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Hear poet Katrina Naomi read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Katrina Naomi back next the poet Katrina Naomi’s poetry has featured on Poems on the Underground, as well as on Radio 4’s Front Row and Open Country. She tutors with Arvon and the Poetry School , and has a PhD in creative writing from Goldsmiths, University of London. Katrina’s fourth collection, Battery Rocks , won her the Arthur Welton Award from the Society of Authors, and was Daljit Nagra ’s Collection of the Month on Radio 4 Extra’s Poetry Extra. She's also received the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry, and with fellow poet Helen Mort, a Saboteur Award. the poems Fickle Lover 00:00 / 01:33 Ours is not a relationship of equals. You’re passionate, rough, violent. So much is an act – you’re always on display – I want you all to myself. Of course, you’re unfaithful, you swim with anyone, moshing their thighs, their breasts, knocking them out with your rush. At one time, I could choose whether to be in love with you. I do my best to ignore your conquests. Instead, I think of when you’re away, how you leave me gifts – razor shells, man o war, jags of glass – fragile reminders of your own tough love. I need your chill; can’t help myself. You swoosh round my brain, frolicking with neurones, make my skin fit me, tighter, tighter, after I’ve plunged right in. I’m going deeper. I can’t consider what you want – pinning me, scraping my limbs along rocks. I’ve learnt to say no. Despite your allure, I won’t go to you at night. But sunrise, I’ll be waiting for you, having shifted my day around your tides; my primitivism seduced – loving how you run, spuming, towards me. And if there were no sea? 00:00 / 00:55 no shushing of the pull / no shimmer of summer / no knowledge of splash / no repetition of clouds / no clouds / no splendour of kelp / no fish / no study of scales / no silhouette of oystercatcher / the moon on repeat / no islands / no need for ships / storms would laze in their beds / no Speedos / no coastal erosion / all of us living inland / no salt / no shells / no need to row / no Jaws / no glamour of rock pools / nowhere for the sun to swim / no rivers / rain unknown / no place to drown in the kelp forest 00:00 / 01:40 the first time she finds herself among brown strands between fear and wonder floating in this other world of upside down a place a person could wed herself to so much dank silence beyond her breath the gentle murmur of limbs in suspension their arc and splay there’s no peace like this in the dry country she’s like a body in a jar at the lab but keeps her Dutch colours sliding her mind through slender lengths of weed fabric-like plastic-like part translucent part shine like nothing else but kelp her restless hair goes on its own pulsing journey she forgets for blissed moments she can’t breathe here this isn’t air waves nudge overhead it’s like any place almost visited say a city say Seville and she talks half-seriously half what-if of how she might live here the kelp wafts in welcome displays its tentacles as she refuses neoprene longs for kelp’s beckon and touch longs to pass as a local a strange fish for sure but one who could belong Publishing credits Fickle Lover: Same But Different (Hazel Press) And if there were no sea?: berlin lit in the kelp forest: winner of the Keats-Shelley Prize for Poetry 2021

Hear poet Michele Grieve read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Michele Grieve back next the poet Michele Grieve was Poet in Residence for The Urban Tree Festival 2022/23, and a recipient of funds from Arts Council England's Developing Your Creative Practice. She graduated from the Faber Academy Advanced Poetry Course in 2023, and has had work published by WildFire Words , Obsessed With Pipework and Anthropocene . Currently collating her first poetry pamphlet, Michele can be found hugging trees, her five cats and her family in Hertfordshire, where she's also undertaking Bardic training. the poems Sunday Roast with My Family 00:00 / 00:57 At our faux Chippendale dining table, Marie Antoinette stabs her wig-mice with scarlet talons if they try for a morsel of her stuffing. Her head lolls to one side, we’re midway through my revolution. It wasn’t a clean strike. Plasma and cells sprint to flavour the gravy. To her right the shadow-man loiters, his wispy nervous edges flicker like the memory of remorse, unsure where they should end. He slices off each finger because he can. He cannot remember the last time he saw his own face. The brother who denies his blood lurks under the table, eating dog fur off the Axminster, trying to angle a view up my skirt. No one stops him. I say nothing. The cosplay mother calls me by my dog’s name then feeds him her breast. ACT TWO: 'THE TWENTY-YEAR SCRIPT' 00:00 / 02:20 GENRE: PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR CHARACTERS: MOTHER (54) SWAN-NECKED, HER SPINE CLINGS TO A MEMORY OF DIGNITY BUT NOW HAS CLOSED RANKS AROUND HER HEART. AN ECHO CAN BE HEARD OF A 'WELL-PUT-TOGETHER' WOMAN, YET BLOTCHY FOUNDATION REVEALS YESTERDAY’S FACE. THE ONCE 'ELIZABETH TAYLOR' HAIR NOW MATTED WITH ELNET, BATTLING TO RETAIN ORDER. DAUGHTER (20) A WEIGHTY PHYSIQUE OF A BODY WEARING ITS SHAME. BAREFACED, HER HAIR IS MID-LENGTH-LANKY WITH PREMATURE WHISPERS OF GREY. DESPITE THE CIMMERIAN SHADE, HER EYES HAVE A GLINT OF ÉLAN VITAL. NO ONE KNOWS HOW THIS IS POSSIBLE. SETTING: 1930s house, stands alone, held captive by