looking for something?

Hear poet Richard Jeffrey Newman read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Richard Jeffrey Newman back next the poet Richard Jeffrey Newman is the author of Words for What Those Men Have Done and The Silence of Men , as well as the translation, The Teller of Tales: Stories from Ferdowsi's Shahameh . Richard curates the First Tuesdays reading series in Jackson Heights, New York, and is on the Board of Newtown Literary . He's also Professor of English at Nassau Community College, where he recently stepped down to focus on his writing after a decade of service to his faculty union. the poems Just Beyond Your Reach 00:00 / 00:54 The prayer you say is neither seed nor plow, nor is it rain to quench your soul’s old thirst. The parched and blistered field your tongue is now bespeaks the long neglect about to burst, like rotten fruit thrown to chase from the stage a comic leaving dead words at your feet; and she, or maybe he, responds with rage, shrinking the room until the single seat that’s left is where you’re planted. Confront your god, shimmering and luscious, there, his skin— or is it hers?—a proffered gift, a prod to every hunger you have called a sin. Welcome each new taste; spread wide; bow low. Lose yourself till loss is all you know. This Sentence Is A Metaphor For Bridge #20 00:00 / 00:55 Imagine hell unfenced, yourself the unburned center of all that burning, every prayer you’ve ever said undone line by line, until the empty page is all you have. Enter there the path in you that is only a path, gather its shadows into a dance, a movement that ends with love, that keeps on moving till love becomes the rhythm, and you the fire, and the dance, the life you’ve chosen to make your loving possible. You thought you had to be the clench you’ve held where none but you could feel it. Give yourself instead to all that rises. Fill that cloudless sky with laughter. After Drought 00:00 / 00:58 Knees rooted in the bed on either side of your belly, my body’s a stalk of wheat bent in summer wind, a bamboo shoot rising, an orchid, and then all at once a cloud swelling, a swallow sculpting air, a freed white dove. You pull me down, but you are hot beneath me, and the gust that is my own heat lifts me away: I’m not ready. Outside, footsteps, voices. Two men. Giggling, we pull the sheet around us till they pass, but if someone does see, what will they have seen? A couple making love. No. More than that: they will have seen the coming of the rain; they will have seen us bathe in it, and they will say Amen. Publishing credits Just Beyond Your Reach / This Sentence Is A Metaphor for Bridge #20: exclusive first publication by iamb After Drought: The Silence of Men (CavanKerry Press)

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 Fiona Sampson read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Fiona Sampson © Ekaterina Voskresenskaya back next the poet Leading British poet Fiona Sampson has been published in 38 languages and received a number of international awards. A Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, the English Association and the Wordsworth Trust, Fiona has 29 books to her name, and was awarded an MBE for Services to Literature. She is Emeritus Professor of Poetry, University of Roehampton, has served on the Council of the Royal Society of Literature, and is a Trustee of the Royal Literary Fund. Other honours include the Cholmondeley Award and Hawthornden Fellowship, as well as various national Book of the Year selections. Most recently, Fiona's Come Down was awarded Wales Poetry Book of the Year 2021. Fiona has also been a broadcaster and critic, editor of Poetry Review , and acclaimed biographer of both Mary Shelley and Elizabeth Barrett Browning . the poems At Lechlade 00:00 / 01:41 The church was full of dead bees somehow a swarm had gathered high inside a transept window back and forth the bees flew through the crossing their too low wrong note like a moan the building held as if holding itself moaning as it held the condemned bees passing to and fro in air that hung sacred etcetera between pillars but could not save them bees are angels too who will save us if we let them but now they flew uselessly offering themselves brown gifts in air above our heads and dead in the house of death on pews and on the red tiles of the aisle at the welcome table the steward refused to let us call the bee man we must wait till they’re all dead she said and I’ve always wondered why she wanted to deal death to the living bees in the gold church what fury or what loss would make you kill the life-givers the velvet singers in plain sight knowing no-one quite would dare stop you knowing we are obedient and that she could close the church against the life that comes flying in by accident as words do sometimes or a truth glimpsed in the high evening air Coming Of Age 00:00 / 01:08 In the beginning the waters covered the earth but before that earth was fire surely the air made fire turn to water air made water-fire like the Northern Lights flaming green and gold and blue