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

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 Jo Burns reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jo Burns back next the poet Translator and medical writer Jo Burns has scooped awards in the Magma Poetry Competition, Poetry Society's Members' Poems Competition and Irish Writers Festival Shirley McClure Prize. Placed and shortlisted for the Bridport Prize and Aesthetica Creative Writing Award (among others), Jo's also been nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her poetry is published in numerous journals – including The Stinging Fly, Poetry Ireland Review and Oxford Poetry. Her pamphlet Circling for Gods , was followed by her debut collection, White Horses . the poems Summitting Kalapattar Deeply, seeing the lotus's blossom, Bowed that man, and smiling Kamala thanked. More lovely, thought the young man, than offerings for gods ... ~ from Siddharta by Hermann Hesse ~ 00:00 / 01:12 I tried to feel the words Siddharta wrote to win a kiss from the lips of Kamala, the taste of figs to a parched samana tongue amorous to taste hot riverblood. Which words caused a courtesan to part her lips for whom kisses were bread, night held up by wine? Origin to night suitors, co-ordinates, which words could boil a frozen pond to desire? Trekking past Khumbutse, Changtse and Lhotse– all eminent yet paled by Everest’s black summit, this huge echo of range begs for the same words as the coloured mantras hung from peak to peak. They call O White Lotus and so, tired in this womb of the world, I crawl then kneel. I’m sick of the old stories of horsemen and clouds. I crave revelations like this where words defeat me. The meaning of oceans 00:00 / 01:21 The Pacific with its screaming sixties, erotic nightmares for every sailor, shouts Adventure! for adrenaline seekers, and discoverers taking on the Humboldt. Whereas the Indian is all about arrival, not departure (that’s the grey Atlantic) De Gama’s rigged stasis and suspension, lashing foreign flotsam into metre where parrots gossip, dance in their throats, the crows are vernacular, without decorum, sparrows serenade aubades to the sun, anklets jingle at sea, you can hear Tagore. The Atlantic, the one I know by heart, cliffs and mists, it’s filled with longing. A cliché of old myths. I’d have to start at the beginning, so I’ll move on to this–– It’s just one water of failed trajectories, unsailed vendée globes. We’re saline stars, buoyant, blind—same old compass and desire: to sail smoothly through love. It’s an art. Maya's soliloquy 00:00 / 00:47 When you leave, it is only fair and right to clear the table once set with laughter and tip the wine glasses into the sea then mix a drop of blood in salt water. When you leave, please feed your paint to the fish. Leave the front door ajar for the wind to bring me the breeze. It’s simple etiquette, when you’re going and determined. When you leave, please throw your anchor away, lose my portraits, and burn all those written lines. Remember from your swaying, wind-blown deck to point your spinnaker squarely to horizon. Publishing credits All poems: White Horses (Turas Press) Share

Hear poet Elisabeth Sennitt Clough read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Elisabeth Sennitt Clough back next the poet Elisabeth Sennitt Clough is the author of the 2017 Saboteur Awards Best Pamphlet winner Glass , and the editor of the Fenland Poetry Journal . Her debut collection Sightings won her the Michael Schmidt Award, while At or Below Sea Level was a 2019 Poetry Book Society Spring Recommendation . Elisabeth has also written The Cold Store and My Name is Abilene , which is shortlisted for The Forward Prize for Best Collection 2023. Elisabeth's poems have appeared in Poem , The Rialto , Mslexia , Wasafiri , Magma , The Cannon’s Mouth , Ambit and Stand among others. the poems There was a door & then a door Poem beginning with a line by Ocean Vuong 00:00 / 00:54 The second door was oak, brawny with a heavy-duty handle & latch, the sort that could mutilate a child’s hand if pushed too much. This is how thresholds are reinforced