two villages, each a mile away, both too far to seek help at 4am. The untamed garden to the front has a semicircular drive, allowing no one to ever truly arrive, or leave. A maternal willow tree reaches roots under the house, raising concrete and concern. The living room is coated with nicotine and anger. Everywhere is busy. Every room is loud. Faded school photographs offer a nostalgia for obedience. The red velour sofa is draped with lace antimacassars; once delicate and white, now tired and soiled. An anxious Axminister lay buried under decades of dander and despair. Sofa reclined; the mother catches up with friends on Coronation Street . An ashtray erupts beside her whisky, both work in unison to flavour the air. The daughter smokes her dummy. Mother: (peeling her eyes off the screen) Prefer your fringe to the side, it’s far more slimming. (Daughter drags on her fag to cauterize her wound. Mother sips whisky to anesthetize her everything.) Mother: (eyes glued back on the screen) I’ll make you a mango Slimfast for tea. The scene repeats ad infinitum without intermission. Gen P 00:00 / 00:44 We stay awake, just in case, like those 'poorly nights' when they were a babe, except so very not. The universe felled, they schooled themselves to swallow fear, breathing broken glass, no memory of air. 2020 liquified my children’s insides, and pain cannot leave without a name. I know of a woman who found her son hanging in his room. He used his school tie. So, we stay awake, just in case, longing for those 'poorly nights' when they could scream and cry. Publishing credits Sunday Roast with My Family / ACT TWO: 'THE TWENTY-YEAR SCRIPT': exclusive first publication by iamb Gen P: Obsessed With Pipework (No. 107)

Hear poet Wendy Pratt read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Wendy Pratt © James Thackeray back next the poet Author, poet and editor Wendy Pratt lives and works on the North Yorkshire coast. She's written several volumes of poetry – her most recent collection being Blackbird Singing at Dusk – and her nature/landscape memoir, The Ghost Lake , was described by The Observer as ‘remarkable ’. Wendy is also the founder and editor-in-chief of Spelt Magazine , which celebrates and validates the rural experience through poetry, creative non-fiction and poetry film. the poems Nan Hardwicke Turns into a Hare In memory of M 00:00 / 01:14 I will tell you how it was. I slipped into the hare like a nude foot into a glorious slipper. Pushing her bones to one side to make room for my shape so I could settle myself like a child within her. In the dark I groped for her freedom, gently teasing it apart to web across my palm. Here is where the separation ends: I tensed her legs with my arms, pushed my rhythm down the stepping-stones of spine. An odd feeling this, to hold another’s soul in the mouth like an egg; the aching jaw around her delicate self. Her mind was simple, full of open space and weather. I warmed myself on her frantic pulse and felt the draw of gorse and grass, the distant slate line at the edge of the moor. The air span diamonds out of sea fret to catch across my tawny coat as I began to fold the earth beneath my feet and fly across the heath, the heather. Sometimes I Pretend I am a Dog 00:00 / 01:51 When we are alone together I allow myself to become pack. We stop and I sit and you move about the place in silence. Sometimes we both lie down with our sides against the parched earth and let our eyes close. When people are near, I act as if I am also a person. Mostly it is just us and the Wolds or the chalk farm roads and wind turbines and rocks and cloud shadows, the fast pace of the sun over great distances. You do not look at the view as I do but you understand how to move within it. When I was a child, I hid under the teacher’s desk and would speak only in dog. I did not pretend to be a dog. I was a dog. I willed myself to canine. The family dog was my brother. I ate from his bowl, slept in his bed. I long to be that animal again. Sometimes I test myself to see how dog I still am. I run my tongue along my canines and feel for the movement of my ears. I slouch my back, and pull my knees up let my spine fall between my shoulder blades. Sometimes I climb a fallen tree or a boulder like that and it pleases me, and it pleases you to see me down at your level. This is joy. In these moments I feel as the earth must feel, and I feel as the glacial till must feel and what it might be to exist only in sensation. Eleven 00:00 / 01:16 I want you to know that we are happy. I want you to know that we laugh. That some days I think I have forgotten what you look like. That we sit on the patio drinking wine and sometimes we don’t think of you at all. That I can’t imagine you at the age you would be now. I want you to know that I keep your clothes near our bed, where I can see them. That your photo is faded and everyone in it looks dated, except you. I want you to know that sometimes I live in the days of your death. That sometimes I can smell the bereavement suite, sometimes the sound of the heart monitor wakes me and the sound of the fan whirring and the smell of toast on the ward and the squeak of trolleys wheeling drugs in the corridor and you in the Moses basket is all there is. I want you to know that on those days it is difficult to let you go again. I want you to know that today isn’t one of those days, I want you to know that today I carry you up to the cemetery like a goldfinch on my shoulder and that you bob away in the air and then back again, and that it makes me happy to imagine us this way. Publishing credits Nan Hardwicke Turns into a Hare: Nan Hardwicke Turns into a Hare (Prole Books) Sometimes I Pretend I am a Dog / Eleven: Blackbird Singing at Dusk (Nine Arches Press)

