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Jemelia Moseley back next the poet Jemelia Moseley is a primary school teacher, poet and spoken word artist from London. Her poem United was published in The Fly On The Wall Magazine in September 2020, while her poems Black , Dying to bloom and Visions of possibilities were published in The Melbourne Culture Centre. Jemelia recently appeared on Numar 17 Radio in the US alongside fellow Alien Buddha Press poets and artists. Her chapbook Love, Joy, Tears, Beers and Poetry is out now. the poems Travelling in Mind 00:00 / 01:16 My body wants to get on a plane and travel far away I want to get away from this life of pain but my mind is thinking all these thoughts in vain because I’m stuck I can’t even really get on a train if it’s not for work or an emergency but I really do need to rest my mind with urgency as my thoughts are hurting me, potentially taking control of me My body is yearning to be free free from masks and free from COVID free from restrictions free from daily predictions I’m yearning for vitamin D yearning to be by the sea my mind and body is just yearning to travel and yearning to be free Imagery of palm trees, the cool breeze COVID on freeze in the pool up to my knees handcuffs released my mind feels free The sun is blazing I feel amazing As I let the sand fall through my fingers the thought of COVID still lingers like the memories of all our lost ones' unfinished stories but we live on in their hope and glory and respect each day as a present as our love for them will never pass The sun sets, stripes of orangey-red my hearts desires have been fed, my mind is at peace and body is filled with ease I lay back on the sunbed and I embrace the tranquility Misery Loves Company 00:00 / 00:42 I am watching TV as the TV watches me I see movement but I hear no sound In my own head space, my own maze, feeling really lost and I really want to be found The comfort of misery keeps misery surrounding me, they say misery likes company yet I am so very lonely I pray for strength and that my ancestors guide me my history seems to define me the unspoken, the untold the truth and the hidden the secrets and the unforbidden all the things I did and didn’t get to love and hold holding on to the things you love, that you outgrow holding onto things that get old And it’s true what they say … peace of mind and love can never be bought or sold Hope 00:00 / 01:07 Cold chilled nights Left outside frost bites Big bears and tiny little mites They hide, hibernate, I procrastinate Work rates, relationships, money How I give, how much I take How much I need, how much I make, The world, the villages, the cities The birds, the bees, the flowers, the trees The growth, my growth Promises, broken and kept the oath I took to love, to cherish To death do us part I wish we could go back to the start It was bright, the sun, there was light There was you, there was me There was hope, there is hope, room to scope A room full of laughter and hope Where there is hope there is love And where there is love there is hope, there is truth There is you, there is me, the sun, the light Piercing through our troubling nights, our mazed minds The wind it sings we listen Our tears they glisten, our hearts are a miss Our love it is missing We yearn for yesterday Sealed with a kiss, smothered with loss The predator's caught its prey Publishing credits Travelling in Mind: exclusive first publication by iamb Misery Loves Company: Harpy Hybrid Review Hope: Love, Joy, Tears, Beers and Poetry (Alien Buddha Press)

Ben Ray back next the poet Poet, reviewer and workshopper Ben Ray is a patron of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival, and a winner of the 2019 New Poets Prize. His most recent collection is The Kindness of the Eel , and his writing has appeared in a wide range of publications including Poetry Wales and The Oxford Review of Books . the poems Epska pjesma for a new millennium 00:00 / 01:19 You wanted to be an epic poem in the drafting to sit with Marko, Branković, Crnojević but our palimpsest homeland had forgotten poetry gifting us only hoarse voices, bloody footprints. We stayed at your house, frustrated we could not make history: but you had inherited from a vanished world distant stories, new borders that tightened round the neck and a rusted can of tear gas from some atrocity. Like good citizens we shut the doors, pierced the cap and inflicted our country upon ourselves pushing / staring / turning / running / choking / children vaulting over chintz sofas in desperation then outside, gasping laughing – you tore your chest open found three hearts: around the third, the snake was still sleeping In October 2000 huge protests broke out in Serbia's capital, Belgrade, against the perceived authoritarianism of the Serbian government, resulting in the overthrow of President Slobodan Milošević. The protests saw a high level of youth engagement. Sinning with Captain Birdseye 00:00 / 01:04 It really wasn’t necessary. They were just two fish fingers left sulking in soggy packaging. But that was the point. An act of Antoinette extravagance, a hubristic vote of confidence in modern society. Was there ever a better expression of disaster capitalism than turning on a whole fridge freezer just for them? No shame: only God can judge their private fishy palace for two, heated with North Sea oil to help them feel at home (Even Anthropocene bad boys have a heart). Then, of course, the breathless question on the crowd’s lips: to eat one and leave the other alone in that icy void? The act of a maniac the act of a daredevil. But look at them now. So settled. So happy. Do you not believe in redemption? Joke’s on you I have a tiramisu in my chest freezer I am a market square after everyone has left 00:00 / 01:16 I am a market square after everyone has left all made of loose veg and plastic wrapping, that pervasive pioneer of untouched spaces. My breath invigorates paper bags across slabs rustles drain-locked receipts into chorus: I am the one who pulls up the cobbles to trip the cyclists. The heart of a lettuce has never looked so lonely nor the leaves of an artichoke so fragile than when I wear them, dressing down in casual wear that