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Hear poet Thomas McColl read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Thomas McColl back next the poet Thomas McColl lives in London and has published two collections of poetry – Being With Me Will Help You Learn and Grenade Genie . He's read as a featured poet at many events in London and elsewhere, including Hearing Eye , Paper Tiger Poetry , Celine's Salon and The Quiet Compere . Thomas has also been featured on East London Radio, BBC Radio Kent, BBC Radio WM and TV's London Live. the poems Susan Sharp 00:00 / 00:59 Susan Sharp was what my first employer, the local butcher, called the knife he’d use to slice the meat. By way of explanation, he said he spent more time with Susan than he ever did with his wife. ‘Tis pity she’s a knife,' he’d joke, but most of the time he was simply singing Susan’s praises – saying how much he loved her serrated, lop-sided smile, her blood-red lipstick, her lust for naked carcasses, and the ease with which she’d split a heart in two, yet always give in to his demands. On my first day, he threatened to slice off my hands when I went to touch her. ‘There’s only one commandment in a butcher’s shop,’ he scowled. ‘Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s knife.’ Working at that butcher’s shop was my first job, and I didn’t even manage to last a week with that paranoid psycho freak, and Susan Sharp, his knife, who he’d fallen in love with and spent more time with than he ever did with his wife. Look at That! 00:00 / 01:01 'Daddy – look at that! a top hat on a tea pot,' you shout, as we stop just a little too close to a china display in the shop and, with a swipe of your hand, you make a fat pot-headed Victorian gentleman involuntarily doff his hat, and a second later, you realise why he doesn't do that – even though he's Victorian and you're a lady (albeit a little madam) – when his hat (which, foolishly, he'd had made out of posh china rather than plush silk) smashes into pieces on the floor. And while you sob and sulk at the realisation, I pay the bill for the damage, while keeping an eye out, as I'm carrying you, that you don't knock any of the many ornate objects crowded round the till, but instead your damned dinky destructive digit starts prodding the top of my face, and my invisible top hat (which, foolishly, I'd had made out of frayed nerves rather than woven silk) is once more pushed to the edge, and once more (just about) remains in place. Hard Tears 00:00 / 00:43 I often cried in front of you – sometimes when you hit me, once when, as you were teaching me to ride a bike, you let go of the handlebars and losing control I fell off, and once, when teaching me DIY, you gave me a heavy claw hammer to bang some nails into wood and I proceeded to bang my thumb instead. ‘For Pete’s sake!’ you said, disgusted. ‘You’re thirteen. Don’t you think it’s about time you managed to resist the urge to blub like a girl every time you get hurt?’ Well, I never cried in front of you again – not even years later at your funeral. Though I was devastated, the tears just wouldn’t come. I wish you could have seen it. You’d have been proud. Publishing credits Susan Sharp: Co-incidental 4 (The Black Light Engine Room) Look at That!: Ink, Sweat & Tears Hard Tears: Burning House Press

Hear poet Andrea Small read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Andrea Small back next the poet Andrea Small is a multi-disciplinary artist working across painting, poetry, voice and video. She's a member of Heeley Women Writers, and has an MA in Creative Writing (Poetry) from Manchester Metropolitan University. She runs singing groups for all sorts of people, believing we all can – and should – sing. Andrea's poetry has appeared in journals including Strix , Dreich and Obsessed With Pipework , and has been featured in several anthologies. She lives in Sheffield, and is learning to be a clown. the poems A Hawfinch Addresses a Nature Writer 00:00 / 01:46 I do not have the look of a small parrot , fool I am not shy , I do not conceal myself — do not blame me for your dull human eyes, your twitching tick-list. We are not here for your amusement. Do not mar our music — it is not quiet , nor mumbled — with your clumsy words. It is not our job to be counted by you. Try splitting this cherry stone, try laying eggs, try living across three continents. We do not erupt , nor invade . We leave such pointless activities to you, you useless lump of a creature, crashing through our parkland, being surprised you can't see us. Pipe down and sit still. I'll have your finger-tip off if you try to catch me, oaf. We can eat yew and survive — can you? We are not smaller on paper, and to discuss our weight is impolite. What nest were you reared in? Be off with your binoculars and long lenses, your maps and statistics. Has no-bird told you your time here is limited? Take a moment. Think about it. Who will rescue you when you have finished laying waste to this land? Not I, human. Not I. endtime After Louis MacNeice 00:00 / 01:01 fingernails bittengone — wondered how we got there — sunwarm over splintered lichened stile is clear — after that — chillfog fell from hands — saw no more — felt timewinds billowing in soundnot — upsicked bigger than ever when woke — heard keyscrape in cold glass — gutshivered — chatterteethed — between soulmoans — he dragwent first — clawfingered the dripdamp walls — through arrowslits snow driftblew on mealone — in windwail howled and fingerstuffed mouth — he was evergone — the bloodthroated endsilence heavyfell huge — now — inoutside springbloom the roses Reunion 00:00 / 01:27 last Tuesday the sheep came back poked her black face around the kitchen door bleated a brief command I went up the fell in the thick dew door left open pots half-washed it was good to be together again I let her lead me for a change halfway up I untied my