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Nathan Dennis back next the poet Nathan Dennis is a playwright and poet of Floridian extraction. He is the Vintner-in-Chief of Wine Cellar Press, a poetry press dedicated to free and formal verse in equal measure. Nathan's work has appeared in The Knight's Library , Anti-Heroin Chic , The Cabinet of Heed and Serotonin. His upcoming chapbook, I Am Hades , is forthcoming from Exeter Publishing. the poems Waltz on the Adriatic 00:00 / 01:03 I’m running out of money. And the money I have, I’m burning on twelve euro Turkish Coffee. Sacking Constantinople, cup by cup, as a Deadbeat Doge seated outside myself in a composite memory of marrying The Sea, in the Drawing Room of Old Europe – where we turn our sins to museums, and make most serene our palaces of failure. My dwindling euro pays for more dwindling daylight, golden dusk that smudges off the cruelties of cold accounts: bank or historical. A sunset censor. A fuzzy shadow blanket. A halo of streetlights off the Basilica that washes our decay into the Adriatic. Venice: I weep the beauty of atonement as the stars tinker down a soft waltz on Piazza San Marco that I shuffle to in a twisting trinity of errors repeated, that somehow becomes more beautiful with each misstep. Blood Orange 00:00 / 01:23 I met a blood orange at the grocery store. I wore gloves when I picked up the blood orange. I wore gloves when I brought the blood orange home. I wore gloves when I took off my gloves. I asked the blood orange to get a test, But the blood orange said that tests were hard to come by And to trust her, because oranges are organic And I can trust organic. And the orange asked me if I had been tested, And I said no, but I wore gloves when I picked her up. So the orange said she wasn’t worried, so I shouldn’t be worried, But if I was worried, she would just peel herself. But I was very hungry. And her peel looked very clean. So I ran the blood orange under some water. And I lathered her peel until her peel relaxed. And I peeled her peel with nails clipped clean, Until the scent of citrus was screaming in my nostrils And the hemoglobin in the pith strained into my hands As rivulets, flooding the channels of my palm lines. And the death god that loomed so large in my mind Shrank so microscopic when looking at an orange unfurled, Asking me so kindly to eat. And vitamin C does a body good. Leviathan America 00:00 / 01:44 Danger! Danger! Harpoons are upon her – Us! Us! Leviathan America: Sperm whale, punctured and moored by her own spur, Bartered without care to any stranger. Danger! Leviathan America! At sea: Cannibal of Democracy. See how she grows fat: guzzling her krill Past her fill. Terror on the open sea: A fifty-foot blubber-laden danger. Stranger! Leviathan America! She: ravenous for ivory and oil, She: sells her calf to Ahab for a helm, She: stalks the seas for leaky heads of spoil. Have you seen that? A whale captain a ship? Watch the leviathan spear her own kin, Overladen with sin, she grows greater. Traitor! Leviathan America! Mutiny! Mutiny on the high sea! No barter left! She sold her sweet plunder. She sold all her oil for all her blubber. She sold her blubber for her ivory. She sold her ivory for her harpoons. She sold her harpoons for her ambergris. She sold her ambergris for drops of oil. And her ship rattles as the tempest howls, And her crew flees as the storm cleaves her bow. And all the sharks and orcas and krakens Circle the overladen cetacean With harpoons of her own perverse making. Lashing, lancing her till the chop foams red From her leaky head: weeping blood and dread Rancid failure: curdled over us – her! Hunted and drowned at our hand, our mother. Mother! Leviathan America! Publishing credits Waltz on the Adriatic: Neologism Poetry Journal (Issue 28) Blood Orange: Anti-Heroin Chic Leviathan America: Wine Cellar Press (Issue One) S h a r e