would melt your heart. If carrots had eyes, they would be Disney-round and doleful as they roll down the orphanages of roadsides fulfilling tragic character arcs as they’re pulped underfoot. I am a market square after everyone has left grand words like desolation and loss are too big for my ordinary leftover onion-skin self, this paper-bag floor-level life – where dashed organic-grown hopes are swept up by street cleaners and next Sunday always seems so far away Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Kerry Darbishire back next the poet Living in the English Lake District and writing most days, Kerry Darbishire is inspired by her wild surroundings. Her poems have won – and been placed in – many competitions, and her work has appeared widely in anthologies and magazines. Kerry's three poetry collections are A Lift of Wings , Distance Sweet on my Tongue and Jardiniѐre . There are also her pamphlets A Window of Passing Light , Glory Days (in collaboration with Kelly Davis) and River Talk . the poems River Talk After Raymond Carver 00:00 / 01:21 I’d slip across mossy rocks to catch your intonations clear as glass splintering morning air, accents you taught me before the scent of pine lifted from your tongue, before blackbirds and traffic spilled over the bridge. Come autumn you’d growl open-mouthed through the woods towards me louder than a stream, faster than a beck, bold as a heron, I’d wait on the brim. Sometimes a rush of hungry dippers murmured through marigold edges like angels, but I didn’t need saving. I learned to measure the highs and lows of your voice even in winter when your lips barely moved, and you held me like a mother in a perfume of breathy lullabies sinking deep into my pillow and I clung as if I was your child to every word you whispered, like fog shifting from your skin. All night I’d lie awake listening to the sound the water made until I was fluent. Jardinière 00:00 / 01:43 When I lift the lid, I let go the ghosts of kings and queens tombed in their paper-dry beds – buds and petals still clothed in the palest dawn, bonfire-grey, evening-sky-pink, thunder-cloud-yellow, honesty’s sheen like rainstorms that often sent us back inside with the smell of drenched earth in our hair. When I lift the lid, I could turn a field into a garden, work all day, become Vita Sackville-West or Gertrude Jekyll using her painterly approach to colour. Season after planted season I grew, cut and gathered aquiligea, rosa rugosa, alchemilla, poppies, larkspur; honoured their brief blooms in vases until they threw themselves down like confetti. When I lift the lid, forty summers rise and wake from slumber: lapsang souchong and cake, birdsong, afternoons fading in deck chairs, slow-scented evenings folded in the wings of moths; my daughter’s tenth birthday, the spring she broke her arm, the autumn she left home and my mother fell ill. It is a thing to leave your soil. When I go I’ll take my garden with me. Song of the Fell 00:00 / 01:40 When you say fellside a woodpecker drums spring into the ghyll, curlews turn their tune inland on salt clouds scudding west to east fast as a fox crossing high slopes where runnels of earth slip from lairs and whins begin to yellow the air. When you say fellside an evening in summer swims out of my children’s eyes as they race to the beck where lizards soak up warmth from boulders, foxgloves guard sheep trods, firm as stone, where reeds lean in like old friends and distance spreads a blue cloth. When you say fellside owls haunt low light, the first frost snaps at hedges of hazel and thorn, snow steals boundaries without a second thought from high intakes at rest, hollow nests, berries shrivel and all evidence of life before is squirrelled under white. When you say fellside celandines must be opening, a half-moon floating in a lake-blue sky lifting sun, swallows and flights of geese over Whinfell; our bright steps climbing a new path to find water-mint, frog spawn, primroses waiting for rain. Publishing credits River Talk: Flights (Issue Five) Jardiniere: Jardiniere (The Hedgehog Poetry Press) Song of the Fell: Finished Creatures (Issue 5, 'Surface')

Jay Whittaker back next the poet Jay Whittaker is an Edinburgh-based poet who grew up in Devon and Nottingham. She's published two collections to date: Sweet Anaesthetist and Wristwatch – the latter chosen as Scottish Poetry Book of the Year 2018 in the Saltire Society Literary Awards. Jay's widely published in journals that include The North , Butcher’s Dog and The Rialto , and has recently had work accepted by The Poetry Review . Two of her poems appear in Bloodaxe Books' anthology, Staying Human . the poems Egg case 00:00 / 05:33 My left ovary is smothered in seven centimetres of cyst. A risk to be reduced. ~ A beachcombed husk in my palm, multiple crumpled chambers deflated and dried, bereft of hatched whelks. A self-contained nodule of nothing, pod of naught. ~ Wobbling on a wooden stool in the school biology lab, I clench my sharpened pencil, transcribe the handbag and curved horns into my exercise book. I will keep practising until fluent, ready to reproduce constituent parts in cartoonish simplicity – a handbag and curved horns. I lay my transparent ruler across the paper and draw straight lines, and label (best handwriting): Ovaries, Ampulla, Endometrium, Fallopian Tubes. But I don’t know them. Not viscerally. ~ And how much less interesting than the febrile atmosphere in the school hall on the day one hundred twelve-year-olds are herded in to watch the childbirth video . At the crowning, commotion at the front. The boy who faints will be taunted for years. ~ Imagine: my abdomen crammed with congealed jelly babies. ~ Sometimes I looked up and my mother was watching me, as though wondering what she’d done. ~ My mother told me: It was the bloody ants’ fault. I was pregnant with you. Your father was away. You know how I hate ants in the house. ~ I am possible. ~ Inexorable ant-march across a kitchen floor. No one to talk her down or reassure. Scrubbing. Safe to use ant powder inside when pregnant? Not sure. Read and reread the packet. Relentless. Ants keep marching. Need to empty the cupboard under counter anyway, in case the ants find it, find the flour