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

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 S h a r e

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 S h a r e

wave nineteen autumn 2024 Christoper Arksey Corinna Board Frances Boyle Julie Stevens Kerry Darbishire Laura Theis

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) S h a r e

Frances Boyle © Curtis Perry back next the poet Frances Boyle (she/her) is a prairie-raised Canadian writer, long settled in Ottawa, Ontario, whose third collection is Openwork and Limestone . Her debut, Light-carved Passages , was republished after ten years in 2024 as a free, open-access eBook. With her poetry published everywhere from The Fiddlehead and The New Quarterly to The Ekphrastic Review and The Honest Ulsterman , Frances has received a number of prizes – among these, This Magazine ’s Great Canadian Literary Hunt, and Arc Poetry Magazine ’s Diana Brebner Prize . She was a long-time member of the editorial board of Arc Poetry Magazine , and is now on the boards of The League of Canadian Poets, and VERSe Ottawa, which runs the VERSeFest international poetry festival. the poems The Whole Tall World 00:00 / 01:07 A column of light, not steady but scintillating. I listen for its faint scratchiness, its syncopated silences, its airy breathing. Exhalation of pores, the inhalation of mountains and the sea’s unceasing bellow-lungs. Surf, like horses that rear and mane- shake, rush in, retreat. And spume a spiraling cylinder. A rising, a lifting, finest droplets hovering on the air. What tuning will bring me past static to clarity, to that thrum of silence, voices chiming, twining, a braid of sound within that space between breathing, behind the exhale, pulling the inhale into animate energy, that silent moment that might be death but for the animal compulsion willing our squeezebox lungs to echo ocean, and breathe. Water and Stone ‘When viewed in deep time, things come alive that seemed inert ... Ice breathes. Rock has tides. Mountains ebb and flow. Stone pulses. We live on a restless Earth.’ ~ Robert Macfarlane, Underlands ~ 00:00 / 01:23 Inside your house, the radiator ticks, floors shift and mutter. The skeleton of struts and beams is clad with plaster and paint. You’ve adorned the walls with more paint —on canvas, on paper. A visiting friend admires the art, the book-crammed shelves. Talk turns to what she’s read, what you haven’t. Excuses for uncracked spines. Your dog’s steps are halting now, nail- clack on hardwood more syncopated than staccato. You hear him sigh. In the driveway, a crunch as tires compress the snow. A squirrel traverses wire and bare branches. The tremble at leafless ends. You feel the slow flow of tidal rock how the current supports you, carries you. Pacific Rim Park, 1984 00:00 / 01:04 An amble of half a mile down to the beach, green on both sides as I carry my pack. I emerge to wave- rush that washes out speech, and set borrowed tent on the sand near sea-wrack. I came on my own to wrench from the mire of my shame over deeds which should have stayed hidden. The campers next site watch me struggle with fire. That woman craves quiet they shush their children. I beachcomb for hours, sand under my feet. Pared down to sorrow, guilt grows slowly leaner. My feeble campfire still gives me some heat while grit, whipped by wind, works to scour me cleaner. Lone nights under canvas deliver release; slow rot, woody moss-scent their own kind of peace. Publishing credits The Whole Tall World: Prairie Fire (Vol. 41, No. 4) Water and Stone: Rust & Moth (Autumn 2022) Pacific Rim Park, 1984: exclusive first publication by iamb S h a r e