Jenny Wong back next the poet Jenny Wong is a writer, traveller and occasional business analyst. Her favourite places to wander are Tokyo alleys, Singapore hawker centres and Parisian cemeteries. Jenny's work has been nominated for The Pushcart Prize, Best of the Net and Best Small Fictions, as well as longlisted for the Wigleaf Top 50. She lives in Canada near the Rocky Mountains. the poems When I Let the Dog Out in the Middle of the Night 00:00 / 01:43 Usually, he will come in, obedient after fulfilling his duties. But tonight, he ignores the open door, lingers at the edge of the deck where porch light slips beneath darkness like a shore into black sea. He looks at me, aging clouds in his eyes. Asks if I will join him. Asks to go further out into the night. I leave the house, take three steps, before hesitation begins to make its inevitable lists. The impending weight of an oncoming workday. The alarm clock that must endure two more hours before unleashing its insistent sounds. The vulnerability of bare feet in the dark. So I recall our bodies back inside, leave our longings outdoors to weather down into undistinguishable forms. We return to bed, but refuse our typical patterns, our usual positions for sleep. Instead. His head on my hand. My head against his side. We speak to each other through the small collapses of our ribs, release ourselves from the definitions of our daily shapes. Goodest boy. Quiet girl. Two beasts who understand that even the gentlest of breaths was never meant to be held for so long. The Cartographers 00:00 / 01:26 The cartographers say my nose is a landmark. A low bridge that is crossed in order to arrive at their first conclusions. From there, they sketch in my origins, guess the vowels that will untwist from my self-bound lips, predict the names of my indoor plants. They will not see the white in my hair is a tired moon threaded through night, or the salt-tinged oasis that wells across the parched dunes of my face in the dark. To speak up is a bend in the knee, an acquiescence to their crooked parallels and unwanted latitudes. So I do not give them words, feed them only silence, and they make small notes in the margins re: poor articulation. In a quiet corner, they assign a broken compass that must always point overseas. I am landscape locked in observation. A map of drawn conclusions and labels. But what is unable to be captured is the movement of their lips along my paper edges, and this weary shadow that grows whenever I am mouthed. What Really Happens When I Sit Alone At Parties 00:00 / 01:16 I plant a graveyard of feathers on my tongue. Watch them sprout into birds without wings. I could pluck up these flightless fowl, snuff out the flame of their beaks, find that charred wick of tongue beneath. A thread of unspoken words, waiting to be pulled. But it’s a pointless show. Those birds see there is no blue in the cave of my mouth, no hope for the freedom of sky. So they bury themselves beneath the roots of my teeth. Even there, I could dig them up, salvage their forms into aspirated syllables that pass for agreeable sound. But the birds have already begun their second evolution. Shedding feathers. Coughing up bones. Revealing slippery skin. In small, salty batches, they slide past scars where my wisdom teeth used to be, and add their bodies to the tangle of old things I hold in my throat. Publishing credits When I Let the Dog Out in the Middle of the Night: exclusive first publication by iamb The Cartographers: Hayden’s Ferry Review (Fall 2022) What Really Happens When I Sit Alone at Parties: Splonk (Issue 5) S h a r e

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) S h a r e

wave seven autumn 2021 Candradasa Charlotte Knight Clare Proctor Daljit Nagra Devon Marsh Giovanna MacKenna Harula Ladd Ivor Daniel Jenny Byrne Kara Knickerbocker Peter A Samuel Tongue Sue Finch Usha Kishore Ysella Sims

Jenny Mitchell Billy Grant back next the poet Jenny Mitchell is the winner of the Poetry Book Awards 2021, and joint winner of the Geoff Stevens Memorial Prize 2019. She also won the inaugural Ironbridge Prize, the Bedford Prize and the Gloucester Poetry Society Open Competition. Her best-selling debut collection, Her Lost Language , was one of 44 Poetry Books for 2019 as chosen by Poetry Wales. Jenny's second collection, Map of a Plantation , was an Irish Independent ‘Literary Find’, and is on the syllabus at Manchester Metropolitan University. Her latest collection is Resurrection of a Black Man . the poems Bending Down to Worship 00:00 / 02:42 Church Mary said her God was in the ground, not Satan but all the things that grew, and flowers were the gems upon His crown. She made a garden all around her house – a broken shack she called a palace where she reigned. You couldn’t step beyond her door unless you brought her a bouquet or something green and pulsing full of life. She filled each glass and bowl she found with blooms she called her jewels though they were better as they gave a lovely scent. She