Hear poet Victoria Punch read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Victoria Punch © Erika Benjamin back next the poet Voice coach and musician Victoria Punch is curious about voice and identity, the limits of language, and how we perceive things. She has had her work published in Poetry Magazine , Mslexia, Magma and One Hand Clapping – as well as in Christmas Stories: Twelve Poems to Tell and Share . the poems A cold striding 00:00 / 00:54 Bridled with ferns in April, a year uncurled. Up – yet feeling low on the blue fuzz of new rain – the brush of a wing on the eave The earth, it seems, has turned on the warming drawer and laid the plates inside, crockery carrots and cucumber, cutlery laid in lines and rows, potatoes, peas and purple sprouting broccoli babies The earth rises like dough. Proven, prickling with spring, the lick of blackberries prophesied, the implacable hedge, laden with strings of wildflower childlings, seeded by flight, small mice and hiding birds, a little shy I’m asking, but I can’t recall the question in the face of the morning an ode to the unexpected find 00:00 / 01:08 I marvel. oh my, oh you – small lime green lurker how did you – damp smirker – get there. armpitted and puckering gloop grip in my top sneak under my collar your squeaky sneaky ways and hazy origins amaze me you have umami, by the look of you tang of salt on my tongue, you tiny appetiser, so phlegmatic, enigmatic part of my one point five daily litres of mucusy nasal secretions little air crumb catcher, dust, dirt and pollen snatcher, crunchy bacteria beguiler you are crisper as you dry your quasi-spherically makes me queasy, I quease I am uneased by your tacky feel, your unexpected gloop your roundness – rolled who rolled you, oh green one? wherefore and what nose did you come from? oh how I’d like to know or maybe (s)not Last Flight on the Road 00:00 / 01:54 that morning – stung by cold blankets on and steam-breath in the air low motor hum of the old car, road ticker-taped and on for miles grey and dim in the husky half-light sidled by the frosted trees thick as thieves the trees stood, still and stoic, lime-cold leaning on the morning light that came in waves upon the air replicating pine for miles they lined the open, empty road we made our way along the road surrounded by the stream of trees counting down the miles and miles curled and hunched against the cold hats and coats and frosty air looking for the early light his silence was a kind of light he joined our vigil down the road cut through the still and lingering air the owl came softly through the trees I held my coffee long gone cold and I forgot about the miles I felt he stayed with us for miles orange wingtips in the light his face was braced against the cold level with my eyes, along the road he slipped like water past the trees gold and russet on the air I held his presence in the air carried it for miles and miles wings the colour of the trees wings the colour of the light eyes held fast along the road I forgot that I was cold his face – the air, his wings – the light I sat for miles in silence on the road I watched the passing trees and felt the cold Publishing credits an ode to the unexpected find: Invitation to Love – Issue 3 (the6ress) A cold striding: Magma (No. 85) Last Flight on the Road: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Eilín de Paor read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Eilín de Paor back next the poet Eilín de Paor lives in Dublin, where she works in services for people with disabilities – a field in which she's studying for a PhD. Her poems have appeared in numerous places, including The Stony Thursday Book , Banshee , Howl , The Waxed Lemon , Abridged , Ink, Sweat & Tears , Flights and New Ohio Review . Eilín collaborated with Damien B Donnelly on their pamphlet, In the Jitterfritz of Neon , and sub-edited Issue 2 of The Storms: a journal of poetry, prose and visual art . the poems Anchor Stitch 00:00 / 01:13 Once he had asked and I said yes, we flew to London, Mum and I, budget, red-eye, trawled the costumeries of Soho, the Liberty remnant troughs, returning that night with six metres of duck-egg satin, two of lace chiffon. We borrowed a form from her friend Joann and for six months, I shared a bedroom with that silent twin, draped in muslin mock-ups, pinned with panels of interfacing, lining. I worked with ceremony in cotton gloves like a magician— shaping cap sleeves, scoop neck, empire line, added thirty covered buttons along the spine, three hidden tapes to bustle up the train. Afterwards, the dress became a headless Havisham stuffed pert with acid-free tissue paper in a vacuum-sealed box with viewing panel, waiting in the attic for a daughter to claim her and now, failing that, staying on as ballast. Why Poets All Wear Sturdy Boots 00:00 / 00:58 Forget mists and honeydew, poems aren't drawn in subtle hues, words are born of mud and blood, wrenched panting from the sludge and scrub. Pull on your toughest pair of boots. Tie the laces skin-blanche tight. Hitch a pack onto your back. Anchor nets around your waist. Scour the earth for worthy clods, fingers stained by foraged weed, forearms bared to better feel the sting and flay of briary twigs. When