apron left it hanging from a blackthorn (when I looked later a goldfinch nested in the pocket beaking lint and hair into place) at the top I dropped the rest of my clothes climbed onto my sheep’s solid back slept on her oily wool like a baby facepalming her father’s broad hand arms and legs hanging over his reliable forearm the branch no wind could break the sheep walked on rocking me past marriages roads not taken shouting fists slammed doors endless beige schooldays to the large-wheeled pram still I slept loose-limbed cells settling into forgotten patterns sun warming my blood Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Theresa Donnelly read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Theresa Donnelly back next the poet Theresa Donnelly is an Irish/Canadian poet who has enjoyed a career in Hospitality & Culinary Management. Widely published and anthologised, she's a past winner (and judge) of Canada's Food for Thought poetry competition in 2014/15. Poet Vanessa Shields said Theresa's poetry, ‘offers a delectable arrangement of observations that both haunt and honour.’ A member of The Ontario Poetry Society, Theresa's also a founding member of The Brooklin Poetry Society . the poems Towards Iseult’s Chapel 00:00 / 02:10 Before the brewery, cross Joyce’s bridge. Smithfield has a lighthouse but few horses! Pass pubs that rival any museum. Sweat of centuries steeped into stone; backyards where squealing pigs were kept. On Blackhorse, enter the Pheonix Park through the ‘Hole in the Wall’; traverse the expanse to Chapelizod. The wooded valley where tragic tales of 12th-century Irish Princess Iseult and lover Tristan abounds. A tree grows above each grave, their network of branches continue to reach for each other; alluringly scented honeysuckle, and the hazel with the knowledge of the universe within its branches. The weir-view at Martin’s Row: a favourite place for contemplating characters and the Liffey’s descent. In the Mullingar House, home of all characters and elements in James Joyce’s novel, Finnegans Wake, Earwicker pours pints, served by Anna Livia Plurabelle. Under a copy of Joyce’s death mask, a tourist reads the aforementioned novel. In one afternoon, he’s swallowed five pages whole. His uncle’s book club in Venice, California, took 28 years to finish it. It’s too nice an afternoon to read. Maybe it’s the stone, maybe it’s the spirits from Wakes watched in his father’s local with inquisitive pen and jotter. A cultural institution. A pulchritudinous view of a city from this riverside village. Dublin’s best kept secret. Mystery of Monarchs 00:00 / 02:08 Honeyed sunlight softens his jagged features. Late January mellows under a magenta sky. Sleeping beneath malleable boughs, his heart is unyielding. But only I know it. Remember, Adelita , the path which ran beyond the gated casement into a world we dreamed but knew little of? When Madre left, he occupied the blue room; frantically paced its floor like a caged tigre . His ingested rage spewing like an erupting volcano, over ink-stained flesh. Betrayed when, even the moon turned her face, leaving innocence to whimper in darkness. Remember, Adelita , you prayed to The Virgin of Guadalupe for wings like those of the monarchs, fluttering above the cornucopia of deep burgundy auroras kiss dahlia? Your prayers answered, during the summer of dearth. In a flurry of orange-silk georgette, monarchs filled the sky: the garden: the room. Emptied me of you. You flew away; found sanctuary on Sierra Chincua . Sometimes I hear your voice, rising on the wind, as it blows above the oyamels . Remember, Adelita , for fear that I will forget. Fishwife 00:00 / 01:30 Was it an act of sanctity or sorcery not to be created from Adam’s rib? Caught in your net, I fought brazenly, until you pulled me from the sea. Sweeping shadows aside, you bent barefoot and bronzed. Your lips allowed me breathe the earth once plump with poison. My eyes became saucers over which daylight spilled. I lay on the shore sweetened by the early tides of May. Seashells ringed my newly fashioned fingers and toes. You knew my name; you repeated it over and over until it was echoed by mute swans. You unbraided my hair, draped it like damp seaweed over stones. Visible silken threads coupled both body and soul beneath your cloak of tightly woven canvas. Duck egg is either blue or green, it depends solely on the light. I chose various shades of it for each and every room, in a house where I have never slept without some memory of water. Publishing credits Towards Iseult’s Chapel: Verse Afire ~ Canadian Poetry Magazine (Vol. 2, Issue 1) Mystery of Monarchs / Fishwife: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Pascale Petit read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Pascale Petit © Brian Fraser back next the poet Pascale Petit was born in Paris, grew up in France and Wales, and now lives in Cornwall. She is of French/Welsh/Indian heritage. Her eighth collection, Tiger Girl , was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best Collection, and won an RSL Literature Matters award while in progress. A poem from this book won the Keats-Shelley Prize. Pascale's seventh collection, Mama Amazonica , won the inaugural Laurel Prize and the RSL’s Ondaatje Prize. Four of her previous collections were also shortlisted for the T S Eliot Prize. Petit is widely translated and travelled, particularly in the Amazon rainforest and in India. the poems Walking Fire 00:00 / 04:10 It’s high summer and the grass hisses where the tigress treads, her pads soundless on the tinder track. Her flanks sway, the cubs cool in their amniotic sacs. She is a walking fire her glance a flare that singes my lashes. I seem to be watching her through a veil of snow or ash – the sky as I know it falling falling and when her face comes into focus it’s like the membrane between us tears. She brushes against the jeep