and sugar inside. Visions of a never-ending ant army carrying their sugar lumps aloft, victorious, back to their queen. Lifting and bending – getting up and down – panicking about ants and – wet in her knickers – a pooling. Blood – I am choosing A punishment for leaving it so late to have a child. For thinking, in their cleverness, with their science, they were above this. The thought of her mother’s told-you-so triumph. ~ The GP said his wife took these tablets too; I would never have taken anything when I was pregnant, I even stopped smoking, I was so careful but I thought I was miscarrying — A risk reduced. I am possible. ~ Alone in bed, sleepless, praying to the god her husband denies. ~ She tells me when I am eighteen, have left home for a university ninety miles north, It was in the Sunday Times a few years after you were born. All the cancers in the daughters are at puberty; you’re safe. She tells me now because of course maybe you shouldn’t go on the pill . I am already on the pill. She tells me in such a way that makes it clear we won’t talk about it again. ~ A hunt for the unknown, the untold, the unnamed. In the Science Library, I turn the handle on a microfilm reader, not too fast (nausea). Oestrogen. Estrogen. Diethylstilbestrol. Diethylstilboestrol. Stilbestrol. DES. Leading me to the long shelves of Index Medicus , metres of cloth-bound volumes, to rifle Bible-thin paper. I school myself in libraries, their tools, fiche readers, bibliographies, catalogues, all they contain. All that was withheld. All that was never vocalised. All the swallowed words. ~ My inheritance: Great grandfather – dies of sarcoma. Grandmother – dies of breast cancer. Mother – exposure to DES in pregnancy. Two breast cancers. Dies of ovarian cancer. Me – exposure to DES in utero . One breast cancer (and counting). I am choosing. ~ Buried deep in my pelvis and scheduled for excision: tissue, but more than tissue. My snail shells, my coiled snakes. Mysterious, seen on scans, analysed by faceless medics, discussed in front of me in medical language by my partner and my consultant, doctor to doctor – I have no clue, really. I am excising a possibility. ~ Absence is a poke of pain when I bend forward too quickly, a stabbing gyroscope, a whirligig of knife-ache when I lie on my left side. ~ A risk reduced. From the 1940s till the early 1970s, synthetic oestrogen diethylstilbestrol (DES) was given to at least 300,000 UK women whom doctors believed were at increased risk of miscarriage. A clinical study in 1953 found DES did nothing to reduce such risk, yet it was administered until 1971 – when it was discovered that daughters of women given the drug were at heightened risk of rare vaginal/cervical cancers. Later research linked DES to greater risk of breast cancer in both mothers and daughters. Clearly something was up 00:00 / 00:42 Every time I drove, plink and ricochet, stones on metal like popcorn in a lidded pan. I blamed the untarmacked track, recent resurfacing on the main road – until a warning light came on – under the bonnet, rats had stashed birdseed in every crevice, nestled pebbles into crannies, built a cairn of stones on the engine. The shock of rat shit on the camshaft. Chewed wires betrayed them, building a haven of warmth and food in the heart of a machine I thought was mine. Canopy (Day 20: First chemo cycle) 00:00 / 00:46 Do tree tips tingle, niggle like my scalp? Most people’s hair (I’m told) comes out on day eighteen. White hairs work loose first, waft down. This late summer evening, my scarfed skull as bald and vulnerable as a fledgling’s, I stand under the row of sycamore, my neck sore from looking up to the abundance of leaves. Whatever happens to me, the earth is turning. At the same hour in winter, haven’t I stood in this very spot, watching bare branches implore the sky for light? Publishing credits Egg case: Sweet Anaesthetist (Cinnamon Press) Clearly something was up: The Rialto (Issue 97) Canopy:Wristwatch (Cinnamon Press)

Eliot North back next the poet Eliot North is a writer, doctor and educator living in Valencian Country, Spain. Her poem yolk was nominated for the 2020 Pushcart Prize by Black Bough Poetry . Her debut digital chapbook Born in a Pandemic was published by IceFloe Press in May 2020. Eliot was commended in the National Poetry Competition in 2014 for her poem The Crab Man , and her work in various forms has appeared in Firewords, Structo, Acumen, Re-side, Dovecote, The Broken Spine Artist Collective, Perhappened and Ink Sweat & Tears. the poems Moonrise over the candyfloss hut Bordeaux, France 1994 00:00 / 02:15 I wander through Aqualand at night, muggy evening, Bordeaux-sticky. The place is closed to the general public, choir off-duty. Thirteen years old in my saggy blue Speedo suit, arms hugged tight to my budding chest. Inside my own head most of the time, I enjoy conversation with myself. Silence wraps me in a bubble. I stand on the edge of the high-board, toes curled over the ledge, naked urge to make the jump: an unobserved leap into dark. Emboldened, I climb metal stairs towards the death slide, bare-footed, alone with fear. I sit with my hands crossed at the top, stare down the vertical drop. Senses alive to cicada wings, pine resin, cold starlight. I lean back. Nobody is there to witness my fall, that weightless feeling: knowing I might leave the confines of the narrow black plastic, smash into French grey concrete or fly. Then the rush of water, it cuts me in two. The pain only adding to my sense of triumph as I walk, legs shaking, towards the main pool. Sit on the water jets, one by one. Watching moonrise over the candyfloss hut, I soak it all up. Waves of pleasure rippling my flush pink face. Granny Loved To Squeeze It 00:00 / 01:10 Grandpa Freeman was as tall as he was round. I remember his neck the folds of flesh, that huge blackhead nestled at the join. How Granny loved to squeeze it. For years she’d been trying to pop it out, puffing on her cigarette, sweat beaded on her brow. We used to encourage her, watch in awe as she tried, their arguments always ending in a squeeze. A punishment he seemed willing to endure until the day it came out, that plug of grime. Years of dead skin and dirt gathered in one expansive pore. WHOOSH! It flew across the kitchen, left a crater as big as my thumb. But after that day, there was nothing left to do, Grandpa seemed deflated, their arguments less heated. And not long after, he died. On the day they let the children out 00:00 / 02:05 On the day they let the children out it was a Sunday towards the end of April.