night and hunger leave you weak, gnaw wild roots, suck bird-scorned fruits, or blistered, bruised and labour-torn, scavenge on through muck and thorn, in thrall of ever brighter gems, hidden just beyond the dawn. Back at the End of the World For Barbara 00:00 / 01:00 This is how you came to an unnamed spit of dunes and winter-flooded fields: the caravan park was too crowded that summer, your mother couldn’t stand it, so your father drove out, turned off, picked a field, made an offer. Clay puddles up in copper pools where we trudge now through marram trails carved by long-scrapped dune buggies, kept up by horses, dogs, the children of the children. At the sedge-break to the waves, sea pea and holly catch the pebbled sky, cast back blues to the wheeling terns, who dive for fish to bring back to their island mates. We dive our feet into the coarse-grain sand, choose old songs on our phones— sing along to the terns, to our mothers. Publishing credits Anchor Stitch: Howl – New Irish Writing (Issue 23), and shortlisted for the 2022 Red Line Festival Poetry Competition Why Poets All Wear Sturdy Boots: exclusive first publication by iamb Back at the End of the World: Local Wonders Anthology (Dedalus Press)

Hear poet Perry Gasteiger read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Perry Gasteiger back next the poet Manchester-based Canadian poet Perry Gasteiger's work is often described as visceral, haunting and uncomfortable. Her poetry looks at birth, growth and death through different lenses – recasting the mundane as extraordinary, and quite often, grotesque. Perry collaborated with Canadian visual artist Rebecca Payne to publish the experimental book, Bruising Bone: life in bloom . She hopes to do more collaborative, multi-disciplinary work in the future. the poems brick by brick 00:00 / 01:16 You know, most of us never asked to be a part of history and to be honest it was pretty boring work anyways: brick by brick by brick to get your cheque to buy the bread to feed the kids and who has two kids these days? In this economy! And that's how you make history: brick by brick by brick until your hands bleed and your nails crack and the cement hardens into the whorls of your fingertips and you think this would be the perfect time to rob a bank because there wouldn't even be any fingerprints left to leave. That's history in the making for you: brick by brick by brick until you're sat on the tallest chimney in the western hemisphere looking down on the earth and you're thinking, you know I bet God doesn't have fingerprints either and that's when the wind gusts and the present shivers beneath you and you're thinking you could maybe definitely stick a landing from 1,250 feet in the air if it came to it and pretty soon all there is between you and earth is skin dug into brick until it fuses, and when it's over and they peel you off the lips of history the pads of your fingers tear from your hands and believe me when I tell you: most of us never asked to be there. Inspired by the superstack in my hometown of Sudbury, Ontario, and a freak tornado that stranded workers at the top – just before they completed it. Leftovers 00:00 / 01:18 I eat leftovers on the day after my mother’s funeral. I eat them cold from the dish, pull plastic wrap back and dig in with my hands, tomato sauce and mashed potatoes crusting under my fingernails. What is left of a person once they’ve closed the lid on red lips in a bloodless face displayed for the sympathy of the living? A feeling, an inkling, that your flesh and bones don’t quite add up, that you are something less than whole. Songs are sung for mourning ears as the dead lay deaf and happy, while people cry into napkins and paper plates full of lasagna and warm gravy – the horizon screams as the sun sets her hair on fire and we let ourselves fall apart. In the bloody dawn of waking, I collect pieces left behind and try to fit them where you used to sit. But the pieces are still sharp, not yet worn to sea glass with our tears and I find myself back on the kitchen floor, trying to inhale your leftovers. two for joy 00:00 / 00:55 and when I came home I did not know how to love a thing which did not cut me down at the knees, did not know I was wandering streets lined with bitter ghosts, littered with bodies I used to wear, praying to the pavement, please swallow me, take me back where I belong; did not know what it was to slip into the warmth of place, to run my hands along the rough of red brick and press my face to broken stones and taste the earth, when I came home the sky opened up in proud baptism, drenched me in tears and I opened my mouth, let the rain fill me, watched the rot of me wash away, let myself die one last time, and woke, finally, to the cries of the magpies Publishing credits brick by brick: exclusive first publication by iamb Leftovers: Natterlogue (work by Natter Bolton night performers, 2023) two for joy: Ey Up Again (Written Off Publishing)