tended to her tiny Eden till the flowers reached above her head – the colours bold against dark skin, so filled with shining light. Her headwraps were like floral wreaths, and every dress was made of faded flowers, the age-old boots like clumps of mud. The days when she was forced to work out in the fields, she feared the sun might scorch her garden. She ran out of the cane the moment that the whistle blew and went to fetch pure water from the stream. Her flowers had to live as they were all the freedom that she knew. On nights when she was grieving, she went outside to kneel amongst the plants, bend her head and talk to God. He answered back by showing her another rock or stone she had to move, revealing yet more ground on which to grow more buds. One Sunday, when the white priest tried to make her go to church, she offered him her shining patch of land with one sweep of her arm. She said I never saw your Jesus, but when I die I’ll end up in the ground to feed the things I love to grow, and that is all the heaven I will need. He damned her as a Godless slave. But when he left, she heard the voice of God again. He spoke to her of flowers as she bent to ornament His crown. Black Men Carry Flowers 00:00 / 01:23 red blossoms on their palms. hibiscus blooms from fingertips. waterlilies circle wrists in contrast to their shade heavy-laden with this crop, they move with grace. vines cling to arms. ferns worn as green insignia. warriors of peace they grow on any street. if you look up. see men are grand estates. a wealth of plants. once torn from land. they burgeon in the wild reach out in dappled light. wide shoulder blades replete with yellow orchids. chests are dappled lawns rolling to a bank of leaves delicate but strong morning glories shape their legs. bougainvillea bends the knees. ripples as it clings to thighs tumbling to the shins. agile on the ground jasmine moves the feet. every step a heady scent rising through a man-made-plant. flourishing. their words fall out as petals. The Seamstress For my grandmother 00:00 / 01:33 I’ll be the dress she never owned – immaculate for special days, the only burden heavy frills and English lace along the hem. I’ll never trail in dirt or suffer dust from cane fields. My heart will burst to make a bodice, stitched with bold Jamaican flowers: yellow orchids, red hibiscus. There will be a giant fern appliqued on her back: my ribcage opened to its full extent. I’ll raise my chin to make the high, firm collar – a throat so elegant, with space to hold my voice. I’ll ask her what she really wants – plain cuffs or golden buttons. Underneath the dress, I’ll make myself silk underwear, a soft and pretty petticoat. Its one equivalent will be her newly coddled skin. My feet will make such dainty shoes, and she will go like Cinderella to the ball. But if she doesn’t want the prince this time she’ll dance away without a care. The English lace will shimmer as she moves. Publishing credits Bending Down to Worship: Map of a Plantation Black Men Carry Flowers: Resurrection of a Black Man The Seamstress: Her Lost Language (all collections from Indigo Dreams Publishing) S h a r e

Darren J Beaney back next the poet Darren J Beaney cuts his own hair and loves punk rock and Marmite. He's one half of Flight of the Dragonfly , which hosts regular spoken word evenings on Zoom and in Brighton, produces the Flights e-journal, and recently expanded into independent publishing. Darren is the author of three poetry pamphlets: The Fortune Teller's Yarn , The Machinery of Life and Honey Dew . His newest chapbooks – The Fall of the Repetitive Mix Tape (Back Room Poetry) and Citizenship (Scumbag Press) – will be published in spring and summer 2023. the poems I was created without innocence 00:00 / 01:03 the philosopher named me lazy love child of tyranny. Conceived of invasion and rage. At my birth historic dreamers clustered around the womb only to wince at the struggle. A foolish cleric anointed my brow with sorrow, branded me radioactive and resistant. Nurture came with provocation and accusation as infancy turned battlefield. Playful years were slaughter and I grew into travesty. Indignation matured, associations curdled, I lived life wretched. I am little more than chronic, my own enemy. I look to scald the preposterous, denounce the bastard, punish false evidence, destroy the offensive. Now unbound I seek a new heart. I am not acquainted with angels, but I believe I am here