* Nature had taken over the intervening weeks: swallows raced along narrow streets, house martins nested under every eave. Butterflies danced in pairs, on pavements, decorating the path to the river unabashed and blousy. Bees hummed a new tune, saddle bags full of pollen as they tumbled past waving flower to flower. Dazzle of dragonfly keeping pace with our pram, parakeets squabbled in giant palms by the old Muslim wall. Familiar rustle of silver birch leaves shivered down the city’s spine, two heron slipped past the repurposed police station, hawk-drawn circles overhead. We couldn’t help but look directly at the sun, similar to the crows, worry melting in the uncorked springtime air. Wood pigeons cooed to us like newborns from struts of the old iron bridge, the opal Xúquer river, gurgling below our feet. Sugar canes creaked and cracked birdsong so loud, it seemed nature had been dialled up especially. A white dove, branch in its beak flapped overhead. We scuffed our feet, the hour allotted over too soon. On the day they let the children out peals of laughter joined in joyful riot, their animal selves unlocked, at last, parents blinked, all startled deer: a safe two meters from each other. * The Spanish government relaxed lockdown on 26th April 2020 so that children were allowed outside for the first time, for one hour, accompanied by one parent. Publishing credits Moonrise over the candyfloss hut: Perhappened Mag (Issue 1) Granny Loved To Squeeze It: exclusive first publication by iamb On the day they let the children out: Born in a Pandemic (IceFloe Press) Share

wave three summer 2020 Aaron Kent Amantine Brodeur Caleb Parkin Carrie Etter Colin Dardis Eleanor Hooker Eliot North Erik Kennedy Holly Singlehurst Jorie Graham Laura Wainwright Maria Taylor Polly Atkin Roy Marshall Victoria Kennefick Marvin Thompson Ricky Ray Sascha Akhtar Vismai Rao Zelda Chappel

Nigel Kent back next the poet The poems of Pushcart Prize-nominated poet Nigel Kent have appeared in a wide range of publications and been shortlisted in national poetry competitions. His collection, Saudade , was published in 2019 by The Hedgehog Poetry Press, following the success of his poetry conversations, Thinking you Home and A Hostile Environment, written in collaboration with Sarah Thomson. the poems Breakfast Scene 00:00 / 01:34 We watch her fill the glass up to its brim with juice and carry it like the sacrament, across the busy breakfast room, tongue pressed between her lips, to where her mum will sit. Her father shovels sugar into a cup of cooling tea to sweeten the bitterness that has spiked their holiday; the image of her with their friend stirring, stirring, stirring. The mother doesn’t notice what her child’s prepared; she’s looking for her partner, who, seeing her arrive, walks off, wading through a churning sea, chin deep, the sand sinking beneath his leaden feet. ‘DADDY’S GOING, MUMMY!’ her daughter screams and makes us silent extras in this breakfast scene; wishing we had lines to shape a new direction to this plot. His partner grabs the siren child fighting sandaled feet that kick out vainly at her fears, and smash the love-filled glass instead, which haemorrhages unchecked across the pristine linen, and though in seconds a waitress removes the sodden cloth and mops up the sticky dregs dripping from the table top, she cannot rid the room of the stain the family has left behind. Miscarried 00:00 / 00:49 When she lost the little girl she’d longed for, they did not try again; ‘Too old!’ he’d said. She did not lie silently in a closed-curtain room; she did not stare mutely into the unused cot. Her grief was a howling, bared-teeth grief; a sinew-ripping grief; a snapping, snarling grief that locked its jaws around her throat and swiped at both his outstretched hands. He learned in time to tip-toe round her, flattening himself against the nursery walls, but he never could ignore the quiet sound of gnawing, as it devoured her hour by hour. Man of words 00:00 / 00:58 You were so different from your older brother. I’d toss words to you, cajoling you to catch them and throw them back. But unlike him, you would not play; you’d let them fall and watch them bounce across the floor. Silence was your mouthpiece; but you were simply biding time, storing the words you'd let drop, and snapping them together with muffled clicks, to make a labyrinth of plastic streets and towering houses, where you would hide, count to ten and challenge me to find you, though I never could, not even when I cheated. You made me wait, testing patience till it failed. Then you’d emerge wearing expressions, borrowed from friends, concealing the face I’ve never learned to read. Publishing credits All poems: Saudade (The Hedgehog Poetry Press) Share

Róisín Ní Neachtain back next the poet Róisín Ní Neachtain is an autistic Irish-Scottish poet and artist now based in County Kildare, Ireland. Though mainly self-taught, she was briefly educated at NCAD and Trinity College Dublin, before studying for two years under Irish artist Gill Berry. Róisín is creator and editor of online literary and art journal Crow of Minerva , and has had her poetry featured in a number of digital publications. She's currently at work on her first collection. the poems Memory 00:00 / 01:12 I held my dreams in my palms Though they were bleeding A soft tremor against my skin Some were shallow Some like a cave Some pricked my conscience Their threads tethered to my flesh And I chewed their weights to set them free My teeth wore down I fell in a haze through our memories When a hollow sound echoed in my mouth And fell past my lips You bit my tongue and hummed The ebb of nameless laughter A cadence of sorrows Spinning a steep melody Now I am unfearful of pain A slow praise of closeness Breathing blue In midnight songs Tightening my pulse Fingers twisting in a frenzied dance To unworded lyrics My