Hear poet Isra Hassan read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Isra Hassan back next the poet Somali-American poet Isra Hassan, originally from Minneapolis, is currently based in Washington, DC. She's had her poetry published in Guernica , Poet Lore , The Waterstone Review , The Insurgence , The Penn Review , Poetry Online and elsewhere, while her debut poetry manuscript was a finalist in the 2023 Center for African American Poetry & Poetics Book Prize. the poems Sigh For Hoyo 00:00 / 00:42 a bodice for your being an accordian for your presence when was the last time you thanked your lungs air and i could you tell we’re biological sisters shared umbilical cords and crawling space dispelled from the cavern of a woman who introduced love to us before we saw the light we being us both we and we’ll always be a we we cried we sighed we rejoiced Of Thee, the Solemn Fluid Sings 00:00 / 00:21 Repentance drapes over a matriarch’s tear, her prayers sedating the quantum nocturne. With it, an avenue of light begins its harmony, murmuring of a kingdom come. Archetype The Ingénue 00:00 / 00:23 The abyss grins at me, I spit in its mouth, or perhaps, perchance, I am the spit in its mouth … Regardless, there and there, together, our wets worship each other. Publishing credits Sigh: The Wake (Vol. 21, Issue 3) Of Thee, the Solemn Fluid Sings / Archetype: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Warrick Wynne read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Warrick Wynne back next the poet With three published books to his name, Australian poet Warrick Wynne has had his poetry featured in various Australian and international magazines and journals, including Walleah Press and Varuna, The Writers House Blog . Warrick lives and writes on the Mornington Peninsula, south of Melbourne. His most recent collection is The State of the Rivers and Streams . the poems Hands 00:00 / 00:39 Level 3 is 'Hands': the swathed palm, the unhinged fist, the fingers fractured black or twisted, suspended in slings wrapped in gauze. We all face each other mute as moons. This is what happens when pressure is applied against the grain, this is the flaw in the great architecture what a piece of work ... how easy it is to break this hold we have on things, we can hardly grasp it. Spider Crab 00:00 / 01:08 Above the Victorian Fish poster, (vivid illustrations of the edible denizens of the deep) a white spider crab mounted on a wooden board pinned to the wall as it was in my childhood. I mean, this exact crab, legs now blackening with age was in a (different) fish and chip shop of my youth, brought here, no doubt, with the goods and chattels from some former enterprise, and I recognise it: one giant claw open wide to snap, the other retracted shy, evasive punch and counter-punch. At Hector's Seafood now, the staff wear light blue tops emblazoned with a yellow marlin rising from a vividly tropical sea. I wait for my flake below fading ivory claws, one outrageously enlarged, one curled inward gently like an invitation, or an imploring gesture to the past. At the edge For Harriet 00:00 / 00:27 We walk to the edge of the bay drawn, it seems, to this great dish where you played and swam and now, stand here, with your own baby strapped to you. Could anything be stranger? the three of us beside the sea, the submerged beach where you played a stone wall, the city in the distance whatever next? Publishing credits Hands: The Best Australian Poems 2013 (Black Inc.) Spider Crab: exclusive first publication by iamb At the edge: Love the Words Anthology 2022 (Infinity Books)

Hear poet J-T Kelly read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. J-T Kelly back next the poet J-T Kelly is an innkeeper in Indianapolis who lives in a brick house with his wife, their six children and his two parents. His poetry has appeared in Bad Lilies , Vita Brevis , Amethyst Review , Agape Review , Neologism Poetry Journal and elsewhere. J-T's debut chapbook is titled, Like Now . the poems Sousveillance 00:00 / 00:56 God has bugged the human heart. There are things in there God wants to hear. I imagine most of it is noise. Maybe God has something set up like a bobber on a fishing line. Talk to a friend about how you need a new toaster, and … Wait. That might be Facebook. God is the one who tells you that Santa can’t give you what you asked for. Behind a series of decorated wooden screens, God is moving, moving always. And muttering. But what is God saying? The language around God is all baffles: mystery this and can-you-catch-Leviathan-with-a-fishhook that. Well here’s the big secret: The listening device works both ways. You can hear God speaking whenever you want. Like now. Like now. Art History 00:00 / 01:42 I don’t know what you know about painting— house painting, I mean—but there’s an art to it. House painters are known to be drunks. So, of course, are painters of art. Caravaggio used models who were drunks and murderers. It takes one to know one. It may be that the mystery is not in the art but in the drunkenness. To be a drunk you don’t even have to paint anything. To paint a house you have to show up every day. You have to outlast the guy who caught the dropcloth on fire with his cigarette, the guy who fell off the roof because he found the safety harness restricting, the guy who cursed and threatened the homeowner in the homeowner’s own home. You have to show up Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and on your birthday. You have to show up on the Feast Day of Saint Catherine of Bologna, patron saint of painters. You have to show up on the Feast Day of Saint Matthias the Apostle, patron saint of drunks. Matthias is the one who, when Judas Iscariot didn’t last, was chosen by lots. It seems to be up to chance who turns out to be a drunk, although, if you’re a painter, the chances do seem to be higher. Who makes it out of drunkenness alive sometimes feels like chance, sometimes like something more personal. There is a mystery. There is an art. My Wife Says Loving the Fall is