to be loved. Love 00:00 / 00:30 on acid tastes like it looks vivid chaos blinding shimmering like sherbet overwhelming with glycerin whispers which vibrate the air as touch becomes hyperactive and the world smells demerara senses on acid in love warp and wrap each other into playful cat’s cradles knotting until rice paper lips eventually find a way I like this place 00:00 / 01:48 and could willingly waste my time here even though it smells of hospital corridors and the walls are balding as paint decays and plaster peels and the brickwork reveals clay intestines. Derisory light pinches though a ceiling sprayed with holes crafting a dingy prospect, somewhere suitable to commit crimes. Window frames nurse broken panes and a latch scalped from a swinging door lies like a fake island in a lagoon of impossible to dredge grime covering floorboards all but conquered by rot. The air has a taste resembling a cave, the description clings to my tongue as my mouth waters like it’s a dripping acid bath tap. I scrunch my eyes closed and catch a smeared breath to stop me taking a bite. I perch, painted into a corner by cobweb tusks. I purge with primeval ivy, flagellate with waning lost feathers. I whistle like an uncomfortable outsider looking for a sign to relax in damage. I imagine … and the obscurity of my thinking invokes an alternative picture, a chamber, a cell, a byre, a stable. An uninhabited room in a tower fit for young princes. I perceive possibility and space. I tell myself I make hollow history as I waste each minute, but I snub my meaningless words and sing to the shadows 'fuck off with your time'. I consider one more squandered hour as I unwind. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb S h a r e

Emily Blewitt © Michael Willett back next the poet Author of This Is Not A Rescue and poetry submissions editor for New Welsh Reader , Emily Blewitt has poems in The Rialto, Poetry Wales, Ambit and The North , among others. She was Highly Commended in the 2016 Forward Prizes, and has appeared at the Hay Festival and on Radio 4. Emily has collaborated with other writers and artists on the Weird and Wonderful Wales project, and is a recipient of a Literature Wales bursary. She's currently writing her second collection. the poems 13 weeks, 2 days 00:00 / 01:18 I don’t know how to say it, but there you were—little ghost in my ceiling, floating on your side. The outline of your slim hips, strung spine stretched lazily in the same position I sleep some nights, facing away from your father. We watched you refuse to show us your nose. You offered your crown instead, crossed and uncrossed your arms and legs, dipped upside-down. You were turning the way a seal rolls underwater for joy. You were radiant and reluctant to share. The midwife said this was your place, that we were just visiting. When finally you lay on your back, a small otter cradling clam and rock, she was quick as a heron slipping a fish to the gullet to capture your image. She had to be. You were elusive. A natural phenomenon observed perhaps twice. Luminous like algae on the water, like Northern Lights. Archaeology 00:00 / 01:25 It’s getting your eye in: scraping the surface layer by layer with the edge of a trowel, moving the earth towards you and exposing the soil, a clutter of generations before you. Brushing dirt off dirt. Holding dirt to the light and tossing. Sifting dirt like prospectors. We dampen the ground, show the plough-lines’ scar, the clay cap that looks like stone, the outline of the ring pit. Stains show organic matter. Marrow sticks to the tongue. We mark what we find in situ because we must. Context is everything. Love, this is how we find ourselves once more in a field, with swifts and hares and the farmer. Where tributaries fuse, where a person might stand from a rath with her children and look out to sea. For every two people on their hands and knees, four more wait at the edge of the trench. This slow unearthing makes us. We dig, not knowing what it is that we are digging for. Parch Marks 00:00 / 01:26 That was the year it snowed in March. Drifts inside the front door, a small snowman in a corner of the attic, and I crunched up and down the hill to our house in walking boots, keeping to the verge. We scattered bird seed in the garden. I conceived and lost it just before the heatwave struck, in May. The grass singed, my sweet peas failed to flower, our house was airless and we couldn’t sleep or touch each other. The cat shifted from tile to tile. I blistered walking up and down the hill in sandals. By August, thunderstorms broke the tension between us and my headaches eased. You told me that when lightning strikes the junction box three times, it shorts. I became lighter, stronger, like wire. When the clouds cleared, parch marks everywhere: seen from the air, scars on the body of the land that prove there were settlements; that someone once lived here and here . Publishing credits 13 weeks, 2 days: Islands Are But Mountains: New poetry from the United Kingdom (Platypus Press, 2019) Archaeology: exclusive first publication by iamb Parch marks: Creative Countryside (Spring 2019) S h a r e

Aaron Caycedo-Kimura back next the poet Aaron Caycedo-Kimura is a poet, painter, and cartoonist whose poetry has appeared in Beloit Poetry Journal , Poet Lore , DMQ Review , Tule Review , Louisiana Literature , The Night Heron Barks, and elsewhere. Aaron earned his MFA in creative writing from Boston University and is a recipient of a Robert Pinsky Global Fellowship in Poetry. With Ubasute , he won the 2020 Slapering Hol Press Chapbook Competition. the poems Family Anthem 00:00 / 01:11 I walk into the garage from side door sunlight ELO on my Walkman my eyes dissolve the darkness to discover my parents locked in a slow-dance embrace whispering to each other like lovers but my parents aren’t lovers they’re Japanese never kiss hold hands say I love you not even to me once I asked Mom if she loved me she replied my mother and father never said it but I knew they did my parents hear my shuffle separate like guilty teenagers she escapes into the house he into the Ford opens the garage door I fumble forget what I was looking for but all afternoon replay that dissonant chord What’s Kept Alive 00:00 / 01:27 She crunches her walker into the sea of pebbles surrounding the stepping-stones, tells me, This bush with flowers is Japanese. That one is too, but different. I hover close behind, ready with an outstretched arm as if to give a blessing. Pick that large weed near the lantern —by the roots — and throw it into the pail. My father planned and planted this garden fifty years ago— hidden behind the fence of their Santa Rosa tract home— but he’s gone now. She hires a hand to rake leaves, prune branches once a month. Soon she’ll be gone. I’ll sell the house, return to Connecticut. A stranger will buy it, become caretaker of the garden, but won’t know that from their San Francisco apartment my father transported the Japanese maple, cradled in a small clay pot — the momiji now guarding the north corner— and that my mother chided him for bothering with a dying shrub. The Hardest Part 00:00 / 01:50 The fire truck siren downstairs raided the air of my mother's dreams. She'd scream in her sleep , my father told me, even after we married. More than a decade past the Second World War— for him, American concentration camps, for her, the firebombing of Tokyo— they moved into a San Francisco apartment that rented to Japs, a one-bedroom walk-up above the Post Street fire station. They painted their bathroom black— It was in style then— shelved books, unboxed a new rice cooker, watered a shrub of Japanese maple potted for their future garden. When the station got a call in the middle of the night, the rumble of the overhead door crumbled into the wreck that was once her home. Swirling lights flashed ancient trees into flames through the thin silk curtains of her eyelids. No warning, no drill, no cover. My father stilled her body, his broad hand on her shoulder or hip as they lay in the dark listening to the slowing of her breath. The hardest part of those nights , he said, was waiting— sometimes hours—for the truck and the men to come back. Publishing credits Family Anthem: DMQ Review What’s Kept Alive / The Hardest Part: Hartford Courant S h a r e

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