last need stilled Remembering Without Believing 00:00 / 01:21 Remembering without believing The stars appeasing Against their obsidian abyss Heat and light unseamed from dust Remembering without believing Questions pressed in psychosis And promises which feel no shame Illegible hypergraphic promises Of love and empty rooms and symbiotic existence And undivided sounds and realities And reproached pain and laughter And dissonant dreams Which lead to my repossession A petty heresy of Silence Look at this earth embedded beneath our nails Our language measured by prayers And lumen a measure of their glare Look at this skin scored by hate Their unfamiliar eye Rooted in fear All truths unchanged in time The Edge of Reason 00:00 / 01:22 A room Like a trite cage Between these four walls Where prodigal sons and daughters return And are rejoiced and bound once more A spiel read like a dead poet A bastard pain The object of such a conclusion Perhaps an accidental gale? Swept and tendering our bones Archaic songs of sorrow That lull us in their readiness Black on white Black on black White on white Letters made barely visible And nonsensical A few steps closer to the edge of reason A past and future arrested in a photograph What will happen if we awake again To see these passings going beyond that edge? To the beginnings of someplace? Someplace more of a sedentary mind A hollowed space in each Man’s chest Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

JC Niala back next the poet JC Niala’s poetry is influenced by her relationship with the land of the two countries in which she dwells: England and Kenya. She spent the growing season of 2021 recreating a 1918-style English allotment on a site at Oxford as a living memorial to the 1918-1919 pandemic, and to those who served in the First World War. Poems written as part of that project will be published by Fig under the title, Portal . the poems Brood 00:00 / 01:44 You were the odd amongst the keets. The one, who would as I nursed Okelo fall off the earthenware pot-turned-perch by the confusion of black and white spotted siblings on my mother’s veranda. And I did not name you. It was enough that you would not be eaten by my family at least but learn to forage and like a seamstress pick out dudus, from the fabric of soul underneath the bombax and bottlebrush trees. The overhanging roof descended to cocoon us, Okelo at my breast, born on the same morning you all hatched. You who would not be contained. Your bright chirps would unveil my mornings when still wrecked by broken sleep I would slip along, slowly to the outside and listen to the sound of Okelo’s suckles amidst your birdsong she would later mimic and sing, as she toddled on the silken sandpit near where I lunched, while she snoozed. The day you were taken Your mother, would have I am sure, uttered the same warning as when she pecked you back into line. Stay close. Do not go into the open green space. but you strayed and into the talons of Kite so swift you, your mother or I were caught on a breath and did not cry out. We watched you reduced to a cluster of feathers, picked clean. The mobile’s shadow hovered over Okelo’s cot. Okelo stirred, I leapt for her. Sprawl 00:00 / 00:30 Watch me grow. I suck it all in to feed the giant. Out of a swamp I rose like Omweri, Squeezed through poorly laid pavement. Still, I welcome those rich enough And those who put them up. Boundaries vanish. I swallow whole suburbs, kijijis. People forget that I once wasn’t here. Changes 00:00 / 01:11 Insects still tell the seasons here. Dusk, when the cicadas, an environmental tinnitus, obliterate thought with continuous sound soften into a lullaby above which the chorus of bullfrogs arise in a vibrato echo and then fall. Call and response, that talking drummers once imitated across the savannah. Beating out news on carved hollow trees skins tightened over cut trunks to produce sound. Messages that carried over lifetimes until they were dulled by walls of concrete that rise from swampy plains to bring Development. Now, ringtones cut through the night air like a panga shearing elephant grass. Yet just beneath the fired earth, red ants, termites crawl along their regurgitated tunnels up and down and through every building’s crack, dashed lines, urgency on parchment, an invisible shelter-trail to inside where I listen for the smell of rain. Publishing credits Brood: The Lamp Journal (September 2016) Sprawl: peripheries: a journal of word and Image (No. 4) Changes: exclusive first publication by iamb

Rhona Greene back next the poet Rhona Greene is a Pushcart Prize-nominated writer from Dublin, Ireland. She loves to read and celebrate the work of contemporary poets, particularly those in the online poetry community. Rhona has had work published in several volumes from Black Bough Poetry, and was shortlisted for its Dai Fry Mystical Award in 2022. She was the featured prose writer in the second issue of The Storms Journal , and her work has appeared on Susan Richardson’s A Thousand Shades of Green poetry podcast, as well as in The Wombwell Rainbow's Disappearance calendar . the poems Day Trip to Newgrange with my Grandmother When I Was a Little Girl More than 5,200 years old, Newgrange stands at the UNESCO World Heritage site Brú na Bóinne in Ireland. The rising sun illuminates its passage and chamber around the winter solstice. 00:00 / 06:16 My grandmother tells me whispers: ‘Fadó, fadó, far away, far below. Éistigí, eistigí. Listen.' O shimmering sun. O breath of life. Still. Life. Still. Breathing. Below, below. Fadó, fadó. Kings, queens, gods, goddesses, preparing, turning, positioning crowns to glitter, to glow, tilting glinting halos light caught dark to shine between flicker and flow, flaming unborn visions to flight, crowning spinning heads brim full to dreaming, deep in the majesty of time. ‘Éistigí.' Shimmering sun. Breathing life. Below. ‘Fadó, fadó’. She whispers: ‘Tar liom’ . I follow. Up one grassy mound to another, then another, little giddy goat galloping up, rolling down, skipping, squealing, spinning round and round and round. Knowing nothing of time – yet, but to follow the sun following me in cartwheeling revolutions of joy and its grip soft, green, underfoot, holding me here, holding me now and O how it fills a throbbing heart to burst spilling over with bird songs of joy and sparkling wide-eyed wonder. Eyes open. Sun. Eyes Close. Wait. Open. Sun. Bright. Shadow. Bright. Shadow. Close. Cover eyes. Splay fingers. Filter. Flicker. Filter. Flicker. Shimmer – Shimmer – Shimmer. Glimpse. Vision. Dream. Whispering whispers. 