath. Treacherous soil! Leaves plunge downwards, to be eaten by the earth. The naked trees testify: this forest is deadly, and will swallow you whole. I hear footsteps racing, running, in thundering lockstep. Flash of black. Flash of teeth. There are dangerous games afoot! Surely it’s time to turn back. Surely it’s time to go home. I am well beyond my borders now. She can’t catch me, she can’t catch me, here, where I lurk and linger on the periphery just out of sight, just beyond her mind’s eye. She knows I am here, her veins course with rage, and vengeance. But she does not know where. She is death. She is danger. But the line has been crossed, the threat prowls within her marked territory. She may think I have lost, but this no longer bears any resemblance to a fair fight. No, now two legs, not enough. I drop down onto four, draw strength from the thousand invisible heartbeats, the lifeblood, the microbiome of the forest floor. There is fear, and some fury, encrusted under each hungry claw. The hunt smells of my father, champion long before I had ever heard of this sport, and I wonder: would he be proud? There is sweat at my temples, and my wrists are bound to stop them from trembling. I step, crabways, low and feral, without shadow or sound. Your ears twitch and you shudder, your neck craning to see what you and I must learn the hard way: the deadliest thing in here is me. Publishing credits Ghosts / Zot dir, or a short history of Mauritius: exclusive first publication by iamb The Other Woman: Glean & Graft / Descent (Fresher Publishing) Shortlisted for the 2021 Bournemouth Writing Poetry Prize

Ilisha Thiru Purcell back next the poet A poet from Newcastle upon Tyne, and one of three to be chosen for the inaugural Poets of Colour Incubator 2023-2024 , Ilisha Thiru Purcell was previously a Young Creative Associate with New Writing North . She performed at the 2023 Newcastle Poetry Festival, and is part of the group Brown Girls Write . Ilisha's work has appeared in Butcher’s Dog and the Bi+ Lines Anthology , and she was shortlisted for Nine Arches Press' Primers: Volume Seven . the poems Coast | 00:00 / 00:51 I stand before the north sea and think that a coast | is a lie. I look for the definitive | separating the sea from the shore, water from land, wet from dry. Where is the cartoon | you see in children’s books dividing the yellow from the blue? I search for a | or a _ or even a ---- telling us what is ours and theirs, but all there is is negotiation between the land and the sea. Haven’t you seen a chunk of cliff plunge into the sea toes pointed? Or how the water takes larger chunks out of the sand, ignoring the white |s on a map saying stay ? Germination 00:00 / 01:05 My shadow strikes out from my body/ as if I'm announcing that now is the time the time is now/ I have been kept in time and now I am the keeper of it/ Meeting my own gaze/ I expand like the lungs of the city I rest my feet upon/ I smile a wry smile/ a 'you can’t even imagine' smile/ A man on a child’s bike asked me where I got it from/ this crescent of grapefruit flesh/ and I replied my mother/ My mum/ who shines brightest in a sea of saris/ who circles my thumb with her forefinger/ like a planet in orbit/ My mum/ dressed in black, absorbing everything, is everything/ a river running to and from everything/ If these images could talk they would tell you/ that there is more than one way to pray/ more than one way to bless a journey/ Dust to Dawn 00:00 / 00:37 The last night I spent alone I couldn’t remember ever seeing daylight and all that came from my mouth was dust. This time I beat back the thoughts like dust off a rug, sank into this new shade of alone. I found within myself a light. Soon I will not need lamplight to protect me from the parts of my mind that have collected dust, I will be content and unafraid alone. Only alone can I watch the dust of my past dance in dawn’s light. Publishing credits Coast |: Bi+ Lines – An Anthology of Contemporary Bi+ Poets (Fourteen Poems) Germination: Sanctuary – Brown Girls Write Anthology (New Writing North) Dust to Dawn: exclusive first publication by iamb