as she saunters past on the long patrol of her realm, her fur dripping after a soak in the stream. Can you see me, Gran ? I ask, I’m as close to a tiger as you once were, but I won’t touch. A baby wouldn’t alarm her, but I would. You’re sitting opposite, saying, It was like staring at a frozen sun . Your eyes grow coal-black as you think of the day you were left alone in a tent. I’m staring at the fire in your living room, anthracite glowing with forests of our Coal Age, flickers of fern horsetail clubmoss embers spitting onto the mat like sabre tooths springing from a cave – that split second when we startle and everyone is still alive even my first cat not yet given stripes by the combine harvester as he lay curled in corn. I’d walk over hot coals to get back to you, just to ask one more question about your tiger. But you were only a baby and probably you only remembered remembering not the thing itself. Just as now, I’m only half- remembering the ghost of your fire where we sit like two Ice Age queens worshipping the heat while underneath us the compressed beds of trees buckle under mountain-building. The tigress has passed by now, and is ahead on the path, rolling over the sand, belly-up, revelling in her power. Already she’s spawned three sets of cubs and they’ve forged their own empires. When she leaps onto a stag the whole world slows to hear the grass speak from inside the deer. Slows enough to listen to what trees have to say with the mouths of storms through their leaves. When I’ve firewalked through the dawn of your death my feet scorched on the cinder path to your house, when I’ve opened the gate of your garden – like opening the gate to Tala Zone where wildlife is almost safe – I will land in your armchair in the deepest cave. And then Gran we will talk again about the forests that once reigned on earth the mysteries of beasts who passed through them, the flames of their spirits surging under fur, not one spark escaping. How even their roars are relics of when the great woods blazed. How it was we who discovered fire and with our knowledge lit the fuse. Jungle Owlet 00:00 / 01:54 What you didn’t tell me is how poachers cut off their claws and break bones in one wing so they can’t perch or fly, that their eyes are sold as pujas, boiled in broth, so herdsmen can see in the dark. You didn’t say how sorcerers keep their skulls, their barred feathers, their livers and hearts, or how they drink their blood and tears. You didn’t mention how a tortured owl will speak like a young girl to reveal where treasure is buried. My kind granny who took me in when I was homeless, who sat down this very evening after I had gone to bed and wrote Mother a stern letter, telling her that she must take me back, it doesn’t matter where – Paris, Wales, Timbuktu. No more excuses, you are tired. And here, your slanted writing is almost illegible, but what I think it says is that you cannot look after a teenage owlet. You use your favourite pet name. I’ve never spoken of this before. I call it up my gullet from the pit at the bottom of my thirteenth year, along with my crushed bones, my stolen blood, and I spit it out through my torn-off beak, in language that passes for human. Green Bee-eater 00:00 / 01:03 More precious than all the gems of Jaipur – the green bee-eater. If you see one singing tree-tree-tree with his space-black bill and rufous cap, his robes all shades of emerald like treetops glimpsed from a plane, his blue cheeks, black eye-mask and the delicate tail streamer like a plume of smoke – you might dream of the forests that once clothed our flying planet. And perhaps his singing is a spell to call our forests back – tree by tree by tree . Publishing credits All poems: Tiger Girl (reproduced with gratitude to Bloodaxe Books for its kind permission)

Hear poet Phillip Crymble read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Phillip Crymble back next the poet Phillip Crymble, a physically disabled poet originally from Belfast, now lives in Atlantic Canada. He's a poetry editor at The Fiddlehead , and has had work published in Poetry Ireland Review , The Stinging Fly , The North , Magma , The London Magazine , The Irish Times , The Forward Book of Poetry 2017 , Bad Lilies , Couplet Poetry , The Honest Ulsterman and elsewhere. Phillip's debut collection is Not Even Laughter . the poems North American Birds 00:00 / 01:21 A world is firstly made of names and labels — what the nascent heart is desperate to possess. For you, my son, the chickadees and finches at the feeding table — nesting in the eaves and calling each to each atop our backyard maple — filled the empty spaces in your head. Next came the illustrations — colour plates you memorized by rote — the simple work of saying like a spell — a song of invocation. All winter long our little house made warm by ornithophily — a reverence of words — the age-old human dream of flight. These days toy trucks and robots dance like planets in your mind. Bird boy, must you leave so soon — sit down with me and stay awhile. Mealworm 00:00 / 00:34 Brought home from school and cast aside — discarded in the mud room — left for me to find by accident weeks later. Confined like one of Bluebeard’s wives — interred beneath a substrate that the kids made out of oats and sliced up orange rinds — the mealworm — newly calcified — abides — waits out its aftertime. Forcing House 00:00 / 01:15 It never worked the way we planned. Our oil furnace always ran too rich. The winter days were damp, and though a grand, romantic gesture, living by the sea was desperate. Socks and underpants on radiators, heating pipes — wet woollens, windows clouded white. A forcing house of laundered clothes, the boiler ticked and bubbled like amalgam in a crucible. The jars of potted jam and marmalade we kept in store. Mornings were the worst of all — the lino kitchen floor as cold as stone. Each day we trundled down for tea and toast you checked the letter-box — as if the news from home might warm us. Publishing credits North American Birds: The New Quarterly (Issue No. 123) Mealworm: THE INDEX: A Quarterly Anthology of Prints (Issue No. 6) Forcing House: Michigan Quarterly Review (Volume 46, Issue No. 1)