'Tar Liom. Tar liom.' Follow the sun. Up ahead, my grandmother billows in floral skirts leading the way beyond here, beyond now, gathering me – ribbons and bows – in ripples, in flow. When the powder puff cloud of her passes on through the yawning gap and disappears, everything slows. My spinning head. My thumping heart. My every motion winds down to stop and I turn to stone – to this chiselled moment tracing rhythms throbbing to touch. There is no name for this. This day of light and shade, cloud and revelation, forever and now humming, thrumming, trembling stone, coiling and uncoiling the spiral of me, of everyone on this trail. 'Ciúnas, le de thoill.' Quiet, please. The stone is singing. I spiral on to the rippling melody of touchstone, following my grandmother’s dusty footprints laid down before me as softly as snow on snow – a faint trail leading toward a mound. The Mound! O how it looms, blooms, blossoms and grows on approach and I, all shrinky Alicey, my heart full of wonder, bending and folding like a butterfly, crouch down and pass on through the low portal of time, entering a long dark narrow passage, becoming one more tiny dimple in the continuum. Squinty blinking into the vast unknown shape-shifting familiars appearing and vanishing between icy breaths, O so shivery cold to the bone, stirring the primal tendrils of instinct to search, reach, touch, intertwining ribboning strands binding, briefly. We connect, reunite and persist in this heart of darkness where shadow dust sprinkles tangled souls into cradles rocked by rhythm and scattered bones, where time bleeds in sun and echoes, where I feel flow. Silently, we seep into sacred chambers, swelling with life in the slip between flesh and bone, where blood pools, warms to touch in anticipation of a promise, a spark. Hearts beat, beat, beat, pounding hard, fast, loud, throbbing rhythm’s ancient pulse, then slowly, gently down, synchronise to quivering harmony and grace notes, time’s simple signature, and O how we hang in this hallowed place oscillating, unknowing, hoping for the untangling of everything so barely contained. Clinging on in unspangled enfolding black ribbons of fragile awakening unravelling, flinging against the entangled dark whispering: ‘Oh Nana. What do I do now Nana? What do I do now?’ Her sweet voice comes calling, softly, again and again. ‘Mo chuisle, a chuisle mo chroí.' Tilt your shattered head skyward, and wait for light to return. Fadó fadó / Long ago (Fa -though) Éistigí / Listen (Ay-shtig-ee) Tar liom / Follow me (Thar-lum) Ciúnas, le de thoill / Quiet, please (Queue-in-us leh duh hull) Mo chuisle. A chuisle mo chroí / My darling, but literally, my pulse/ beat of my heart (Muh cooshla. A cooshla muh cree.) First Love 00:00 / 00:43 It leapt out of me glistening like a wild salmon on the run up the Boyne – river of my heart. Surging on and on, driven by impulse or memory of its pea-sized beginnings. Tiny thing, mother-planted in the burrowed gravel of her love. Flipping itself in the sparkling air, hurling against rushy waters, turbulent life gushing towards it. First love – the flippin’ and leppin’ madness of it! Shiny Distant Thing 00:00 / 01:25 Wings singe-glow transparent in dipping gold – light is leaving. A silhouette in solitary flight far from this catastrophic labyrinth of gloom. Soft comes the crash of night – music melancholy, blue. Waves receding murmur a vow of silence: ‘mare tranquillitatis - hush, hush, hush.’ After comes rain like petals – sacramental, light. Then comes mourning dovetailing dark infinite deep and shadow-dazzled bright breaking fast any commitment to sorrow, resistance to flow. Anointed, ocean-holy, ascend through blossoming trees to sky-high altar sacred-blue and wish a upon a fish high-leaping to catch a shiny distant thing – star-shaped, moon-blest. Then dance! Publishing credits Day Trip to Newgrange with my Grandmother When I Was a Little Girl: Freedom-Rapture (Black Bough Poetry) First Love: exclusive first publication by iamb Shiny Distant Thing: Sun-Tipped Pillars Of Our Hearts: The Dai Fry Award for Mystical Poetry Anthology 2022 (Black Bough Poetry)

Thomas Zimmerman back next the poet At Washtenaw Community College, Ann Arbor, Michigan, Thomas Zimmerman teaches English, directs the Writing Center , and edits The Big Windows Review . He's been active in small press publishing since the 1980s, and his latest poetry book is Dead Man's Quintet . Thomas' poetry can be found in Pulsebeat Poetry Journal , Pulp Poets Press , Green Ink Poetry , A Thin Slice of Anxiety , Grand Little Things and elsewhere. the poems Few Good Things 00:00 / 01:00 A sluggish walk in dewy woods with Ann and Trey, who nearly snagged a fresh-dead bird. The sun burned off some brain fog, thoughts began to breach, and then submerged without a word. Unshowered, stubble-chinned, I had a bad night’s sleep: Trey licking, barking in his dreams. Or maybe it was me, poor poet sad enough to nurse his ironies and memes. And now black coffee’s coursing through my wan and tepid blood, spring-gleam in glacial shade. Yet ennui clings like moss, chill hanging on. Not hard to see how few good things get made. How long this search for beauty, truth, gods’ signs? Ad infinitum? No, just fourteen lines. How Slowly 00:00 / 00:54 Some days, how slowly flows the river: that of consciousness, and I a crumbling cork in it. Oh rudderless. I think of all the swimmers in my streams, some surfers too. All hunted down: white sharks. My screen glows whiter than potential, clean blank canvas stretched, which I, most days, mistake for nothingness. Last night, twice, thunder shook the house. An inch of rain. So muggier than hell today. But after work, I saw a fawn, curled cool in backyard spruce shade, looking at me with intent, or so it seemed. But I admit I often think that you are looking at me that way too. You like to say you’re not. Dispatch 00:00 / 01:10 My dad would have been 94 today, and I’ll be 63 next Saturday. Regardless of which Zimmerman’s alive or dead, years fall like rain to swell the river, same mad god still counting drops. Now, drowned gold sun, dry champagne in your glass, strong ale in mine. I slept in late this morning, haven’t showered. Mind’s a dark pavilion, fairness in the shadow turning blue, and temples gray. I write because I want to feel alive: the poet in the book I’m reading says the same. New moon: late birdsong, whine of tires on the interstate, the bedroom window cracked to let the night air in, death floating lonely and austere. I feel it pass but know that it and I will cycle back. This dispatch from the planet, time, my molecules: so slightly all coheres. Publishing credits Few Good Things: Beakful (November 28th 2023) How Slowly: Disturb the Universe (February 13th 2024) Dispatch: Litmora (No. 0, August 2023)

Kyle Potvin back next the poet Kyle Potvin is an American poet whose debut full-length poetry collection, Loosen , appeared in 2021. Her chapbook, Sound Travels on Water , won the Jean Pedrick Chapbook Award. Kyle's poems have featured in Bellevue Literary Review , Tar River Poetry, Rattle, Ecotone, The New York Times and elsewhere. the poems Do You Know Pain? 00:00 / 01:09 The slice of the knife The rock to the head The blow to the eye The lumbar puncture That spinal tap The mistaken try Or perhaps The prenatal jarring Pushing and bearing Perineal tearing The prick of the needle Poison-plumped veins White sores in the mouth Cold fog in the brain Then the burn of the beam For thirty-three days Day after day The high-energy rays Did you turn Up your eyes Write words in your mind Tap beats on your thighs To distract and deny Then return to this earth Forgetting it happened The aching and bruising The bleeding and writhing For the scarring is healing The hurting subsiding The hunger returns Tomato salted and ripe The slip of the finger The slice of the knife Mysteries of the Corn 00:00 / 01:22 Your priest of 20 years retires. Then your hairdresser. Elephants become sacred and the circus leaves town forever. Even the only queen you've known is blue, wearing sapphires from her dead father. Loss is the corn on your door: 16 rows 800 kernels. You finger each like a rosary bead: Hail Mary Mother of Yours lost in plaques and tangles. Glory Be to Your Father, livelihood lost to her care. Hail Holy Queen, watch over the teen shot near the corner and for the other who died of (conjecture). Our Father, remember the birch, lost to infestation, and the road around the lake, no longer traveled. Each year, the husk dries, decays a bit more. But you hang it anyway, a totem to stubbornness. After all, an ear to the ground is useless. You know what's coming. Sin 00:00 / 00:59 At eight years old, I dodged the sisters' eyes: ate my sandwich, then donned a saintly face, walked out the gate, past church and up the rise toward Horn's Variety, that mythic place. The path was new to me. I walked alone and genuflected to inspect a sheared- off branch, a mica fleck, a swallow's bone. I used a stick to write DAM HELL; then cleared away the words. Dust pleated in my skirt. I felt a breath unloosen in my chest, expanding, fearless in this wondrous dirt of disobedience, this fresh unrest. The church bells rang. I rose, denied the call. Picked freedom, sin, a red-hot fireball. Publishing credits All poems: Loosen (Hobblebush Books)

Mims Sully back next the poet Nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, Mims Sully is a poet from Sussex, England. She was a winner of the Visual Verse Autumn Writing Prize 2022 , and has had her work published in Prole , Ink, Sweat & Tears , The Ekphrastic Review , And Other Poems , Obsessed with Pipework and other journals, as well as in anthologies by Sidhe Press and Black Bough Poetry. Mims started writing poetry after studying Creative Writing at the Open University, and many of her poems are inspired by her experience of caring for her mother, who had dementia. the poems Simple Hex For A Slanderer 00:00 / 00:51 Write their name on a piece of paper. Put it through the shredder. Place the ribbons in a bowl. Ignite. Watch them grow tongues, curl back and blacken, flaking to ash. File your nails (the sharper the better) then clip the tips, sprinkle over. Add some callus freshly grated by pumice, a crust of wax picked from your ear and one salty tear. Lubricate the mix with your own spit and lashings of mucus then stir and speak: Unkind words will not go unpunished but form ulcers yellow and bulbous tight with pus on the tongue. My Father’s Belt 00:00 / 01:00 looped around my waist, moves when I breathe like a phantom limb. The leather cracks, moves when I breathe. With bronze lustre the leather cracks as if with laughter. With bronze lustre, his face creased as if with laughter as disease spread. His face creased, a shifting of skin, as disease spread its tightening belt. A shifting of skin drawn across bone like a tightening belt; his body buckled. Drawn across bone this broad strap buckles my body with a strong clasp. This broad strap holds me together with a strong clasp like my father's arm. Holding me together; like a phantom limb my father's arm loops around my waist. Afternoon Entertainment, Chamberlain Court 00:00 / 00:58 I wasn’t sure at first if she was even listening, though we sat in rows in front of the baby grand, as the piano man played all the old classics. It was when she closed her eyes that it happened – her hands started patting her jeans in time to Over the Rainbow. Then her fingers stood to attention, as if remembering: the coolness of ivory, warmth of wood, weight of black and white keys. She leant into the music as her right hand rippled across her lap onto my leggings, while her left hammered chords on the neighbouring gentleman’s knees. And just when I thought I should intervene, she opened her mouth and sang at the top of her voice about a blue-skied cloudless world where someday, I might find her. Publishing credits Simple Hex for a Slanderer: Prole (Issue No. 27) My Father's Belt: Pulp Poets Press (March 1st 2021) Afternoon Entertainment, Chamberlain Court: exclusive first publication by iamb