Warrick Wynne back next the poet With three published books to his name, Australian poet Warrick Wynne has had his poetry featured in various Australian and international magazines and journals, including Walleah Press and Varuna, The Writers House Blog . Warrick lives and writes on the Mornington Peninsula, south of Melbourne. His most recent collection is The State of the Rivers and Streams . the poems Hands 00:00 / 00:39 Level 3 is 'Hands': the swathed palm, the unhinged fist, the fingers fractured black or twisted, suspended in slings wrapped in gauze. We all face each other mute as moons. This is what happens when pressure is applied against the grain, this is the flaw in the great architecture what a piece of work ... how easy it is to break this hold we have on things, we can hardly grasp it. Spider Crab 00:00 / 01:08 Above the Victorian Fish poster, (vivid illustrations of the edible denizens of the deep) a white spider crab mounted on a wooden board pinned to the wall as it was in my childhood. I mean, this exact crab, legs now blackening with age was in a (different) fish and chip shop of my youth, brought here, no doubt, with the goods and chattels from some former enterprise, and I recognise it: one giant claw open wide to snap, the other retracted shy, evasive punch and counter-punch. At Hector's Seafood now, the staff wear light blue tops emblazoned with a yellow marlin rising from a vividly tropical sea. I wait for my flake below fading ivory claws, one outrageously enlarged, one curled inward gently like an invitation, or an imploring gesture to the past. At the edge For Harriet 00:00 / 00:27 We walk to the edge of the bay drawn, it seems, to this great dish where you played and swam and now, stand here, with your own baby strapped to you. Could anything be stranger? the three of us beside the sea, the submerged beach where you played a stone wall, the city in the distance whatever next? Publishing credits Hands: The Best Australian Poems 2013 (Black Inc.) Spider Crab: exclusive first publication by iamb At the edge: Love the Words Anthology 2022 (Infinity Books)

Susie Campbell back next the poet Susie Campbell's poems have appeared in many UK and international journals, visual poetry anthologies and exhibitions. Currently studying for a practice-based poetry PhD at Oxford Brookes University, Susie is the author of six poetry pamphlets – I return to you , Tenter and Enclosures being her three most recent. Her newest work, The Sleeping Place , will be published by Guillemot Press in 2023. the poems A Deictic Miracle, This Boxwood Prayer Nut Exhibit: Waddesdon Bequest, British Museum 00:00 / 01:41 To hold and be held, an uncracked walnut, a little earth. There is something strange about this richness, growing into its own boundaries, rank and subtle as a hunted creature. Time has become a strongbox of interlocking branches. Global complexities, plumbed with pipelines of gold, are reduced to wafer-thin discs, slotted one into the other, light bevelled into a compound syntax of mortise and tenon. An articulation of honest wood, it holds the shape and hard veins of the forest by fitting it to the palm: an armillary sphere circling an internal sun, opened by flicking up a tiny hinge secured on its pin. Ahead, glimmering through a tiny screen, carved and fretted to this terrestrial cage, a thimble saint with his trembling hound bows before the stag. Kneeling here, prayer beads in hand, an intricate system of shadow blows from antler and slender branch to form the cross, thorn-sized and lifted to the wooden sky, as outside bends to imitate this reconciliation. if magic 00:00 / 01:24 if such ordinary box jar tin or burlap and if tested unbought night finds an opening past neighbours fought for squeaking and scratched open by tiny razor- sharp and left beyond and further how the night is done with moss and damp and squelch and how quickly attaching themselves to dark are wet marbles if tied up in a pouch and with mercy new-opened and sticky and still smelling of sleep as sap is and here a soft clink of word against word could be taken for protection a charm new-minted from darkness against theirs ours some dispensable such brittle claims across this globe of glass could be soothed or silenced if won by this as talisman Hush 00:00 / 01:43 A hill beneath and a filled-in door. This bench, its damp wooden flowers. A dead tree stripped clean and time fucking stops. You reach a corner of you are there. You are there. An edge of grief you can park in an empty tongue. The fields are empty. That’s near enough. You expect you have come here to honour the dead. An open field looks like battlefield words: gone, absent, missing. You come to hold it in memory but it becomes spongy underfoot. You do not mean to remember her, the time you brought her here. A list in a notebook of useful words: Blank Nil Null Hush-hush Ssh Shush Sodden ground but your body remembers so you try to follow even as it is hardening and solidifying, becomes a whole, no longer possible to enter nor be held by it. Nil. Null. Hush. Ssh. Shush. You cannot enter nor explore its spaces nor the dead in their apophatic silence that gap in words. Listen. Hush. Publishing credits A Deictic Miracle, This Boxwood Prayer Nut: Shearsman Magazine (125/126 – Autumn/Winter) if magic: Stride Magazine (December 2021) Hush: Tenter (Guillemot Press)