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

Lucy Holme back next the poet Originally from Kent but now living in Cork, Ireland, Lucy Holme is a poet and mother whose poems have featured in The Liminal Review , Púca Literary Journal and Re-Side. She also has work forthcoming in Southword , Marble Poetry , Poetry Bus , Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal and new online poetry journal After... . In April 2021, she was a recipient of a Munster Literature Centre Mentoring Fellowship with the poet Grace Wells, and is now studying for an MA in Creative Writing. Lucy's debut chapbook, Temporary Stasis – shortlisted for The Patrick Kavanagh Award – will be published by Broken Sleep Books in 2022. the poems The Haunted Kind 00:00 / 01:29 I can tell you all I know about awakening under scratchy winter blankets in the half-light of Sóller’s horseshoe bay. A view of the promenade, a 1950s sepia vignette. Off season. Tramuntana, olive-scented. Better with fewer bodies to watch our story unfold. Nights were cold in April although the days still had their welcome pockets of sun. We couldn’t gauge the depth of one another’s heart, so we handled them gently, like rare species. Bared faults before they were revealed, pushed shadows out. One night when I awoke, I felt a presence in the room that wasn’t you. Saw a pale hand turn the knob and then retreat. You said you sensed it too. Ghosts were all around us in the verdure, on the skipping sand. You told me of your cleverest friend, about your country’s complicated past. I kept my own history vague for fear of breaking the spell. The claims we make, early in the day, I just can’t lie and these are my worst traits. Laid bare, they shift like sediment on the shore. You take the sadness, add the words, mash them into something you can use, a cleansing poultice for old wounds. Best remember who you said you were, before the ghosts gather to call you out. La Yegua 00:00 / 01:38 Brown burnished gold, silken flank shivers with sweat. She comes near to sneeze, to stomp then leaves in a kinetic blur, a muscled sketch from Duchamp, I lay my palms flat as her muzzle sniffs and strong jaw chomp-chomps. She studies me. Lashes dark and wet, angles fine as cut glass. She resists form. After all, she is so young. They shout whoa pícara! Click their tongues when she rears and fumes. The bridle constricts blood flow, breath heaves as it tightens. Expansion curtailed, power diminished. I reach for her, but she eyes me with disdain. Turns to rise on hind quarters, lope like six beasts conjoined, across the prado. Every fly that lands creates a twitch that sends her in circles, proud breast raised skywards. She refuses to be scavenged, to be bled dry. Now I know her name, Carletta, I visit each sweltering day and build a life for her. Count the summers she has been on display. We greet each other as — not quite old friends — but something close. We are of a similar temperament: enraged by things we cannot convey. We speak a different language, but I can sight-read the low simmer, her impatience with her teachers. Against the rope fence, I hold her reins, white-knuckled, a luchadora they will try, and fail to tame. Altair Shines for my Beloved New Year's Eve, 2019 00:00 / 01:23 You are above him now, an eager light, just off starboard bow. Unbodied alpha aquilae, aflame. As I, far from inky ocean sprawl, search the city sky, mapping longing and loss. Shroud me in your polished glow, Altair, so I might have courage beyond tonight, onward to dawn. This year, grief cut me off mid-flight, when I had tried so hard to soar. It snatched what I couldn’t bear to lose, gifted unexpected treasures for which I had no room. Reason had me choose what I loved the best, resolve bade me solemnly to forget the rest. But if our eyes lock through you at midnight, we’re halfway back together. So tell me, eagle eye, nestled in the aether can you make us strong again? Can you help us plot our own small constellation, far from the flare of repercussions? To reconcile, so we might burn at full intensity once more? Just as you do. Altair, light the course home for my beloved, as he navigates the dark Atlantic path. Know that I am also at sea, pacing these cold corridors. Waiting for sorrow to loosen its grip on me. Publishing credits The Haunted Kind: The Honest Ulsterman (February 2021) La Yegua / Altair Shines for my Beloved: exclusive first publication by iamb S h a r e

Alice Stainer back next the poet Alice Stainer is a lecturer in English Literature and Creative Writing on a visiting student programme in Oxford. She is also a musician and dancer. Her work has appeared in Green Ink Poetry , Atrium , Feral Poetry , After… , The Storms and The Dawntreader . Alice has been nominated for Best of the Net, The Pushcart Prize and the Forward Prizes, and recently submitted her debut pamphlet. the poems Firebird A ‘Golden Shovel’ after Fleetwood Mac’s Songbird (as sung by Eva Cassidy) 00:00 / 01:12 Hair severely chignoned, pearls choking your throat and always, a white-feathered bodice holding you in. But the heats of Brazil are simmering beneath—swans and songbirds are all very well, but you are a firebird. Fervid rhythms are hard to resist, Tito’s black eyes like cinders singing sparks for you alone, Margot, lighting you to dance like all of Covent Garden is watching. Pas de deux. Oh they don’t like it, though fluting your praises. But you know those flights between London and Panama bear the flame of your being, uncontained by a ballet score. Gradient 00:00 / 01:56 A glorious day, Dad, as you would say (that always made us snigger, did you know?) Pull on your boots—you do still need them?— army surplus from the funny shop in Hotwells. We scoffed, but you said they were ‘value for money’. Come on then, Dad—there’s a hill needs climbing. Plastic-pocketed map bouncing on my chest— I’ve learned its language as you did, and more: zigzag up a slope, flex with the contours, pick your way over hummocks. Skirt the bog but don’t cry over lost wellies. Vivid green patches have a forked tongue. Heather helps you to hang on. There’s one path I have yet to find, Dad— but I will. I will. Right, binoculars slung round my neck— chance of a ptarmigan, wouldn’t you say? Those chubby boulders of bird. Once, Mum and I saw a whole flock— consolation, we thought, for a stumbling day when the cloud came down. I remembered, you see, what you said about the hills. Now bog myrtle is spicing the air. Hurry up, Dad! We have got all day but still, this clarity of sky is precious. Mete it out like Kendal mint cake in the high places. My turn to lead the way—although in truth, you’ve climbed this hill ahead of me, and now will never leave it. Jane Austen's Teapot 00:00 / 01:24 Time to bring in the tea-things. Cups rattle like eager chatter; china-blue leaves twine about their rims; stems graft, tighten. The wooden caddy is plundered, yielding riches. Silver spoons refract the light, and in the exquisite pot brooding at the white cloth’s heart, the leaves infuse in swirling heat. Steeped then strained, the tea arcs into cups in a long, dark stream. One sugar or two? White sweetness to mitigate black bitterness. But let’s not talk about that. Round the table, a froth of muslin. Cups are cradled, alliances formed and fractured, fragile as porcelain. Then the ritual is over, the tea-things put away—until the next time. But look inside the pot: advancing up its ivory sides, a deepening stain. Will it ever be time to talk about that? Publishing credits Firebird: After… Jane Austen's Teapot: Paradox Literary Gradient: Atrium S h a r e

