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Poet Natalie Ann Holborow reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Natalie Ann Holborow back next the poet Natalie Ann Holborow is a writer, digital content specialist and marathon-runner. She won both the Terry Hetherington Award and Robin Reeves Prize in 2015, and has been shortlisted and commended for various other awards including the Bridport Prize, The Poetry Society’s National Poetry Competition, and the Gregory O'Donoghue International Poetry Prize. Her debut collection, And Suddenly You Find Yourself (Parthian, 2017) was launched at the Kolkata International Book Festival and was listed as one of Wales Arts Review's Best of 2017. Her second collection, Small, will be published by Parthian in 2020. the poems Andromache 00:00 / 01:30 Assume I am wearing black. Assume I have swathed myself in the hollow shades of his bruised knees, dust-clogged and sticky, assume I am leaching away with him. The tracks of his belly scar the dirt. Does anyone ask for his wife, hair dripping over the Trojan walls, towering ten feet over the beetled men below, gleaming up and blinking through her? Assume the wind blew me over the edge of the wall, quiet and pale as salt. Hear me say nothing at all. See these living hands. Hear the smack of my palms against stone, blood coiling its way to my heart, bind me tough as a horseman’s rope. Blow my bones to polished pipes they play when great men fall. For me, no tune at all if I should choose to stagger up, sway on broken toes, burst my lungs screaming for the dead man’s bones with our only child tumbling over crumbling stone in a gasp of blood and milk. When Hector cracked his back behind the chariot, when the bruises flowered blue, when our only baby spiralled like sycamore, the Gods, I felt it too – I called Astayanax, I called Hector. Who called Andromache? Who? Black Dog I am in that temper that if I were under water I would scarcely kick to come to the top. ~ John Keats ~ 00:00 / 01:31 He woke me just this morning, nose pushed to my sleepy cheek, breath shuttling down my cool neck: my faithful black dog. His tail clubbed me all shades of violet. The sun sawed me in half. He follows me to the kitchen. Here he comes, his canine shape gleaming like polished jet. I stoop over my coffee, hiss at him to go. My mouth lands on his drooping ear but the stupid dog is deaf; his dumb tongue a dripping slab searching my hand like a rodent. When milk won’t do, he loves the sting of salt. He nuzzles the lid of my eye. Wherever I go, he follows. At office desks, restaurant booths, hunched in the seat of a taxi, my faithful dog sniffs out my bones. When lovers come, he turns possessive. I wriggle free from their fingers, stop them kissing the sides of my jaw. They leave when I talk to the papered wall. I grieve when their footsteps have died. I go to bed at odd hours to watch the small pulse of blue time. When sleep stands me up for the zero moon, the dog strikes me down with his paw. Smoke Signals 00:00 / 00:55 We grew apart in inches, not miles. The house hummed, an empty theatre, our mother pushing the vacuum between our silence. Hacking clots of broken words, your lungs drained themselves into your pillows, fists thumping softly until you sucked in again, stained your breath from a chilly window. Where are you – I knuckled the question into the wall which dragged on between us, searched with my palms for your warmth. A blank inch pulled you away, and I listened to those hisses, those furious sobs, heard the weight of them bending your spine. The vacuum tumbled to a stop. You stopped hissing, opened your window, blew quiet smoke across mine. Publishing credits Andromache: Southword Journal Black Dog and Smoke Signals: And Suddenly You Find Yourself (Parthian Books) Black Dog also appeared in The Stinging Fly Share

Poet Christina Thatcher reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Christina Thatcher back next the poet Christina Thatcher is a Creative Writing Lecturer at Cardiff Metropolitan University. She keeps busy off campus as Poetry Editor for The Cardiff Review , a tutor for the Poetry School , and a member of the Literature Wales Management Board . Her creative work has featured in over 50 literary magazines, and she's published two poetry collections with Parthian Books: More than you were and How to Carry Fire . the poems Becoming an Astronaut 00:00 / 01:25 Brother, if you want to become an astronaut you must first earn a degree in engineering, science, or mathematics. This will take four years or more. After this you can choose: become a pilot, join the military, complete a PhD or recognize you exceed the height requirement (147 centimeters) and