Jinny Fisher back next the poet Before writing poetry, Jinny Fisher was a classical violinist, a teacher, and a psychoanalytic psychotherapist. Her poems have since appeared in Lighthouse, Against the Grain , The Interpreter’s House , Under the Radar , Tears in the Fence , Prole , Ink, Sweat & Tears and Osmosis . Jinny's writing has been commended and placed in national and international competitions. She was first runner-up in The Interpreter’s House Open House Competition in 2016, as well as in Prole Laureate in 2020. Jinny also runs the Poetry Pram: taking poetry to audiences at festivals for random one-to-one readings. Her pamphlet, The Escapologist , was out in 2019. the poems Privilege 00:00 / 01:25 Aged eight, my brother walks through the cathedral school’s stone doorway. He is assigned a number, to mark with indelible ink inside his shoes. He is taught only by men who have been taught only by men. Big boys creep to the beds of shaking small boys, who wake in cold, damp sheets. Masters walk pretty boys upstairs, for personal attention, special education. * But my brother can pitch a note, so is chosen to be an apprentice chorister, learning melody and polyphony from the boys around him. Cantoris and Decani , the Cathedral choir stalls become his refuge; his friends are animal misericords under ancient polished seats. He floats to the rhythm of versicle and response, to refrains of psalms and canticles that swirl up to the fan vaulted Sanctuary ceiling. Praetorius, Tallis, Purcell—their anthems shall cradle and comfort him always. And in peace he shall both lie down and sleep. Retrofocus 00:00 / 01:32 Brownie 127: The Beach. As we skimmed the deeps, his freckled back was my boat. I felt the rise and fall of shoulder blades under my thumbs, his mouth swivelling into view as he gasped for breath. Look: a squinty grin, a cartwheel, a sandcastle – fortified against the tide. Asahi Pentax: The Shed. Dust-coated cobwebs, thick as tea towels, draped the windows. I dangled my legs from the workbench, viced the battens while he sawed, and there were so many splinters to be gouged. Look: a table – sanded and glossed, a captain’s chair, three splay-backs. Nikon F: The Studio. A windowless shed at the end of the garden. Only my friend was with him. We all knew there were cameras on tripods, banks of flash-guns, umbrellas to diffuse the glare. I imagine his camouflaged murmurs as her blouse falls to the floor. Listen: Lovely – peep from under your lids. Now – a little smile? Little Brother, Big Sister 00:00 / 00:38 At the back of Deb’s wardrobe, Dan finds the frock: pink satin frills, unicorns, fairies— soon to be sent to the charity shop. Grandma’s beads from the dressing-up box set off the shine in his wavy blond hair. His unisex trainers match Deb’s rainbow socks. Dan poses and pouts to the full-length mirror, catwalks into the kitchen with a shrill ta-da! Father’s eyes roll. He storms out, slams the door. Publishing credits Privilege / Little Brother, Big Sister: exclusive first publication by iamb Retrofocus: The Escapologist (V. Press)

May Chong back next the poet May Chong, a Chinese/Malaysian poet and speculative writer, has had her work featured in Strange Horizons , Uncanny Magazine , adda , Parentheses Journal and elsewhere. She enjoys spoken word (watching and performing), birdwatching and terrible puns. May's nature-themed micro-chapbook, Seed, Star, Song , is available as part of Ghost City Press' Summer 2020 series. the poems You ask the soil if you belong 00:00 / 02:10 What has always been whispered through other leaves grows bold, thunderclaps laterite-red: never. Transplant, hue and clay, your roots never the right length. Untrue/half-bred not hybrid, weed not plant. Be silent and show some gratitude for this flowerbed, for being at all allowed. If you protest, tear up taproots and leave, raw mandrake words and all. Never mind how we were all planted once upon a time. One more time. The loess left behind answers come home . You will be welcome and warm, one with brethren abandoned before seedcoat thoughts. Come home , you must return to ancestral yellow, mellow alluvium where no others are allowed. (But you have already torn/ been torn tongue from stem to survive. You feel the way you will wither, alone in a field of pinched heads.) Rocks whisper from where black dragons tumbled them riverwise. In your sap runs neverbelonging, mountain thrust into monsoon. We are all of us guests from nowhere. The knowing makes it easier to bear the stones. And still you want. You awaken. Again you ask the soil if you belong, and you should not be grateful for silence. Yet you are. Lockdown 00:00 / 01:11 Grant me space secured with key, myself and I. Walls of my own creation, closest to a one-man hug. A floor to take a stand on, because the letting in has meaning. Give me granite and blood concrete before those who have ripped 'moment' and 'wait' and 'just' from their dictionary. Swallow the deep diggers who think keys are only for those in hiding. My time has its meaning, its rhythm and combinations because bolts in the head are trouble and padlocks through the heart are worse. Ask the selves I debrided, husbanded, ribs toothed like tiger traps. Vulnerability has meaning, meaning let me slam the door closed and fling it wide to let you in, you who means something. And even now 00:00 / 01:19 A radish waxes defiant in the asphalt below JR Osaka station’s pedestrian bridge. A man thinks of its rich tresses, his granddaughter, the last time he felt like smiling. Near Wangsa Maju, a moth flies into a packed LRT. Small as hope, alive. A whole carriage holds its breath until it lands on a Bangladeshi worker's chapalled toe. Some nameless brown bird gurgles into the rain-soaked morning. Soon there will be sun and wind enough for everything to dry gorgeous. Silence is learning how to unlock love, unlock tears from behind teeth, loose them with the gasp of something born anew. You learn from your elders how to make broth from the good bones of a world and still, and still, and still— Publishing credits You ask the soil if you belong: Bending Genres (Issue 19) Lockdown: exclusive first publication by iamb And even now: Banshee (Issue 12)