Hear poet Caitlin Stobie read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Caitlin Stobie back next the poet Born in South Africa, Caitlin Stobie holds a PhD from the University of Leeds where she lectures in Creative Writing. She's won both the Douglas Livingstone Creative Writing Competition, and the Heather Drummond Memorial Prize for Poetry. South African literary journal New Contrast named Caitlin one of the country’s ‘rising stars’ in poetry. Her debut collection Thin Slices appeared in November 2022 – the manuscript of which was shortlisted for the Melita Hume Poetry Prize. An earlier version was also shortlisted for the RædLeaf International Poetry Award. the poems Five Ways of Looking at a Period 00:00 / 01:48 I A ruined pool party. Cat-scratch in the pants. Thighs tight and plastic-wrapped. Luxury cotton towel sex. Soggy apologies like I’m-on-my . II Peach’s pit-flesh. Cherryburst anemone. Pomegranate plasma. Beet-cloaked clover. Hibiscus nimbus. III Brings muddy sleep, long as gumtrees. Quenches anxiety with slippy lip sap. Approves full-bellied foods, potatoes, ginger root. Pulls distraction’s tubers and unearths certainty. Teaches how to stand being lonely. IV When eggs crack jokes about coming first. When proteins drag blush over queenly cheeks. When lipids birth another month’s dead doulas. When sickle cells group under coven moons. Hello, capillaries. Hello again, iron age friends. V Cramping coloured like conception’s twinge. Craving the ever-ready chocolate advent. Carving papayas with turmeric fingers. Wishing for its mercurochrome tinge. Then, sudden puddle of thank-fuck . Ngiyakuthanda 00:00 / 00:36 In Zulu there is no difference between like and love. Between 'I want to hold your hand' and 'Can I see your ring finger?' Between wanting to know where you stand and wanting a one-night stand. Between the sheets, between two lives, just one phrase makes it come together. I’m still not sure whether open interpretation makes love easier, or just lost in translation. Even Birds For Faith 00:00 / 01:12 We arrive in Cambridge after a long night’s flight: eighteen twenty-somethings with a hangover of Africa. What really matters, the man says, is everyone’s comfort. We wouldn’t want anyone to be out of place. Don’t ask and don’t confess potential transgressions. This is a tour, after all. So I keep clear of the line, sick, tight with my truth. Faith is still too but later that night she knocks on my door and cries for skin she’s never been in. These queer constructs: towers cut on ancestors’ backs. We discuss spectrums of shame. Late dawn is lilac phosphorescence crossed with migrating shadows. There’s no snow, just white ash. Surely the others see; they must sense our bent. Even birds know silence is also an answer. Publishing credits Five Ways of Looking at a Period: Banshee (No. 12) Even Birds: The Sol Plaatje European Union Poetry Anthology Vol. VI (Jacana Media) Ngiyakuthanda: uHlanga Issue 1 (uHlanga Press)

Hear poet April Yee read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. April Yee back next the poet April Yee is a writer and translator of power and postcolonialism. A Harvard and Tin House alumna, she reported in more than a dozen countries before moving to the UK. April reads for Triquarterly , contributes to Ploughshares online, and mentors for University of the Arts London’s Refugee Journalism Project. the poems Kopachi / Pripyat / Vilcha 00:00 / 02:07 In the cloud that drifts online, I discover an image of myself, notebooked, remember I toured Ukrainian villages in April, the anniversary of their before and after, the date they understood dirty and clean , touched new energies released into air. My recollection floats ungraspable as air. The high-res photograph does not recover dead actions to the hippocampus, now clean as a blank notebook sheet. I remember the detailed email from my father after I said I’d go to Chernobyl that April. He cited a scientific study: Dear April, Mushrooms, exposed to soil and air, can remain radioactive for years after. For breakfast, the local hotel covered pasta in mayonnaise and dismembered hot dogs. I also half-recall the clean white shirt of an engineer. He’d keep clean our air in a then-future, now-past April with a steel sarcophagus to stop the embers from dispersing particles in global air. His metal tonnes could fully cover the Statue of Liberty, he intoned, after a meal of many courses. I marvelled, after, how he kept his white shirt so pristine clean. A visiting Japanese mother, face covered, gripped two Geiger counters an April and a half since Fukushima blew the air. She earthquaked her body to remember. Actually, I use records to pretend-remember. I Google articles I must have written after that trip, read emails maybe sent from air- craft raining pollutants over unclean nimbuses. I trigger cruellest April, places where every root was covered in irradiated air and nuclear embers. After, I wash my consciousness clean, allow the cover to contain all of April. Listening to Lola Flores 00:00 / 01:03 In your ghost berry house, you screw the leg still tighter in its wooden frame, the hoof suspended, question mark. Botanists peg the mulberry to man, their shots at life quick decades. No estás más, corazón. Silkworms spin threads from fruit before it spoils. You shear off fat, locate shrunk flesh. Off bone it falls. He plumps the fruit your maid slow boils to blood-gelled jam. In your arguileh’s crown, his coals burn orange hot, each breath you take cremation. Hide your father’s jamón bone in the slingshot shadow of the lamp you break, below