through your iris in the beginning was like a game of scissors paper stone and I could not decide which to trust cold fists poking from anorak sleeves or paper blowing against the chain-link fence long mornings when maybe our teachers were bored too but we were igneous then we must have been cooling already for steam covered the sky the sea the sun when it settled on the window glass and still the sea was always at the foot of our day like a beginning like coming into language like God in the hymn books setting breakers of blue fire across the horizon At Mukito For Jaan Kaplinski 00:00 / 01:13 What’s here now when I come like Jaan’s sheep like Sappho’s lamb stepping down into the valley as the bright evening light slips and pools beside a wall along the water with the gnats and water-skimmers bright and dark falling across the stepping shoulders of the careful beast so quiet so inevitable little lamb of death calling the poet home although he called you first into the clearing with the pond the long-armed well the barn swallows and in the dark the nightingales sing inexhaustibly about the forest going on forever beyond the fence rail as poets do singing in darkness up among the wooden beams of habitation while the lamb comes to lie down at the threshold comes gently to your feet Jaan I didn’t call him here Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Kittie Belltree read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Kittie Belltree back next the poet Kittie Belltree is a Specialist Tutor for neurodivergent students at Aberystwyth University. She received a Literature Wales bursary for her debut collection, Sliced Tongue and Pearl Cufflinks . Her short stories and poems have appeared in Cut on the Bias , Heartland , The Brown Envelope Book and Cast a Long Shadow . Kittie was recently selected for the Representing Wales Writer Development Programme, supporting writers from low income backgrounds. She's hard at work on a novel, and writing her second poetry collection. the poems The Magician’s Daughter In the fairy stories, the daughters love their fathers because they are mighty princes, great rulers, and because such absolute power seduces. ~ Carolyn Steedman ~ Landscape for a Good Woman 00:00 / 02:36 He draws a silk scarf from a secret pocket in his trousers – snakes it around wrists, splits in two, twists it taut, like her vocal cords, places it over her eggshell eyelids, then offers his hand – white-gloved bowing low, he lets loose the stolen jewels lining his jacket. She accepts – blindly – curtseying into the citrine shaft of spotlight that slices the stage in half, then footsteps into the dead-flat chest, arranges herself – doll-like – inside before he lays the wooden lid to rest. Until now he has kept her for himself, fed on a diet of sliced tongue and pearl cufflinks. The ritual begins before the stage door, before the audience, the dressing room – where he inserts the knife into her velvet and feathers, plucks her hair into tucks and tresses, places a glass slipper on her pillow. Thus, he enters without breaking and she slips seamlessly into the space conjured by his third wife who broke all his spells while he snored by the stove after Saturday matinée , stole the key to his best hat box for her whale-bone combs and peacock frocks and vanished with a ventriloquist from Vladivostok. He feels the thickness of the blade like honey inside her and the strength of his heaving old magic. Why, his wand can cut her in two – separate her bones from her meat like halving a peach. She is ripe, now, for his next trick – Now he has her undone, he will make her disappear. Now – Austerity 00:00 / 01:16 Dirty rat. You’re a fat duck in the House of Lords, fiddling expenses, pinching, farting. You insinuate intemperance, an excess of back-bedrooms, a debauched dissipation in disability benefits, washed down by a superfluity of free school dinners and social care. You point parsimonious fingers into porky pies. You lie with the fishes, the figures. You’re a tight-fisted wrecking ball, punch drunk on stuffing filthy wads into greasy palms and off-shore pension pots. You’re out to lunch, insatiable, voraciously force-feeding families into food banks, mincemeat, rent arrears, debt. You’re a champagne Charlie Chancellor of The Exchequer who neglects to check. You’re specks of white powder smirching naughty nostrils. You’re a glut of gluttony gutting kitchen cupboards, a rip-roaring rusty tin opener doing dentistry on the NHS; an overweight authority on obsessive abscission-making; on cutting things cuttingly; thinking yeah, what the fuck . Bond In 1945, August DeMont drove to the Golden Gate Bridge with his five-year-old daughter, Marilyn; told her to climb over the rail and jump. She did so without hesitation. Seconds later, he dived 'gracefully' after her. A note left in the car stated: 'I and my daughter have committed suicide.' 00:00 / 01:59 i For that was the fact of the matter. The fact of the matter in a sentence. A punishment. The blunt force of its grammar. Pragmatic punctuation precise enough to slice through time like a seam. That night, the rain fell in short, pattering clusters. Your clothes moaned in the closet. A dog slipped out into the dark. The quiet fact of the matter. Seven words for sadness. Words like stones. ii She never spoke. Someone said the car seat was still warm when they found the note. The matter-of-fact fumbling at the rubble of my heart. A cigarette butt tossed into space. iii How to smother a black hole revoke the last wordless slam of doors annul the unspoken bond deeper than any drop leaving me done with life. A sentence followed by a full stop. Publishing credits The Magician’s Daughter: The Lampeter Review (No. 11) Austerity: The Morning Star (May 21st 2020) Bond: Poetry Wales (Vol. 54, No. 1)