decide this is enough to try. Astronauts must then complete technical courses in meteorology and geology. You must learn to scuba dive, to survive in the open ocean, tread water for hours. You must fly a T-38 Talon Jet, learn Russian. You must receive medical training. You must accept the principles of microgravity. You must simulate space walks at the Neutral Buoyancy Laboratory. You must repair and operate space vehicles. You must relearn how to move objects in a frictionless world. You must trust your mentors and rehearse your chosen mission. You must embrace fear but understand, too, that you are ready: you have been training for this since the first day you picked up a needle and took yourself to the moon. Detox Passage after William Brewer 00:00 / 01:21 You find spoons everywhere: under kitchen cabinets, inside comforters, poking through boxer briefs. Yesterday, you sat on the sofa and discovered spoons had replaced stuffing. You cut open cushions, heaved out hundreds. This is a clearing process. You dream only of metal. The pastor tells you: This is normal. You must simply let go of the spoons. You accept this but the sink still fills up with silver. The shower spits sterling. Rid yourself of temptation, my son. The pastor has our father’s blue-green eyes. You listen and nod: throw out every spoon in the house. You tell the pastor you can do it. You believe you can do it. God is with you, my son. The jerks in your arms and teeth begin to go. All you had to do was rid yourself of temptation. You thank God for new strength, bow your head to pray for more good, more clean, but every time you close your eyes you see that silver curve and linger. Hail 00:00 / 00:48 If stones were being thrown it would be better, at least then there’d be mystery and motive. Who did this— leapt into our high-walled garden at 4am with an arsenal of rocks? Instead I think it is a sign: thunder, high winds, rain and then a battering on the conservatory roof, our puffy-tailed cat running from the room, up-ending sleep. Like last year’s oak which rotted and fell, claimed a car in the office parking lot just as your body was carried like a grain sack to the barn— I fear this hail is exclaiming it happened: you finally let go of your life. Publishing credits Becoming an Astronaut: North American Review Detox Passage: commended in the 2019 Battered Moons Poetry Competition Hail: exclusive first publication by iamb Share

Poet Rae Howells reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Rae Howells back next the poet Rae Howells is a poet and journalist from Swansea, UK. She's won both the Welsh International and The Rialto poetry competitions, and her work has featured in a wide range of journals including Magma , The Rialto and Poetry Wales . Rae's poetry has recently appeared in anthologies including The Result is What You See Today and A470: Poems for the Road , in which she also translated her poem into Welsh. She was one of ten poets selected for a digital residency and exchange between Wales and Vietnam, resulting in the collaborative trilingual multi-media showcase, U O | suo . Rae co-authored the pamphlet Bloom and Bones with Jean James, and her collection, The language of bees , is out in 2022. the poems Merchant Vessel Defoe, 1941 00:00 / 01:51 Moon nights were the worst like being on a ruddy stage with the spotlight shining in your eyes the audience somewhere down there in the oily stalls beneath your feet you couldn’t look them in the eye but they saw you all right unblinking periscopes with the waves clapping. we’d clank across the water a band a moving factory waves riddling on the rivets and the machine of the ocean grinding they knew exactly where we were of course they did we were the great flywheel rattling over and they, iron whales, waiting in the tide’s deep belt. So we kept our backs to Brazil and breathed our hope to Swansea. We were bananas tucked in our skins sweating in boxes in the tin stomach of the hull our hands worrying black spiders in our sleep I couldn’t swim a stroke y’know kept my steel helmet on so I could drown the quicker I hated the watch all that starless black stretching out like a long ear listening our convoy was the world we could have been the only people alive the others wavering candles alongside lamps and smoke the cigarette ends flaring and then – BANG! you always saw the white flash of death before you heard the whump of it before you retched at the cordite stink chlorine fire and oil burning on saltwater and the shouts of tiny men flung into the moonroad you couldn’t help but wonder when your turn would come I’ve still got my medals somewhere, y’know, tucked up in a tin box round as faces. The swing 00:00 / 02:02 Six years on