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

Hear poet Jill Abram read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jill Abram © Naomi Woddis back next the poet Director of Malika's Poetry Kitchen, a collective encouraging craft, community and development, Jill Abram grew up in Manchester, travelled the world and now lives in Brixton. She's performed her poems everywhere from London to the Ledbury Poetry Festival, as well as in Paris, the USA and online. Jill's poetry has appeared in The Rialto , Magma , Finished Creatures , Ink Sweat &Tears , And Other Poems and Harana . When not writing poetry, Jill produces and presents a variety of events, including the Stablemates series of poetry and conversation. the poems Stepping Out 00:00 / 01:01 His tight hold and strong lead send the calendar backwards. I shed half my lifetime, my weight as we quick quick slow across the grass. This stranger saw my winces at every kick of the drum, tish of the hi-hat, chose to rescue me for a foxtrot around the garden. Evening sun stretches shadows – our heads bob among apple trees. I move at his command – can hear the melody playing in his head. We flow over the lawn: chasse, turn, promenade. A burst of laughter could be at our expense. His step never falters, he does not loosen his grip. Dive 00:00 / 01:38 Tanks checked, mask on, I topple in backwards, descend. I approach your feet, count ten little toes, as there should be. I want to check fingers too but only have enough air for one full scan. They’ll have to wait until I’m halfway. Your legs are plump, a dimple on each side of chubby knees, as yet no sign of patella bones. There are folds at the top of each thigh to be checked carefully at every nappy change. And now I can see you are a boy. You should be my boy. A fat little belly, umbilicus trailing, wafting in the swell. Two functionless nipples but you’d look wrong without them. Now I can fin along an arm from your shoulder to the relief of thumb, four fingers, and across to the same on the other side. I swim away to see your whole face then back for the detail; teeny round chin, lips surprisingly full and a perfect bow. The cliché button nose, your eyelids fringed by blond lashes, closed. I want to see the colour of your eyes, for you to see me. Marriage Vow 00:00 / 01:11 Mum says Dad was brought as a date for her sister by his friend who said, This is my friend Leo. Mum says Dad would have asked out whoever answered the phone, but he only rang at dinnertime when she was nearest. Mum says Dad took her to dinner and concerts, If I wanted to have fun, I’d go out with one of the others. Mum says Dad said, I’d like to marry you, but I only earn £4 a week. Mum says Dad went away, so when he came back she said, I suppose we’d better get married. Other people said she could give up work once she was a wife, but Dad said, Not bloody likely! After more than fifty years and two more generations, Dad says, Turn the radiator up, I can’t hear a word! Dad says, Have I had my dinner? when he’s just had his lunch. Mum says We’ve had the better, now’s the worse. Publishing credits Stepping Out: exclusive first publication by iamb Dive: The Fenland Reed Marriage Vow: Cake Magazine

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

Hear poet Devon Marsh read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Devon Marsh back next the poet Since serving as a pilot in the US Navy before embarking on a career in banking, Devon Marsh has had his poems and essays published by The Lake , Poydras Review , Black Bough Poetry , Split Rock Review and River Mouth Review , and has been featured on periodicities: a journal of poetry and poetics . Devon lives in the North Carolina piedmont, and is currently searching for a good home for his first full-length poetry collection. the poems Driftwood – Olympic Peninsula 00:00 / 01:24 Children throw driftwood into the sea, rebuking the wood’s audacity. Limbs and trunks lie ashore, bone-like rather than a severed part of forest. Yet the skeleton-white logs pay homage to shadow-black forms. Trees above wave-carved cliffs oversee the beach. Tall firs look ahead. The firs turn from the ocean, put breath into the sky. They look back and think again. Children cast pieces of trees to withdraw with the tide and feign they won’t return when we’re gone. Tall firs regard the sea. They look back and think of me, know I am of the forest even as rhythmic waves pound within my veins. How many will pulse the shore where I stand rooted to a spot on the sand? I take evergreen breath from the sky, look back, breathe again. I watch my heirs, relish their audacity. My children throw driftwood into the sea. Own Fault 00:00 / 01:36 Last night’s rain bowed the stream. Water cranes to peek above the rim, see beyond the channel of its world. On green hillsides, scattered orange firs resemble derelict sculpture, ignored rather than poisoned, like a forest erected when we built bridges that threaten to collapse from negligence. How could we fail to maintain our means of traverse? I would find another way to you, swim a raging torrent, tasting with each dip of my face the rusted tang of failure. Distracted by thoughts of a