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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 S h a r e

James McConachie back next the poet James McConachie was born in the UK but has lived for the past 17 years in a remote farmhouse in Spain’s coldest, emptiest inland province. He's turned his hand to more jobs than he feels are worthy of mention, and is never happier than when finding himself lost at high altitude on horseback with only the wind, vultures and music of Hildegard Von Bingen for company. Aside from poetry, James has written prose for the Dark Mountain project , and has more in the pipeline. the poems first post 00:00 / 01:03 dry heave, I ball my fists or bang my head off the table, I might weep into the dark corner of our stupored soul for knowing and forgetting all those moments of nothing grace a mother wets a tissue, wipes a streak of blood from her child’s face yet swept into the fire the eternal touch of honeyed hand Iskander scores the sky to the east and for what? small fears the language or the naming of the land, or some fucking flags always the same shit reasons, always forgotten but sorrow filths up the crescent beneath the nails forever and it will be written we should. have done. better. dry heave, I ball my fists bang my head off the table, and weep again, this morning it seems there’s always time for another cold horror, another mother’s letter liebre 00:00 / 01:00 three days of gales and I’m meshed into a tousled briar, clearing the corral, all thorns the handstain fruit long wintered away oil can chimes giving it the full four clangs slices and scratches of maybes and should’ves the blood the wind and the want give life, their constant brutal diligence, the letters laid in winter’s bright book of hours the garden, knee deep in my dereliction, sees the sun as it lands but doesn’t stick somehow the sky, a haze of headaches and icy hostilities bustling up over the tops and away out on the campo, a hare flickers under the cloud shadow, shrieking across the field, almost dark I gather logs, the stars show again so heaven’s veil is torn just a little, at the hem longings 00:00 / 01:30 oneday, imma dance like a dervish out of the dark scoop gold pennies from the sky scatter quinces at your feet, found at last your cool hand in the bright bower, oneday oneday, imma song the things I shoulda said to the silence of the windless glade and if unheard, it will only hope to summon the breeze, to the daylong quiet shade, oneday oneday, imma shine the nightingale’s silver lyre pluck such tunes as only a god might whisper to a bird, all sighs and secrets, to leaven the unhurried word, oneday oneday, imma speak the mark and measure of this time the sneaking sand, the simple sorrows, the the supermarket savagery of war’s fire and lime, oneday oneday, imma swim all the way over the ocean to the very rim of the world, the paper cowl will shrink and shrivel, just as it should the forgotten face, the skin uncurled, that was my own, oneday oneday, imma find the boy who startled the stars, who shares my smile then inks together these battered bars drinks deep the rushing sap, beneath the ragged bark oneday, imma dance like a dervish, out of the dark Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb S h a r e

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 S h a r e

Corinna Board back next the poet Corinna Board teaches English as an additional language in an Oxford secondary school. She grew up on a farm, and her writing is often inspired by the rural environment. Her work has appeared (or is forthcoming) in And Other Poems , Anthropocene , berlin lit , Propel Magazine , Spelt Magazine , Atrium , Ink Sweat & Tears , Magma and elsewhere. Corinna won the Gloucestershire Wildlife category of the 2023 Gloucestershire Wildlife Trust poetry competition, and was commended in the 2024 Verve Poetry Festival Eco-Poetry competition. She published her debut pamphlet, Arboreal , in January 2024. the poems Picking up my prescription ‘Sometimes as an antidote to fear of death, I eat the stars.’ ~ Rebecca Elson ~ 00:00 / 01:00 There are no stars in this city. I nibble on concrete, sip cocktails of NO₂. I’m dying for a decent constellation. Would some of those neons do? Or the flashing red lights on a high-rise? I FaceTime Olivier in the Pyrenees. He points his camera at Ursa Major, Cassiopeia, Orion’s Belt … Star after star devoured through my screen. I whisper Merci , then sleep like a baby. When the woman in Boots tells me I’m glowing, I say it must be the new meds. I keep quiet about the stars. On the tube ride home, they twinkle in my stomach like a Tiffany’s heist. My uncle brings back a fox tail from the fields 00:00 / 01:09 He is carrying his rifle, brandishing the tail like a trophy. A week ago, the fox (was it this one?) got into the coop and slaughtered all the hens. My uncle is grinning. The tail is cleanly cut, bloodied at the end. It hangs from a nail in the big barn, swinging like a corpse on the gallows. For days, I'm scared to touch it. The fur is coarser than I expected. I comb it with my fingers, breathe in its musk, close my eyes and pretend it's whole. Later, I run wild with my cousins. We are foxes — and I, the eldest, am the mother, the vixen. Driven by hunger, I burn through the fields, my cubs left hiding in the ripening wheat. The wind ruffles my coat the wrong way. Too late, I pick up his scent. Field notes 00:00 / 02:02 1. field noun : an area of land, used for growing crops or keeping animals, usually surrounded by a fence. 2. Green as far as the eye can see, then the brook. Water-mint, pebbles bedraggled in weed. 3. A six-year-old girl with a net, a bucket full of bullheads. Friesian cows bellowing, tick of the fence. Where did the years go? 4. Before he died, my uncle planted a rowan tree – there in the tall grass. 5. When we first saw the barn owl, it could have been a ghost. It flew low over the field, wings whispering. 6. If I buried my heart, what would grow? Perhaps a sapling. 7. Today, I have counted three kinds of butterfly: marbled white, common blue, speckled wood. 8. Dear Field, Do you ever dream of picking yourself up and striding off over the horizon? Be honest now. 9. I don’t know what I’d do if you left. I love you, field. Please stay. 10. Are you crying or is that rain? 11. In the field, I’m a child again. All this green, all this sky. I could disappear. 12. Meadow foxtail, yellow oat, timothy. I am the field, and the field is me. I am , the field is . Publishing credits Picking up my prescription: Anthropocene (July 2024) My uncle brings back a fox tail from the fields: Modron Magazine (Issue Four) Field notes: exclusive first publication by iamb S h a r e

Matthew Stewart © Marina Rodriguez back next the poet Dividing his time between Extremadura in Spain and West Sussex in England, poet Matthew Stewart works in the Spanish wine trade. Following on from his debut collection, The Knives of Villalejo – a work some 20 years in the writing – Matthew recently published his second full collection, Whatever You Do, Just Don’t . He's also the author of the popular, influential and much-praised poetry blog, Rogue Strands . the poems Los Domingos 00:00 / 00:48 You’ve taught me to sip a café solo , to let its bitterness seep through my gums and mark the end of our tapas and wine, just as you’ve taught me to relish silence in the slow, shared sliding-by of minutes. I no longer force the conversation these never-ending Sunday afternoons while muffled westerns blink on the telly. An ancient carriage clock fights to strike four and your mother pours her glass of water. Perhaps this week she’ll suddenly repeat her suspicion of a neighbour’s illness. Or we’ll sit here without the need for words till your father stirs and cranks the volume to signal kick-off at the Bernabéu. Heading for the Airport 00:00 / 00:40 The cab suddenly turning up twenty-seven minutes late after my ten frantic calls from the pavement outside your block, your dressing-gowned silhouette hovering on the balcony with a halo of wispy hair. My suitcase thrown in the boot, doors slammed, the driver crunching gears, I forgot our goodbye wave while checking my flight. If only that cab had left me behind, longing for Spain. No way to know I’d never see you alive again. The Last Carry El Paseo Marítimo, Chipiona 00:00 / 00:32 You were seven and hadn’t asked for one in months, but the salt wind had whipped your energy away before calamares fritos at our favourite place on the prom left you woozy, slumped in your seat. Even as I threw you over one shoulder and braced for the trudge to our house, my back was hinting at a future without your breath tickling my neck. At you walking, beside us, if we were lucky. Publishing credits Los Domingos: Wild Court (King's College London) Heading for the Airport: The Spectator (July 16th 2022) The Last Carry: The Spectator (January 30th 2021) S h a r e

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 S h a r e

Laura Theis back next the poet Writing in her second language, Laura Theis has work in POETRY , Oxford Poetry , Magma , Rattle and elsewhere. As well as being nominated for a Forward Prize, she's been the recipient of numerous awards and prizes, including the Alpine Fellowship Writing Prize , the Oxford Brookes Poetry Prize and the Hammond House International Literary Award. In addition, Laura's collection, A Spotter’s Guide To Invisible Things , won the Live Canon Collection Prize. She has two new volumes of poetry due out in 2025: a collection with Broken Sleep Books, and her debut children’s poetry book with The Emma Press, Poems From A Witch’s Pocket . the poems in my mother tongue the name for grand piano is wing 00:00 / 01:00 in my mother tongue words can be feathered which turns them into old jokes or proverbs owning a bird in my mother tongue is sign of great madness: you can accuse someone with an outrageous opinion of cheeping and chirping if you want to convey that you are flabbergasted or awed in my mother tongue you might say: my dear swan which is what I think when I first hear you play as your fingers move over the keys I wonder what gets lost in translation between music and birdsong whether both soar above our need to shift between words then I remember in my mother tongue the name for grand piano is wing Medusae 00:00 / 00:59 Do not lose faith on the day you wake up with spiders instead of hair. Do not cry as you look in the mirror. Remember: They may stay. They may not. They are here for now. If you must, take pains to cover your head. Hide their crawling under your most elegant hat lest people recoil from you in the streets. Or don’t. Remember Medusa and her snakes. She’d turn anyone to stone if they looked at her frightened. She was a monster and proud. All hiss, curse and scorn: danger. And yet to think someone must have loved her enough to name half of all jellyfish those moon-glowing blooms of floating fluorescent umbrellas and bells after her. miðnæturblár 00:00 / 00:47 we have to look up when we search for our dead even though we buried them in the ground but the dead like to call to us from the moon they try to spell out their wildering words in clouds or meteors they try to wave at us through murmurations and other such avian patterns in significant moments they do this to teach us to make lifting up our eyes a habit remember they say once every day for a couple of minutes the entire sky turns your favourite colour: the very darkest shade of blue Publishing credits in my mother tongue the name for grand piano is wing: won first prize in the Poets & Players Poetry Competition 2023 Medusae: how to extricate yourself (Dempsey & Windle) winner of the Brian Dempsey Memorial Pamphlet Prize miðnæturblár: POETRY Magazine (April 2022 'Exophony') S h a r e

Lydia Kennaway © Simon Wiffen Photography back next the poet Lydia Kennaway's debut pamphlet, A History of Walking , was published in 2019. Her poems have appeared in a variety of anthologies and magazines, including The Rialto , Raceme and Poetry & Audience . Lydia won the Flambard Prize in 2017, and is Walk Listen Create’s Poet-in-Residence for 2021-22. A New Yorker living in Yorkshire, Lydia gained her MA in Writing Poetry from Newcastle University. the poems A New and Accurat Map of the World Drawne according to ye truest Descriptions, latest Discoveries & best observations y.t have beene made by English or Strangers 00:00 / 01:11 I have made landfall with a mouth full of sand, tossed from the sea with splintered fingers and a barnacled belly. I will eat nameless fruits and hope against poison. I will watch the moon rise while the turtles hatch and make their flappy way to water. I will scrimshaw a comb for a sweetheart I never had and sing to longfeathered birds shanties of blood-red roses. I will find passage on a passing caravel. I will return to the town I once called home. I will draw maps but make no claim that they are true, only that these are the things I have seen and the places I believe I have been. Inuit Anger Walk 00:00 / 00:54 I am a furnace in the snow. I have been given my anger-stick and told to go plant it where and when my flames have turned to embers and so I walk past my people who know to look away. I walk past the Place of Drying Fish, past the Place of Catching Fish, past the Place of the Seals who do not know to look away. I walk beyond the place called The End of Places until the heat spills from my eyes. Here I drive the stick into the yielding snow and turn to face the cold walk home. The Invention of Walking 00:00 / 01:32 Feathers, tails, claws, fins and fur, antlers, paws and scales: these are your creations. Now you take a lump of clay in your big tired hands to make another. You are weary but roll and pinch and pinch and roll the clay and start again. Out of habit you make four limbs, stick them to a blob of body, add a head. Oh hell, not that again. But then you lift the forelimbs, set the head so it doesn’t hang but balances, tricky, on a slender neck-stem. For locomotion it will stagger, shifting the weight from one hind leg to another, a constant fall and recover. With its forward-looking eyes it can want. With spare limbs it can carry, possess, and – being upright – it displays its sex but doesn’t know this yet. You make it to crave the having and dread the losing. You will teach it shame and blame Eve and a serpent and a tree while its fate is to fall always fall and recover, fall Publishing credits A New and Accurat Map of the World Drawne according to ye truest Descriptions, latest Discoveries & best observations y.t have beene made by English or Strangers: Any Change? Poetry in a Hostile Environment (Forward Arts Foundation) Inuit Anger Walk / The Invention of Walking: A History of Walking (HappenStance Press) S h a r e

Susan Fuchtman back next the poet Currently living in Iowa, Susan Fuchtman writes poetry, memoir and short stories. Her work can be found in Plume , Emerge Literary Journal , Stonecrop Review , Stone of Madness Press , Reckon Review and elsewhere. the poems Weight Bearing 00:00 / 01:30 Before I took a breath, before my blood rerouted, while my eyes were still closed, my parents argued about their individual visions for me, and after hours, days, after questions and explanations, they stepped into each other’s dreams and chose my name. Adam and Eve’s first responsibility was naming the animals, and even then, before sin and brokenness, before the veil was torn to make things right again, sitting there in that paradise they proposed and compromised and did the best they could. I visited my parents yesterday, and if you were there, at first you might only notice their faltering gaits, knobbled fingers, and unwavering opinions, but as the day progressed, you’d see they’ve not forgotten how it felt to hold me, stroke my hair, kiss my baby cheeks, to sacrifice a lifetime— to give me a name. I thought about all the names written in all the world in all time— charcoal on cave walls, quill and ink on papyrus, blue ballpoint on number ten envelopes, crayon on school papers, typewriter ribbon on essays, sharpies on name badges, pixels on phone screens, fingers in red dirt— How does the earth bear the weight of them? Riders 00:00 / 00:54 I think you, meaning the gray-haired audience in a dark bar on the north side of Chicago, will like our arrangement of this song. The guitar glisses into space. From closed eyes I see stars pulsate down to a green pasture, mating-marked sheep grazing, dead tree in the center. Out of the ominous sky, lightning. Tree flares flame, grass too wet to catch. I open my eyes, sit back. Irrelevance hangs in the air like smoke. The singer’s voice softens to a whisper, tapping out riders on the storm like impatient fingers on a table, waiting for the next bright blaze. What If Wars 00:00 / 02:02 were fought by old people say, 60, who have retirement in their sights and grandchildren they hope to see grow up— so they take vitamins and do exercises or maybe yoga, and eat organic and get eight hours of sleep— what if those old people were dressed in camouflage and sent to basic training where they climbed over walls and crawled under barbed wire while live ammunition was shot over them and then, having demonstrated their fitness, were given guns and 50-pound packs and loaded onto planes to go to a country they may or may not be able to point to on a map, a place where they may or may not understand what is being fought over, a place so far away that they can’t come home for Christmas and little ones will cry and say, ‘I miss my Grandma.’ And what if the other side did the same, and the battlefields were filled with grandmothers and grandfathers and great uncles and aunts and brothers and sisters and mothers and fathers, all in camouflage and all with guns— You’ve already guessed this poem isn’t very clever because you know what would happen: The grandmothers would bring sugar cookies and the grandfathers would share cigars and talk about baseball or soccer, and the guns would be forgotten as big picture albums were pulled from back pockets. They would forget what they were supposed to be fighting about, and host each other in their respective homes, maybe a container on base here or a tent there or a foxhole in between. Because by the time you are old, it’s not that you’re so feeble that you can’t remember, but you know there are some things better not remembered. And by the time you are old, what you must remember is that time is short and life is precious and life is short. I apologize for repeating myself but it’s so easy to forget. Publishing credits Weight Bearing: Emerge Literary Journal (Issue 16) Riders: exclusive first publication by iamb What If Wars: won an Honorable Mention in the Sinclair Community College Spectrum Awards 2015 and was published in the awards booklet S h a r e

Ivor Daniel back next the poet Ivor Daniel’s work has appeared in the Cheltenham Poetry Festival's wildfire words , Steel Jackdaw Magazine and Writeresque . He lives in Gloucestershire, where he works as an English tutor. the poems Perfect Bed 00:00 / 00:56 I dream I am at Bembom Brothers Dreamland funfair park with Tracey Emin. Hard by Margate sands. I know I shouldn’t drink that Vodka on the Helter Skelter. Apart from that, a Day as Perfect as the Lou Reed song. We Kiss with Fish and Chips Lips, Join Hips. A Turner Sunset Going Down. I guess it is the Golden Hour. Blair’s Babes and even some of his men MPs are busy Changing a whole heap of things for the Better. Back in your room we remember that we even Changed the Bed this morning. The linen soft and cool next to our Optimistic skin. Questions & Starlings 00:00 / 03:01 Wow! Can the sun set blue azure and flame at the same time? How do starlings twist and turn as one? Who decided this is called a murmuration ? And who was that, going behind that awesome tree? No...It couldn’t be.. sweeping turning swooping......soon arriving from all directions. swelling then melting then swelling. streamlining safe in such numbers. pirouetting protection from predators. twist turn swoop swirl your genie is out of the bottle. shape-shifting unsolid sculpture of starling. you spinning top you sundown twister. a magic carpet has slipped its cave. . ...a cloud of iron filings .. ... dancing from... ..and to .. . . ..an ecstatic magnet. if we could cast the ashes........ of our loved ones as elegantly as your silken swirl then that would be the perfect way to go. intuiting when to turn in complex shifting patterns through a liminal space between remarkable and miracle. flying like no one is watching or maybe like God could be watching. oblivious of compass points and rocket science yet also knowing more than this. murmuration motion poetry in motion your swarm is the truth. black mustard seed beauty. then in the last of daylight at the secret signal a final funneling collective swoop down an unseen chimney to land on your roosting grounds. I labour with my leaden words, and muse on whether starlings know how spellbinding they are. And God. Is that you behind that awesome tree? Is this the last, the only, evidence that you exist? Was this your hobby all along: the choreography of sunset starlings? And is that just the slightest hint of disappointment on your face at how the human cohort of Creation has performed? Tread Lightly 00:00 / 01:31 I navigate the micro fathom ocean charts of flat portal ice puddles on a January farm track With their trapped air bubbles whorling patterns coils gyres spirals curls Trapped otherworldly whirls Secret as fingerprints coiled like intestines mysterious as a foetal scan marbled as the white fat in Spanish ham Iced lava lamps but underfoot Liquid light shows behind psychedelic bands but monochrome The frozen surface flat as frosted glass The patterns captive Zany This is the cat ice So named because it can only bear the weight of a cat Cold-pawed agile Although I am yet to meet the cat who would leave the warmth of the hearth to test ice puddles with its paws or fret on other scientific laws as hydrostatic pressure capillary action et cetera I make a resolution to tread lightly Publishing credits All poems: Exclusive first publication by iamb S h a r e

Jen Feroze © Ami Robertson back next the poet Former Foyle Young Poet Jen Feroze has had her poetry featured in a wide range of publications – from Magma , Poetry Wales , Spelt , Ink, Sweat & Tears and Stanchion to One Hand Clapping , Dust Poetry Magazine , Atrium and OneArt . She's also edited anthologies for Black Bough Poetry and The Mum Poem Press. Jen was a winner of the 2022-23 Magma Editors’ Prize, and her debut pamphlet is forthcoming from Nine Pens. Jen likes chunky knitwear, turquoise things, and cheese you can eat with a spoon. the poems Gorge 00:00 / 02:46 Whenever there’s an icebreaker about where we come from, my answer always elicits the same smile: ‘Oh yeah, that’s where the cheese is made! I’m pretty sure I went there with my school once.’ So many kids bussed in to stare through cloudy glass at curds, nonplussed, craning their necks upwards at the cliffs. It’s funny the way hormones can flatten even the highest cliffs, can make centuries of river-worn limestone a stage, from which we played out our teenage dramas. Raise a glass to the breathtaking arrogance of middle school. Smile at the fact that we never stopped to take stock, not once, we assumed these caves, these dripping stalactites, came ready made. There was the time our history teacher made the front pages, connected by strands of DNA to the cliffs, to the ancient bones found there, to the man that once inhabited their skin. 10,000 years, and he’d not moved a mile from the dig site, was drilling us on The Iron Curtain, smiling at the sudden smallness of his concept of history, polishing his glasses. Some summer nights we’d smuggle blankets and cider and glasses over the stile and onto Black Rock. Fires were lit, pacts were made breath was snatched. Some things were lost, others found. The sky split in a smile, loosing meteors like teeth. We lay on our backs, knees mimicking the cliffs, until the shadows of our friends became indistinguishable from one another. I felt drunk and happy and sad and too old and too young, all at once. Then limestone stained siren blue brought us up short, for once. We hugged our own ribs close, carried our bones like glass. He was the brother of a friend’s friend. There were painful verbs to choose from: To fall? To jump? Was it worse if a decision had been made? For a short while, we looked with reverential gaze and sweaty palms at the cliffs, then the flowers died, Christmas came, and he was buried again under forgetful smiles. After school we scattered to the winds, city-bound, throwing smiles over our shoulders. So sure of our futures, and never once pausing to give thanks or even glance back to those cliffs. So desperate were we to be grown, to be skyscrapered behind glass, to be able to say we got out, we did it, we made something of ourselves, away from that shadowed small town we came from. And as they have always done, the cliffs stand silent, a knowing smile carved from water and rock into the landscape of so many childhoods. Only once we left, did I see how we’d been shaped, hot as freshly blown glass; forged, gorge-made. Self-portrait at 35 Weeks 00:00 / 00:36 Not the moon, but her reflection caught in a pond. My tenderly planted bed, latticed by slugs – a seemingly overnight silvering of this pungent earth. Something you’d find glazed on the bottom shelf of a bakery. A bag thrashing with fairground fish. An upturned bowl of porridge. Oh, you slow-punctured water bed. Oh! You magnetic globe for strangers’ hands, the unwelcome and the minuscule, pushing as if against a curved pane of glass. Moving Day 00:00 / 01:44 For weeks now, the house has been haunted by the suits and shoes of zealous estate agents. The dark hush of the trees – excellent allies, excellent secret-keepers – was felled a long time ago in the name of the city’s loud expansion. Now there is nowhere to hide. Hard candy smiles pass through each room, looking out through sugar-glass panes they convince themselves are dusky and bubbled with age alone; running their hands over mantels and recoiling at the layer of dust on their fingertips. The house holds its breath, waiting for someone to touch their lips, to taste its sweetness. Then this afternoon, a truck yellow as sherbet lemons arrived and spilled four bright, warm lives out and inside. So much noise and so many running feet after so much gnawing emptiness, so much guilt. The boxes smell like hope. They make the house ache. There are two children – a boy and a girl, curls soft as candyfloss. They delight in choosing their new bedroom; they fall asleep without a story, without a nightlight. Downstairs, their parents clink glasses of cheap wine as night arrives at the windows. They discuss where to hang the family photographs, who they should call to look at the old oven that didn’t want to light this evening. If the house could talk, it would tell them to buy a new one, shamed by the wicked pile of ash that still covers the grill. If the house could talk, it would press upon them the wisdom of keeping breadcrumbs close at hand, even in the absence of trees. It would feel a slow tide of sugar rising unstoppably in its walls at the sound of young laughter, at the thought of those little, darting tongues. Publishing credits Gorge: Spelt Magazine Poetry Competition 2021 (Highly commended) Self-portrait at 35 weeks: Poetry Wales (58.2, Winter 2022) Moving Day: exclusive first publication by iamb S h a r e

Julieanne Larick back next the poet Julieanne Larick is a poet and editor from Northeast Ohio. She edits poetry for Gasher Press , prose for jmww Journal , and manages social media for The Dodge . Julieanne's poems have appeared in Passengers Journal , Eunoia Review , and Kissing Dynamite . She's currently working on a full-length poetry manuscript, centred on her family mythos and the environment. the poems Oranges 00:00 / 01:01 Our family comes from pilgrims, my mother tells me at dinner. They were pilgrims weeping into the river, in flight they wept in memory frothing with rain and drinking up the oranges baka received for Christmas, squelching with sour juice and sun. My mom asks if baka would want to read this about her family. Baka grew up too quickly; she watched as pilgrims left iron shoes in the swirling disturbances of the Danube, her father, the wine-dipping man, sinking like the orange in water, an O on his lips. Yes, she would want to read about those years on the Danube, those rainfalls and sun showers, the stinging grief on our eyelids, net of slain fruit in our palms. Previously published as Pomorandža A Common Phrase I Hate 00:00 / 01:13 If a tree falls in the forest, it didn’t really happen if our bodies aren’t crushed by the force. If the deer dies silently by the lake, if no one lingers behind while I tie my shoe, if no one finds our bodies together, sewn up by the earth’s moss, green fingers drawing us further away from the people who knew us. Did we ever live or die, did we ever love? If I scorch my fingertips and no one notices the burn, it didn’t really happen since the world keeps spinning outside the scars of my hands. Around and around and around until all the people I know wrinkle from a million little pleasures. I told a stranger I loved her outfit in a Tesco while I was buying six cans of gin fizzes. She wore a pink button down and said it was her boyfriend’s. She smiled; the first time a stranger smiled at me since I turned 19. If we both loved each other but never said a word, did it really happen? Previously published as Elegy to Lying Home 00:00 / 01:20 I take I-71 home from college, unpack all the stuff I collected over the year. Return my favorite sweater to Nebraska and migrate the bird necklace to the last man who loved me. I leave parties at 7 and spit out drinks, return cigarettes. I unwrite lots of essays about Donne and Wordsworth, uncheck books from the growing reading list. My dad takes back his apologies. I absorb salt in my eyes, rub dirt on my skin, abandon old friends before loving them again. Unlearn their names. I turn 18, then 17, then 16, then 15, I ruin a birthday party for my sister then go back to the hospital where they drain my body of fluids and I watch my heart beat faster and slower and I spit the water and all the pills back to where they came from. I erase the note saying why I wanted to die, that I sense my hometown turn its back on me. Leaves cough up orange and blacken in bloom, back to their own loving mothers. Previously published as Warm Creature Publishing credits Oranges: Perhappened Magazine (Issue No. 9) A Common Phrase I Hate: Passengers Magazine (Vol 4, Issue No. 2) Home: Passengers Magazine (Vol. 4, Issue No. 2) S h a r e

Holly Peters back next the poet Holly Peters is a Creative Writing PhD student at the University of Plymouth. She held the position of Plymouth’s Young City Laureate from 2019-2022, and had her poem Artificial Moons featured in the Moths to a Flame: Art and Energy Collective installation at the Glasgow Botanical Gardens during COP26. You’ll typically find Holly hiding somewhere between the covers of a book, or out walking her crazy spaniels, Dotty and Booby. the poems Building the River a Bed 00:00 / 01:12 a river skitters in the dark wriggling like a lullaby’s shh I take the first rock; it weighs the same as the peach pit in my stomach. Clay rolls in the canyon of my palm, squishing between fingers, then shuddering back to shape. An audience of stones, I deliberate, the choice all mine. nothing falls fast in the waves, settling down for its final rest The second breathes dust, hot to touch, singed syllables filling my throat. You don’t have to ignore the craters: use your nails and crack them open. The river shapes beds from burdens: kneel down, whisper them gently. water ages slow, sighs as it swallows my offering Crumbling. I’d avoided the river for years – it no longer able to relieve me – yet I still gather the third rock that slices through the sand timer’s neck. The bank cuts into the hard white behind my shins and I cry as I litter what’s left like ashes. soft drops melt like they were never there at all The Bread Affair 00:00 / 00:53 Her teeth grind in time with the knife that slathers butter over his slice of bread. His dinner steams, fragrant with turmeric and all the time she has spent stewing over it. Not that he takes any notice. Whatever plate she presents him with – matsutake mushrooms, moose cheese, wagyu beef – his mouth waters only for the ample half-wheat bread. Her arrangement of lip-pink tulips has already been extracted from the table’s heart, so his bulging loaf can fill its centre. He takes his time massaging butter into the bread’s porcelain cheek. He cups his hand, its back arching, then spoons his dinner inside, letting the slice envelope it like skin. He chews it, mouth opening wide, tongue slopping. The crumbs cascade, shredded like the last slivers of her patience. I Want to be a Forest 00:00 / 00:49 You won’t know which part of me you hold in your hands: my lower lip, a worn-down heel or knobbly elbow – because it’ll look no different to dirt. You’ll be given a watch-sized box filled with two palmfuls of what’s left of me, and even though I’m only saying it, those flakes, like tree bark, are my heart. All the rest, enough to fill a wheelbarrow, will be mingled with the remains of others. What was once kneecaps, earlobes, eyeballs will become part of the damp woodland floor. But in that forest, it will always be a part of me you hold in your hands. It will be earth, and worm food, a home for tentative tree roots, a world unravelling in the planet of your palm. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb S h a r e

Kimchi Lai back next the poet Kimchi Lai is a bilingual poet based in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. She has performed at Urbanscapes 2018 and 2019, and won third place in the 2018 Asia Pacific slam at Lit Up Festival in Singapore. Kimchi's work has also featured on The KITA! Podcast, as well as Speak Easy on BFM. She self-published her first chapbook, Solace in Solstice , in May 2019. the poems Waxing Moon, Waning Lover Featuring《水调歌头·明月几时有》by 苏轼 00:00 / 02:21 明月几时有?把酒问青天。 Tonight, the moon is full. She smiles at me, her gaze illuminating the glass in my hand as if she knows I wish it was you I am holding instead. 不知天上宫阙，今夕是何年。 I wonder if we have met in a different dimension; or if we will meet in heaven. 我欲乘风归去，又恐琼楼玉宇，高处不胜寒。 I would sit with you under an arbour in the gardens. Surrounded by pillars cut from the finest of jade and sharpest of teeth, protecting us from the fierce winds that try to blow us apart. 起舞弄清影，何似在人间? But the air is still tonight, and you are not by my side in this life. So how dare I wish for your presence in another? 转朱阁，低绮户，照无眠。 The moon comforts me from my window. She is trying to coax me into slumber. 不应有恨，何事长向别时圆? “You see”, she whispers to me. “I shine brightest in the face of longing. What need is there for my light if your lover radiates enough warmth? What need is there for a full moon if you already feel complete?” 人有悲欢离合，月有阴晴圆缺，此事古难全。 Perhaps I will never see your crescent smile, or hear your gibbous laugh again. Yet I know this: we are under the same sky. And now whenever the moon waxes or wanes, I will know it is her saying that you are thinking of me. 但愿人长久，千里共婵娟。 Fatal Blossom 00:00 / 01:00 The sprig of leaves I planted the first night we spent together bloomed today. You cup one in your hand, petals the deepest shade of sunset at its final second before plunging into dusk, haphazard but stunning. Ignore the thrum beneath your feet; the tangled vines that pulse and hiss with poison and hidden truths cannot hurt you as long as you keep me near. Let them creep quiet and swift the same way nightfall creeps upon day, curling around your crown to whisper sleep into your temples. Do you understand? This garden started out an angry mess of ivy – it was never supposed to bloom. Do you like periwinkle? Focus on the flowers. I worked so hard on them. Romantic Sentence 00:00 / 00:53 Words are unconfined, not meant to be held. But once in a while I will get lucky and manage to catch some at the tip of my pen, just long enough for me to string them into an ink necklace. Alive with earnest grammar and passionate vocabulary; every dotted 'i' and crossed 't' quivering. Staining my fingers in haste I drape it around your shoulders, fasten the ends with a full stop. The letters startle at your warmth, smudging slightly. They tumble downwards in my clumsy locution and catch at your collarbone. The same way my breath does in my throat when I see them sigh and settle into your skin; dark blue biro etched across your chest. Oh, sayang. You were meant to wear these words. Publishing credits Waxing Moon, Waning Lover / Romantic Sentence: Solace in Solstice (self-published) Fatal Blossom: exclusive first publication by iamb S h a r e

Elisabeth Kelly back next the poet Elisabeth Kelly lives on a hill farm with her family and too many animals. She's been published in numerous anthologies and journals both online and in print, and she's authored three poetry pamphlets: Carbon , Mind Mathematics and Wild Chamomile . Her first children's book is due out in 2022 from Stairwell Books. Among Elisabeth's favourite things are puddings, and the changing of the seasons. the poems Otzi and the Giant’s Eye 00:00 / 00:31 Sometimes, I feel I am curled up in the eye of a giant, light glints makes an iris out of sunbeams that wink from the depths of this ice sea. I forget for a moment, that suffocating pressure keeps me still as bonded molecules suspend me in a sphere of solid fluid. And I wonder, if I tap a finger against this lens would my world fracture into crystal tears and cry me out from the depths of this ice sea. Tiny Bird Heart 00:00 / 00:15 Light whispers at the window, blue burrows through nudges the dark away. Quietly I uncurl, the nest gives way, as your tiny bird heart beats through the sound of your feet dabbling across the floor. Wild Chamomile 00:00 / 00:40 It smells of pineapple when your crush it, I didn’t know that was the smell, until later. It is the smell of summer, concrete cracks where engine oil pooled, rainbows on slurry puddles, afternoon trips across fields to find an old milking carriage eroding in dens of nettles, the corrugated roof calling like Sleeping Beauty’s turrets full of promise, drizzling reality across the rotting wooden floors. It is scars created by rusted metal treasure, submerged in bogs, or broken bottles used on flat stones to cut berries, it is long days alone. Publishing credits Otzi and the Giant's Eye: Dodging The Rain (This Ice Sea) Tiny Bird Heart: Green Ink Poetry (Discovery Part 2) Wild Chamomile: Wild Chamomile (Selcouth Station) S h a r e