the mulberries, their blinded lobes seen too in cemeteries of my home. West / East 00:00 / 01:53 My eyes are the hammered edge of a Chinatown butcher’s cleaver, heavy and heaved with momentum, not sharp. There’s enough sharpness in sheared bottles, wires embroidered with barbs, paid bills that slip inside the flesh. I heave my eyes on discards, cleaving past from present: Who touched this can, and can it buy my lunch? My butcher heaves his cleaver through a duck’s shiny body, and I see the X-ray of its bones, perfect whites circling congealed purple cores. The rice: free, my butcher’s Buddha plea. I swallow slowly, seeing with my tongue for paddy stones that seek to crack my teeth. I picked one time a book, heavy with large font: The Geography of Thought. A man inside theorised mankind’s mind cleaved in the age of the ancient Greeks, each fisherman hauling his solo catch while Chinese strewed rice across collective fields. West sees the thing; East sees the place the thing sits in. I can see I am now West: sifting, sorting, seeing the trash, and not the street the trash sits in. Someone saw this book as trash. Were I East, I’d be the rice, the duck, and the butcher, whole in every grain. Publishing credits Kopachi / Pripyat / Vilcha: Commended in the Ambit Poetry Competition 2020 Listening to Lola Flores: Ware Poets 22nd Competition Anthology 2020 (Ware Poets) West / East: Live Canon Anthology 2020 (Live Canon)

Hear poet Rowan Lyster read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Rowan Lyster back next the poet Bristol-based poet and physiotherapist-in-training Rowan Lyster is currently living with Long COVID. Her poems have been published widely: most notably, in Bath Magg , Magma , Poetry Wales and The Rialto . Rowan is a member of the Southbank Centre New Poets' Collective 2022-23. Her pamphlet, We Will Be Fine , is forthcoming from Little Betty. the poems It can help to know that others are experiencing something similar 00:00 / 01:08 I am having a flare-up of brain fog. In the heat, the nurse said many patients report feeling a weighted blanket on their limbs. There is no timeline for recovery. Everything is always the hardest thing. I am having a bit of trouble with my breathing. A flare up of weighted blankets and elephants standing on my head. The nurse said sometimes your brain is cornflour mixed with water. It is important to live inside the fatigue diary. Actions causing fatigue, like completing a diary or self-blame, should be listed in the fatigue diary. The air is exhausted, a weighted blanket. Sometimes it is cornflour mixed with elephants. There is nothing new to offer here. The sofa and I resent each other. I have been referred to an app for patients and sucked all the sugar off the ibuprofen. Once again he has been pulled from a sea 00:00 / 01:03 the barnacles on the harbour wall have taken his hair and part of his scalp he is vomiting on my coat we both apologise then laugh the ocean recedes uncovers pieces of him I hadn’t noticed he is carrying my shoes for me lemon cake is arriving for his birthday the middle is full of poppy seeds people singing we are riding the dodgems when he drives straight into a metal spike it protrudes between his shoulder blades while he keeps asking me why they’ve let the signs get rusty a sound like fingers through lentils beneath us the ground is becoming thinner I stack shingles to resemble a beach it would be easier without his hand pebble-dry and cold in mine Preoccupied by a sense that you may be unhappy 00:00 / 01:18 I suggest a fun night out, in which we will visit and destroy a series of homes. It seems proper to begin with the mansion, which, of course, we burn down. From below the ha-ha, we watch inhabitants flee in dressing gowns. Despite the flames reflected in your eyes, you lack a certain zeal. We move on to more conceptual methods: ant eggs in the curtain linings, floodlights installed outside bedroom windows, disheartening messages daubed on walls. We deal with colleagues, and then friends. You sleep with someone else’s husband; I steal a newborn and exchange it for a cabbage. Our family homes are less of a challenge than might have been expected. Through the letterbox, a manila envelope containing a warning note and new passports. At dawn, when nobody else is left, you bundle yourself into a cupboard, duct-tape your own mouth and ankles while I take a clawhammer to the fuse box, block the sink and leave the tap running, finding a little peace in the knowledge that I did everything I could to help. Publishing credits It can help to know that others are experiencing something similar: And Other Poems (November 8th 2023) Once again he has been pulled from a sea / Preoccupied by a sense that you may be unhappy: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Suchi Govindarajan read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Suchi Govindarajan back next the poet Writer, poet and photographer Suchi Govindarajan lives in Bengaluru, India. Her poetry has appeared in publications ranging from IceFloe Press and Cordite Poetry Review to perhappened magazine and Usawa Literary Review . Her poems have also been included in two anthologies. Poetry is Suchi's first love – fiction is her newest. the poems Of blood and war 00:00 / 02:10 The first time it happens, you are barely twelve. So much blood must mean either wound or war, s o you run to your mother and ask if you are dying. This is not death, she says, this is existence — just the basic bloodshed of being woman. There will be a celebration next week, she says with silks and jaggery, turmeric and gold. But don't be swayed by such fleeting love; the real gift is an unwritten book, stitched with rope, bound with tradition, its pages ornate and yet so sharp with rules, they only slice the fingers of women. Because you are a child, you take this gift, and you come to believe in this