Elizabeth M Castillo back next the poet British-Mauritian poet Elizabeth M Castillo is a writer, indie press promoter, and two-time nominee for The Pushcart Prize. Her writing reflects the various countries and cultures she grew up in and with – exploring themes of race, ethnicity, woman/motherhood, language, love, loss and grief (often with a dash of magical realism). Published widely in the UK, USA, Australia, Mexico and the Middle East, Elizabeth has bilingual debut collection Cajoncito: Poems on Love, Loss, y Otras Locuras to her name. She'll add debut chapbook Not Quite an Ocean in December 2022. the poems Ghosts 00:00 / 00:45 I tell my children there are no ghosts in this house. I press a kiss into their cheeks and foreheads and leave them to the peaceable mercy of sleep. No ghosts, I say. Except the one that lives in the stain on the bathroom floor. The lady that swirls around the bottom of your mother’s teacup, in amongst the sediment. The ones you plastered into the walls. No ghosts, except the one that lies in bed between us. The one hidden beneath the flowers in the garden. The two I folded between the pages of my passport. The one that stares back at me from the bathroom mirror when I brush my teeth at night. Zot dir, or a short history of Mauritius 00:00 / 01:47 Ou koné ki zot dir? So many things mon tann zot dir they say / they say the dutchman came / he ate the dodo / curious bird / stupid bird / zot dir independence will be won by the wits of the indian / papi inn dir / nu bizin alé / nu bizin get out / zot dir Le Père de la Nation has the ear of the queen / they say / things are better in Australia / In UK / In SA they don’t say créole zot dir coloured / Mo matante inn allé last year / 65 / before the riots start / labas tou prop / she said / labas seulman ena bon dimoun / nice people / they say / zot inn met bann lekor / under the mountain / enba la ter / they say / Mauritius is still the star of the indian ocean / they say parti socialis pu sauv nu zile / zot dir / ten thousand rupees / c’est rien / they say / sorti la! / sorti la! / kifer Kaya pann res trankil ? / they say / the hungry tourist / come down / devoured our coastline / the south / the east / is all we have left / Ramgoolam / they say / has lined his own pockets / they say it once / they say / look to the horizon / thick and black / we blame Japan / zot dir / the island is retracting / inwards / they say / nu zil pé vinn bien gran / no more beaches / no fish / ban pecheur / zot disan / has pooled down by the river’s mouth / Jugnauth / zot dir / his hands live under the table / so bann kamrad / their coffers are full / faratha from six / to 25 rupees / they say / we have no language / they say if bis don’t kill you / hopital will / they say / pa kozé / stop saying all the things we saying / res trankil / dernié fwa kiken in kozé / so disan / his blood / it runs beneath the mountains / out beyond the reef / into the sea / that you left behind / The Other Woman 00:00 / 02:16 The sun has set, and at this hour, shadows hang between the daylight and the trees. There, the sudden scent of blood, scent of man , carries to me on the breeze, the wind howling through, falls silent at my feet: 'good hunting, milady,' it whispers, then retreats. There is a darkness in this forest, an end that rivals death itself, in the mist about my ankles. Even lizards know they would do well to hide inside their hovels, and underground. Dirt crunches beneath. Treacherous soil! Leaves plunge downwards, to be eaten by the earth. The naked trees testify: this forest is deadly, and will swallow you whole. I hear footsteps racing, running, in thundering lockstep. Flash of black. Flash of teeth. There are dangerous games afoot! Surely it’s time to turn back. Surely it’s time to go home. I am well beyond my borders now. She can’t catch me, she can’t catch me, here, where I lurk and linger on the periphery just out of sight, just beyond her mind’s eye. She knows I am here, her veins course with rage, and vengeance. But she does not know where. She is death. She is danger. But the line has been crossed, the threat prowls within her marked territory. She may think I have lost, but this no longer bears any resemblance to a fair fight. No, now two legs, not enough. I drop down onto four, draw strength from the thousand invisible heartbeats, the lifeblood, the microbiome of the forest floor. There is fear, and some fury, encrusted under each hungry claw. The hunt smells of my father, champion long before I had ever heard of this sport, and I wonder: would he be proud? There is sweat at my temples, and my wrists are bound to stop them from trembling. I step, crabways, low and feral, without shadow or sound. Your ears twitch and you shudder, your neck craning to see what you and I must learn the hard way: the deadliest thing in here is me. Publishing credits Ghosts / Zot dir, or a short history of Mauritius: exclusive first publication by iamb The Other Woman: Glean & Graft / Descent (Fresher Publishing) Shortlisted for the 2021 Bournemouth Writing Poetry Prize S h a r e