but still, sometimes, I wake and find you in the dawn, the woman from the mother-and-baby group, pushing the swing, still there, in that playground – do you remember? both of us in the park: your older daughter is straddled into the safety swing, her legs flying up towards the sun as she leaves you and comes back, leaves you, and comes back and I am with you, the wind insisting itself into everything, the row of boats along the foreshore with their metalwork ringing, crying out, my own baby snug in the hull of her pram, and her small, reliable, heart working, winging in its chest so that when I gull myself next to you – squawking too noisily about motherhood – I almost miss your daughter’s eyes, locked onto you, airborne tight, as she reluctantly leaves you, and leaves you, a series of small griefs, her swoop, her snag of delight, each time caught uncertainly in that belly-drop moment between soaring joy and parting. I was too slow to notice you were a cracked egg, albumen leaking out of you, the way you forced yourself to push the swing away, willed your muscles to obey, each push a wrench of the heart. I presumed you had simply left your baby boy with your mother. But of course, there are your daughter’s eyes, fixed on you as you slowly implode – you, with your heart strung up on a pendulum – transfixed, watching you caught in that terrible moment between: oscillating, flying away, hands outstretched for the miraculous return. The winter-king 00:00 / 00:52 little-word bird little wren feathered lung only built for singing purifying freezing air through a feather ball chitter chatter piper little wren little brownleaf keeneye built for singing round like a minim little wren pink wire feet gripping winter’s branches holding on to cold little bird only built to pipe built to whistle keeneye watching snow fall crowning the holly little thornbeak feathered bauble hanging on the pine only built to sing turning cold air into arias too quick for the ice to catch little keeneye raised eyebrow jingling the dead leaf bells surely too small to be – but they say you’re the winter-king only you can sing us into light Publishing credits Merchant Vessel Defoe, 1941: Magma Issue 74 The Swing: Please Give Me Your Heart to Hold Longlisted for the Winchester Poetry Prize 2019 The winter-king: The Rialto Winner of The Rialto Nature Poetry Competition 2018 Share

Poet Scott Elder reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Scott Elder back next the poet Scott Elder’s work has been widely published in the UK, Ireland and elsewhere – his poetry having been placed or commended in numerous competitions in England since 2016. Breaking Away , his debut pamphlet, was published by Poetry Salzburg, while his collection Part of the Dark was published by Dempsey & Windle. A second collection, My Hotel, is due out from Salmon Poetry in 2023. the poems Dieppe 00:00 / 00:36 A quarter past two and you wondered if your body were a breeze or a breath of moonlight, if your children drew on the tide in the harbour or the dew-covered garden in their dream work. They lay like feathers in a single bed. And you, at once the lady in the window and the woman moving down the cobblestone lane to a pier beyond the bulwarks and pilings, blending, step upon step, your own colour and form into that nightscape. Here and Again After the song The Here And After by Jun Miyake 00:00 / 00:52 Half-sliced a lily on the table petals burning white on white there’s no saying who’s under that skin salt spray spindrift a taste of rust a drop of blood just name it it’s there a knife-slit away not waiting for someone to whisper come alive come alive instinctively twisting back to spawn to begin again the incantation the ragged waltz half-here half-gone you touch your lips to a lily’s wound this is sorrow it murmurs the pain is gone The Man 00:00 / 00:53 It’s only a dream but keeps coming back a highway ticking off concrete slabs the man steps in three saplings in his fist four thousand miles from Casablanca banyan trees a forest in his sack he hasn’t smiled for a decade do you know the way to Casablanca I ask he tries to speak he rounds his lips then something heavy falls this way I crumble to earth snowflakes cover my broken limbs he tells me to listen to the motor’s hum: toora loora looral snowflakes cover my eyes toora loora looral I try to smile Publishing credits Dieppe: Coffee-House Poetry Runner-up in the 2016 Troubadour Poetry Prize Here and Again / The Man: High Window Journal (Issue 12) Share