unquestioning dark, the flowers that will wilt, the milk that will spoil, the men and other fragile beings that will take ill. Everything, she says, that can be defiled by you. Last April you helped your aunt make mango pickles. This month, even your touch will spoil them — all that careful soaking in brine and spice — all that ageing in the home's coldest corners where you will now sit for days every month, muffling the many mouths of your pain. You cannot go to temples now, says your mother. You cannot worship the goddess I named you after. You are still a child, she says, but you are enough woman You are still a child, but you are already too much woman for anyone to bear, not the men, not the priests. They must pray to save all their gods from you. You told me once that he loved you 00:00 / 01:29 You told me once that he loved you because you were simple. I wondered then if he had seen your bookshelf or your bathroom. Did he see that small callus at the base of your palm? Does he know the weight of your gaze as you look out the window? Even on cold nights, you never cover your feet with a blanket, yet you show me these socks he bought for you to wear. They are the exact shade of purple that you hate and call violet. You told me once that he loved you even if you weren't beautiful. I wondered then if he had seen you speak about justice or poetry. Has he seen how you hesitate before you burst into laughter? Does he know you have your grandfather's hooded eyes? You told me once, under the yellow light of a station, of your surprise at his love and his existence. It was a windy night, your wild hair was held in a bun. You were wearing a sweater that billowed like a storm. You told me then you would try and love him back. I smiled, and felt a new grief in my limbs. Current affairs 00:00 / 02:05 My teacher told me my poems should be more current, should celebrate things in the news like the breaking of sports records, like the eradication of diseases, new machines in our libraries, or how a child, just six years old, sang like he was born of birds. Don't just write about flowers he said, or philosophy or these clouds of unrequited love that billow about your youth. Until we broke the mosque, I did not follow his advice. Until then, nothing in the world had touched my cocooned life: I had touched nothing in the world. But now I felt like it was my chariot wheels that crayoned dried blood into the tar. I watched my parents turn to wolves at orange moons, cheering for men with pickaxes, waving their fists at a box they could not turn off. But when I went to my teacher my words now a raw torment my pen now moving hard enough to leave round bruises on the page behind (at last, I thought, a poem he would praise) he grew narrow and cold. In a play last year, he had painted my face blue, draped me in shawls of gold and Raamar green. I had broken a bow for him. Now he whispered mantrams to protect his gods, and flung my poem back and told me to stick to love and clouds and flowers. Something that would dissolve and disperse easily. Something that would not leave marks even on the back of a page. Publishing credits Of blood and war: Usawa Literary Review (Issue 2) You told me once that he loved you / Current affairs: 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 Devjani Bodepudi read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Devjani Bodepudi back next the poet Devjani is a writer and teacher of Indian origin currently living in Rugby, UK. Her poetry has been published in several international anthologies, journals and magazines, including Stanchion Zine , Sunday Mornings at the River Poetry Press and Cephalo Press. Her debut poetry pamphlet is For the daughters carried here on the hips of their mothers . Devjani is currently working on her second novel, as well as studying for an MA in Creative Writing at the University of Birmingham. the poems Swans and Chariots / A Prayer 00:00 / 01:50 You watch over her sleep like you have done countless nights before you let sleep come over you. You take her warm hand soft like down and kiss it once whispering a prayer Never depend on another like I do now. Never love without a reason to love Because reason will spare you pain you begin. You stop. You open the window draw the curtain tighter let in the air block out the light. You remember your own mother’s words she demanded you hear so you would be spared something like humiliation if you spoke up. She told you to keep the peace, let the men be. But ideas like humiliation, submission, like peace are flipped like a fish that has browned too deeply on one side. So your prayer is not your mother’s as you clasp your baby’s hand to your mouth to her ear, her eyes closed as you near. Be angry – whenever the moment demands be a gale, the sightless storm that fells the calm stoic trees which stand silent in reprise before the rains be the queen of all rage and reason Because it will carry you away like a chariot pulled by a thousand silver swans into the air into the night up into the stars where the men cannot follow where the air is too thin to swallow anything but love. And she sleeps with those words hung like firefly in the dark of her room and you are tired. You turn to turn off the lights, check the window one last time, and you glimpse the stars beyond the rooftops waiting for your swans and your chariot that may still come. You’re in the kitchen 00:00 / 01:02 You're in the kitchen radio news on implore me awake from dreaming eyes of witness screaming against falcons and peacocks unicorns and lions. Wild myths and accusations like crows carrying cloth bundles of discarded rags, dried with the browning of her blood in their beaks. Drowning with the smoke in her lungs. She’s gasping. There’s something obscene about the cutting of one’s own hair in public you say, but so is the slicing of her tongue and the paring of her