Short-sighted 00:00 / 00:23 The racing clouds of autumn make my heart race, as if life had no bottom, no top, just space and time to love what is, one thing by one, without this wintry business of being done forever. Publishing credits Sousveillance / Art History: Like Now (CCCP Chapbooks) My Wife Says Loving the Fall is Short-sighted: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Charlotte Oliver read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Charlotte Oliver back next the poet Charlotte Oliver lives in Yorkshire. She's had poetry commissions from the BBC, as well as from Scarborough’s South Cliff Gardens Restoration Project. Her work has appeared in various publications including Dream Catcher, Green Teeth, Ice Floe, Black Bough Poetry, Cape, Spelt and Fevers of the Mind . Charlotte's debut chapbook, How To Be A Dressing Gown , was published by Dreich Chapbooks, and she's currently working on a radio ballad funded by Arts Council England. the poems How To Be a Dressing Gown 00:00 / 01:11 Your role is that of a hug in clothing form, you must channel the softness of a lullaby and the gentleness of true love. And, of course, have big pockets with a tissue inside. A valuable source of warmth you must be a mobile retreat in times of illness, heartbreak, a good Saturday book after a hard week or a crisp Christmas morning. Be always ready, lurk in unexpected places (the bathroom floor? the dining room? Monday lunchtime?) and your greatest gift: the trump card the un-ignorable siren to the world and uninvited visitors at the door, that the wearer is OFF DUTY and no questions can be asked (but this must only be used in extremis or its force will fade). You have the power of an unexpected sponge pudding with custard but stay humble and keep yourself together – lose your belt and you will probably become dusters. Nothing Happens But Everything Happens 00:00 / 00:40 Like the imperceptible inhalations of rising bread. Like bare soil in winter. Like Mondays in Lockdown when the earth scrapes round with grief. Like when I cook dinner, everyday. Like a feeling you didn’t ask for. Like a yes or a no. Like the silence when you ask if they’re okay and the words in their throat crumple up like a paper straw sucked too hard and you can’t straighten it out for them. Hope 00:00 / 00:45 I want the belief of an ant with a giant leaf, of the Alsatian that escorts its owner down the street, of a herring gull leaving land behind, of a wasp. I don’t remember what it used to be like, just the clatter of freedom like waves on a pebbled shore, and eternity’s breath on my bare neck. I don’t remember how it felt just the early taste of you – fresh water from a quiet stream. I don’t remember much except the view that embraced me from all directions: a thousand greens, stitched together with hope. Publishing credits All poems: How To Be A Dressing Gown (Dreich Chapbooks)

Hear poet Polly Walshe read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Polly Walshe back next the poet Polly Walshe is a poet and painter, whose pamphlet, Silver Fold , was published in November 2024. Her poetry has appeared in PN Review , The London Magazine , 14 Magazine , Shearsman Magazine and The Spectator , and has been longlisted three times in the UK's National Poetry Competition. In 2019, a selection of Polly's poetry featured alongside Melissa Ruben’s paintings in Night Vision(s) at the Atlantic Gallery, New York. That same year, Polly won The Frogmore Poetry Prize . She also scooped a Betty Trask Prize in 1995 for her novel, The Latecomer . the poems One Small Case Only 00:00 / 01:11 Have you ever packed your bag before a war, Grabbing a few things hurriedly, Paperwork, some underwear? What, you wonder, will you really need? Will it even be possible to change your shirt During the war while on the road With nowhere to stay? You throw In a hairbrush, lipstick, evening shoes But who will have time for these? You know That in a day or two you’ll be laughing Dryly at choices you’ve made, At your ridiculous ideas. As if anything Will be normal! As if washing in clean Water might occur, or going to bed At a predictable hour after a meal. Something inside you knows this dance As if by memory, the need to thrift And thrift to pay a slave’s remittances And how there’s always someone more Forced out of you, a hedgerow poet Or a hidden priest, a conjuror To heal those wounded by their shame, Uncover words that fit when hope expires And cold stars offer no grace. Brand Sharpening Section A: Core Concepts (i) Now 00:00 / 00:49 Now is your only home And will make you authentic Across all platforms Not franchised to the future Or the past As many operators are. The progress of shadows Cuts up the hour But Now – and who knows how? – Has seamless power. All representatives and strategists Must beware of actioning Precise time terminology When Now is always streaming Perfectly, Licence up-to-date. Our Now is flashier, A great deal more Kardashian, Than tomorrow, Next week, Or the endless wait. Extraordinary Rendition 00:00 / 01:43 There was a woman who turned into a shadow, You could pass your hand through her quite easily. It was her desires, she could not overrule them, They chaperoned her everywhere and wore a hollow In her and the hollow grew into the whole of her. Mostly she longed for random retail objects, Heart-breaker shoes or a small Norwegian table, But her longings also looked for unprotected people Who lacked the strength to pull against the pull of her. This