Hear poet Zannah Kearns read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Zannah Kearns back next the poet Freelance writer Zannah Kearns has had her poems featured in Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal , The Dark Horse , Finished Creatures , Under the Radar , Ink, Sweat & Tears and Atrium . A members’ winner in a summer 2021 competition run by The Poetry Society, Zannah co-runs the Poets’ Café – a monthly open mic in Reading, Berkshire. the poems High Tide in the Morning 00:00 / 01:13 It strikes me the moon controls more than our tides just as these children surge into my room, my bed crash into my heart, flood me with chatter, their energies zingy as sea spray. Lockdown: the house is awash with unfinished projects, dirty socks scrunched-up sheets of abandoned drawings. I’m scrolling news that’s rolling in story upon story too many names, too many splashes. I can lose hours gazing at friends’ pictures their perfect reflections mirrored in lakes but we’ve all of us blown far out to sea, swung on each wave at the whim of the moon. Under sunlit windswept skies we cast off into this day its dip and swell into its lull helming as best as we can. Love as a Mutt 00:00 / 01:25 We run — our laughter bouncing against bricks and the fence we threw mud at last Wednesday. We run with faces turned for a moment to the sun, feeling its glow as a kiss on our skin, held for all memory. The Earth has halted her turning to say our names. Then, coats flapping with busted zips we’re away again — hair unbrushed, fingers raw, some nails bitten to bloody quicks, but none of it matters because now snow falls! Gentle flakes spiral through air stilled. Skin bright, breath visible, our small hearts are as hot as baked potatoes. We spread our hands while the sky pegs out her grimy sheets. Near some dustbins, a mangy dog cowers, all ribs and bald patches. Some throw stones, but Jamie tosses her coat, scoops the mutt — ears cut off, bones a collection of loose rods she can hardly keep in her arms. I’ll call him Princess. Bet you can’t keep him. But Jamie, smiling, doesn’t hear. On Holding On and Being Held 00:00 / 01:31 In Aviemore, I climbed a wall of ice glittering in the winter sun — an edifice of glass. I led the route, kicking crampons to make shelves, reaching up with yellow-handled axes, chipping holds; scaling a ladder, right then left like Jack climbing his beanstalk through the cloud, snowflakes falling so thick they looked furred. And my heart full. It’s the first time I’d ever winter-climbed. Everywhere, white was all I saw so, even though I was several storeys high with nothing much to hold me if I fell, something about the surrounding cloud, the mountain’s bowl like a cupped hand, felt substantial. I, who am often consumed by fear, had none. Sometimes now, far out on one of life’s edges, I like to remember that day on the mountain when the tips of my toes were hooked in its snow, how the flat of each boot rested on air. Publishing credits High Tide in the Morning: Locked Down | Poems, Diaries and Art from the 2020 Pandemic (Poetry Space) Love as a Mutt: Under the Radar (Issue 25) On Holding On and Being Held: The Dark Horse (Issue 43)

Hear poet Helen Kay read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Helen Kay back next the poet Helen Kay has poems in The Rialto , Stand and Butcher’s Dog , as well as in her pamphlet, This Lexia & Other Languages . She curates Poetry Dyslexia and Imagination : a creative platform for people with dyslexia and other forms of neurodiversity. A finalist for the 2022 Brotherton Anthology, Helen won both the Repton and the Ironbridge poetry competitions in 2023. On social media, she's known for her hen puppet sidekick, Nigella. the poems Bitter (from 𝑂𝐸 Biter) 00:00 / 01:37 The fox took away my old hens last night to feed its starving cubs. Its vampire teeth parted feathers, pierced the oesophagus and windpipe below the sinewy neck and severed the spinal cord, quick as birds that snatch worms or pluck a butterfly off a shelf of air. No waste; no signs, bar sequins of spilt corn on moulted feathers. Wearing his wife’s kimono, a QC beat to death a fox caught in the wire fence round his hen coop, blooded his baseball bat. I am not bitter, Foxy. The cruellest bite is the empty plate of death. I would bequeath you my thighs, breast and legs to plump up your bony kin. Worse things lurk darkly: two million hens gassed and eaten daily. We will chainsaw the coop, splintering tears of plywood on the earth. We will plant egg-smooth bean seeds in our hen manure and watch the sparrows steal red cherries. I will stir my tears in a glass of wine or let them fall to dry on a page of words. I will wear my fox socks, post #fox pics cross my fingers, bolt my door at dusk. Scrabble 00:00 / 01:08 Every night Dad and I clicked the tiles slick as casino chips. A whiskey soda lit his petrol-coupon glass to a sparkling chandelier. An ashtray snake-charmed a Silk Cut while he positioned the tiles, turned misspellings into jokes. Winning did not matter; it was our way of talking. We were both dictionary-dependent, lifting its cover like the lid of a Milk Tray box. We fished letters from a yellow wash bag, sliced them into so many meanings. Slotted in our chairs, we made order: ashtray, coaster, fag packet. My pen knitted lines of scores, filled the evening’s blank page, and always, upstairs, Mum, out cold, a burnt stub, empty tumbler, blank tile, jumbled-up bag of letters we could never put into words. My Brother’s Widow 00:00 / 01:05 Not wanting to waste things, she sows your tomato seeds, too late. The seedlings sprout in May, vulnerable and hairy, moving forward imperceptibly, as she is. Soon she has too many plants and gives me two. Neither of us knows which bits to snip, what to feed them, only that we are growing gently together, reaching out. Green leaves unfurl their fingered symmetry towards me. Constellations of yellow flowers hold tomorrows. I can catch your flamboyance in the way they crowd my yard. Sal has planted marigolds with hers, calls it companion planting. In a way, I won’t mind a lack of tomatoes. The absence of them, lurking round and red beneath the leaves, seems fitting. Publishing credits Bitter (from 𝑂𝐸 Biter): Live Canon Anthology 2022 (Live Canon) Scrabble: won first prize at the Iron Bridge Poetry Festival 2023 My Brother's Widow: longlisted for the Cheltenham Poetry Competition 2023

Hear poet Katie Stockton read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Katie Stockton back next the poet Katie Stockton is a welsh poet, playwright, crossword lover and recent graduate of the UEA Masters Writing programme. She's the 2020 Snoo Wilson Writing Prize winner, and was recently longlisted for the Poetry Society's Collaboration Award. Her work has appeared in Hellebore Press, Forward Poetry, Ink, Sweat & Tears and others. Her writing commissions include those by The Sunday Times , Norwich Arts Centre, the Maddermarket Theatre, RADA, Drama Studio London, WalesOnline and Young Norfolk Arts Festival. the poems Basilisk 00:00 / 00:55 Faces have seen older, stranger faces than this, train windows too, which’ve learned a new habit of smudging me out. My face squished between the hardlines of a hat and a collar. Can you will a face into a second state of life? Let me tell you: the universe is a snake – I saw this in a true dream – it sheds and it sheds, leaves behind its echo-brothers on the porches of its next-door neighbours. A face cannot live like this. I’m no universe of cold-blood, I am an egg cracked, slipping. You can shadow-reckon my wrinkles, hear the shadow-people that live in these folds. When my face was a stone, a marble. cold and membraned, when I liked things the shape of a full stop, I used to stare long at the basilisk in the mirror, every morning. Askew Road 00:00 / 00:51 Heat. Around the fruit bowl like flies, dripping from the fridge handle, the upturned door numbers, dropping from the hallway creak. The single periwinkle house beckoned heat down to us. Summer’s fingers run tracks through window droplets. We measure out our stay in Askew Road, London, in the hexagons of limescale, its ones or twos at the bottom of the mug, or the tip of the tongue, if unlucky. The heat of it. The sun a pea pod ready to be split. The neighbours rattling their keys. The people have stopped parking their cars. The buses are carving a new route away. We’ve become our mothers’ daughters, fathers’ sons. We could leave for home, or obey the heat. Genus 00:00 / 01:14 this garden is plotted into the lines of my hands I put an earthworm to my upper lip and whisper for access to my own skin when it comes to butterflies I am a royalist a weatherman craving a wallflower a template of root an earthworm chewing pieces of the dark school happens again in blades stems are paper spines no schoolyard tyrants this time, just those things I’ll never attain the symmetry of and the teacher is the entire memory of winter blinking over the hill’s shoulder making me into flowers unfurling without fear that their twins will be there again this year the earth forgives the worm that needs it the world forgives the wound the hyacinths and I have reached an accord when they’ve gone I’ll construct solariums out of a new genus slink down the garden path to sleep in roses through winter no lullabying flowerbeds the magic birds gone quiet but I won’t be afraid of giving into soil of inhaling the heady pollen that sleepwalks the slopes of mountains into my skin Publishing credits Basilisk: Re-Side (Issue 1) Askew Road: Hellebore Press (Issue 4) Genus: exclusive first publication by iamb / Runner-up in the Hestercombe Gardens Poetry Competition 2019

Hear poet Nichola Deane read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Nichola Deane back next the poet Nichola Deane’s first collection, Cuckoo , followed on from her pamphlets Trieste , a Laureate’s Choice, and My Moriarty , which won the 2012 Flarestack Poetry Pamphlet Prize, and was The Poetry Book Society’s Autumn Pamphlet Choice for 2012. Nichola’s poems have appeared in Poetry London , Archipelago , Magma , Oxford Poetry, The North and elsewhere. Michael Mackmin describes her work as ‘amazing’, while Carol Ann Duffy says Nichola is a poet who is ‘sophisticated and lyrically charged, precise and daring.’ Douglas Dunn goes further, calling Nichola ‘a future English Elizabeth Bishop.’ the poems ‘Hotel de la mer’, ‘Hotel de l’Etoile’ After Joseph Cornell 00:00 / 00:44 I have arrived here with my suitcase, full of the sea wind. I am unpacking, laying out on the bed, Black Rock, Port Madoc, Rhos Neigr, Caldey: small hotels of my childhood, rickety static caravans, the last pinks and purples in the west, the tracing of lines and faces and first names in darkening sand. I am looking at all that I made with mere pebble and shell in those fading oases. I am looking at my hopes and can smell salt. Cuckoo 00:00 / 00:34 When the buds on the birch disappear I appear so spooked, het-up, heaven-fretted, bejesused, souped up with all the may- bees in May, the new plight of the new (Cuckoo , Cuccu ) to haunt us back, to the sleeping greenwood (like that? how so? ) with a – wake for a voice, my loopy echo, a bit of locus pocus Anubis January, 2015 00:00 / 00:22 The heart will weigh – what after all its watching? Less than a sparrow’s, and then, then nothing at all: heart-in-the-branches, heart-in-the-split-bark, heart-in-the-nodding-wind. Publishing credits 'Hôtel de la Mer', 'Hôtel de L'Étoile': The Rialto (No. 84) Cuckoo / Anubis: Cuckoo (V. Press)

Hear poet Ed Garvey Long read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Ed Garvey Long back next the poet Life coach Ed Garvey-Long is a queer poet from North London. He has an MA in Creative and Life Writing from Goldsmiths, University of London, and published his first pamphlet, The Living Museum , in 2019. Ed's poems have featured in Under the Radar , Perverse , clavmag and harana poetry . His hobbies include hand-sewing quilts, and long walks with his husband. the poems Visitor 00:00 / 01:06 I look up from my muesli and Jane Austen’s in my kitchen, red-cheeked from dancing and tiny like a museum mannequin. She comes to join me at the table, doesn’t say a word, smiling warmly like we share a funny truth. I don’t say a word either – what would she make of my accent? She looks around bewildered but taking it all in her stride. Maybe she often falls out of time to join gay men eating their muesli? We look at each other awkwardly again with beaming smiles and a sense of when is this going to end? She goes to speak, looking at me directly, but she fades out, and then she's gone. Sunday in the Woods 00:00 / 01:10 All the dogs follow us home. At first we pretend it’s an inconvenience, but then we start dancing and skipping with a conga line of cavapoos and dachshunds, labradors and cockers, huskies, newfoundlanders and chihuahuas gambolling and prancing behind us. Once home, we thrive drenched in dog slobber, swimming in kibble and poo bags – our flat’s a Pets At Home warehouse. But we love them all endlessly, yes. We love them all more than the bored middle-class families did. We love the chaos of it, we love the glory and the noise. And the love: we love the love of having them with us, falling over each other in an abundant pile, a glorious fur phantasmagoria. Borrowed Light 00:00 / 00:43 Friday and I pick off the moss of this week and let myself stand in brightness streaming through our modest windows yellowing my books the snake plant likes to be crowded and the song thrush is back to nest if we have anything it is borrowed light warm on our faces large and powerful and second-hand Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Heidi Beck read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Heidi Beck back next the poet Heidi Beck grew up in a small New Hampshire town – emigrating to the UK in 1998, where she now lives in Bristol. She holds an MA in English Literature from the University of Chicago, and an MA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University. Her poems have been published in The Rialto , Magma , Poetry Ireland Review, The North, Butcher's Dog , Finished Creatures , Under the Radar and The Alchemy Spoon . Heidi also has poems with The Friday Poem and And Other Poems . She was longlisted in the 2020 UK National Poetry Competition. the poems Hunting Season 00:00 / 02:35 A girl steps from a yellow bus at Loon Pond Road, anticipating a long walk home—down the hill, around the pond, past the swamp with the beaver dam, the final stretch just woods—with her heavy bag of books. It’s hunting season, and the men are out in pick-up trucks, stalking through the woods with ammo, scopes and shotguns, dressed in their camo, carrying coolers stuffed with cans of Budweiser, Coors, Tuborg Gold. The girl puts on a safety vest, flimsy fabric in fluorescent orange, begins to sing—Supertramp, Fleetwood Mac, all the lyrics to Evita —loud and long, so they hear she is not a deer, so loud she does not hear the pick-up truck slow behind her. It pulls ahead, stops, just past the swamp. Hello, Honey, where you heading to? She smells the beer as they corral her. Let us help, all smiles and hands. The book bag drops, the vest falls off, she’s on her knees, white rump to the air, trying to keep her tail down. She shakes her head, now fuzzy and furred, nose dark as dirt, everything narrowed. Her ears stretch, eyes widen, gaze becomes fixed, the world slows. She remains still, their laughter like an echo, then lifts herself on spindly legs, fragile bones at risk as she attempts to kick, hooves flailing. She tries to buck and punch, awkward in these limbs. Flanks damp, she spins, all panting ribs, spins again, falls. A girl steps out of the forest, arriving for dinner, late. They glare at her clothes, her hair, her wet, evasive face. She tries to describe how she was a deer. Stop! they cry, stop with your lies, your make- believe tales. Don’t bring this trouble here. All the Things Flying are Overwhelming 00:00 / 01:34 Even here, which feels like home, I need to be ready for the planes, the sucking sound and roar, the possible explosion— I’m mapping the trajectory of falling and flame while trying to track the flamingos, their splayed-out necks, the pink under wings as they jockey and speed, then they’ve gone too far and a flash of godwits whistling past, turning white turning black left white right black white black and he shouts You’re missing the spoonbill, just over your head! Didn’t you get it? and I swing my lens and there’s only an egret flapping to splash too late but then storks, Shit , my settings are all wrong, wheeling higher and higher, keep calm, find the pattern, pull them into the frame and keep on walking past the mountain of salt to Iberian magpies in the pine tree shade and don’t startle the hoopoe on the manicured grass, then the bright yellow spot of a weaver bird calling from the reeds by the lake, but look up, maybe an osprey or eagle, how the gulls squawk and lift in a tangle and a pintail duck crash-lands by an ibis, startling a grebe and everything’s flying and the crack of a golf ball and I flinch, remembering that man and the blood pouring out from under his hands. Family Bible 00:00 / 03:00 GENESIS On the first day I watched The Flintstones , The Jetsons , Sylvester and Tweety. I created sculptures from slices of American Cheese. I climbed up my slide and saw that it was good. EXODUS And so 2.6 million men were sent to Vietnam; another 40,000 fled to Canada. LOTTERY The Law said birthdates should be placed in capsules, mixed in a shoebox, transferred to a glass jar. NUMBERS The birthdates of three of my uncles were chosen. GEORGE He raised his hand when they asked who could type, and stayed behind the lines, tapping out words like defoliation. He didn’t know about the truce between Agent Orange and his chromosomes until he was nearly sixty, when we learned how acute lymphocytic leukaemia could kill you, and how quickly. HARRY He remained in combat, first with ‘the Gooks,’ who took out part of his intestine, and then with Benedictine and brandy and blackouts, with nicotine and nightmares. The hemochromatosis turned his skin grey, the liver cancer waited for the lung cancer to get him first. He died on the bathroom floor, haemorrhaging from a shot of chemotherapy. 1 PETER He once kept a pet duck and ordered a crocodile by mail. He could recite the statistics of every attack by a Great White Shark. He met the love of his life over there, Heroin. He married her, became a panhandler, settled down to a lifetime’s free access to methadone. 2 PETER He sits in a classroom of medical students at Yale, Exhibit A, a shrunken, shivery gnome in a beanie, insisting that everyone would be happier with Heroin. WIDOWS Katheryn and Antoinette. REVELATION On Christmas Day my father is on his seventh mission, flying cargo out of Okinawa, with seven Vietcong shooting at his tail. I visit Santa on his Throne in the belly of a Lockheed C-130 Hercules, the seventh child to sit on his knee. I beg him please could he bring me a Barbie. He gives me this Bible, full of Good News, instead. Publishing credits Hunting Season: Live Canon Anthology 2020 (Live Canon) All the Things Flying are Overwhelming: Finished Creatures (Issue 6) Family Bible: The North (Issue 63)

Hear poet Ken Cockburn read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Ken Cockburn back next the poet Poet and translator Ken Cockburn spent several years at the Scottish Poetry Library before going freelance to work in education, care and community settings – often in collaboration with visual artists. His most recent collection is Floating the Woods . Ken's also the man behind the pamphlet Edinburgh: poems and translations , which features work written for the guided walks he leads in the city’s Old Town. He also translated from the German Christine Marendon's Heroines from Abroad . the poems Hands 00:00 / 01:37 These hands have buckled belts and fastened buttons These hands have howked the tatties from the ground These hands have handled cutlery and weapons These hands have picked the apples from the bough Hands to hold a pen or blade Hands to strike and cup a match Hands to give the eyes some shade Hands to take another catch These hands have spooned out medicines and teas These hands have painted watercolour scenes These hands have tinkled old piano keys These hands have worked industrial machines Hands to turn another page Hands to hoist and set the sails Hands applaud those on the stage Hands with dirty fingernails These hands in tearooms picked up cakes and fancies These hands have sharpened pencils with a knife These hands held partners at the weekend dances These hands have mapped the progress of a life Hands to scrub and peel potatoes Hands to cup a baby’s head Hands to knit a balaclava Hands to smooth the unmade bed Hands to give a proper measure Hands to stitch the binding thread Hands up when you know the answer Hands to shush what’s best unsaid Ward 00:00 / 00:48 I keep my diaries in a large bookcase my mother told me crossly, years ago, she was now giving to my sister. Fine, fine. I left with what did belong to me, returning sooner than expected when, days before the move, my father collapsed. I went to visit him in hospital as he convalesced and took my daughter who, at eighteen months, was still innocent of past and future, caveats, grudges, grip and slow release. Let property wait. The ward dispenses all we need for now. Rodney 00:00 / 00:58 At that school at that time there was no choice: rugby. Skinny, tall and slow I was put in the second row, scrummed and pushed on cue. Asthmatic, on cold days I wheezed until my lungs gave in. I was keen. I wanted to be good enough for the first fifteen unlike Rodney, disinclined to bother. Played at full-back to avoid set pieces, on the whole, he was left untroubled. Once we were on the same team; a breakaway left only Rodney between the runner and our line. 'Tackle him!' I shouted, but he stood his ground and the ball was touched down. At that moment I could only admire his simple refusal to play the game. Publishing credits Hands: part of Lapidus Scotland's Working with ‘Hands’ and Living Voices Ward: exclusive first publication by iamb Rodney: Poetry Scotland (No. 101)

Read 45 poems from 15 emerging and established poets – and hear their authors read them too. Welcome to wave 19 of iamb. wave nineteen autumn 2024 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

Hear poet Margaret Dennehy read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Margaret Dennehy back next the poet Born in Waterford City in Éire, Margaret Dennehy now lives between Dungarvan in County Waterford, and Cork City in County Cork. Her work has appeared in several anthologies, and in 2020, a poem of Margaret's was featured in the RTÉ Radio One Extra series, Keywords . She is yet to publish her debut collection. the poems Ever Full Bithlán – Ever Full Tobar Rí an Domhnaigh – Well of the King of Sunday 00:00 / 01:38 A rusted ring embedded in a mooring post Marks the spot where ferrymen Offloaded their summer-Sunday cargoes Of 'hooded devotees' in search of health and healing. Rounds made, of three or nine, From east to west, following the motion of the sun. Stones, stacked in small mounds, tallied prayers. Pilgrims bathed their foreheads and hands in its waters And drank deeply of its cool, clear goodness. Rags of red or black Tied to its shady canopy of ash and elm. Left to flutter and fade, like leaves in the winter, Till they took up the wishes and woes of the bearer And carried them away on the wind. Only remnants now remain Of this 'fairy font' of wellness (which gave my place its name). A limestone plaque on the wall. The border of its beehive mound traced in brick beneath. Its sanctity suppressed in the name of 'progress'. Bithlán – this ancient spring of ritual and restoration, No longer nourishes the needs of those Who struggle to survive the marauding malady of our times, Or those in search of succour and of solace, Or those who seek to be healed and made whole again. Cinderella Shoes After Subh Milis by Seamus O’Neill For Maeve 00:00 / 00:54 Morning – a pair of black 'killer heels' Lies abandoned at my hall door. One, upright, standing tall. The other, fallen wearily on its side Like a warrior slain in battle. The stiletto heel, his weapon, Poised to strike his slayer as he fell. A momentary impulse surges to insist, That these high-rise icons of fashion Be removed at once from my hall floor! But the urge to scold is soon suppressed As I think of the time When these black sentries of style (To me, a secret signal of her safe return) No longer stand (or lie) at my hall door, And the one to whom these Cinderella shoes belong, Is gone. Exposure 00:00 / 00:37 Their smiling faces caught in a moment by the push of a button. As light through lens hits silver crystals, A latent image is made. But the magic happens in a dark room Where, like a blind man feeling his way, The one who draws with light, Feeds film onto a spool. Like a priest, he prepares for the ritual that Will once again make visible the happiness of those Who believe that the joy Of that snapshot moment Will last forever. Publishing credits Ever Full: Poems from My 5K (Cork County Council Library & Arts Service) Cinderella Shoes / Exposure: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Jim Newcombe read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jim Newcombe back next the poet Born and raised in Derby in the heart of the English Midlands, Jim Newcombe moved to London in 2006. Since then, he's lived in every quarter of the capital – enjoying an active cultural life of concerts and visits to theatre productions, museums, galleries and taverns. Jim's writing has appeared in numerous publications, and was shortlisted for the prestigious Bridport Prize, as well as for the Pendle Prize for elegies commemorating the First World War. the poems Eight Owls for Hieronymus Bosch 00:00 / 01:43 I Between the inward and outward wave upon the shore a rhythm in feathers that wasn’t here before called into being its substance and its law. II Between the masculine and feminine, between the how of her and why of him, came one with wings who shamed the seraphim. III Out from opposing poles that brought us here with eyes of sun and moon that knew no tear a tremulous presence maintained the biosphere. IV Between one nation’s customs and the next a primal entity that left the scholars vexed denied in its descent the doctrine of each text. V In the skewed trajectories of time and space it roosted aloof and in the darkest place rotated the clock of its expressionless face. VI The wood has ears, the field has eyes, and dawn reveals the eyes in every ear of corn that scans our thoughts, their verdict full of scorn. VII It is the decoy to all you think is true, to everything you ever thought you knew; the one note in its voice asks Who-are-you? VIII Both the signal to a secret and a lure, it hears the silence of a spider on the floor and sees most clearly when it’s most obscure. The House 00:00 / 02:16 Boundaries were defined by harsh words and bolted doors, yet by night I snuck past sleeping sentinels, the dark air pregnant with unanswered prayers, the page of each wall scripted with shadow, seeming to swell with pressure, as though something passed through it. Rain tapped at each window where the gloating stars peered in like patient voyeurs, the rhubarb blanched in moonlight as the clematis loomed, scaling the house, rending foundations I could not fortify. Spiders were hatched from cracked corners. I searched for clues, listened at keyholes for conspiracies, my memory mapped with creaking floorboards that betrayed my presence. I would spend hours in prayer and soliloquy trying to subsume the guilt I had inherited. Before they could be caught or killed the spiders would scuttle back to their dark dimension, as though a gash could suck up its own blood. Somewhere in hiding was the eight-legged mother of them all, her deftly strung web a grid of carcasses; wings, shells, corrupted husks mauled and festering. I couldn’t sleep for fear of it. Sometimes I would try the cellar door: deep and forbidding, that underground lair, where steps descend into a darkness that writhed with apprehensions. I couldn’t reach the light switch to dispel my suspicions which grew like rumours of a secret sin. One day I would confront whatever was down there and return victorious (if return at all) to where another, like me, would dare to descend along the cellar’s corpse-cold walls, dank and mildewed, the treacherous gloom now bristling, bristling and black with all that is unassumed. The Moon and The Sea From A Shake of the Riddle 00:00 / 01:00 VIII The moon and the sea – are they in harmony or at war? The martial marriage of the pale satellite and the brisk lush rasp of breakers – their sickly scurf and slosh, the weft and warp of crawling froth, and the pendulum tide like a nag gone berserk in its bridle, while the blind pupil of the milky moon dumb and vacuous, dimpled with craters, barren as the soul of an atheist. Holding dominion over the toiling water, that wormy, comet-scuffed wafer, that shrunken bauble of colourless light, still separate despite its travelled distance, its clean light of clinical intellect frozen from shadow, whose oblique brilliance does not illumine, but only reflect. Publishing credits Eight Owls for Hieronymus Bosch / The Moon and The Sea: exclusive first publication by iamb The House: Eunoia Review

Hear poet Jemelia Moseley read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. 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)