fingers, dividing each one into two, four, eight, twenty on each hand. More fingers to cut, to mutilate and sew a button on her lips that humiliate you with their open-mouthed seductive innocence. Dance then, fan your tail, mock-bow and roll your eyes like a kathakali dancer behind your mask. Smile, hand me the coffee cup. I am wide awake. Aubade 2307 00:00 / 01:02 Dying suns cool rise northwards. Fading sallow light shines upon your face you look ahead. In profile you are sculpted marble monument to what we were before we scatter to distant, painted orbs. The curse of the explorer you say to me haven’t we said goodbye before? But this is more urgent than simple seeking. An escape to safer shores. Distorted reflections swim on the ship’s hull which will bear you unconditionally. It beckons open-mouthed, expectant, swallowing you whole. My own vessel awaits me – a different quay. We travel in parallel lines meeting never, perhaps. Perhaps. Because I will hope for the impossibility of an alternate truth. Publishing credits Swans and Chariots/A Prayer: For the Daughters Carried Here on the Hips of their Mothers (Fawn Press) You're in the kitchen / Aubade 2307: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Tom Bailey read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Tom Bailey © Holly Falconer back next the poet Tom Bailey, a poet from London, has had poems published in The Poetry Review , berlin lit , bath magg , Propel Magazine , Anthropocene , Under the Radar , The North , Poetry News and the Munster Literature Centre's Poems from Pandemia anthology. Recently awarded the Poetry Society’s Hamish Canham Prize , he was also one of several winners of the 2024 Guernsey International Literature Festival’s Poems on the Move Competition . His pamphlet, Please Do Not Touch or Feed the Horses , won the Poetry London Pamphlet Prize, and will be published in spring 2025. Tom currently lives in Edinburgh, and is co-editor of online poetry magazine And Other Poems . the poems Wheatfield with Crows 00:00 / 00:49 The field is on fire obviously. The horizon coughs up a mouthful of crows and the dirt track does not seem to know where it’s going. Funny, how often we are surprised by darkness, like the frontiersmen who went west for gold and found oil instead. Van Gogh once said that a row of pollard willows sometimes resembles a procession of alms-house men. Van Gogh once said The sadness will last forever. The sky is on fire also but it is a blue sort of fire, with a patch of white which is either a cloud or a moon. Poem Granada, Spain 00:00 / 00:53 Anyway frosts thaw in this spring sun, and the river comes melt-swollen down the mountain. Across the valley the plane trees hold up their hands to the light. Swallows flit and flicker in rings, and a pair of griffon vultures float their stillness in the heat. Something everywhere is surprised, and the river threads its noisy voice through the needle of itself. Somewhere a goat clitters over rocks. Somewhere a donkey brays in a field, and morning whittles itself into afternoon. All day a particular sunbeam has been searching for your face, not knowing yet that you aren’t here, that you aren’t anywhere. Please do not touch or feed the horses 00:00 / 01:40 Please do not touch or feed the horses. Please do not approach the horses or walk within five metres of their circumference. Do not try to speak to the horses or look them in the eye, and please do not attempt to befriend the horses. It is important not to interpret the facial expressions of the horses. Nor should you ascribe human meaning to the movements of the horses. Do not imagine the thoughts of the horses, or ponder the philosophical questions that the presence of said horses may or may not lead you to ponder. Please do not make use of the horses as simile, metaphor, or other such figures of speech. Please do not describe the horses in language inappropriate to their equine existence. Maybe you think you love the horses, but you must not lie in bed at night and let them fill your dreams: the sound of the horses cropping thin tufts of Timothy grass, the way their muscle-knitted flanks tense when a tractor coughs on the hill or the kissing gate swings shut. Please, friends, pass through this field. It is late. We have lost so much already. Publishing credits Wheatfield with Crows / Poem: exclusive first publication by iamb Please do not touch or feed the horses: Epoch (Vol. 70, No. 1)

Hear poet Elizabeth Langemak read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Elizabeth Langemak back next the poet Elizabeth Langemak’s poetry has appeared in AGNI Online, Shenandoah , Pleiades, The Colorado Review, Literary Imagination , Sugar House Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, The Beloit Poetry Journal and elsewhere. Her work has twice appeared in Best New Poets: 50 Poems by Emerging Writers , and been featured on Verse Daily . Elizabeth lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and is the recipient of fellowships to the Vermont Studio Center and Breadloaf. the poems What Everyone Has Done vs What Everyone Would Do 00:00 / 01:36 Even taught hard and so long the truth is we have and would always back out again. I think. Really, who has not, is not still ready to erase their own name, to flip and come up new. Not unsing the Song, precisely, just stop singing. Like seeming stopover or changing clothes, like promised return but stepped or stepping out for good, into Gray: how simple it was and would be again. Each wolfthought behind us reappears fresh, everyone did and keeps flicking back hoods, revealing our faces changed and still changing. So many faces behind and beyond us. With lap-hands, with crossed legs, an upright spine of baked bricks and stiff, Virtue forgot us and never remembered. Unfooled and refooled by gnawing and guilt, each breath and Choice was and still would be lastingly fixed, decisions