person drifted round a little spitefully and yet You pitied her. She was so small, so guinea grey, And getting greyer, more transparent, every day, While the hollow in her grew insatiable, hanging Out of her like Bonnie Parker to suck the strangers in Who stopped to talk to her. The hollow Would swallow her too, eventually, her nose, Her rings, her smile and her broken-brimmed fedora, Closing its portal to the human world and shooing Its desires back to their dark stable For refurbishment, but not before enticing several More unguarded strangers, showing them the charm In her and dragging them to the far side of her Where they remained, lost in a modish purple fog, Not understanding where they were and dreaming That they still lived modern independent lives, Following the news, et cetera. Publishing credits One Small Case Only: Pennine Platform (No. 95)  Brand Sharpening: Shearsman Magazine (Nos. 131 & 132)  Extraordinary Rendition: PN Review 269 (Vol. 49, No. 3)

Hear poet Simon Alderwick read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Simon Alderwick back next the poet Raised in Surrey and now settled in Oxford after several years of moving between various locations in England, Wales and the Philippines, Simon Alderwick is the author of poetry pamphlet ways to say we’re not alone . His poems have been featured in Magma , Anthropocene , Ink Sweat & Tears , Berlin Lit , Acropolis , Dust Poetry Magazine and elsewhere. Simon's debut collection, reaper in a headlock, will be published by Broken Sleep Books in 2026. the poems love in the age of extinction 00:00 / 01:01 hot day on her lips, record-breaking thighs. no ice left when she tells me – we need a circular economy. she breaks the bones in my fingers, feeds me water – filtered – through a paper straw. straddles me, hushes my concerns, this aging population. she knows love’s impossible, keeps sandbags stacked against the door. we can't die out like dinosaurs – she says – we are God's chosen creatures. but her laugh, a tipping point. she drills me until she strikes oil. we spill across the bedroom floor. smoke like chimneys after. she says: the future’s out on Mars. – i don’t think we’ll make it. when she's gone my cat brings me birds fallen from the sky. the game 00:00 / 01:11 my daughter holds a red building block to her cheek, says: hello . i pick up another brick, say: hello . no daddy , she says, taking my hand, you’re in London . she walks me to the bedroom; goes out; closes the door. i put my ear to the receiver of the block. i can hear her through the door. hello . brick heavy in my hand. i miss you . my hand against my head. when are you coming home? i tell her soon. i tell her i’m on the airplane. i break down the bedroom door. holding my arms out like an airplane; fly around the front room; land in the front garden; run to the front door. my daughter runs to me kicking toys across the floor. i hold her in my arms. it’s a silly game but it feels good to make a game of it at last. flubbergust 00:00 / 00:35 can't come out today – bit of a mad one i was opening a packet of crisps and found a blue whale inside i said: normally the packaging is inside you but he failed to see the funny side i called a number on the crisp packet but i don’t think the girl was listening she said it should go out with the general waste i said for the love of god it's still alive Publishing credits love in the age of extinction: exclusive first publication by iamb the game: shortlisted for The Telegraph Poetry Competition 2022 flubbergust: Magma 81

Hear poet JP Seabright read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. JP Seabright back next the poet JP Seabright is a queer disabled writer living in London. They have four solo pamphlets published: Fragments from Before the Fall , No Holds Barred , The Insomniac’s Almanac , Traum/A and the collaborative works GenderFux and MACHINATIONS . They have been published in journals such as The Rialto , One Hand Clapping , Fourteen Poems , Culture Matters , Under the Radar and 14 Magazine , as well as nominated for Best of the Net, The Pushcart Prize and The Forward Prizes. the poems Dungeness 00:00 / 01:04 The shingle glistens suggesting buried treasure under a bleached whale of a sky, grey smoke mingles with ashtray clouds, a nuclear desert crunches underfoot. The hum of the reactors is silent now, the world's contracted thus, blue-feathered birds curl and call over a dilapidated corrugated shack. Time stands still. Cronus and Chroma collide where stone solicits sky, the air itself imbued with solace and the metallic taste of sea. Stories of those who sought a living as scattered flotsam on a desolate shoreline, are lost in the rags of time. Dungeness is less a place and more a state of mind. Clothe the Night with Stars, My Love 00:00 / 01:43 in the sunshine. your horse. the forest. hungry and frail. the woods are washed. with the orb of broad waves. eyes disdain the world. and the cough of the poet sings of flowers in the stream. the autumn of the west. the splendour of the moon. this wilderness of death. so vast and beautiful. dust strobes. the self is still. our faith has dispersed. peacefully. noiseless and few. a gap in the clouds. an impossible sun. its curtain hangs with the heavens. abandon those who rest in the shade. wear the storms of men and brides. acrid in the stream. rainbow shadows. like a birthday. heavy and decorous. starlight wanders at the threshold. feeble yet found. clothing the night with stars. the calm of