in farming country. Give your prayers to the sky. The neighbours are out of earshot. What could a flappy city girl know about the ebb of backwaters? People here read shotgun holes like exegesis. Old mail piles up. All letterboxes are sealed shut. Some days even the windows shudder. Everyone’s forgotten the first door. Histerid 00:00 / 01:22 In a hardbacked book with charcoal-grey covers in an attic, above a small bedroom, next to an illustration, the error of a typeface places a hole in a word, His terid , so that it becomes owned. You are mine says the pronoun to the beetle. But the neglectful parent had let his terid go, its skinny legs toddling beneath its round belly in-between legs in crowded market places, through garden fences to the edge-of-town industrial estate and beyond – the place where all lost things end up – the Gymnasium of the Forgotten. There his terid crouches on a varnished floor at the end of a long wooden bench, next to Arthur, who’s sat next to Tom, willing someone to sight him, make a call from the black telephone: Hello, Mr England, we have located your terid, reported missing and suspected extinct in 1936. Please come and collect. The Arse-end of Summer 00:00 / 01:01 Like warlords, the neighbour’s firs cast darkness across my lawn. So much in my garden promised to blossom but never did. A section of wasp nest dangles from a tree like a slice of dried meat. The splatter of an heirloom tomato still decorates next door’s patio beneath a sign: trespassers will be composted . A wood pigeon repeats itself four times. I mimic it twice. Sunday afternoon alone in a rose-less garden, still in my nightie – maybe I’m no longer alive, but don’t realise? A motorbike engine growls out the miles over cracked asphalt, past wheelie bins stinking of yesterday’s burnt ends. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Louise Longson read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Louise Longson back next the poet Widely published in print and online, Louise Longson is the author of Hanging Fire and Songs from the Witch Bottle: Cytoplasmic Variations . She won the inaugural Kari-Ann Flickinger Literary Memorial Prize with her upcoming collection These are her thoughts as she falls , and has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize. She was also Highly Commended in The Hedgehog Poetry Press' second A Proper Poetry Pamphlet Competition in July 2024. Translated through the twin prisms of myth and nature, Louise's poetry brings together her personal and professional experiences – she's worked for many years with survivors of trauma at Rape Crisis, as well as with charities focused on alleviating loneliness and supporting mental health recovery. the poems Drowning on Dry Land 00:00 / 01:41 We go in a drought year, and she remembers a sacrifice that was made to the god of Water, when the village was buried under the flow that ate the river and the broad pale fillet of rock where she used to bathe and fish. Huge metal bulldozers rumbled like tanks, planes practiced overhead for a dam-busting raid over the water, unaware of the irony. Twisting streets she walked to school and clean white stone houses became slack and rubble. The foundations of her childhood crumbled away with them. In this dry summer of baked mud, the reservoir breaks its silence. The village has come up, gasping for air. Her memory gushes out in a flood of nostalgia that is hard to bear. It is a hunger, remembering. An ache that hurts more than all the forgetting. By spring, it will slip back beneath the water and she, too, will be gone. Only a pile of sad stone remains; the shaped and faced remnants of a former beauty. History will hold them; both no longer existing and existing at once in an ellipsis of space, a lacuna of fluid time. Battered Woman 00:00 / 01:03 That’s what she was called, back then, like something you’d get from a chip shop. She was the chicken on a spit with the life cooked out of her. Pasty skin, pied with bruises ebbing in colour from Baltic-blue-black to sick mushy-pea-green. Dried ketchup in her nostrils, split lips. Told by her mother she’d made her bed and must lie in it, she could have her cake but couldn’t eat it. Knowing her place is in the queue, waiting her turn until he shouts. Who’s next? Wrap her up in words: newspaper stories said she screamed so quietly the neighbours never heard. Nobody saw her until she slipped back into the waters; disappeared with the slap of tailfin and quicksilver flash. I trawl for her in my dreams. How I Find and Lose My Mother 00:00 / 01:29 Hope is what keeps her going down the street, to the unremarkable house that, like her, needs a new coat of paint. To be repointed, given an extension. I only had twelve weeks. She comes with a shopping bag and a social worker. It’s a crash course in redemption. Pass, and we can leave together. Fail and we will be sent off discretely in different directions. We were never left alone. Each moment of interaction kept in a detailed logbook. You were to be picked up, hugged, fed, changed into a non-risk situation. But, sleep deprived, there were two things I could not keep: my anger at bay and you. Now, forty years later, she tells me her story. History scrapes me, scribing pain onto my scrimshawed bones. Here I am. Unbroken, whole, and as perfect to her as the day she walked away, alone. We only have twelve weeks. Publishing credits Drowning on Dry Land: The High Window (Summer 2023) Battered Woman: Songs from the Witch Bottle: Cytoplasmic Variations (Alien Buddha Press) How I Find and Lose My Mother: Allegro Poetry Magazine (Issue 30)

Choose a wave of poetry library/quarterly journal iamb to hear that issue's poets each read three of their own poems. poets one winter 2020 Ankh Spice Briony Collins Clarissa Aykroyd Geraldine Clarkson John McCullough K Weber Kim Harvey Lisa Kelly Mari Ellis Dunning Mariah Whelan Mark Antony Owen Mark Fiddes Matthew Haigh Natalie Ann Holborow Nigel Kent Rae Howells Rishi Dastidar Sarah Fletcher Steve Denehan Tara Skurtu two spring 2020 Aki Schilz Angela T Carr Anna Saunders Claire Tr é vien Emma Page Georgia Hilton Helen Calcutt Jack B Bedell James Roome Jo Burns Maggie Smith Mat Riches Matthew M C Smith Neil Elder Paul Brookes Reshma Ruia Sarra Culleno Scarlett Ward Bennett Scott Elder Seanín Hughes three summer 20 20 Aaron Kent Amantine Brodeur Caleb Parkin Carrie Etter Colin Dardis Eleanor Hooker Eliot North Erik Kennedy Holly Singlehurst Jorie Graham Laura Wainwright Maria Taylor Marvin Thompson Polly Atkin Ricky Ray Roy Marshall Sascha Akhtar Victoria Kennefick Vismai Rao Zelda Chappel 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 Leah Umansky Lloyd Schwartz Martin Figura Matt Merritt Melita White Mona Dash Rachael de Moravia Rennie Parker five spring 2021 Aaron Caycedo-Kimura Alan Kissane Brian Bilston Emily Blewitt Jemelia Moseley Jill Abram Joanna Nissel Katie Stockton Khalisa Rae Mariam Saeed Khan Maxine Rose Munro Nicola Heaney Pey Oh Robin Houghton Stewart Carswell six summer 2021 Andy Nuttall April Yee Ben Ray Charlotte Ansell Dominic Leonard Douglas Tawn Elizabeth Langemak Kathryn Bevis Kimchi Lai Michelle Penn Monica Cure Nathan Dennis Pascale Petit Róisín Ní Neachtain Shaw Worth seven autumn 2021 Candradasa Charlotte Knight Clare Proctor Daljit Nagra Devon Marsh Giovanna MacKenna Harula Ladd Ivor Daniel Jenny Byrne Kara Knickerbocker Peter A Samuel Tongue Sue Finch Usha Kishore Ysella Sims eight winter 2021 Beth Brooke Catrice Greer Cora Dessalines Fiona Sampson Hilary Otto JC Niala Leeanne Quinn Lucy Holme Marcelle Newbold Natalie Crick Oliver Comins Peter Scalpello Robert Harper Suchi Govindarajan Zoe Brooks nine spring 2022 Alexandra Citron Barney Ashton-Bullock Catherine Graham Charlotte Oliver Craig Smith James Giddings Jonathan Davidson Judith Kingston Kyle Potvin Liz Houchin Mark McGuinness Nóra Blascsók Olivia Dawson Rachael Clyne Radka Thea Otípková ten summer 2022 Annick Yerem Bill Sutton Elisabeth Kelly Elizabeth M Castillo Emma Kemp Gerry Stewart Jay Whittaker Ken Cockburn Kitty Donnelly Michael McGill Penelope Shuttle Richard Jeffrey Newman Ruth Taaffe Shiksha S Dheda Simon Middleton eleven autumn 2022 Charles G Lauder Jr Daniel Hinds David Butler Heidi Beck James Nixon Jan Harris Kittie Belltree Lauren Thomas Lisa Tulfer Lydia Kennaway Maggs Vibo Nichola Deane Rick Dove Sam Henley Smith Susan Fuchtman twelve winter 2022 Caitlin Stobie Doreen Duffy Jenny Mitchell Jeremy Wikeley Jim Newcombe Jinny Fisher Leanne Moden Louise McStravick Ruth Wiggins Sadie Maskery Samantha DeFlitch Sue Butler Susie Campbell Thomas March Zannah Kearns thirte en spring 2 023 fourteen s u mme r 2 023 fifteen autumn 2023 sixteen winter 2023 Anila Arshad-Mehmood Anna Milan Ben Blench Courtenay Schembri Gray Dale Booton Darren J Beaney Di Slaney Emily Cotterill James McConachie Jude Marr Mary Ford Neal Michael Conley Rachel Deering Sam J Grudgings Stephanie Clare Smith Alice Stainer Aysegul Yildirim Dave Garbutt Deborah Finding Devjani Bodepudi Ed Garvey Long Hannah Linden Ian McMillan J L M Morton Jamie Woods Jerm Curtin May Chong Ramona Herdman Valerie Bence Victoria Punch Abigail Lim Kah Yan Adam Cairns Andy Breckenridge C Daventry Dominic Weston Elisabeth Sennitt Clough Emma Lee Gaynor Kane Grace Uitterdijk Julie Easley Lesley James Luke Palmer Lynn Valentine Özge Lena Wendy Allen Alan Buckley Conor Kelly Dorian Nightingale Faye Alexandra Rose Holly Peters Isra Hassan J-T Kelly JP Seabright Jen Feroze Jenny Wong Matthew Stewart Pascale Potvin Phil Vernon Rebecca Goss Sarah Connor seventeen spring 2024 eighteen summer 2024 nineteen autumn 2024 twenty winter 2024 Carol J Forrester David Pecotić Eilín de Paor Helen Kay Ilisha Thiru Purcell Iris Anne Lewis Jonathan Humble Lesley Curwen Margaret Dennehy Nina Parmenter Sarah Holland Steve Smart Sue Spiers Thomas McColl Tracey Rhys A R Williams Deborah Harvey Hilary Menos Isabelle Kenyon Julieanne Larick Liam Bates Mims Sully Nicole Tallman Niki Strange Phillip Crymble Rachel Carney Sinéad Griffin Thomas Zimmerman Warrick Wynne Yvonne Marjot Christopher Arksey Corinna Board Frances Boyle Julie Stevens Kerry Darbishire Laura Theis Lewis Wyn Davies Louise Longson Marc Alan Di Martino Michele Grieve Nicholas McGaughey Oormila V Prahlad Rhona Greene Suyin Du Bois Tom Bailey Daragh Fleming Dion O'Reilly Graham Clifford Jane Ayres Kevin Grauke Laura Lewis-Waters Marie Marchand Pam Thompson Polly Walshe Rachel Smith Rowan Lyster Sharon Phillips Simon Alderwick T S S Fulk Wendy Pratt 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 twenty-two summer 2025 Carl Alexandersson Charlotte Gann Fidel Hogan Walsh J A Lenton Julian Bishop Kate Jenkinson Katrina Naomi Kerry Trautman Loic Ekinga Mary Mulholland Patricia M Osborne Rishika Williams Samantha Terrell Sarah James Wren Wood twenty-three autumn 2025 Barnaby Harsent Claire Orchard Eric T Racher Estelle Price Helen Laycock Hilary Sallick Hilary Watson Karan Chambers Kate Caoimhe Arthur Lysz Flo Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig Michael Burton Piero Toto Sarah Wallis Victoria Spires

Hear poet Pey Oh read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Pey Oh back next the poet Pey Oh (she/her) is a Bath-based poet from Malaysia. Her first pamphlet, Pictograph , was published by Flarestack Poets in 2018. Her recent work appears in harana poetry , Butcher’s Dog Magazine, Long Poem Magazine and The Scores – A Journal of Poetry and Prose . the poems Penang After Pablo Neruda, Sonnet XXVII (from Cien sonetos de amor ) 00:00 / 01:53 I do not love you as if you were the rasp of heat on my shoulder blades, or the endless cicada song in the night. The hush of humidity is as strong as a hand over my mouth I would lick the salt from. I do not heed the call of your secrets, as if from a distant city with its lure of neon and sweat. The loneliness of 2am stalks me, dark doorways with rusted postboxes, whose sentinels are worn men with bony limbs. I do not find hope from small altars on cracked pillars, ash dusting gilt letters. The burning spirals of incense do not carry the whisper of my prayer between us. Fire everywhere, wicks flare on oil and wax. I do not visit my ancestors' bones to hear the chanting of monks kneeling together on the marble floor, or to see the temple snake dazed by smoke make prophecies, lowering its double eyelid and tasting the air. I do not love you as if you were a mosaic of dragons or those filial tales on florid tiles. Distant hills call me to dusty steps of duty, winding around the tall spire. English is my Second Language? 00:00 / 02:20 Whispers, restless meanings, rocking the cradle. Sleep now, a lullaby of pictographs. Dancing with the seagulls in my first Encyclopaedia of Birds, white wings, black tipped, flashing in the blue sky, white dress, baby feet, flashing in that blue heat – flight and dreaming yoked together as the many-names-of-things. Second language, the ladder to my escape; the way out, the other world – I wrestled for it, asked for blessing; Exile is an English name. In banishment, a faint music still follows me: a bamboo scaffold, wobbly but strong, to build new rhythms in a journey – not home . I go to China, place of my ancestors; I clamber around and wind its golden dragons round my thumbs. Master its ways, gallop the horses of the steppes – on a high plateau, dance with Generals drunken and fat, in gold braid and red caps. I dream in tongues varied and few; in none, come the power of commonality – lonely fragments like us, seeking to be held close. First language follows me like instinct or a beautiful abstract; entirely open in meaning – a stricken mute maiden at my heels. I’ve learned to jump through the hoops now; I am my other tongue, whether right or sinister – bound like a confident wave to the sea. I feel the power and the draw of it; the sensual limning is a careful adornment of bare bones – talisman and relic for dissecting the myth: making it new. The Fox Fairy 00:00 / 01:12 Appearances are deceiving. How do you know I’m not one of those women with secrets. You know the kind – ones who take husbands – then slip out at night to run in the fields; dew wet and odorous after the passion, to hunt for mice. How do you know I don’t relish the crunch of small bones, the death snap, the warmth of raw meat? They’ve always said Fox Women have long black hair and never look in the mirror. How do you know I mightn’t have a fox mate in some mountain lair? His instinct cannot tell him I am fey. His is the innocent way of courting this tawny piece. A moon maiden dancing in the dew. A woman with secrets. Publishing credits Penang: harana poetry (Issue 4) English is my Second Language?: Pictograph (Flarestack Poets) The Fox Fairy: And Other Poems

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 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

Hear poet Victoria Punch read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Victoria Punch © Erika Benjamin back next the poet Voice coach and musician Victoria Punch is curious about voice and identity, the limits of language, and how we perceive things. She has had her work published in Poetry Magazine , Mslexia, Magma and One Hand Clapping – as well as in Christmas Stories: Twelve Poems to Tell and Share . the poems A cold striding 00:00 / 00:54 Bridled with ferns in April, a year uncurled. Up – yet feeling low on the blue fuzz of new rain – the brush of a wing on the eave The earth, it seems, has turned on the warming drawer and laid the plates inside, crockery carrots and cucumber, cutlery laid in lines and rows, potatoes, peas and purple sprouting broccoli babies The earth rises like dough. Proven, prickling with spring, the lick of blackberries prophesied, the implacable hedge, laden with strings of wildflower childlings, seeded by flight, small mice and hiding birds, a little shy I’m asking, but I can’t recall the question in the face of the morning an ode to the unexpected find 00:00 / 01:08 I marvel. oh my, oh you – small lime green lurker how did you – damp smirker – get there. armpitted and puckering gloop grip in my top sneak under my collar your squeaky sneaky ways and hazy origins amaze me you have umami, by the look of you tang of salt on my tongue, you tiny appetiser, so phlegmatic, enigmatic part of my one point five daily litres of mucusy nasal secretions little air crumb catcher, dust, dirt and pollen snatcher, crunchy bacteria beguiler you are crisper as you dry your quasi-spherically makes me queasy, I quease I am uneased by your tacky feel, your unexpected gloop your roundness – rolled who rolled you, oh green one? wherefore and what nose did you come from? oh how I’d like to know or maybe (s)not Last Flight on the Road 00:00 / 01:54 that morning – stung by cold blankets on and steam-breath in the air low motor hum of the old car, road ticker-taped and on for miles grey and dim in the husky half-light sidled by the frosted trees thick as thieves the trees stood, still and stoic, lime-cold leaning on the morning light that came in waves upon the air replicating pine for miles they lined the open, empty road we made our way along the road surrounded by the stream of trees counting down the miles and miles curled and hunched against the cold hats and coats and frosty air looking for the early light his silence was a kind of light he joined our vigil down the road cut through the still and lingering air the owl came softly through the trees I held my coffee long gone cold and I forgot about the miles I felt he stayed with us for miles orange wingtips in the light his face was braced against the cold level with my eyes, along the road he slipped like water past the trees gold and russet on the air I held his presence in the air carried it for miles and miles wings the colour of the trees wings the colour of the light eyes held fast along the road I forgot that I was cold his face – the air, his wings – the light I sat for miles in silence on the road I watched the passing trees and felt the cold Publishing credits an ode to the unexpected find: Invitation to Love – Issue 3 (the6ress) A cold striding: Magma (No. 85) Last Flight on the Road: exclusive first publication by iamb

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

Hear poet Steve Smart read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Steve Smart back next the poet Poet and poetry filmmaker Steve Smart is based in Angus, Scotland. His poems have appeared in Atrium , Firth , The Poetry Shed , The Writer's Café , Ink, Sweat & Tears , Poetry Scotland , Gallus , Consilience and elsewhere. Recent collaborations have meant Steve's poetry has featured in anthologies published in New Zealand, Canada and Scotland – while his poetry films have been screened at various international festivals and exhibitions. In 2023, funding from Creative Scotland helped Steve and Irish poetry filmmaker Colm Scully deliver a new poetry film workshop for the Scottish Poetry Library. the poems luminous without being fierce 'Light in Scotland has a quality I have not met elsewhere. It is luminous without being fierce, penetrating to immense distances with an effortless intensity.' Nan Shepherd, The Living Mountain 00:00 / 01:20 We meet were ridge meets sky – your kin are only here, above a rising contour of warmth, an unrequested flood shrinking your island tundras, stranding you upward, a feathered bellwether. You switch from being, to being unseeable – lichen-hill-skin you’ll speckle-wait me away, hunker into arctic whites – if the high corrie snows hesitate, else doubtful greys for spring. I forget so much, but remember each of all our meeting places. The map knows their names – I recall stones and land and the rise and fall, where you were, were not, and were again. I saw your presence shimmer, while I gazed breathless – while you waited, while I was not too much, while you were still. entrenched 00:00 / 24:07:02 Mine hunters with doll-sized trowels, flense the russet soils with caution. Is that slight discolouration the circumference of a wooden post? That line a distant season's burning? Stratigraphy layers the plot, yields the story. Circumstantial evidence – is that scrape a street number, a mason’s strike, or just more tumbledown sandstone subtext? The palm gifted a stone tool finds an easy accommodation, caresses as if to cup a cheek – to retouch, re-dress familiar bodies, in more than a change of clothes. How much for ten minutes chat? Of different days and other treasures – of how children always fight, of what the sky says in the dark, of one mind horde to another. sidelong From the United States Library of Congress details of the first photographic portrait image of a human produced in America: Robert Cornelius, head-and-shoulders self-portrait, facing front, with arms crossed. (Daguerreotype, 1839.) 00:00 / 00:59 Robert Cornelius remains sceptical. He does not trust that it will work, or that a specific future develops when this image will be visible. He does not pause to comb his hair or consider us, but guards himself against the possible exposure, against the theft, of unmarshalled spirit. Slow counting silent hesitation, he glances sidelong from 1839, doubtful of our existence, his focus on what he next intends. Publishing credits luminous without being fierce: Alchemy and Miracles (Gilbert and Hall Press) entrenched / sidelong: exclusive first publication by iamb , though sidelong was previously blogged by the author

Hear poet David Butler read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. David Butler back next the poet David Butler's third poetry collection, Liffey Sequence , was published in 2021 – the same year as his second short story collection, Fugitive . His novel, City of Dis , was shortlisted for Irish Novel of the Year 2015. the poems Distancing 00:00 / 00:53 Now we are wintering – the whole hive stupefied to silence, each in their cell who isn’t soldiering, an inmate of a new Shalott – the cities, simulacra: drone-shot piazzas; enchanted palaces; empty trainset trains; vistas dreamed by de Chirico; traffic lights sequencing the memory of traffic – confined while, ineluctably, somewhere else, the toll, the toll, until we’re numbed by the scale of it; each week, the heat and bustle more distant, more unlikely; nothing to feed but waxing apprehension: what will eclose this long cocooning, and on what tentative wings? And then the sun broke through 00:00 / 00:46 A sea of jade and muscatel; the sky, gun-metal. Landward, the storm-portending birds, white-lit, Riding wild contours of wind, uplift To tilt at the raucous crows. This Is how it is to live, the ticker tells, Looping the floor of the newsfeed. Somewhere, an outrage; an airstrike; Somewhere, a politic withdrawal. This Is how it is to live: the wind blowing The charcoal of crows’ feathers; The rent in the clouds; oblique tines beating Sudden ochre out of a sullen ocean. These Are Not Days 00:00 / 00:46 These are not days, they are shadows flitting over the too-familiar ground, dry and rubble strewn, where our choices are buried. These are not days, these shades, tremulous, mere changes of light. Quiet as thieves, as witnesses, they slip past in silent legion. Count them up, and they come to years, but years empty of substance. They are the dry husks of our lives, the whisper inside the hourglass. Days are not the coinage of will, as once we imagined. One day they rise like locusts, to devour us. Publishing credits Distancing / These Are Not Days: Liffey Sequence (Doire Press) And then the sun broke through: All the Barbaric Glass (Doire Press)

Poet Matthew M C Smith reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Matthew M C Smith back next the poet Matthew M C Smith, a Welsh poet from Swansea, is editor and founder of Black Bough Poetry . His poems have been in Anti-Heroin Chic, Barren Magazine, Icefloe Press, Wellington Street Review, Other Terrain and Fly on the Wall Press. Matthew is writing his second collection after his debut, Origin: 21 Poems . the poems Cool Oblivion '... llithro i’r llonyddwch mawr yn ôl.' from T H Parry Williams' Dychwelyd 00:00 / 01:23 Choose life; extract yourself from systems, circuits, voices, spies in ether. Crawl as servant, slave from your masters, take freedom in roadless deserts. Leave gasfields burning. Echoes in canyons, drift of caverns, find your channel in rock, seeking nothing, nothing at all. Close your mind in cool oblivion, hide inside your silent shadow, where blood slows to deep time’s pulse. Dying King 00:00 / 01:51 I am with you. I am always with you. You pulse with a click of the drive. The dying king. I press your paper-thin shroud of skin, as thumbs curl over balsa bones, ridges royal. My eyes probe famine’s faultlines, scan this lucent husk, your twilight mask. Under your arm, now thin, translucent, I