Giovanna MacKenna back next the poet Giovanna MacKenna can be found looking at the black bits of life and finding ways to make them shine. Her work has been published by Nine Pens , Robida , Abridged , SouthChild Lit , Bear Creek Gazette , Brag , Tether’s End and The Speculative Book 2021. She can also be heard on the Eat the Storms poetry podcast . Giovanna is currently working with The Museum of Loss and Renewal Publishing on her debut collection. the poems Someone else's ending 00:00 / 01:40 My father’s ending came first. It was surprising to him, to me. He saw it there, immovable before him as if all other life had been replaced by a gaping chasm of death, bleeding across his once-expected future. I kicked and screamed and wept and stabbed at it. He stepped calmly, readily, into its black, silent embrace. My mother’s ending was postponed, delayed by her flaming energy. She was affronted by death’s early arrival; the decade she had counted on, reduced to months. She was not pleased. Her ending nearly broke my life. She bare-knuckled her way to an extra year denied her ending, at the end clawed back a scrap of living from death’s sure hands. My mother stole the minutes, hours, days. She made death wait and wait and wait until with every slowing beat each failing organ an affront she keened for her life as it left her. Stranger 00:00 / 01:17 After your funeral, in a house weighted with people you had known and loved and loathed, I stood, under the narrow attic stairs and turned the pages of the book I’d made. The book with photos that showed you grow from bold-eyed infant immigrant, to blazing adulthood to crochet-wrapped and smiling in the hospice garden. Visitors flowed around me, bitter coffee and tiny meringue clouds flavouring their talk, easing discomforts. A woman I didn’t know hesitated as she passed. I grasped her hand, pressed pen to palm and asked, Will you write about my mother? Later, when there was nothing left but dirty plates and echoing rooms, I found the stranger’s words for you: She took me in. She taught me how to make an omelette, so I would not go hungry. hidden/object 00:00 / 01:07 It is the thing you find at the back of a drawer when clearing out your mother’s house. It is the object nestled in the dusty, fly-corpsed grey of a wooden corner amid layers of old receipts, rubber bands, dry pens and keys that have lost their doors. There it is, silent crouching, stealthy, the one small thing which at first glance, has no form other than its mystery. It is the fragment you salvage, dust off, polish slowly with the corner of her old blue cardigan. It is the thing you hold to your breast as you sink down onto the pins of your grief. Publishing credits Someone else's ending: exclusive first publication by iamb Stranger: Tether's End Magazine (Issue 1) Hidden/object: Things to Do with Love (Dreich Themes) S h a r e

Peter A back next the poet Published widely in such places as Laldy , Spindrift, Poems for Grenfell Tower, A Kist of Thistles, A Kind of Stupidity and Bridges or Walls? , Peter A won first prize at the 2016 Paisley Spree Fringe Poetry Competition. During 2020, his work was anthologised in Words from Battlefield, Poets Against Trump , Surfing , The Angry Manifesto and Black Lives Matter – Poems for a New World . Peter's debut chapbook, Art of Insomnia , was published by Hedgehog Poetry Press in 2021. the poems Found in France 00:00 / 02:30 Though you would have to concede its picture perfect rural beauty here for the record are the things you wouldn’t like about the place. The middle of the countryside such a distance from anywhere. The crowded transport transferring from the airport. The open windows to keep the place cool inviting houseflies. The doorway dogs, the ever-darting omnipresent lizards. The lack of television. The steps, useful for others, which would be impossible for you. Around those steps the lavender which at home would aid your sleeping but here for you a nightmare, attracting wasps and bees. The spider’s improbably small body, impossibly spindly long legs, waiting in the shower room, patiently. Also the tiny white spider – I bet you never saw an entirely white spider! The mosquitoes, the hornets. The blood-sucking horseflies almost certainly lining up to feast upon you in particular. The bats awaiting the chance to be entangled in your lush long hair. The swimming pool that would be out of bounds for you. The conversation in which you would not wish to speak. The revelation before bedtime concerning the cleaner’s cat, its trophy mice and the minor flea infestation – successfully eradicated we think but let us know if you get bitten . As for me, the only aspect of the French place I do not appreciate is you not being here. After 00:00 / 00:54 After words their last have spoken and from here gone Afterwards it is said cockroaches will make the earth their own Do you see already some may be working to inherit behind the scenes planning preparing strategies awaiting the endgame from which all cockroach-types are due to benefit after the black rainfall/after the slaughter of words and laughter After Late night teardrop 00:00 / 00:40 I should certainly stop viewing old home movies, not because of their patchiness or participants’ awkwardness – that’s all part of their charm. Not because of their faded definition – I always liked the Impressionists. Not because they are silent cinema, recorded with the cheapest camera, but because they leave my heart haunted. Publishing credits Found in France: Art of Insomnia (The Hedgehog Poetry Press) After: Sci-Fi (Dreich Themes) Late night teardrop: The Wee Book of Wee Poems (Dreich Wee Books) S h a r e

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) S h a r e

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

Pascale Potvin back next the poet Pascale Potvin, who writes as Viola Volée, has published several chapbooks – her newest, SEX, GOD, & OCD , arriving in February 2024 from Naked Cat Publishing. Thrice nominated for Best of the Net, she's also had her work put up for The Pushcart Prize and Best Microfiction, as well as longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50. Pascale's work has appeared in Juked , Eclectica Magazine , trampset and many others. She's Editor-in-Chief of Wrong Publishing, and writer/director of feature film, Baby Fever . the poems Down a Seized Throat 00:00 / 00:38 How can hair be healthy if it’s dead? My bloody earlobe says the most about me. A leaf falls onto the street and it hardens then softens back into a baby. Yet while summer brings old lusts, like birds for others, I never understood song; On the trail, I place a bandaid for blisters in my mouth, till the ridges of my tongue are gone. Because, what if a wasp dove into my Flavor Aid, like taste creates cult? What if it was a bird? It’d have to swim. What Does It Mean When a Guy Says You Look Pretty While He’s On LSD? 00:00 / 00:38 It means he closes his eyes, like umbrellas stop feeling the rain. It means that, when I wave to him, I make the grass move with the sky. And it means that, when I say hello, he’ll hear a rhyme: je te veux (my therapist said u might have a crush on me, so i need you too scared to become famous cause the people past our deaths might dissect your pages: there, they would find me folded up, up in the letters’ livers like you still tried to get me out). Museum One 00:00 / 01:03 did i ever tell you that i stopped at a museum, just a block from my house for the wifi? i couldn’t wait longer to be touched by you; teenage bodies are too fertile and we were the bodies in the god oh kiss my neck, like cutting a dandelion stem, i’ll do it, like rain water’s submissive to its leaf (i promise if one chair in the history of the world ever got turned on in a flash of unsolved natural mystery, it would be that one) like nature photography (selfie of me in a top that reminds me of u) and so what’s the point of living, or writing, i wonder? if there’s no one left to fall for? if there’s no one to seduce, in that order? i’m free, my pussy against the dirt, like it’ll never taste me again as an artefact or a grave i would’ve worn your name, gone on display Publishing credits Down a Siezed Throat / What Does It Mean When a Guy Says You Look Pretty While He’s On LSD?: exclusive first publication by iamb Museum One: excerpt originally from Fifth Wheel Press' 2022 calender (Fifth Wheel Press) S h a r e