the sun. a servant of the past. a bright steed mingles in the water. streaming of stars. your screeching. eyes of the sea. winged with the bursting. overwrought and mournful. felicitas seeking the sun. one life of a day. a garden flower. the sound. and sometimes the heavens. murky and white. lovefull. Nocturnal Omissions 00:00 / 02:56 : I am a ghost of a chance : a weeping husk of a human : scattered remnants of once-functional behaviour : barely grasped : longed for : no longer attainable : I am my own undoing : an unravelling : this unbelongingness : this : this unwarranted fuckering bliss : this sickening lurch : I play paper scissors stone with my memories : each trauma crushing : cancelling out the next : the act of obliteration : a removal of meaning : how joyous! : a negation and a revelation : a quivering flatline : cut down to the quick and the dead of our own true selves : whatever that is : this : skeletal kiss : embryonic kick : fuck the shame away : in the dark : on your own : your phone’s flickering hiss : a faithful companion : outside : the city is on heat : your body a hot flush of mistaken identities : mixed media on rye : the city is a hex : your body a burnt match : fire flares the streets : your body stains the sheets : with thoughts of filth : nightmare ejaculate : lick your bones clean : and yet : it is darkest before the dawn : this : is a lie : sometimes the dawn never comes : sometimes the darkness is within us : some have darkness thrust upon them : the city is a hellscape : life is hard : don’t let anyone tell you otherwise : the utter aliveness of it all : this : this relentless existence : sometimes I think about dying : peace for our time : go home and get a nice quiet sleep : looking back on this half-century : a battlefield : these scars : wars fought : sometimes won : mostly lost : losing : still : the slow decline to senility : I ask for pity : as I age : for despite all best intentions : I come to closely resemble : the man I most despise : tomorrow never dies : but this darkness before the dawn : this what if this is all there is : and yet : lighter days are coming : is a lie : I tell myself : Publishing credits Dungeness / Clothe the Night with Stars, My Love: exclusive first publication by iamb Nocturnal Omissions: Impossible Archetype (Issue 11)

Hear poet Phil Vernon read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Phil Vernon back next the poet Trained originally as a forester, Phil Vernon has done international humanitarian and peacebuilding work since 1985. His third collection, Guerrilla Country – forthcoming from Flight of the Dragonfly Press in 2024 – draws together his interest in landscape, peace and conflict. Phil's two previous collections, Poetry After Auschwitz and Watching the Moon Landing , are complemented by his version of the mediaeval hymn Stabat Mater (with music by Nicola Burnett Smith), which has been performed internationally. the poems The command ‘An order is heavier than a stone.’ 00:00 / 01:23 The magistrate, for fear his fear will come to pass, sends formal notes to regiments. The chief of police, sure they wish bloodshed over peace, calls out the words that make it so. The soldier puts in play his plan to teach these people what he understands. *** A simple mark, a sound or gesture sets in motion—everything. Block exit gates with bayonets. Cut through the crowd. Fire tear gas, baton, then live rounds above their heads— then lower. Aim at where the densest groupings are. Don’t shrink—redouble your resolve when they begin to flee. Send in the tanks. *** Inside, the image of the golden sanctum barely shimmers, pilgrims walk in silent circles, heel to toe, around the sarovar . *** How certain must they be, who utter these commands, the stage they stand upon and laud and idolise is crumbling in the sea? Where do their shadows go? And where do ours, who fail to prevent their words? The King’s Peace 00:00 / 00:57 To keep his peace, our king built temples, courts and palaces, and scarred the land he’d won, with ditches, ports and roads; determined how we die; and blessed us with his enmities. To teach us irony, he named his cousins lords and justices. Apprised of God’s mistake by priests and clerks, on pain of punishment he made us speak a single tongue. His word was written, maps were drawn. But laws and maps and roadways lengthened distances, and when he sailed, he left no instrument through which to see, but a kaleidoscope. We turn and turn its wheels but cannot make the fractured picture whole. Dereliction 00:00 / 01:14 We learned the forest long before we learned our books: heard woodlarks, cuckoos, jays, watched roebucks, martens, wolves, each in its place and in our secret places— hillsides, hilltops, streams and dips. We learned that trees brought down become a space for sunlight, seedlings, tillers, scents and sounds; that canopies of beech and oak and angled beams of dancing light make way for vistas, brambles, willow, birch, then beech and oak and angled beams of dancing light; that a loved and loving land is always moving tirelessly from sun and sound to quiet shade, from quiet shade to sun and sound. Our land’s become a hungry, dull-eyed fox made ragged and thin by mange and hunched in the edges hearing and seeing nothing; limping to nowhere, too tired to be afraid or unafraid. Publishing credits The command / The King's Peace: Flights (Issue 4) Dereliction: exclusive first publication by iamb

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