Poet Zelda Chappel reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Zelda Chappel back next the poet Zelda Chappel's first collection, The Girl in the Dog-tooth Coat , was published by Bare Fiction Press in 2015. Her work has also appeared in a number of journals, anthologies and collaborative projects online and in print. Formerly the Editorial Curator of the now defunct Elbow Room mixed arts journal, Zelda continues to work as a creative mentor and workshop facilitator. She won the National Poetry Library's Battered Moons in 2014 , and has been commended in a number of other competitions. the poems PTSD season 00:00 / 00:42 It is at the most inopportune of moments I am caught remembering the pressures of lip on lip & needing the salt of something to savour it, remembering there is a sea & it is ravenous for gritty light & bare skinned sky, all vulnerable & daring it’s delicious & blasphemous to think of what I wasn’t, what it was, what failures I wore instead of you I was sinking still gladly taking on water, unknowing This time of year 00:00 / 00:50 they’re out pushing leaflets through the doors again asking if we left our baby at St Peters if we know who did and it gets me every time I want to confess I left my baby in a chapel too once but she had already left me on Skype we joke about time travel me six hours ahead and you ask for no spoilers so I tell you a have a new desk plant that I called her Callie that there’s a delay on the line and I can hear myself and it’s strange I ask if you’re coming back soon you don’t know your aunt survives another season and no one thought she would Bad air 00:00 / 01:07 and it was in this place I got caught growing light-sick weed’s damp smell a bitter vexation, sweet urine stench a warning in the alley we take every time this is the beginning of the line and the end and the light is tight as a lime, under-grown between my lives, bad air is a grievance I can’t settle this is the beginning of the line and the end and I mutter our griefs constantly, solitude a scream in a fist kept closed, the beginning of the line, the end and water absorbs everything or simply unmakes what we made beginning, the line, the end is tether and death gets proved in our kneading so hard I am breaking, breaking this beginning, end Publishing credits PTSD season: exclusive first publication by iamb This time of year: The Interpreter's House (Issue 72) Bad air: Luminous, Defiant (Listen Softly Press) Share

Poet Georgia Hilton reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Georgia Hilton back next the poet Georgia Hilton is a poet and fiction writer originally from Ireland who lives now in Winchester, England. In 2018, her poem Dark-Haired Hilda Replies to Patrick Kavanagh was joint winner of the Brian Dempsey Memorial Prize – her debut pamphlet, I went up the lane quite cheerful , being published by Dempsey & Windle that same year. Georgia’s first collection, Swing , is also published by Dempsey & Windle. the poems Dark-Haired Hilda Replies to Patrick Kavanagh 00:00 / 01:26 On Raglan Road I saw you first a dishevelled man with heavy black-framed glasses. So severe you looked but you had a wound that made you beautiful. After we talked that first day, I dreamt of you. You were walking towards me very fast and purposeful with an intent that might have been mistaken for malice, had I not loved you. I abandoned caution at first. But my father gave me a great gift when he said to me, Hilda, you cannot eat words and air, so I became a doctor and married the engineer. But not before I had given you poems with your own name in them, given you my youth. Let you open the catch to a window in my mind, thinking I would fly, but you had me chained to a pedestal. I, no marble idol, just a flesh and blood woman. And you were always an awful man for the drink, you said so yourself, Patrick. Oh to think I might have been one of those sorry women who follow their husbands to the pub screaming for them to come home before they spend the rest of the housekeeping. I might be a creature made of clay, Patrick, in fact, I’m sure I am, but you have a brass neck calling yourself an angel. Cinderella 00:00 / 01:19 If I were to slip into the river, it would not be at Poor Man’s Kilkee, where teenagers and vagrants take their ease with cans of lager. Nor would it be on O’Callaghan’s Strand, where the grey silt is deep, deep and a dozen swans are on the slipway. Nor would I make a dramatic leap off Sarsfield Bridge by the boat club, where an indecisive light flickers over the martyrs of 1916. No – I would choose this stretch, just downstream of the Curraghower with views of King John’s Castle and Thomond Bridge. By day the seagulls swoop and dive, swans fight the estuary current, and you can see the hills of Clare beyond the bend of the river at the Island Field. But by night my eyes are drawn only to the water – the roiling inky black inviting me to shed my