made wholly from cinders, from shadows and sparks hopped free of our fists. So here’s what we did, what we would still do despite having done: eyes shut and necks turned we reached and keep reaching shoulder-deep and our hands fell still falling on something blind but Beating O Beating and warm. We are pulling it into the Light. All My Questions Become Their Own Answers 00:00 / 01:23 When her legs struck out shuddering like fat lightning bolts. When my breasts turned to stones within stones on my chest. When I couldn’t tell hindmilk from foremilk, and my collapsed tent of gut held no guess. When she wouldn’t sleep and so no one would sleep, or vomit flew like a fist on the end of a long, gloved arm from her throat. When I knew better, but still. When over a phone, when in fever, when in the puce doctor’s office with my list and all I’d forgotten to write there. When I held her up to the mirror I looked like a person holding her question like it could be her answer if only she could coax it to speak. Is she sick. Should the doctor. What should I. Who should you. When I finally nippled a finger into her mouth would you believe I felt first punctuation squatting under her tongue full stop like a fat bud of cartilage, an unfused bone of statements from which all questions understand how to grow. I asked then, I keep asking: who planted this pea an inch under soil, who waits for that pea to lift its hand into the light, who knows what it will want to know. Conspiracy Theory 00:00 / 01:48 In Arkansas, the red-wings go down, nearly two thousand slapped out of the night. Beaks pointed, wings drawn to their sides as men shot from cannons, they land unseen, on their sides, like pepper shook out on a small Southern snow. They fall in a scene now cut from the movie. They fall together with a noise mistaken for gunfire, or soundless as dust falls, one to the ground at a time. One burrows up from the earth. Like a stone from a sling, one kills a deer with a crack to the head. When they’re poisoned or struck or sucked whole through the props of a low-flying plane, when they cramp, when wind ices their sails or God licks them with lightning, they fall. They fall from great heights, not as Icarus fell, flailing, but they duck into the dive and go down as though grateful, or, some say, they fell upright like jumpers whose chutes wouldn’t open, feet first toward accordion crush. Not every faller makes for the grass, but some plunge into the false skies of blue cars, some are delivered to doorsteps like badly thrown papers. Before you wake up, some are dog-gotten or swept downstream like small ships, one lands in a nest, one is not dead but crawls into the hand of a man dressed in orange. While you sip coffee and news of air travels over the ground, an enemy folds one into your bed. Most are gone by noon. Some were never there. Wherever they go to, they stay. Publishing credits What Everyone Has Done vs What Everyone Would Do: earlier version appeared as The Be Good in Yew All My Questions Become Their Own Answers: originally appeared as The Answer to Everything in Storyscape (Issue 19) Conspiracy Theory: Shenandoah (Vol. 63, No. 1)

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

Hear poet Róisín Ní Neachtain read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Róisín Ní Neachtain back next the poet Róisín Ní Neachtain is an autistic Irish-Scottish poet and artist now based in County Kildare, Ireland. Though mainly self-taught, she was briefly educated at NCAD and Trinity College Dublin, before studying for two years under Irish artist Gill Berry. Róisín is creator and editor of online literary and art journal Crow of Minerva , and has had her poetry featured in a number of digital publications. She's currently at work on her first collection. the poems Memory 00:00 / 01:12 I held my dreams in my palms Though they were bleeding A soft tremor against my skin Some were shallow Some like a cave Some pricked my conscience Their threads tethered to my flesh And I chewed their weights to set them free My teeth wore down I fell in a haze through our memories When a hollow sound echoed in my mouth And fell past my lips You bit my tongue and hummed The ebb of nameless laughter A cadence of sorrows Spinning a steep melody Now I am unfearful of pain A slow praise of closeness Breathing blue In midnight songs Tightening my pulse Fingers twisting in a frenzied dance To unworded lyrics My last need stilled Remembering Without Believing 00:00 / 01:21 Remembering without believing The stars appeasing Against their obsidian abyss Heat and light unseamed from dust Remembering without believing Questions pressed in psychosis And promises which feel no shame Illegible hypergraphic promises Of love and empty rooms and symbiotic existence And undivided sounds and realities And reproached pain and laughter And dissonant dreams Which lead to my repossession A petty heresy of Silence Look at this earth embedded beneath our nails Our language measured by prayers And lumen a measure of their glare Look at this skin scored by hate Their unfamiliar eye Rooted in fear All truths unchanged in time The Edge of Reason 00:00 / 01:22 A room Like a trite cage Between these four walls Where prodigal sons and daughters return And are rejoiced and bound once more A spiel read like a dead poet A bastard pain The object of such a conclusion Perhaps an accidental gale? Swept and tendering our bones Archaic songs of sorrow That lull us in their readiness Black on white Black on black White on white Letters made barely visible And nonsensical A few steps closer to the edge of reason A past and future arrested in a photograph What will happen if we awake again To see these passings going beyond that edge? To the beginnings of someplace? Someplace more of a sedentary mind A hollowed space in each Man’s chest Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb