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Angela T Carr back next the poet Angela T Carr is a poet, editor and creative writing facilitator. Winner of the iYeats International Poetry Competition 2019 and The Poetry Business 2018 Laureate's Prize, Angela's had work placed or shortlisted in over 40 national and international literary competitions. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in The North, The Lonely Crowd, The London Magazine, Poetry Birmingham, Strix, Mslexia and elsewhere. Originally from Glasgow, Angela now lives in Dublin. the poems Girl with Child on a Swan's Wing Grave 8: Mesolithic Cemetery at Vedbaek, Denmark 00:00 / 03:24 I was a girl when my father brought me to him – my dowry, the tawny-sheened hide of a buck, twenty bright strings of the teeth of a roe – I came, the tremble of a small wild thing. I came, a creature caught – a hunger, a heart, its string the beat of the forest. Strangers stripped me, braided shells in my hair, said my sons would be warriors, a chief’s kin: And my daughters, I thought, what of them? Men killed boars to roast and feast, the night air thick with smoke, their flesh, a drum and burning stars – they writhed about his head as he took me. In time, my belly grew a boy, a fawn – he kicked and quickened, my nearly child – I hunted him across three starless nights and, blooded, fell. Women washed my corpse, wreathed me in ivory, daubed me blue – my wedding fine, a pillow. They wept as they bore us out through the grasswood huts, past the hummocks of the elder dead, to the shade of the trees, laid out where the black earth bared and the sun, a bone knife, speared the charging sea. A tithe of red ochre, blown from a bowl drifted down, clotting where the birth-tide flowed. We were put to ground in the lope of the wolf's moon, my breathless boy in the cuff of a swan's wing – flint blade at his belly – and I, ringed in teeth, all the beasts of the forest at my throat. The Truth About Figs 00:00 / 01:40 Each ripe fig has at its heart a devoured wasp: a solitary female, to pollinate the fruit's inverted blossom; she crawls in at the meeting of the bracts, the ostiole: a hole so small it rips her antennae, splits the tectonic opacity of skeletal wings; sky-bereft and undone, she nonetheless tends the fig's dark garden, its minute inflorescence – strokes stigma, seeds stamen, tucks her eggs into the styles of ovule florets – and settles into death: the enzymatic gall of her own deflowering. Sink your tongue into the burst of purple skin; mouthful of fleshy sweetness, born of a sting. Quadratic Love Song 00:00 / 01:27 So many things will sit inside a square – a book, a bell, a tooth, a cup, a bone – but who would look and think to find them there? Who’d ink their shape in light when there was none? I think about the square that is a house, a room, where footsteps creak the wooden boards – the one that’s empty of the two of us – I’d name the sound if I could find a word. Though you were never one to fit a tongue or root equations as are graphed by hand – you’d lay your shadow as your sun demands and slip through pauses tighter than a drum. My arms have learned to love the weight of air, to circle what won’t linger in a square. Publishing credits Girl with Child on a Swan's Wing: The North (No. 62) Winner of The Poetry Business 2018 Laureate’s Prize The Truth About Figs: The London Magazine Placed third in The London Magazine Poetry Prize 2016 Quadratic Love Song: The Lonely Crowd (No. 10) Share

Laura Lewis-Waters back next the poet Secondary school English teacher Laura Lewis-Waters gave birth to her first son during the UK's COVID-19 lockdown. Small wonder then that motherhood, mental health and traumatic birth feature prominently in her writing. Laura also researches poetry as a means to raise awareness of rising sea levels; her forthcoming collection, Where Sea Meets Sea , will explore the changing East Anglia coastline through writing both confessional and imagined, as well as verbatim. Laura's debut chapbook, Bathroom Prisoners , was born in May 2022. Her second collection, Beneath the Light , arrived in March 2023. the poems The Faceless Lady at Covehithe 00:00 / 01:20 She waits near the edge. Wind catching at her white linen dress. She waits for the fishermen to tread the headland toward her. They’ll come at low tide to the morlog, to the sand and shingle banks for their bass and their sole. And she’ll call to them. Wondering why recognition then fear always flits across their features. They’re too close to the edge again. In the dawn, mist rises off the broads. They don’t hear the cliffs sigh and let go. They don’t hear her moan. She retreats to St Andrew’s. A boy in a red bobble hat weaves himself through tumbling arches around graves on their seaward tilt as though ready to go back. Every William – every John – every sailor – every fisherman. The sea was hungry this year. But she’ll not let her Matryoshka home fall. Somewhere a baby cries, or perhaps it is the wind or sea martins. The bobble hat has disappeared. She hopes the church still stands on its return. From the tower she watches the cliff crumble and creep inward. She cries into the night, but nobody comes. They stay away on moonless nights when milk and mist mingle. The babies are hungry. Come morning she waits by the edge, her face as flat and featureless as the sea while the fishermen’s wives hang their linen out to dry. Haze-bruh 00:00 / 01:01 The sea gives and the sea takes and when it takes, it is with fire it threads itself in sky, lets the air ride its brackish back like a thousand battle-driven horses charging to reclaim township, it is all the elements knotted together; double sheet bend against farmer country. Sometimes it crawls up unnoticed lapping up sand with unquenchable thirst, a love too strong for stratified silt. One winter, the sea devoured two bungalows; the bells of a 14th century stone church destined to toll beneath the waves. Its wilding rampage on yellow gorse- lined path wind-whips the tower; north-westerly, chipping at field-boys’ teeth at teatime. Another winter, it tucked away four houses, shop and bakery overnight its briny breath inhaling more than flat margin brown its craggy sigh raking shrinking cliff top and painting the silty clay horizon where the sea gives, and the sea takes takes. Living with someone else’s anxiety 00:00 / 01:09 is adopting it as your own it’s realising you have counted black linoleum squares 1,000 times sat on the bathroom floor incapable of standing up. It is learning magic tricks the way you learnt to ride a bike, slowly, painfully, rituals that have to be adhered to a couple a day at first until every little task that keeps you alive is riddled with them – it’s turning the tap on off on off just because you brushed your teeth and always stepping into a room with your right foot because if you don’t you’ll never conceive. It is being your own failure you feel selfish for acknowledging because you are the ‘normal’ one, the unmedicated one, reassurance that asbestos is not in the crumbling Artex one. It is filling in the gaps in the grout so one day the house can be sold as a show home when all you really want is to fall down those little hollows. It is slamming doors, crying, collecting swimming certificates faster than anyone around you, legs growing tired, throbbing beneath the water. It is befriending magnolia walls because your husband, best friend, sister, colleague are the ones that need you. Publishing credits The Faceless Lady at Covehithe: exclusive first publication by iamb Haze-bruh: Trees, Seas & Attitude (Black Cat Poetry Press) Living with someone else’s anxiety: Bathroom Prisoners (Written Off Publishing)

Jerm Curtin back next the poet Originally from County Cork in Ireland but still living in Spain after many years, Jerm Curtin received the 2021 Patrick Kavanagh Award , as well as the 2020 Cúirt International Festival of Literature's New Writing Prize for Poetry . He's also won the Listowel Writers' Week Single Poem Competition on two occasions – first in 2015, then again in 2018. the poems Strangers 00:00 / 02:44 Remember how a traveller, who was unwelcome, would pass through our village in doctrinal black. We were untutored, barely literate. We'd say a low-flying swallow harboured rain, and he'd tut-tut at our weak embodiment of knowledge. We feared his presence; we'd seen strong men drown on dry land after his passing. Now it is no longer the past, nor yet the future, with its tracking devices and sanitary masks. It is the middle of the night. You cannot tell what is life and what is death. Like a newcomer in town, death enlivens even a dull Sunday, which is why, perhaps, we sheltered and adopted an outlaw blacksmith. He could forge the sharpest pike in Munster, a weapon which struck fear among our foes; but he preferred to hide with his descendants in our remote townland and fold them in our midst. Death can ordain like a patriarch, or come for the patriarch, now as human as anyone. It can flourish in the cold, night air like snow before it falls, when a man out of step with himself pulls up in an articulated truck at a service station far from his home and his destination, where he has trouble with the local tongue. A pump attendant, who'd represent Hope in a morality play, comes out to serve him and sees the damaged door mirror, blood smeared on the window, the dent. The attendant can deal with all of this across the barrier of language. There's been a death, no doubt – he catches as much, as the foreign driver proclaims both innocence and guilt and offers him a cardboard box with such beseeching and mumbled grief that the tawny owl inside, open-eyed, stretched on its back, could be either an injunction or a gift. Lola Wakes 00:00 / 02:54 Coffee grumbles on the stove, and Lola wakes. – I had my dream again, she says. At night, she reads in bed, books that lift the streets like bedclothes so that the corpses in the subsoil turn their faces to the light. – Look, she says, and points me to the shock of nakedness in war. My eyes are drawn to a beautiful bush of pubic hair, burning all the more fiercely because the woman's face has an open wound and she's sprawled dead on the street. – There were girls at school with those same names. She reads them out, smarting at the roll call. This is her town. I am a stranger here. I can ignore the grate of rough unwieldy boots on cobbled streets, can take the sandals from beneath the bed as if we lived already in the Arcady we wish to create, where our flowers and potted plants, geraniums on their stalks, might stand in place of severed heads on pikes and so redeem the past. – My sleep was soured, Lola concludes. * * * * * * All our dark childhoods, our backs to the border, only an outlaw's footfall away. I was the child who shrank from the nuns and kept my skirt clean and my mind a blank. I was chaste and silent, and desired above all else to be lifted up into the sanctity of Christ Our Lord. Instead, we were taken over the border for contraband coffee. The bus had wooden seats and smelled of bleach and black tobacco. We visited churches while the nuns went about their purchases. Then we stuffed the bags of coffee grains under our skirts, under our overcoats, under our blouses. On the way back, the nuns smiled their obsequious smiles and the border guards waved us on. We filed out at the convent gates, handing over the smuggled wares. Now the taste of bitter roast grains each morning brings me back to who I am. Cacti / A Poetry Lesson ‘Tan toste que acabada / ouv’ o mong’ a oraçon. oyu hûa passarinna / cantar log’ en tan bon son. que sse escaecéu seendo / e catando sempr’ alá.’ ~ Alfonso X, el sabio ~ 00:00 / 07:16 A time will come when every poem I write will be as ingrained as checking a watch, kneeling or making the sign of the cross. Faith will not matter, nor authenticity. I will come to my page like a blackbird to its branch, repeating the lessons I've learned: something to do with age, and with routine, and a grandmother opening her arms to a child. Years hence, standing above the sinkhole or the stairwell where a child’s look was lost, miles from the delicate arms at rest on a banister or a low windlass wall, I remember the silence on the sunny porch like a poetry lesson as she nurtured life from the dew in the shadow of the cacti. It was a feeling as old as the soft blue hills; the lichened orchard, past its prime, ripened with marvels and moss, like a backdrop to Paradise. Now, as I cross a thoroughfare, hand in hand with a lover, or run my fingers down an arm in the dark as if it were the railing on a deck, and other fingers return the caress, or as I hear the nightingales among the reeds, it is that first heaven I'm reminded of. How she lingered out on the porch, tending to cacti and potted flowers. How I knew I mustn't disturb her. Later she'll bring out her currant bread and Lucozade, a caraway-seed loaf. Meanwhile, I try to keep occupied. I find the mood has penetrated everywhere. In a dusty outhouse loft, I come across damaged and dated toys, school jotters, rusty tools and gadgets, fabulous tarnished fishing flies, American letters stashed in a box, red, white and blue around the borders, solemn statesmen on the stamps. I follow my grandmother, tall and thin, her hair like ermine, back through O. Henry to New York. Her face flashes out above the crowd. The Depression brought her home, in ways I am too young to know. When I am older, I'll remember; another bauble to occupy my time, but nothing on which to rely; I catch a sense of intangible doom – as in a fairytale, where no disguise will free a victim from a lure, or return a wanderer to their course, as if old age had built a wall about its house and time itself had stalled and drawn to it a child who knows they must not enter. But once I turned the key on that outhouse door, a century might well have passed before my grandmother called me from the parlour, her tête-à-tête with the cacti over. And almost as long before I'd read a poem about a hapless monk in an orchard. A worthless monk, beaten round the ears, whose beard cannot hide his sores, one the others can't abide, so he is sent to dig and till the soil, and while he works and weeds, he asks the Blessed Virgin for a glimpse of what's in store for those who enter Paradise. He prays among the seedlings in his care, under trees whose nuts will be their staple through the winter, and fruit trees, whose flowers he loves and worries through frost. He works and hears a blackbird sing. Or is it a thrush? His ear is poor, but the song is beautiful; he spends the afternoon in its thrall until the time to gather tools and join the other monks for Vespers. Wistfully, he hoists the hems of his tunic up. In evening light that bathes the path, some shrubs are now as large as trees, there are others he can't recognise; but it meanders as it always does, and takes him as far as the chapel. Bells ring. He steps inside, and genuflects. He makes the sign of the cross before the Eucharist. And finds himself beside a brother who he does not know, and whispers: 'Who are you? And which monks are these?' After the first outbreaks of plague had passed, the last monk of the old school came in from the garden, in aspect rough, speaking a dialect we barely comprehended. He asked for brethren we knew nothing of, so we first beat him with a stick and bade him talk sense. Then, contrite at our behaviour, we washed and fed him like a stray, showed him to a cell and allowed him rest. Next day we garnered from his nonsense, hobbled in that old tongue, that he referred to monks now long deceased, and a prayer to the Virgin Mother in which he'd asked to savour Paradise, whereupon a bird had sung. We calculate its trill went on three hundred years. Such is the miracle of prayer: a simple monk in a garden granted a glimpse of Paradise, while we hung on his words, and mourned its loss. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Maria Taylor back next the poet Maria Taylor is a British Cypriot poet. Her debut collection, Melanchrini , was shortlisted for the Michael Murphy Memorial Prize. More recently, she published her pamphlet Instructions for Making Me with HappenStance. Maria's writing has featured in a range of magazines, and she's Reviews Editor for Under the Radar. Her new collection, Dressing for the Afterlife , is due out from Nine Arches Press in September 2020. the poems What It Was Like 00:00 / 01:03 When the stranger’s baby cries, my body remembers the shrill, tuneless song of need. It remembers endless nights of cat and dog rain. It remembers our road falling asleep, as we forgot to remember us. That summer, clothes stopped remembering to fit. We’d look through thin curtains and remember the sun, mimicked by sodium light. I remember the feel of warm, sleep-suited limbs, still breathe in their powdery smell. The stranger I used to be lives in the present tense now. The baby fidgets on her chest like a rabbit. Then he’s calm. His blue eyes gnaw on me for a moment till his head’s at rest, the frail, dreaming head of infancy that only knows a need for love and milk, that won’t remember any of this. Ghosting 00:00 / 00:46 Think of Will, the ghost of Covent Garden, the murdered thesp who’s walking alongside you down and down a staircase that never ends. Dapper gent. Eventually you’ll see daylight. The actor won’t. Spare a thought for the ghosts we pass at stations: their secret meetings, flings, kisses. People vanish into thin air every single day, even ghosts fade in time. Where do they go all those see-through Elizabethans, Plantagenet kings in car parks, crying boys reaching out for our faces, those we can’t see, can’t feel. You’re no different. Look, here’s your own reflection. Woman Running Alone 00:00 / 01:05 A woman who follows her own trail and pounds pavements of unending cities, past statues of forgotten men, fountains, sticky sunshine pouring over tower blocks, past gentrified basement windows where wives hear the washing-up howl between their hands, past suits on phones and panda-eyed women in doorways with faces that say I know, I know – tell me about it; these streets where open hands beg for more than is ever offered, where someone’s kid is a sleeping bag, where the wolf-whistle becomes the wolf and love’s worn like musk aftershave, where she forgets who she is: Ms. Keep On, Ms. Never-going-home, neither running away nor running toward anyone, wind-sifted, letting the weather sing through her, she who is different to her brothers. The rhythm fills her with flight – and her wings, what wings she has – Publishing credits What It Was like: The North Ghosting: Atrium Woman Running Alone: The Result is What You See Today: Poems About Running (Smith/Doorstop) Share

Ruth Taaffe back next the poet Hailing from Manchester and having lived variously in Sheffield, Thailand, Australia and Singapore, Ruth Taaffe is now settled in the south of England. She writes about her experiences of living overseas, the idea of home, and how the natural environment finds its way into our identity. Ruth has taught English internationally for more than 20 years, and has a Masters degree in Creative Writing from Lancaster University. Her poems have appeared in such literary journals as The Poetry Village , Acumen and One Hand Clapping , and her debut collection is Unearthed . the poems Driving Over the Snake Pass Under a Shed with a Goldfish on my Lap 00:00 / 01:04 These were the final items to repatriate taken over the hills to my first home – the cats had gone ahead two weeks before. Young enough to still depend on parents, we knew the baggage that we did not take could be left at their door and kept for us. Tied to the roof rack like a tortoise shell, the shed, unconstructed, was just boards of wood. I peered skyward as you drove, for any shift in light foreshadowing some avalanche of splinters. We kept the radio off, tuned in to creaking and the steady slosh of fish water that I was powerless to stop. We had no idea how our life would be rebuilt a thousand miles away, or why fish, when moved into some larger water, grow. Acrobat 00:00 / 01:23 He toes the wire which sways like a hammock, outstretches his knotted arms of rope. Ears ringed gold as a sailor of air. His back and chest inked by compass, star. Fixing his eye low on the horizon where he’ll land in time with our ovation, he climbs the unicycle, inches backwards, slowly unwalking the plank. We buoy him up with our applause, become his crew, his wave and tide, life vest of his triumph. And he ours. Four clubs fly like seagulls mobbing a fish, or words trying to land on a line. Each catch sharpens our awe. Then, he’s passed a fifth on fire! We stow the clapping, trade in calm. For this moment we anchor him with our belief, as the solo drumbeats start. He catches in time, leaps to land, and signs a charter of hope on our hearts. Nightjar 00:00 / 00:58 Squat like a knot of dark upon dark at the edge of dusk. Folded blades of downed chopper, landed mound of bark and leaves. Your snake eye opens up like a moon glassing the night. Bug-eater lacking fangs to pierce the nocturne skin, only your baleen beak sifting plankton from the sky, flat as an unsent valentine. You shoot soft tuts of fireworks cluck up Morse code. Heart monitor for the forest, it was told that you stole milk from goats, but you preserve such sweetness, Chupacabra. Open wide, let the world pour its song back into your throat. Publishing credits Driving Over the Snake Pass Under a Shed with a Goldfish on my Lap: 192 Magazine Acrobat: exclusive first publication by iamb Nightjar: Finished Creatures (The Poetry Village)

Dominic Leonard back next the poet Dominic Leonard’s writing can be found in PN Review , Poetry London , the TLS , Pain and elsewhere, with two of his poems featuring in the spring edition of The Poetry Review . In 2019, he received an Eric Gregory Award. His pamphlet, Antimasque , will be published by Broken Sleep Books in 2021. He lives and teaches in London. the poems Seven Birds Passed Through a Great Building 00:00 / 01:00 Seven birds passed through A great building—I cannot Remember you always but I have been finding ways to Remember you enough. I have Loved only from a safe distance, Staring into sinks long enough To know the sense of spillage That comes with every act of Honesty. Seven birds passed Through a house of spectacle Through the light that lounged Around each of the great stupid Bells and I thought about how Profound it felt, hands thick And heavy on my stupid knees. When I say that once I dreamt You were a taxi on fire plunging Down every country road in England I am not being facetious I am testing my immensity. I am trying to manage my fear, Which is to say I cannot risk Heaven, or any attempt at heaven I Have made so far, not when each Line I find is a room gone dark just As I leave it and always the birds are Flown and I’ve missed it just, just. What is the wind, what is it After Gertrude Stein 00:00 / 00:53 An egg – lithe beast that could crack with any pressure, That gets yellower towards its centre, that hangs between The fingers. A ghost-vision, serenely bovine. Incubated, Stratified. A correct language of where it was, where it Went, how are we anchored by it. But, to wander with it – How the wind knocks my ham-fisted breath from me, Makes a pelt of it. And wedged is the wind, trickling Into and out of all my little compartments and rooms, A fawn in a field seen blurred through the rain at nearly Seven in the evening after stumbling from the house. Something to consider when deciding on materials to Rebuild the world from after testing its capacity for grief, Which is all this was. On forgetting the anniversary of a death 00:00 / 00:13 If that’s you hearing – out on the roof, astride your miscreant echo – you made this of me, didn’t you. Publishing credits Seven Birds Passed Through a Great Building / On forgetting the anniversary of a death: exclusive first publication by iamb What is the wind, what is it: Stand (Issue 223, Volume 17 No. 3)

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')

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

wave twenty winter 2024 Daragh Fleming Dion O'Reilly Graham Clifford Jane Ayers Kevin Grauke Laura Lewis-Waters Marie Marchand Pam Thompson Penny Walshe Rachel Smith Rowan Lyster Sharon Phillips Simon Alderwick T S S Fulk Wendy Pratt

Shaw Worth back next the poet Shaw Worth is a student living in London. His work has received three commendations in the Foyle Young Poet of the Year competition, appeared in the Waltham Forest Poetry Competition anthology close , and is forthcoming in World-dream. Shaw also co-edits Meanwhile Magazine . the poems Breaktime on the Toddlers and Tiaras Set 00:00 / 01:24 Today my two-year-old is Regional Beauty Supreme. She will be Princess Kansas. She will devour the world. Her two main hobbies are broad daylight and temporary teeth called flippers; we throw them in the summer river, we watch them dance like mayflies. Before she goes on stage they play Wichita Lineman for me and the soft string whine comes to get me, and these all-time winner women and the local bowling alley recede. I go back to my father, who hated me; he said our name was Resaca for fighting but I stayed here in the county to listen through the wire for the future, which is my champion daughter. At home I marry the mirror and try her lipstick on at dinner. I am the quality controller. She knows we need the money and she brings it back each Monday. I wash the dresses. We sing together every weekend. We storm like thunder through the waxed music halls, then I pass her the mic, and her glitter in their golf ball eyes makes the world see more clearly and the cinched March sun walk out to greet the judges and these endless plains, where we are unloading a pickup of trophies and rejoicing in endless victory. Dharma Talk 00:00 / 01:31 Ani Pema says we would prefer to remain asleep in the West. Just like that: quietly. And she laughs loud and jokes since her wisdom overflows. But distraction is freehand and creative, I think; while I walk in the shop I listen— I should be bolder at adding new people on Facebook, whose images I glide over nightly a fish through a reef, or a bored mountain goat, tripping on the space between crags. It’s so important, she says, to get out of this pool of steamy slash fictional nothing, of thoughts that crawl like sci-fi animals, of unwatched films & love poems— you are not who you think you are. You never were . But before I get discursive and freehand about dinner, I remember again that still I can breathe, and adopt a posture of repose in the air, like a fly on a thousand-petalled lotus. I twist my left hip & it hurts for a week; I bruise my calves on the flow of time, I get dinner, again. There are road stops on the path. On the four hundredth petal of my long trashy thriller, the gang climb the glacier in search of the body; the killer impersonates below. They find her, filled with love and righteous action, dig her out from the hard-set snow. Landscape as Guided Meditation 00:00 / 01:24 No, I’m serious. Imagine you’re fifty one hundred fathoms tall, big head up with blue generous Neptune, and your feet down in the Cape Cod lake where there were eels and you met your teacher. You have no pain and high dexterity. You think aloud with your shoulder blade the size of the province: it says don’t trust the work, do it again, you might just find that something in all this boundless space, these foamy bits of lake that lodge beyond the breath. Look, there’s Jupiter. I guess breath is the end of be all. You’re so massive you can’t float by. Uncombing your hair the length of Cape Cod will send a theta wave to Earth with the power to make the highways curl up on themselves then heal all beings of hope and fear. So do it. Go do the dishes and strike the bowl till it becomes a portal. Crawl through to a large non-conceptual room, the first of ten final perfections. We don’t need to list them here quite yet. The lake has dried up with waiting for you the wallpaper is Neptune imagined. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Charlotte Knight back next the poet British-Ukrainian poet Charlotte Knight is a 2021 New Poets Prize winner , and was commended in the UK National Poetry Competition in 2019. Her work has featured variously in Magma, SPAM, Lighthouse Journal , Perverse and elsewhere. Charlotte is studying for a Masters at Goldsmiths College. Her pamphlet, Ways of Healing , will be published by Smith|Doorstop in June 2022. the poems [Insert Sappho Reference] 00:00 / 01:03 pour wine over this white goat or like hunt me for sport oh baby love a long fusillade of mistakes burning holes in my new purple furs love a frenetic chasing why do i have four legs or love a fecund horn sounding and me and my pheromones so very tangible you can smell them in the cheese like the things you awoke in me your head a bunch of violets my lap a goat’s lap can i collect this as a sadness can i carry this hurt in a basket specifically woven for the occasion can i be exiled is there an island for heartbroken goats why am i bleating when i say [insert sappho reference] i mean i get it we have all loved somebody with the knowledge that they won’t love us back i mean i don’t get it i am a goat why am i crying Hell is Real 00:00 / 01:02 Travelling southbound on Interstate 71, motorists pass a sign which reads HELL IS REAL . It stands in a plowed field and serves as a reminder to all God-fearing farmhands that they must indeed fear God. I am not so easily influenced, I could never be a farmhand for the Lord. In fact, I frequently shoplift and have thoughts about holding hands with you in public spaces. The HELL IS REAL sign is one of many roadside prophecies erected in the midwest. Amongst others, there is Jesus Saves , Jesus save My Soul , I Need u Jesus . I do not believe in Jesus, but I do believe in believing. And though I could never be a farmhand for the Lord, I have to love Him. Look at all the signs He gave us. Singing Before I Drown in a River in Denmark 00:00 / 01:03 mermaid-like and incapable of my own distress i collect flora from the riverbank looting a natural ecosystem hoping to one day be framed in gold i carry my losses with me every flower a symbol how foxgloves are death how cattails innocence how pansies are love in vain how you you held me always obscured in dark corners like with nature how easy to say we are separated tall grass wildflowers no waves no waves a tributary husband we were subject to bursting banks breaking boughs overseas mad with grief singing for you till my muddy death how easy to say gone Publishing credits [Insert Sappho Reference]: runner-up in the Outspoken Prize for Poetry (Page category) Hell is Real: Ink Sweat & Tears Singing Before I Drown in a River in Denmark: Neutral Spaces (Issue 2)

Maxine Rose Munro back next the poet Maxine Rose Munro is a Shetlander adrift on the outskirts of Glasgow. Her poetry has been published widely, exhibited at the Stanza Poetry Festival, shortlisted for the SMHAFF Awards, and nominated for The Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net. Maxine runs the First Steps in Poetry feedback programme, which offers beginner poets free feedback and support. the poems Finnman 00:00 / 01:12 My land is a constant, stripped by inconstant seas and I should know better: allure soon abandons all promise and beauty lies like an oily film on your surface. I have no use for fortune-tellers spinning gaudy futures – tall, dark strangers on narrow, isolated islands can't be true, but are surely puzzle and paradox. False, false man there is as much plastic in your offer as silver fishes in the sea. Now you tell me of your sunken treasures and hidden depths, but never your shifting, treacherous nature. I dream of your sea rising to enfold me, cover my mouth and stop my breath. I am lost and will go with you. But first come close, closer, let me see if, like waves meeting land, you break against me. The Finnman is a legend of the Northern Isles. Sometimes he can be benevolent, others he seeks to entice women down to his undersea world, only to turn them into his slaves. Let me sing a song of love 00:00 / 01:11 though we both know I'm not romantic. Though it could end in embarrassed mumbling and staring at our feet. I know I take time to get going, and often head off in a confusing direction, but just sit, and I'll do my best. Let my voice crack, wander between dialects like it does when I'm worried I'm an idiot putting myself forward for a kicking, a puppy wanting to pee all over the floor, shivery with terror, anticipating horror. I've written the words and rehearsed them a dozen different ways but none of them were as right as I wanted. It's funny how so very hard it is to do this, but let me try. Let me stand up before you, not quite look at you, let me sing the words I wrote you, edited over and over and over again. Let me sing this song – I love you. I'm glad I found you and no one else. Let's live all our lives together. There. I have sung my song. I hope you don't think I got it wrong. I hope you feel the same. Mother Tongue 00:00 / 01:04 If I were to speak with my mother's tongue my words would reach up out of the land, rooted deep in the language she learned sat at the knees of Viking descendants – the soil pressed against her bare skin: möld , a word that grew in her fertile mouth. To be dirty rich was möld -rich. To be nearly buried by the drink, möld -drocht. Her word for the Earth: Aert . Spoken with an ai , a rolling r , and a tih . Compact. Solid. And if she were to say 'from all the earths', well, this was her way of saying 'everywhere'. Stuck and grounded, both aert -fast. And that was how she looked to me, a woman who couldn't work with abstracts, their gush, their drift from the source. But my father, ah now, my father, he was one who was soothed by this. His words were dreams of the sea. Publishing credits Finnman / Let me sing a song of love: exclusive first publication by iamb Mother Tongue: Acumen

Lloyd Schwartz back next the poet Lloyd Schwartz is the author of five collections, including the forthcoming Who’s on First? New and Selected Poems. His work has been chosen for a Pushcart Prize, The Best American Poetry, and The Best of the Best American Poetry. His other publications include Elizabeth Bishop: Poems, Prose & Letters , and the centennial edition of Bishop’s Prose . Lloyd is the Frederick S. Troy Professor of English Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts, and Somerville Massachusetts' Poet Laureate. He was awarded the 1994 Pulitzer Prize for Criticism, and a 2019 Guggenheim Foundation Fellowship in poetry. the poems Nostalgia (The Lake at Night) 00:00 / 03:10 The black water. Lights dotting the entire perimeter. Their shaky reflections. The dark tree line. The plap-plapping of water around the pier. Creaking boats. The creaking pier. Voices in conversation, in discussion—two men, adults—serious inflections (the words themselves just out of reach). A rusty screen-door spring, then the door swinging shut. Footsteps on a porch, the scrape of a wooden chair. Footsteps shuffling through sand, animated youthful voices (how many?) —distinct, disappearing. A sudden guffaw; some giggles; a woman’s—no, a young girl’s—sarcastic reply; someone’s assertion; a high-pitched male cackle. Somewhere else a child laughing. Bug-zappers. Tires whirring along a pavement ... not stopping ... receding. Shadows from passing headlights. A cat’s eyes caught in a headlight. No moon. Connect-the-dot constellations filling the black sky—the ladle of the Big Dipper not quite directly overhead. The radio tower across the lake, signaling. Muffled quacking near the shore; a frog belching; crickets, cicadas, katydids, etc. —their relentless sexual messages. A sudden gust of wind. Branches brushing against each other—pine, beech. A fiberglass hull tapping against the dock. A sudden chill. The smell of smoke, woodstove fires. A light going out. A dog barking; then more barking from another part of the lake. A burst of quiet laughter. Someone in the distance calling someone too loud. Steps on a creaking porch. A screen-door spring, the door banging shut. Another light going out (you must have just undressed for bed). My bare feet on the splintery pier turning away from the water. Crossword For David 00:00 / 00:49 You’re doing a crossword. I’m working on a puzzle. Do you love me enough? What’s the missing word? Do I love you enough? Where’s the missing piece? Yesterday I was cross with you. You weren’t paying enough attention. You were cross with me. I wasn’t paying enough attention. Our words crossed. Where are the missing pieces? What are the missing words? Yet last night we fit together like words in a crossword. Pieces of a puzzle. A True Poem 00:00 / 01:18 I’m working on a poem that’s so true, I can’t show it to anyone. I could never show it to anyone. Because it says exactly what I think, and what I think scares me. Sometimes it pleases me. Usually it brings misery. And this poem says exactly what I think. What I think of myself, what I think of my friends, what I think about my lover. Exactly. Parts of it might please them, some of it might scare them. Some of it might bring misery. And I don’t want to hurt them, I don’t want to hurt them. I don’t want to hurt anybody. I want everyone to love me. Still, I keep working on it. Why? Why do I keep working on it? Nobody will ever see it. Nobody will ever see it. I keep working on it even though I can never show it to anybody. I keep working on it even though someone might get hurt. Publishing credits Nostalgia (The Lake at Night) / A True Poem: Cairo Traffic (University of Chicago Press) Crossword: Little Kisses (University of Chicago Press) Share

Rachel Carney back next the poet Writer, creative writing tutor and academic Rachel Carney is based in Cardiff. She won the 2021 Pre-Raphaelite Society Poetry Competition, and has had work place highly in several other competitions. Her poetry has appeared in One Hand Clapping , The Interpreter's House , Ink, Sweat & Tears and elsewhere. Rachel's debut collection, Octopus Mind , with its themes of perception, creativity and neurodiversity, was one of The Guardian’s Best Poetry Books of 2023 . the poems Self-Portrait as Pieces of a Saint After Saint Teresa of Avila 00:00 / 01:01 you may kiss my jaw in Rome or grip my finger bones in Avila peer through thick museum glass at my shrivelled drooping heart and see how they transfigured me at death into a slice of pious art my humble flesh spooned out in prayer my left arm pinned for you in crystal decomposing slowly in its own realm I am exhumed again my skin ripped from its frame plundered for your touch your taste devoured by your curiosity your faith in me and though you hold the pieces of me in your hands I am not here I never was Dys 00:00 / 00:56 I want to dis/ entangle the sly hiss of dys, to dis/embowel the fraught dis/ease of it, as it slips in front, so sure, so certain. I want to dis/turb its dis/avowal, crumple it, curtail its sudden fist, flung like an abuser’s kiss. I want to dis/arm the beast of it, dis/dain its dis/approval, dis/pel its dis/paraging taste, its dull dis/gust, how it dis/ figures our praxis, dis/misses us. I dis/inter dys – its cold corpse dis/carded on the kitchen floor, like an old god. Mine 00:00 / 01:18 I’ve known you, always, in the small pearl of your absence, drifting slowly away from me across the years. I’ve felt your restless waters, your crumbling edifice, your waves. I’ve seen how dark this cave is, full of dancing shadows, echoes of echoes. There is no avoiding the possibility of you in the ebb and flow of ongoing tides. I’ve seen you in the flash of the sun on the water. I blink, and then you’re out of sight. I’ve heard your quiet breath, as you lap against my surface. Your shore is wide and open, your song a song of life, your ripples hardly there. I’ve always known how impossible you are. A bubble, faint with light. The skin of you so thin. What would it take to turn you into flesh? How can we know what could have been? Publishing credits All poems: Octopus Mind (Seren Books)

Mark McGuinness back next the poet Bristol-based Mark McGuinness has had poems in Ambit , Anthropocene , Brittle Star , Magma , Oxford Poetry , The Rialto and Stand . He was awarded third prize in The Stephen Spender Prize 2016, and commended in the Ambit Poetry Competition in 2021. Mark hosts the poetry podcast A Mouthful of Air , where he invites poets to read a single poem and discuss the inspiration and process behind it – as well as reading classic poems and talking about what makes these work. Mark also collaborates on concrete poetry projects with the sculptor Sheena Devitt. the poems The Opening Lines of Troilus and Criseyde by Geoffrey Chaucer Translated by the poet from the Middle English 00:00 / 03:38 Before we part I want to speak about Prince Troilus, son of Priam King of Troy, And how his destiny in love played out In double sorrow: from misery to joy Then out of bliss once more. Lend me your voice, Tisiphone – help me to compose These woeful lines, that weep as my ink flows. To you I call, you goddess of sharp torment, You cruel Fury, eternally in pain: Help me, who am the sorrowful instrument That helps all lovers, voicing their complaint; Because it suits, to speak the matter plain, A wretched man to have a gloomy fellow, And a tragic tale, a face that’s full of sorrow. For I, who serve the servants of the Lord Of Love, daren’t pray to Love for my success On pain of death; I have so many flaws And languish so far from His help in darkness. But nonetheless, if this may bring some gladness To any lover, and advance his courtship, Give him the thanks and leave me with the hardship. But all you lovers bathing now in gladness, If any drop of pity be in you, Remind yourselves of any former sadness That you have felt, and also of the woe Of other folk; recall the times you too Felt Love affronted you with misery Or that you won Him far too easily. And pray for those caught in the same condition As Troilus, more of which you’ll shortly hear, That Love will bring them heavenly salvation; And also pray for me to God so dear, That I shall have the skill to make it clear Through Troilus’ own unfortunate adventure What pain and sadness all Love’s folk endure. And also pray for those left in despair Of love, with no chance of recovery, And all those lovers, whether him or her, Whom wicked tongues have done great injury. Pray thus to God, from his great charity To grant them passage from this earthly place Who lose all hope of Love’s redeeming grace. And also pray for those who are at ease That God will grant their love shall long endure And give them all the gift to please their ladies According to Love’s honour and His pleasure. For so I hope to make my soul more pure: To pray for those who wear Love’s livery, And write their woe, and live in charity, And feel for each of them the same compassion As though I were their own devoted brother. Now listen to me with your full attention For now I will go straight to my main matter In which you’ll hear the double sorrow suffered By Troilus when he loved the fair Criseyde And how she left her love before she died. Lockdown 00:00 / 01:22 We’re cooped up with ourselves. Alone together for weeks or months until it’s safe to breathe. The virus crosses continents like weather. For now we’re stuck here, wondering when or whether we’ll get back to our everyday routine. We’re cooped up with ourselves, alone together, the death toll rising, falling, like a feather at the mercy of an idle breeze. The virus crosses continents like weather. As days drift by we find new ways to weather boredom, frustration, solitude and grief. We’re cooped up with ourselves, alone together, and some of us are at the end of our tether, and some of us are sinking week by week. The virus crosses continents like weather. Has life as normal vanished altogether? Once locked up, can we ever be set free? We’re cooped up with ourselves. Alone together. The virus crosses continents like weather. The Illusionist 00:00 / 03:57 The theatre’s gilded like a music box. The lights go dim and someone takes the stage. ‘Good evening everyone, I’m Arthur Fox.’ We know he’s not. The real one’s still backstage. The lights go dim and someone takes the stage. He looks the part; we gingerly applaud. We know he’s not. The real one’s still backstage. ‘And here’s the man you’ve all been waiting for!’ He looks the part; we gingerly applaud. The curtains part. The curtains close again. ‘And here’s the man you’ve all been waiting for!’ ‘Thank you all for waiting in the rain.’ The curtains part. The curtains close again. We troop back slowly to our starting spots. ‘Thank you all for waiting in the rain – ’ ‘Sorry Arthur – the pillar blocked the shot.’ We troop back slowly to our starting spots. The cameraman walks sideways through the crowd. ‘Sorry Arthur – the pillar blocked the shot.’ ‘I know. It feels a bit disjointed now.’ The cameraman walks sideways through the crowd; we part and close behind him like the sea. ‘I know it feels a bit disjointed now. The whole thing will look seamless on TV.’ We part and close behind him like the sea. He reappears behind the left-hand door. ‘The whole thing will look seamless on TV. I know the repetition’s such a bore.’ He reappears behind the left-hand door. His eyes are covered; both hands firmly tied. ‘I know the repetition’s such a bore. Please take your time, examine every side.’ His eyes are covered; both hands firmly tied. The dazzling spotlights keep us in the dark. ‘Please take your time, examine every side and let the camera see it, clearly marked.’ The dazzling spotlights keep us in the dark. The volunteer does everything he’s told. ‘And let the camera see it, clearly marked. That’s right. Just there. Now cut along the fold.’ The volunteer does everything he’s told. We half expect to see him levitate. ‘That’s right. Just there. Now cut along the fold. The time has come. Let’s hope it’s worth the wait ... ’ We half expect to see him levitate. A moment’s pause that seems to take an age. ‘The time has come. Let’s hope it’s worth the wait ... and look whose name is written on that page!’ A moment’s pause that seems to take an age. He takes the sheet and holds it up as proof. ‘And look whose name is written on that page! I’d like to ask you all to raise the roof!’ He takes the sheet and holds it up as proof, although the mechanism isn’t clear. ‘I’d like to ask you all to raise the roof: please give a big hand to our volunteer!’ Although the mechanism isn’t clear, we’re still transfixed by what we’ve all just seen. ‘Please give a big hand to our volunteer! Just wait until you see yourself on screen!’ We’re still transfixed by what we’ve all just seen: a show that never actually took place. ‘Just wait until you see yourself on screen. The stops and starts will vanish without trace.’ A show that never actually took place will be assembled in the cutting room. ‘The stops and starts will vanish without trace. When Charlie gives the signal we’ll resume.’ We’ll be assembled in the cutting room. ‘Good evening everyone, I’m Arthur Fox. When Charlie gives the signal we’ll resume.’ The theatre’s gilded like a music box. Publishing credits The Opening Lines of Troilus and Criseyde: placed third in The Stephen Spender Prize 2016 Lockdown: first appeared on author's SoundCloud The Illusionist: The Rialto (No. 80)