history, surrender my skin. The old stone steps are there, I would not need to climb or jump but simply descend like a debutante – keeping both shoes on. On the Naming of Convict Ships 00:00 / 00:45 It seems cruel to name a convict ship the Eleanor. Eleanor, after all, is the parson’s daughter, who smiled at you once or twice. You could no more touch her than you can touch thin air. Eliza is the girl who took your hand at the county fair. Caroline is your sister, Georgiana the grim mistress you have only glimpsed on horseback. Jane is the governess at Manor Farm. Mary is the dairyman’s daughter. Elizabeth the name you sometimes murmur in your sleep, and Isabella is someone you will never meet. Isabelle, Isabella, Bella, Belle. Publishing credits Dark-Haired Hilda Replies to Patrick Kavanagh: I went up the lane quite cheerful (Dempsey & Windle) Cinderella: Lunate On The Naming of Convict Ships: Swing (Dempsey & Windle) Share

Poet Jack B Bedell reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jack B Bedell back next the poet Jack B Bedell is Professor of English and Co-ordinator of Creative Writing at Southeastern Louisiana University, where he also edits Louisiana Literature and directs the Louisiana Literature Press. Jack’s poetry has appeared in Southern Review, Birmingham Poetry Review, Pidgeonholes, The Shore, Cotton Xenomorph, Okay Donkey, EcoTheo, The Hopper, Terrain and other journals. His latest collection is No Brother, This Storm . Jack was Louisiana Poet Laureate 2017 to 2019. the poems Neighbor Tones All a musician can do is to get closer to the sources of nature, and so feel that he is in communion with the natural laws. ~ John Coltrane ~ 00:00 / 01:07 In Coltrane’s circle, all tone shares a common ancestor. The vibrations between F and F# wave in invitation. Tremolos whisper desire, not dispute, and every pitch shares a bit of itself with its neighbor, like electrons swapped during the intimacies of physics. Even when scales cannot reconcile themselves geometrically, we can choose to hear them together. We can transpose the culture of sound, make room for the diminished and the supertonic. These connections yearn to be made, even if our ears resist. How much of ourselves do we leave with each other taking the same seat on a bench, or grabbing the same spot on the handrail to pull our weight upstairs? We share the breeze, the noise it carries. The space between us, never empty, is full of us. Summer, Botany Lesson 00:00 / 00:43 No matter how many blossoms I point out exploding overhead on our neighborhood walk, my daughter isn’t buying it. She’s in love with the sound of bougainvillea, thinks the word’s so pretty, there’s no way it stands for something real. She believes I made it up, strung long vowels and kissy, soft consonants on a strand of rhythm to make her giggle. I wish I could tell a story that would win her faith, but learn to let it lie. Some truths beg for a fight. Some would rather echo on branches in crooked light while you just walk off holding hands. Dusk, Meditation … like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. ~ Herman Melville ~ 00:00 / 00:40 Sometimes the truth hides in the wide open of a shorn cane field, and no matter how you stare its lines will refuse to define themselves. They’ll pulse in the dull breeze, and spread like ribbon snakes across furrows in the dirt until the whole ground blends and furls in waves. Squint all you want, or close the distance on foot. What’s there to see won’t shine any brighter. Open yourself to the field’s expanse like a shell in salt water. Purge your questions before they pearl. Publishing credits Neighbor Tones: The Cabinet of Heed (Issue 12) Summer, Botany Lesson: L'Ephemere (Issue VII) Dusk, Meditation: One (Issue 18) Share

Poet Polly Atkin reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Polly Atkin back next © Adam MacMaster the poet Polly Akin lives in Cumbria. Her first poetry collection, Basic Nest Architecture , was followed by her third pamphlet, With Invisible Rain, which draws on Dorothy Wordsworth’s late journals to express pain. Polly's first pamphlet, bone song , was shortlisted for the 2009 Michael Marks Pamphlet Award, while her second, Shadow Dispatches , won the 2012 Mslexia Pamphlet Prize. Her second poetry collection, Much With Body, will be published by Seren in October 2021. Polly is also working on a non-fiction book that reflects on place, belonging and chronic illness. the poems Motacilla flava flavissima 00:00 / 01:39 When you came to us in the grey yard it was out of the darkest season the first bright day brightest of bright challenging to identify at the time the trees black streaks with sticky buds like rain drops against the grey-green fell you flew out of the lightless mouth of winter with the sun in you most yellow of yellows the sun in you the sun trailing after the spinning rock of your body blazing yellow spreading yellow with every dab of your tail the train of a comet the augur you were you must have flown into the darkness and found the sun by the thin arc of yellow escaping from the well where she had been buried I thought you must have carried the sun in your beak like a seed that you jolted and swallowed her yellowest of all yellows most yellow most bright you coughed her out from your perch on the splintering fence and filled your mouth with nest stuff instead you stayed with us chose us you built your yellow world in the cracks in our grey one lit up with yellow yellow glowed from the fissures in the slate they call you a migrant breeder when you turn to red a passage visitor you knit your home in the passage between houses the passage between one and another your yellow between your yellow lighting the way Still 00:00 / 02:11 For a while I was still. They made me still in a room with a castle view they taught my arms to lie still. It hurt to jerk pinned down. Still they live. My electric elbow. My stutter wrist. Knees skip on the spot. Feet stick reflect the kick. Running in sleep eyes rolling. Viscous movement. Stammering rest. My left leg crossing my right is terrified trapped its breathing heart the hand of a metronome set too fast. I watch it swinging counting out frantic time to the patterned code of the carpet. I cannot feel it. I cannot control it. This is the blood’s attempt at communication. This is the body’s refusal. It throws its hands up. Listen to the hidden. I am not paying the right attention. You say stop frowning. I do not know I am frowning. My forehead aches with trying. With shaping the mouth for a motion like speaking. Radiant somebody says confusing alarm with wellbeing. No one can interpret the language of my blood’s blind panic. The figures add up to nothing. The pressure keeps building clicking up a shifting scale. For a while I was still. They made me still. In a room where I could not move for wanting. Now I am matter and current flux radiant energy dripping ticking. Leeches 00:00 / 01:38 Leeches have three hundred teeth. Leeches leave a bite mark like a peace sign. Leeches excrete anaesthetic when they pierce your skin, like Emla cream. Leeches are precious. A medicinal leech is hard to find. We are listening to the radio on the drive to the hospital. Natural Histories. A half hour of leeches. A leech is doctor. A leech is a fiend who sucks you dry. A leech is a bad friend. A good leech will save lives. Leeches are curious. Leeches migrate around a body. Victorians tied strings to their leeches and let them roam, mine the body’s unseen continents, drain what they couldn’t control. I consider the grace of leeches. The diaspora of leeches. The harvesting of leeches to extinction. An old man reads a young man’s poem, in which a leechgatherer on a lonely moor becomes a beautiful cure: the last leech in England and I think of him now - as I lay on my bed, a needle in each elbow crook, the cold saline dripping in, the hot blood dripping out – skulking in a pool on the weary moor, a small striped ghost very beautiful, very precious, very good. Publishing credits Motacilla flava flavissima: Watch the Birdie: For the Sixty-seven Endangered Species of Birds in the United Kingdom (Beautiful Dragons Press) Still: With Invisible Rain (New Walk Editions) Leeches: Gush: Menstrual Manifestos for Our Times (Frontenac House) Share

Poet Tara Skurtu reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Tara Skurtu back next the poet Tara Skurtu is an American poet, writing coach, and speaker. A two-time U.S. Fulbright grantee and recipient of two Academy of American Poets prizes, a Marcia Keach Poetry Prize, and a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship, she is the author of the chapbook Skurtu, Romania and the full poetry collection The Amoeba Game . Tara is based in Bucharest and leads creativity seminars and writing workshops internationally. the poems Hum for Indrė 00:00 / 01:13 Are you aching? The poet held my hand at the edge of the world’s smallest village. Think of pain as a plane. She wanted me to forgive what I couldn’t forgive. Only the side door to the Assumption of Mary was unlocked—she knelt at the Virgin’s painted feet and prayed, and I took pictures of a crucified Jesus in a fishbowl under the alter table. She wanted me to love the man I couldn’t love. It may take a year. Outside, she translated, word for word, a Lithuanian saying: “When you fall down drunk, the ground will catch you.” My god is no god but the God of Human Will. I needed the poet’s prayer, I wanted her to will my forgiveness to bloom. A bruise is a plane: I fell, the ground caught me, I got up. Writing Poetry is Like Fielding Ground Balls 00:00 / 01:47 Someone is smoking in the lavatory and one of the flight attendants says shit and she gets on the mic and says whoever this is will be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law upon landing while I’m writing I hate ballpoint pens with a ballpoint pen because they don’t spray my period-brown ink all over the white designer jeans of the gorgeous Miami woman to my right—which was how I learned not to write poems in a metal box in the sky with a 1930s Sheaffer fountain pen—and I was the one waiting at the lavatory door when we all smelled the smoke and didn’t know what to do and I’d already been between two bombs at a bombing, so after being ordered back to my seat with a full bladder of wine, I order a whiskey, and this turns the Romanian flight attendant on, who winks and gives me nuts and olives on the house, and by now I know again we aren’t about to explode this time, and swallow my nip and eat my snacks and continue, with this ballpoint pen I hate, working on what will, nineteen days short of two years from now, become a poem, and we land in Bucharest and everyone but me claps in perfect post-communist unison and the smoking man gets away with it. Penance 00:00 / 01:58 But it was I who held your arm as the three gravediggers hammered your father’s narrow coffin shut. It was I who drank every pour of your mother’s vișinată, sucked the liquored meat of each sour cherry from its pit, swallowed even the floating worms. But it was also I who disobeyed the two saggy-breasted, callous- handed babas in headscarves, who, after asking if I knew anyone at the funeral, scolded me in Romanian for placing twelve marvelous white roses on the grave and not in the village church, where they’d live longer, be admired by the living. It was I who wiped the vișinată vomit from your face, wiped it from your arms and hands with my hands in the back of the backyard before dark. Daily I wipe everyone else’s piss from public toilet seats. And daily I let traitors kiss my cheeks in public—but tonight, in my sleep, I’m finally arriving in outer space. I’m in orbit with my husband, whom I’m leaving for no one. We’re breathing air that’s just air and I want to go back to our speck on the sliver of earth out the window, but this is now and I am here, so tonight we’re in space for years, and this may shorten my life—but what a view! Publishing credits Hum: Poetry Wales Writing Poetry is Like Fielding Ground Balls: AGNI Penance: The Baffler Share

Poet Holly Singlehurst reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Holly Singlehurst back next the poet Holly Singlehurst lives and works in Cambridge, England. Her poems have appeared as part of And Other Poems , while her fiction has been featured in Banshee literary journal. Holly was shortlisted for the 2017 Bridport Prize, and commended in the 2016 National Poetry Competition for Hiroshima, 1961. the poems Love song from a seaside souvenir shop 00:00 / 01:42 Instead of telling you how much I miss you, I send a small, funny magnet with a crab and a bucket, a bouncy ball, sun warm stones from an empty beach, sand sticky fingers from a soft, ripe peach and the glass clear water to clean them. I send you a fat, heavy parcel of fish and chips, steaming in damp paper, buttery flakes in crispy batter and just the right amount of salt and sauce. I hand wrap the bath warm evening, write something short on a postcard with pastel houses, and cut grey cliffs, and a first-class stamp. For a moment, I’m torn between a wood carved seagull with your name on it and the whole ocean, so I get you both. The blinding glint of sun on its surface, the tight squinting smile of your eyes when you look right at it. It’s not on display, but I ask, and they have it – that secret sound the stones make underwater; a solid bubble of your breath, so you can watch it rise up to the blue sky and break; the best jellyfish, so small and domed and perfect that when you open it you’ll say, It’s so pretty, it belongs in a bakery, and I’ll laugh and say, I know just what you mean. Hiroshima, 1961 after Yves Klein 00:00 / 00:39 In the street, I am warm past my summer skin, the pavement is burning the soles of my feet. My shadow copies me as I open my arms. When I jump, it jumps, but it doesn’t leave the ground. The light through my closed eyes tells me a secret, that I am the most beautiful red. And another, that it has travelled millions of miles, unobstructed, to touch only my body. On Agate Beach 00:00 / 00:40 A blue whale has fallen belly up on the sand, and crowds of people stand round with wet hair, hushed voices, in their jewel bright shorts, and the first woman I loved split herself open from wrist to elbow and bled out in the bath, up over its lip, slipped under the heavy wooden door, and the floor beneath my feet is tiny stones, and bones, and broken glass worn by water, and a whale’s heart is as big as a car and far more magical. Publishing credits Love song from a seaside souvenir shop: exclusive first publication by iamb Hiroshima, 1961: The Poetry Society Commended in the 2016 UK National Poetry Competition On Agate Beach: exclusive first publication by iamb, and a winner of The Pushcart Prize 2021 Share

Poet Jo Bratten reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jo Bratten back next the poet Jo Bratten writes and teaches in London, but was raised off-grid on a farm in Ohio’s rust belt. She moved to the UK to study at the University of St Andrews, where she completed a PhD on the modern novel. Her poetry has appeared in Ambit, Butcher’s Dog, The Interpreter's House, Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal, Ink Sweat & Tears and elsewhere. Jo is working on both her first pamphlet, and a novel about cicadas. the poems Sunset Over Watford 00:00 / 00:52 I am not terribly good at love. Yet I begin to think I could be, if love is loving small things: the moment when the second magpie lurches across the path; or the girl in the purple coat running towards the dog she doesn’t know; old men on the bench with sandwiches in the rain; the back of your neck; breathing you in quick, thick gulps, like cold water after bedtime; the smell of dying daffodils that still strain to hold their heads bravely towards the February sun as it sets over Uxbridge, Ruislip, Pinner, Hatch End, Watford – all bright and glittering in the smoky air. Amulet 00:00 / 00:57 In these times we tighten, fasten locks like lips, stockpile pills, believe our own haptic power to summon the fever-gods, draw blood to rub across the lintel, into apotropaic scratches cut into doors and walls. You touch me like a mezuzah, hang me by your heart, an omamori, a scapular, a locketed caul; hold me on your lips a cicada of jade, in your pocket like a hare’s foot, a whelk’s shell; I circle you like hag stones, word you a breverl: the skies are quieter, clean; a blackbird pauses, tilts her head, builds a nest. After Us 00:00 / 00:53 When the floods clear what will be left, washed up at our gate or lodged between the polite paving stones along our tree-lined road? Other people’s newspapers, bags for life, little rusted badges with an old slogan, lost socks and dreams, righteous anger bloated like a dead rat, effluent thoughts and prayers sludged blackly across our doormat’s smiling welcome; bits of ourselves we’d cut away and scattered in the river as fish food stuck now on the stern brick of our house, obscene in their pinkness, puckered like little sucking mouths, trying to get back in where it is so warm and so dry. Publishing credits Sunset Over Watford: Ambit Amulet: The Mechanics’ Institute Review After Us: Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal Share

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

Find out more about iamb – the poet directory and quarterly journal for contemporary poetry inspired by The Poetry Archive. about iamb Part library of poets, part quarterly journal, iamb is where established and emerging talents are showcased side by side. Not just their words, but their readings of them. Expect new poems, every three months, free to your device of choice. ~ Mark Antony Owen, Creator & Curator, February 2020 ~ Auditions re-open Sep 2025 how you can support iamb The simplest way is to share your favourite poets' pages on social media. You can also donate whatever you can afford to help keep this journal online, ad free and free to all. Thank you for coming, for reading, perhaps donating. Above all, thank you for listening.

Audition to be part of quarterly poetry journal iamb between the 20th and 27th of September 2025. audition for iamb AUDITIONS REOPEN 20th-27th Sep 2025 The last week of September 2022 was an unbelievable auditions window for iamb . More than 180 poets sent in submissions, and a great many secured places in future waves. Soon, it'll be YOUR turn to try out for a place in this journal. Come back to this page on September 1st 2025 to see how you can submit your audition. There'll be 99 places available across eight waves – four each in 2026 and 2027.

wave twenty-one spring 2025 Andrea Small Bob Perkins Fred Schmalz Gillian Craig Jane Robinson Joe Williams Kelly Davis Maggie Mackay Marie Little Mark Carson Moira Walsh Perry Gasteiger Robin Helweg-Larsen S Reeson Theresa Donnelly