crossing I won’t make, it’s a verdant tree, lovely with life I curse when I misjudge my cast. This is my own fault, no one else to blame for a hook sunk to its barb in this summer’s terminal growth. Wade ashore, cut the leader, leave the mayfly perched above the current. Its name —Ephemeroptera —gives a nod to its day in the sun. Tie on line, knot nymph to tippet, eye the yellow slice of sky backed by faience, by cobalt. I wade in, cast again, try not to squander light. Around me, trees agree on a color for night. Storm 00:00 / 01:18 On the porch, close to 10pm. Enjoying red wine, lingering rain, thunder moving off, songs of at least three types of frog. Lightning flashes at greater and greater intervals, building tolerance for a gap that will carry to the next storm. This is when I replay our conversation wonder why you wondered what I meant. And also wonder if I should remark to you, inside, about the storm as it subsides. Something obvious, a point of sure agreement. The darkness rather than what’s in it. With no flashes I see the sheen of the screen. Pixeled black covers the yard, drowns the pond, obscures field and forest and sky. Night tries to mist onto the porch like rain, pool with shadows. The candle keeps it at bay. I’m on the bright side listening to frogs, replayed conversation, and receding thunder until it’s time to blow out the flame. Publishing credits Driftwood – Olympic Peninsula: River Mouth Review (Issue 4) Own Fault / Storm: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Simon Middleton read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Simon Middleton back next the poet Simon Middleton lives in Dorset with his wife and small children. His writing has appeared in Envoi, IOTA, The Cadaverine, Firewords Quarterly and The Best New British and Irish Poets 2017 . His poetry has been shortlisted for The White Review's Poets Prize 2022 and The Magma Open Pamphlet Competition 2020. Simon's work was also highly commended in the Winchester Poetry Prize 2020, and has earned him the 2018 Bridport Prize's Dorset Award. the poems Daedalus III 00:00 / 01:18 The parameters of our prenatal world are governed by the gospel of The Pregnancy Bible where life is measured in weeks and foodstuff. (I feel uneasy likening embryos to food. Like Saturn devouring his children.) Still, Kate marks each new seven-day cycle with a new object of comparison: from the first, tentative days as a poppy seed to a kidney bean, from fig to peapod to lemon. It challenges my knowledge of fruit and vegetables. I was scuppered at week ten, when the baby was the size of a kumquat. The weekly shop has become a scientific exploration where the grocery aisle spans an installation of life. The Bible says, 'Fully formed, head to heel, baby will be the size of a small pumpkin.' Near term, I find myself standing absently at supermarket shelving, head tilted, imagining bodily features on a melon. Space Was a Material 00:00 / 02:18 Next time we see him, he is a still-life arranged in a plastic box. A Special Care Nurse leads us like a guide at a museum, where we stand, examining the thin rise and fall of his back. We stand as we did once in Hepworth’s studio, natural light alive against whitewash walls, our focus centred on a table with a plinth that held the polished form of an ‘Infant’. Remember how little air there was? How the whole fabric of our lives seemed to fray then re-thread, so the room felt pliant? And how, standing before ‘Three Forms’, we were told, For Hepworth, space was a material, distance a quality – as much a part of the composition. In the ward, machines draw his life on a screen in shallow peaks, as he lies beneath a knitted sheet. Remember how little air there was in Hepworth’s room? Seeing the child she shaped, knowing ours was forming in the dark of your womb. Was that the texture of longing? Or do we feel that now? Seeing his half-strapped face. The ventilator trunk. The scalp crowned with gingering blood. The newness of his body mapped by wires. Remember how the air seemed to cement, suddenly? As we found our hands parting a break in the air, venturing a terrified palm inside to trace the frightening space above his tiny form, afraid to cup a part of it, in fear we may dent the fontanelles, disrupt the shallow concertina of his lungs. Is this where we are now? Feeling the material of our lives tighten around us, as we wheel him in a tank through the world’s corridors. Isolette 00:00 / 01:13 Thank you for holding him while we can’t, for keeping him safe inside your little frame, for the solace in knowing, clear plastic crib, that at the end of a long white corridor, you exist to prevent his life from faltering, that an object of such sadness, with a most beautiful name, is there, whirring quietly like an undertide, like a holy mother, blessed altruist. Let’s praise these small mercies, despite their slightness: he’s warm, at least, we can still see him through your transparent walls, in your crystallising brightness, and we can pray the grey-lilac of his newborn form will settle, that his knotted pulse can harden, that the prone lightness of his body will brace. Thank you, small plastic island, for bringing him back. Publishing credits Daedalus III: IOTA (Issue 98 – 'Bodies') Space Was a Material: The Bridport Prize Anthology 2018 (Winner of the Dorset Award 2018) Isolette: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet T S S Fulk read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. T S S Fulk back next the poet T S S Fulk, a neurodivergent author and poet who lives with his neurodiverse family in Sweden, holds an MA in English literature from the University of Toronto, and has had his work published by numerous presses and journals. He edits Sublimation: a Magazine of Speculative Poetry and Art , and is an active musician who plays bass trombone, the mountain dulcimer, and the Swedish bumblebee dulcimer. His first collection, Metamodern Morning Angst and Other Horrors , appeared in 2024. the poems The Unquiet Grave 00:00 / 01:14 I awaken midst caresses of the westerly wind my sweet spectral lover their touch light forgotten kisses I arch my neck, face beaming up toward gently falling rain darkening cleansing blotch by blotch the polished marble stone A lone silhouette approaches Soon Greenwood shall I leave His name is buried deep below under piles of rubble the detritus and floss of time yet by the moon he comes bearing blossoms to wilt for me brushing stray leaves aside With trembling lips he stand o’r me a lamb to the slaughter Spiked tendrils of my mind extend Soon Greenwood shall I leave He is still in the peak of life so dearly that I miss I swell grateful for each visit another hook attached I know not why he comes to me a blessing from the gods For he shall be my salvation his sacrifice my boon As the vessel fully opens now Greenwood shall I leave Morse Code 00:00 / 00:35 Soundwaves came up through the walls the dull barely perceivable rhythm patterns from our son’s feet tapping to K-pop videos These were not seismographic waves and yet they drilled into my brain whose neurons sought to organize into the semblance of a song And that is all it takes to ruin my routine to keep sleep well at bay Yes, that is all it takes to enshroud the next day in a fog of tiredness What message was crypted therein? Simple fragility A Sonnet in a Time of War 00:00 / 00:42 When the new gods arrived with their train of monsters we stood still mouths agape with disquiet and awe as they toppled buildings slaughtering us like sheep The dead outnumber the living our homes turned to tombs of rubble Rising above the smoke and dust the wailing of the survivors fails to reach the old gods’ ears Our pleads unheard thus unanswered The new gods dance upon the dead We fall down and kneel in despair For we have called them here to make our world a great boneyard Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Robin Helweg-Larsen read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Robin Helweg-Larsen back next the poet Anglo-Danish but raised in the Bahamas, Robin Helweg-Larsen was educated in Jamaica and at Stowe. He's lived and worked in the Bahamas, Denmark, Canada, Australia and the USA. Robin has had more than 400 poems published in various literary journals, including the Alabama Literary Review , Allegro , Ambit and Amsterdam Quarterly. His chapbook, Calling the Poem – on the art of summoning and working with 'The Muse' – is available to read online. the poems Camelot at Dusk 00:00 / 01:44 From under low clouds spreading from the south The red sun drops slow to night’s waiting mouth. Rush lamps are lit; the guards changed on the walls; Supper will not be served in the Great Halls With Arthur still away. Each in their room, The members of the Court leave books or loom To say their Vespers in the encroaching gloom. Lancelot, up in his tower, Sees the sunset storm clouds glower, Feels his blood’s full tidal power, Knows he has to go. In her bower, Gwenivere Puts a ruby to her ear, Brushes firelight through her hair, Feels her heartbeat grow. Guard, guard, watch well: For the daylight thickens And the low cloud blackens And the hot heart quickens To rebel. From his tower, caring not For consequences, Lancelot Crosses courts of Camelot, Pitying his King. In her bower, Gwenivere Feels his presence coming near, Waits for footfalls on the stair, Lets her will take wing. Guard, guard, watch well: If attention slackens When the deep bond beckons, Evil knows Pendragon’s In its spell. And as the storm clouds, rubbing out the stars, Deafened the castle and carved lightning scars, Drenched Arthur rode for flash-lit Camelot Where he, by Queen and Knight, was all forgot. Old Sailors 00:00 / 00:54 Two tars talked of sealing and sailing; one said with a sigh 'Remember gulls wheeling and wailing, we wondering why, and noting bells pealing, sun paling — it vanished like pie! And then the boat heeling, sky hailing, the wind getting high, and that drunken Yank reeling to railing and retching his rye, John missing his Darjeeling jailing, and calling for chai? While we battened, all kneeling and nailing, the hurricane nigh, and me longing for Ealing, and ailing?' His mate said 'Aye-aye; I could stand the odd stealing, food staling, not fit for a sty, and forget any feeling of failing, too vast to defy – home-leaving your peeling-paint paling too far to espy – all because of the healing friend-hailing, the hello! and hi! and, with the gulls squealing, quick-scaling the mast to the sky.' This Ape I Am 00:00 / 01:48 Under our armoured mirrors of the mind where eyes watch eyes, trying to pierce disguise, an ape, incapable of doubt, looks out, insists this world he sees is trees, and tries to find the scenes his genes have predefined. This ape I am who counts 'One, two, more, more' has lived three million years in empty lands where all the members of the roving bands he’s ever met have totalled some ten score; so all these hundred thousands in the street with voided eyes and quick avoiding feet must be the mere two hundred known before. This ape I am believes they know me too. I’m free to stare, smile, challenge, talk to you. This ape I am thinks every female mine, at least as much as any other male’s; if she’s with someone else, she can defect – her choice, and she becomes mine to protect; just as each child must be kept safe and hale for no one knows but that it could be mine. This ape I am feels drugged, ecstatic, doped, hallucination-torn, kaleidoscoped, that Earth’s two hundred people includes swirls of limitless and ever-varied girls. This ape I am does not look at myself doesn’t know about mirrors, lack of health, doesn’t know fear of death, only of cold; mirrorless can’t be ugly, can’t be old. Publishing credits Camelot at Dusk: The HyperTexts (2015) Old Sailors: Snakeskin (No. 146) This Ape I Am: Better Than Starbucks (Vol. II, No. X)

Hear poet Michelle Penn read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Michelle Penn back next the poet Michelle Penn’s debut pamphlet, Self-portrait as a diviner, failing , won the Paper Swans Prize in 2018. Her poetry has appeared in Perverse , MIR Online, 192, The Rialto, B O D Y, Poetry Birmingham and other journals. Michelle plans innovative poetry / art / music events in London as part of Corrupted Poetry . She’s also a member of Malika’s Poetry Kitchen . the poems In air 00:00 / 01:58 She sees only the flies, flies flitting about the bed in the operating room, Field Hospital C, Danang, the name echoing like two bells, chiming then fading to stone, replaced by a distant beep and the flies, flies and a slurred recollection of her daughter's voice on the telephone, something about after, something about Thailand and the flies, their wings like rotors, a strange sound for flies but maybe Vietnamese flies move in a different language, and they’re flying while she lays still, encumbered by strings or wires, trailing from her nose, her arms, something beeping, and the flies with their rotor wings, darting squares in air, landing on the tray where the scalpels are spread, then taking off again, and why do they trace hard squares while their wings are rotors and rotors are round, none of it adds up and maybe she’s also a fly, somehow snared in wires and strings, a fly tethered to a bed or maybe the earth while the others beat their wings, the steady rhythm of rotors but then the flies all land at once, their feet tickling her face, her hands, no more rotors, just a soft buzz and a distant beep then she is lifted, hot air, a deep cool, a cloth brushing away the flies, flies fluttering silent wings and disappearing into a clean white wall, then a white bird surfaces, a featherless bird, whispering, you're in Thailand now, your daughter is flying over, and her daughter, flying from far away, she hopes her daughter will wear her feathers. talking philosophy 00:00 / 00:40 we were meant to discuss eternal return but the fires were blazing again & the riots & it all felt — the sunshine a bit too bright & the last time we said this has to be the last time we’re all in the same storm but not in the same boat, not in the same ghost things have to change, we say & take to the streets yet again but I've heard how sometimes firefighters join the flames, how they become so entranced, they burn Hotel October 00:00 / 01:21 the woman has become her blue-tint portrait another autumn in this room season oblique as the underside of a chin, the hard corner of a table, October tricky-sweet, like liquorice on the tongue outside, the gentle mobs dissect her life ten-second censors, all of them and yet she longs to believe in the attraction of thing to thing, life to life, each drenched in some god’s love another October in this room, another fall fall , that Americanism, so blunt, no Latin gymnastics, just fall , from the Old English for fail, decay the Old Norse for sin gravity always feels strongest in fall an apple tumbles from a branch, the moon plummets towards Earth, space and time collapse into one another withering leaves sink in conspiracies, autumn the moral to summer’s fable, October asking questions to which she is the ghost Publishing credits In air: The Rialto (Issue 94) talking philosophy: 192 (Issue 2) Hotel October: The Alchemy Spoon (Issue 1)