once slept, sheltered from terrors in the night. Now, I keep watch. How did it come to this? Morphine dulls your silent ward. It keeps you from fires in the fields, from the sibilant hiss of the underworld, the gaping maw of night. We are skin, my dark follows your dark. * Above tides, I feel winds of unconquerable spirit. I stand at the edge, choking with loss. Cosmology 00:00 / 00:50 from static we make our slow Rosetta linger lone in void of dark no one can hear us in these rooms of silence this is our language of stars fingers of intricate play & movement there are lights faint and far as moths we are drawn & dance Publishing credits Cool Oblivion / Cosmology: IceFloe Press Dying King: Anti-Heroin Chic Share

Poet Carrie Etter reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Carrie Etter back next the poet Carrie Etter is an American poet resident in England since 2001, and Reader in Creative Writing at Bath Spa University. She has published four collections – most recently, The Weather in Normal – and numerous chapbooks. Her poems have appeared in Boston Review, The Guardian, The Iowa Review, The New Republic, The New Statesman, Poetry Review and The Times Literary Supplement, as well as in anthologies such as The Penguin Book of the Prose Poem and Out of Everywhere 2: Linguistically Innovative Poetry by Women in North America & the UK . Carrie also publishes short fiction, essays and reviews. the poems A Birthmother's Catechism 00:00 / 00:56 How did you let him go? With black ink and legalese How did you let him go? It’d be another year before I could vote How did you let him go? With altruism, tears, and self-loathing How did you let him go? A nurse brought pills for drying up breast milk How did you let him go? Who hangs a birdhouse from a sapling? Eldest 00:00 / 01:28 Lean forward in shadow. The room is corridor opening into square, passage and purpose. On the distant bed, a spill of mottled flesh, the white cotton gown fallen to little use. You gape in the doorway. His body is positioned away, toward the window. You stare until he calls, calls you into mutual shame. Now you must gentle. The mind, relieved, packs away its unfinished question. The bowl of green gelatin has no scent. You hold it to your nose as he draws the cloth up with a tug, his grasp like a bird’s. No, not shame. Not now. Though he doesn’t know it, he will be glad when you sit down at last. This is your father. The room is white and inescapable. Paternal 00:00 / 02:24 A parent a plinth. The first week he regarded hospital as hotel. So the variables include the kind of stone, its consistency, the velocity of prevailing winds. What’s purer than an infidel’s prayer? How strangely, in the second week, the swollen limbs stiffened. And the effects of climate change: milder winters, more precipitation, two, three heat waves each summer. All American, non-Jewish whites are Christian by default. Incredulous, I realise his bicycle may rust and walk it to the shed. Such an ordinary act of reverence. The pulmonologist, the neurologist, the family physician. A bed is a bed is the smallest of bedsores. Blood doesn’t come into it. Ritual, of course, is another matter. A Midwestern town of that size exhibits limited types of architecture. I’ve yet to mention the distance. Come now, to the pivot, the abscess, another end of innocence. In every shop, the woman at the till sings, 'Merry Christmas,' a red turtleneck under her green jumper. I thought jumper rather than sweater, a basic equation of space and time. Midnight shuffles the cards. Translated thus, the matter became surgical, a place on the spine. Each night the bicycle breaks out to complete its usual course. A loyalty of ritual or habit. 'ICU' means I see you connected to life by wire and tube. A geologist can explain the complexities of erosion. The third week comes with liner notes already becoming apocryphal. Look at this old map, where my fingers once stretched across the sea. Publishing credits A Birthmother's Catechism: Imagined Sons (Seren) Eldest: The Weather in Normal (UK: Seren / US: Station Hill) Paternal: Divining for Starters (Shearsman) Share