Mark Antony Owen back next the poet Syllabic poet Mark Antony Owen writes exclusively in nine original, self-created forms. His work centres on that world where the rural bleeds into the suburban: a world he calls ‘subrural’. Mark is the author of digital-only poetry project Subruria , as well as the creator, curator and publisher of online poetry journals iamb and After... the poems Tom & Jerry & me & you 00:00 / 00:57 I wish you had known your great-grandfather, my granddad, stubbed out by thirty years of smoking and lying about it. Anyway, he loved Tom & Jerry. I remember his cigarette wheeze; how he’d laugh at the pair and fold in two whenever Tom got smashed in the face. He fought in a war (Granddad, not Tom). Actually, Tom did fight a war: your great-grandfather’s name was Thomas – ‘TOM!’, as your great-grandmother reduced him. Jerry did terrible things to Tom. There are war stories of him, punching through doors to escape the memories of men he served with, men he saw killed. Yet the Tom I knew was a pussycat. Muntjac 00:00 / 00:36 A dog escaped from its yard, straying from the bounded woods, you drop like a ripened fruit – slip from your disguise of fog to reveal the awkward wedge of you, disrobed and alert. The sprung trap of your leaping; desperate kick at the wire wall that separates our worlds. You are willing me to freeze, be you, and instinctively, my muscles seize with your fear. A designated public place 00:00 / 01:03 You are in a designated public place, watching a thin stegosaurus of bunting get battered by the wind. The Jubilee beds, crowned by grey roses; the never-ending rain. This time of year there would normally be stalls, bouncy castles, young mothers wiping picnics from the faces of toddlers. Look up and you might see swifts, winding invisible maypole streamers round the shifting contrail of a jet. Today, swings unswung, slick, unclimbable frames. You are in a designated public place, yet you’ve never felt more private in your life. Come again when the bins are dizzy with wasps and the bandstand buzzes with hits you can hum – before that old gaoler winter chains the gates. Somehow a honey bee 00:00 / 00:24 Somehow a honey bee made it into the house. All the windows locked, doors shut. Found it could pass through panes with the ease of birdsong; knew no structure would bar the way to one so vital. Or had been here, all night. Publishing credits All poems: Subruria (Release Two) Tom & Jerry & me & you / Somehow a honey bee: exclusive first publication by iamb Muntjac / A designated public place: Places of Poetry Share

Rishi Dastidar back next the poet A poem from Rishi Dastidar’s debut Ticker-tape was included in The Forward Book of Poetry 2018 . A pamphlet, the break of a wave , was published by Offord Road Books in 2019, and in the same year, Rishi edited The Craft: A Guide to Making Poetry Happen in the 21st Century for Nine Arches Press. His second collection, Saffron Jack , will be published in the UK in March 2020, also by Nine Arches Press. the poems A leopard parses his concern 00:00 / 01:57 1. I am concerned about Claudia Cardinale. 2. By ‘concerned’ I mean ‘in lust with’. 3. By ‘in lust with’ I mean ‘I sigh for’. 4. By ‘I sigh for’ I mean ‘my eyes are hungry for her when she appears on screen’. 5. By ‘hungry’ I mean ‘revel in her’. 6. By ‘revel’ I mean ‘enjoy’. 7. By ‘enjoy’ I mean ‘endure’. 8. By ‘endure’ I mean ‘wait in the hope that she might, like a god, pick me out to be noticed, even though I have done nothing noticeable’. 9. By ‘pick me out’ I mean ‘not actually come near me lest my reserves of charm desert me at a highly inopportune moment’. 10. By ‘not actually come near me’ I mean ‘actually come near me, preferably in a darkened Neapolitan hotel room’. 11. By ‘darkened’ I mean ‘the presence of Lampedusa will be evident; he will be sitting in a green damask armchair, his walking stick tapping out the beat of a fugue’. 12. By ‘fugue’ I mean ‘a Morse code translation of his most famous quote’. 13. By ‘quote’ I mean ‘the only appropriate approach to living’. 14. By ‘living’ I mean ‘love’. In my pocket 00:00 / 00:26 In my pocket is the moment I woke up with you stroking my left bicep, gentle alarm clock; a well-practiced image of intimacy from a red-eye’s soon-again stranger. But it isn’t; time and touch leave nothing apart from a memory. Neptune's concrete crash helmet 00:00 / 01:26 I rest my head for a moment on the cool concrete wall of the art gallery and in its undulations I can feel the past trying to break out of its unexpected vertical tomb. I could rub the back of my head into one of the grooves, wear it away, erode it imperceptibly over a day’s eon until I could place my head right back into the crevasse, a temporary sarcophagus, an extra heavy duty crash helmet. This of course might be an over-reaction to the images I’ve just seen: a world melting, gangsters wearing dresses and razor’d scars of silver stars, lakes of petrol waiting for paper boats to be sailed upon them, as if Neptune had said yes to a sponsorship deal from [insert oil company name here] but only lately realised that the proposed replacement for a rapidly-drying Aral Sea might not have been everything promised in the brochure. Caveat emptor, as we all should have said in 1764 when Hargreaves spun Jenny, but how could any of us know that coal + steam would equal not just movement but the end? I might stay in here, it keeps my head cool. Publishing credits A leopard parses his concern: The Compass In my pocket: the break of a wave (Offord Road Books) Neptune’s concrete crash helmet: Magma Issue 72 Share

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