Hear poet Sinéad Griffin read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Sinéad Griffin back next the poet Sinéad Griffin has been published in Poetry Ireland Review , The Irish Times , Under The Radar , The Four Faced Liar , Hog River Press and elsewhere. One of her poems was recently included in the Poetry Jukebox installation at the Irish Museum of Modern Art in Dublin. Thanks to an Arts Council Agility Award in 2023, Sinéad is now working on her debut poetry collection. the poems View from the Dunes 00:00 / 01:06 Run hip-high through seagrass to the hollow, lie on the slip face of dunes, perfect angle to observe heaven. Hear breakers hush, windward side, by the hole for Australia dug with an orange spade. Fern plumes in place of daises, hands sticky with forest scent, intoxicated by the shape of some boy’s name, he loves me, he loves me not, he loves me, we never stop on not, crave feelings we can’t fathom, dream one day we’ll walk other realms. Castletown days of tide, not time, we don’t know the Wexford shore will tumble, the slope of illness to come. For now, all the world seems nothing, but a few big thoughts away. Letter from Dublin 00:00 / 02:14 Remember us as city schoolgirls, brown uniforms, scratchy gabardines and knee socks on the Quays. I’m in Dublin this late June evening, the footpath all bar stools and al fresco food, so continental even the seagulls curse in three languages. Burglar bars still gird low-level glass, metal shutters rattle closed at dusk, only the charity shop window invites with a teapot, cat jigsaw, jade skirt, a snorkel and flippers green as Liffey wall scum. Do people still river swim? A string of rosary beads makes me think of O’Connell Street Mad Mary, she’d dance, sing, proclaim, our traffic island Doris Day. We never crossed at her spot, scared off since she tried to talk to us about God. As per usual the Quays are insane, elbow-out-the-window taxi drivers shout blame up Ormond Quay. The traffic flow opposite to how it was in those days. Sure look. Buses of assorted colour, doors flush to pavement, not like our navy and cream old favourites, bubble-nosed, open rear platform and pole, no door, years before health and safety was born. You taught me where to grip the pole, swing on once the bus left the stop, dodge the conductor if we were lucky, scamper box steps at the back, sit and stare like we’d been there forever. Capel Street, tonight I join the boardwalk, bounce timber planks, feel the suspension. Rewind. Reverse flow. The 26 is leaving Aston Quay before time, you leap the platform turn and smile. Figment or a memory, now I’ll never know, but you pull away and I have to let you go. August 00:00 / 01:07 I sit with my parents, drinking hot coffee in the strong sun of their back garden. My father in T-shirt and shorts, welcomes the warmth, my mother is shrouded in cotton, doubly shaded with a parasol and floppy hat, since medication makes her sensitive to the light. They tell me about a neighbour’s dementia, a cousin’s husband’s angina,   they tell me they bought Lotus biscuits in Dealz. We don’t mention my sister, how August was ours, a year minus five days apart. All the while I watch a white butterfly turn in flight, zig-zag the grass, like a slip of white paper, a note that flits away, like something I meant to say. Publishing credits View from the Dunes: The Waxed Lemon (Issue No. 2) Letter from Dublin: South Dublin Libraires Online (May 2023) August: The Four Faced Liar (Issue No. 2)

Hear poet Marie Little read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Marie Little back next the poet Living near fields and dreaming of the sea, Marie Little has published poetry and flash fiction with Acumen , Ink Sweat & Tears , Black Bough Poetry , Retreat West and many others. She enjoys unpretentious poems, twisty flash and the challenge of a writing prompt. Marie is co-creator of The Swadlincote Festival of Words , and runs writing groups for adults and children. She's best known for her children’s poetry as Attie Lime, and her debut children’s collection is Blue Jelly and Strawberries . the poems In the Sunday Garden Club Hut with Dad 00:00 / 00:44 Underarmed up onto the bench beside you pondering your bad back, too much flesh above my knees I absorb the morning like a dry seed. You chat easy with customers most already friends hand them smiles in paper bags forget the price of things. I play shop with the black iron weighing scales, palming the cold weights, testing the brass bowls for honesty. You hand me boiled sweets, tidy jars, curl twine, lift the stink on the fish, blood and bone bin to make us squirm, laughing. I measure myself carefully in scoops. Dusk 00:00 / 00:42 Six o'clock draws its curtains, twists the dial on chemicals keeping me sunny. The mood over the field is indigo blue, heavy with sooty clouds in waiting. I have no need of litmus paper. I know my score. Bottles in rows wink at me, each emptied to a different level, each a slightly different chime in the tune of dusk. I shun them all, flick the kettle on. Slide something herby, caffeine-free from a purple box, steep it so long it might understand. Drink it in sips, watch the soot spread. Later the bottles will sing. Parents, 1982 00:00 / 00:26 She is milk of magnesia, camphorated oil (warm to the touch). She is petroleum jelly, sodium bicarbonate, cream of tartar. He is the berry-stained wooden spoon as long as my arm, the sticky muslin, dripping. He is the jam-saucer, nestled in the ice box. He is pectin, like quiet magic. Publishing credits In the Sunday Garden Club Hut with Dad: Ink, Sweat & Tears (March 2022) Dusk: Acumen (No. 103) Parents, 1982: Molecules Unlimited Anthology

Hear poet Clare Proctor read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Clare Proctor back next the poet Clare Proctor's poetry has appeared in Shooter , The North , The A3 Review and Finished Creatures , as well as in anthologies from Yaffle Press and The Frogmore Press. Clare's writing also featured in Handstand Press' This Place I Know: An Anthology of New Cumbrian Writing . She placed second in both the 2018 Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year and 2021 Ware competitions. Clare lives in Cumbria where she teaches English, and is a member of Brewery Poets. the poems This Woman Wears a Green Dress After Julian Cooper’s Bella Vista Hotel 00:00 / 01:09 This woman stands in the doorway, wearing a green dress. This woman wears a green dress, clenches her fingers. This woman clenches her fingers – her nails make crevices in the skin of her hand – this woman makes empty crescents on her palm. This woman is the body that makes a shadow on a side of the bar. Her body blocks the light trying to shuffle through the door, through the window stained with street dust. This woman breathes in the bar-room smoke, lets the clatter of an empty tequila glass fall into the back of her mind, lets its stickiness become salt, the salt of the sea breeze that she senses behind her eyes. This woman sees nothing. She is listening to the wind crossing a far-off ocean. Her green dress lifts in it. On Falling in Love with Poets 00:00 / 01:06 I have fallen in love with poets, with the spaces they hold within them like underground caves. I want to be lowered into those caves with a head-torch, reach my hands out to the walls, scarred with their stories. I want to fall into their voices, when they do not hesitate, but resonate, like the deep note of the viola. I love the idea of falling in love with poets, and in love with all that poets have loved; with their moments of climax, with their late-night tears, with their unchosen words that slip from their lips when angry or drunk or tired. I want to fall for their suffering, dip into it as if it is a well, wash in its dark water. I want to feel their pain, like splinters stuck in the skin of my fingers. I have fallen in love with the word – poet – how the two soft syllables shape my mouth. Sappho's Leap After Felicia Hemans 00:00 / 02:24 The women are ceaseless. The women are ceaseless as the waves. The women are ceaseless as their own echoing sighs. The only way for the women to be still as the sea-bird hovering on the death wind, is for the women to throw themselves from cliffs. If the women want to jump from cliffs, they should dive in a perfect arc. The sun should be setting behind them or fingers of the dilated moon sifting over their bodies, the sea a molten silver. Their fragile forms should be the shape of a crescent as they dive, a flattering silhouette. The women can be gentle and sentimental or fierce and tragic, but at all times when jumping from cliffs, the women should be beautiful. Men may want to paint the women later. The women should hurl themselves into the sea because their love is unrequited. Their unrequited love must not be for other women, but for a man/sea god. The women’s pain should be private unless they are jumping from a cliff; they should cry in a pitiful fashion, a few tears on the cheek subtle as pearls. They should avoid ugly crying, or they may not be a fitting subject for a painting. The women should consider the weather, should pick a day that best fits their form and colouring. They should pair their outfit with the sun/moon/white cliffs. Their dress should flit around in the wind enough to expose bare legs and should cling enough in the rain/sea mist to delineate their breasts. The women should keep their hair long so that it can whip around their faces and stream behind them as they fall. The women should fall in slow motion, over and over again, into the mind of the man/sea god. They should never land on the rocks, breaking their body and shattering their face, neither of which would reflect well on the man/sea god. Women who are planning on jumping from cliffs should check the tides. Women jumping from cliffs should be recovered in one piece, their free dark hair pushed back from their pale faces, that should look at peace now that they can sleep forever in the unslumbering seas, dream about the man/sea god that they absolutely, definitely love. Publishing credits This Woman Wears a Green Dress: came joint-second in the Canterbury Festival Poet of the Year Competition 2018 On Falling in Love with Poets: Byline Legacies (Cardigan Press) Sappho's Leap: won second prize in the Ware Poets Open Poetry Competition 2021

Poet Maggie Smith reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Maggie Smith © Patri Hadad back next the poet Maggie Smith is the author of four books, most recently Good Bones (Tupelo Press, 2017) and the forthcoming Keep Moving: Notes on Loss, Creativity, and Change (One Signal/Simon & Schuster, 2020). Her poems and essays have appeared in the New York Times, Tin House, Poetry, The Believer, The New Yorker, the Washington Post, and the Paris Review. Maggie is a freelance writer and editor, is on the faculty of Spalding University’s MFA program, and serves as an Editor-at-Large for the Kenyon Review. the poems Ohio Cento 00:00 / 01:18 The sun comes up, and soon the you-know-what will hit the you-know-what. But this is what it means to have our life. We need a break from this ruined country. Sometimes it feels like it has just begun and it’s over. What we know of ourselves gets compressed, layered. Remembering is an anniversary; every minute, a commemoration of being, or thinking—or its opposite, a strip of negatives. Some days, I don’t even know how to be. I sink my feet past time in the Olentangy as if loneliness didn't make us in some absurd blessing. —If there even is an us. When are we most ourselves, and when the least? Is it too late except to say too late and hear the whole world take a rain check? I worry it is. Porthole 00:00 / 01:11 I was hoping the world would earn you, but it rains and rains, too busy raining to win you over. Child, I count ten rivulets shining down the bedroom wall. Let’s pretend we’re on a boat at sea and watch the neighbor’s magnolia trees pitching through the porthole. The leaves slosh and thrash against the glass. Some days I think, What have I gotten us into? This tearstained wall and constant dripping into buckets, the mold a wild black shadow. Child, I promise you the rain will stop. Let’s read another chapter in the book about the kingdom of crows. It has to stop. Let’s count as high as we can while I braid your bath-damp hair. At the End of My Marriage, I Think of Something My Daughter Said About Trees 00:00 / 00:29 When a tree is cut down, the sky’s like finally, and rushes in. Even when you trim a tree, the sky fills in before the branch hits the ground. It colors the space blue because now it can. Publishing credits Ohio Cento: the American Poetry Review Porthole: Crab Creek Review At the End of My Marriage, I Think of Something My Daughter Said About Trees: Iron Horse Literary Review Share

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

Hear poet Aysegul Yildirim read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Aysegul Yildirim back next the poet Aysegul Yildirim's poetry has appeared in various international magazines. Most recently, she contributed to Anne-thology: Poems Re-presenting Anne Shakespeare . An academic working at the intersection of environmental humanities and sociology, Aysegul has published a poetry pamphlet titled Plants Beyond Desire . the poems uproot 00:00 / 01:10 Her only childhood memory about plants is picking up flowers. Dahlias from grandmother’s garden; a tiny medley of purple dead nettles, camomiles, vervains, brought home from park visits with mum. By the end of the day, they’d always be in the rubbish bin. Years later, she got put in a tiny medley of humans packed in an aeroplane, never to come back. Those left behind are still tired from grief, even though the plane has not crashed yet. By the time the purple on the hands was cleared, dead nettles flourished. Nobody had cried for them, ever. Later, the idea of home has gone for us all, tiny corruptions magnified. Except for the roots. The Long Stay 00:00 / 01:52 I follow the threads of the dark grey carpet for some time. ‘Fix it before moving out,’ I answer myself. Something creeps through. I start measuring the cold surface of the confined space with my flesh, at once, and wear it. Fits me perfectly, I think, except for the spiders who want to escape. They breathe surprisingly loud. I spoil their fantasies by staying fat and awake. The love-hate relationship. Includes giving space and pesticides. I need to go out. Putting on my coat, doing up the windows, on the doorstep I calculate: if I leave now, the performance. Unforeseen contacts. Time is kaleidoscopic in this stone-built body. I have the eyes of a housefly. The carpet’s cleaning will be reduced from my deposit. My only connection with the anthropocene. My solitude is my image. If vision requires distance, I must have been doing it all wrong. Let’s start again: I need my coat when it rains. I need water too. I can’t unlearn the language of solitude, I can’t speak two languages at a time. It’s real. And it’s dark. I take off my coat. Feel the soft feel of the carpet. The grubby, quiet softness. re-root 00:00 / 00:46 Someone told me to burn sage indoors but the true magic is that no two leaves are identical. And the fact that I took a dry leaf from where it waits for me in the mud. It was the beginning of winter in Falmouth and sometimes you need that moment of acknowledgement of your image by the assemblage of the holy cliff. I’m not able to speak their language. I was receding endlessly. The leaf stayed with me nevertheless. He just fell down, he thinks. But he only had to leave himself gently to the ground. No two fallings are identical. Some- times you need to root faster than you can fall. Publishing credits uproot / re-root: Plants Beyond Desire (Broken Sleep Books) The Long Stay: exclusive first publication by iamb .

Hear poet Kevin Grauke read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Kevin Grauke back next the poet With work in The Threepenny Review , The Southern Review , StoryQuarterly , Fiction , and Quarterly West , Kevin Grauke is the author of short story collection Shadows of Men . He's also the winner of the Steven Turner Award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Kevin teaches at La Salle University, and lives in Philadelphia. His next collection, Bullies & Cowards , arrives in 2026 from Cornerstone Press. the poems The Secret of Tornadoes 00:00 / 01:07 Tornadoes, I knew at age four, were dragons spun to furious life from sickly spring skies. Watch meant be careful. Warning meant hide. Born in the Alley’s south, I learned this quick. Let’s make a fort in the tub! Mommy once shouted much too loudly, wrestling a mattress past the toilet. Houses could become like weeds pulled up and flung. Cradles landed in trees, sometimes still with babies. But then an older girl, already in school, told me the secret: Touch the sidewalk, honey. If it’s warm, one’s coming. A whisper—wisdom meant only for me. Honored, I stayed quiet. Pretending to tie a shoe I couldn’t yet knot, I pressed my palms to the sun-shot sidewalk, dirtying them in the unicorn dust of her hopscotch chalk. Frightened but grateful, I flew home fast to warn Mommy, my pink hands aflame with a May day’s false prophecy. Ant 00:00 / 01:00 I hope to capture this moment exactly, how the late afternoon sun on this sixth day of May is shining now on this journal page so perfectly, casting a shadow of my pen that looks like nothing if not a hummingbird darting its bill into and out of the flower of yet another attempt at something good. Soon, the sun’s gold will sink below the trees, but for now it holds steady, content to give me a little more time to try to capture its likeness. Onto the glare of this still empty page an ant wanders. Nothing more than a dark speck, it meanders about, a mobile period in search of a true sentence to end. I watch it move from here to there and there to there until it finally disappears over the edge, headed elsewhere, but not before leaving me a path to follow with the words of this very poem, now finished and named in its honor. First Lesson 00:00 / 02:06 Two houses down, a young man, a little girl, and a bicycle. Behind them, in the grass, training wheels tossed aside. Way down and far back, I feel both dad’s stooped patience and the mettle of his daughter’s courage. But what I feel most: the unspoken swirl of their fears—of spills and scrapes, of tears and pain. And it’s almost a more aching beauty, even as clumsy and raw as it is, than I, remembering my own once-tiny girl now grown, can bear on my own. I watch him, the father, so proud, how he claps and shouts while jogging alongside as close as he can manage without jostling an arm or handlebar. He sends out so much encouragement: Go! You’re doing it! Keep pedalling! When the inevitable comes, it’s no surprise. It is, after all, inevitable. The front wheel wobbles, turns too much to the left, to the right, to the left again. The end then happens so slowly—the flailing, the toppling, the falling over— almost if it were taking place in a series of stages (Duchamp’s bicycle descending the stairs) as she moves from upright to tilted to tilted still more to crashed to now splayed on the sidewalk like the insides of a dropped egg. Not unlike a hand-cranked siren from days even before my own, the two wheels spin two cries into the neighborhood silence: one the girl’s, one the father’s. Together, they braid a thin rope that each hopes the other will snatch to save the day’s grace. It swings between them, back and forth, then stops. Each is so certain they’ve let the other down. Except for the crickets, it’s silent now. She’ll learn, of course, and he will have taught her. Of this I’m sure. For now, though, failure. But in memory this will glow like treasure. Publishing credits The Secret of Tornadoes: The Minnesota Review (Issue 101) Ant: Alabama Literary Review (Vol. 32) First Lesson: Poet Lore (Vol. 118)