Emma Kemp back next the poet Emma Kemp is from Coventry, where she runs the local Stanza of the Poetry Society. Her work has been published in journals including Transpositions , Ekstasis and The Rialto , as well as in anthologies such as the forthcoming Looking Out, Peering In from The Hedgehog Poetry Press. the poems A warning to myself not to entertain your preliminary advances 00:00 / 02:13 I buckle on the edge of myself, my virtue, your passenger seat. Some unholy unknown, taut between us. Your skin is ash. The thin blue off the instrument panel. My cheeks flushed in the dark, keyed up. You tell me that you are hard as regards rejection, given to press on in the face of defeat. I can believe that. I can believe you would impress yourself upon me. I can believe you leave a mark. Think back: you smothered your self in plastic irony. Admit you are untrue as Coventry blue. Admit inside that plastic shell you are spring loaded, a nichrome coil pressed hard to a twelve-volt socket. On charge, not blue but blaze red. You must know by now I am bone dry as summer brush, as tinder. Would you like me to tear you out of yourself so you can enjoy us destroy each other? I wonder. How much fire it would take to separate you into your fractions. Not a lot, my dear, not while I am feeling all prodigal. I could insist upon you, light you up, draw down bitumen from your contempt and naphtha from your audacity. Perhaps we would get high on what was left. I imagine that I can distil you and live happily alongside some residual fragile goodness. You say I want better . I say you want to forget yourself. I suspect you already have. I cannot take part in your remembering. Know this: you do not want me the way you think you do. See here. I can unbuckle. I can exit. I can take my dry bones elsewhere. I can wish you very well. A nichrome coil/twelve-volt socket was used as a cigarette lighter in older cars. Rovings 00:00 / 00:47 Tell me, love, why we addle ourselves in our search for truth, when we know that all there is is a heap of hastily shorn fleece from which all the time we are spinning? Fumble in the wool and pull some out, rove between your hands to form loose strands. I will do the same. We will spin from these rovings, at times alone, at times together. And then we knit. See how what takes form is neither yours nor mine but defines us? Forgive my dropped stitches; you may have dropped a few, too. Please do not hide yourself away and try to knit from your own pattern. I am in it. Render 00:00 / 01:27 You have seen that image of Thích Quảng Đức burning to death at a crossroads in Saigon and wondered at it. A mixture of knowing and incomprehension. That the human spirit can achieve self-mastery to the point of self-destruction. You have longed to sit cross-legged by the vast ocean, have it lick at you and carry you away; you have longed to become a symbol. A soup of sorrow and raging self-pity. That the human spirit can flare and burn out is a given, but you must pour water on the altar. You have stationed yourself on shingle and felt the insistent pain of every stone. You have waited for the tide to come in, and the tide has come. Every tide refusing to send you to the sea floor. The sea buoys you, dismisses you, light as flotsam returns you to the shore. You have felt the pang of the anticlimax. There is no one here watching; nothing has gathered around you. Your clothes are heavy with salt shame, streaming from you as you walk on, chilled, not shivering. To find what is next. You are rendered to yourself. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb S h a r e

Michael McGill back next the poet Michael McGill is a writer from Edinburgh whose work has recently appeared in The Interpreter’s House , Lunate , The Haiku Quarterly and elsewhere. Michael also has work in the Scottish Poetry Library’s Poems by and for Social Workers anthology. As well as performing for Big Word Performance Poetry in Edinburgh, Glasgow and London, Michael has appeared in several episodes of BBC Radio 3’s The Verb. His work has also been featured on the Micro podcast . the poems Puppy Dog Man 00:00 / 02:01 I thought I saw a puppy dog. I did! I did! I saw the Puppy Dog Man! Baroompta-doo-da. Walk tall, Puppy Dog, Puppy Dog, walk tall – Hey there, Puppy Dog Man – Puppy Dog Man never understand; never understand, little Puppy Dog Man, never understand – Let's talk man to man, acrobat to magician, Devil to Christian, honest man to politician on the street, drowning in a sea of integrity, of humanity; 'Such things as these don't please His Majesty!' Baroompta – do do do. Hello? Oliver Speaking speaking. I was talking to the dog, Maury. Please, you're annoying me. Baroompta-doo-da. Lie low, Puppy Dog, Puppy Dog, lie low – Hey there, Puppy Dog Man – Puppy Dog Man take me underground; take me underground, little Puppy Dog Man, take me underground – New street! New street! I wanna live in a new street. I wanna live in your face. I wanna live in the warm puppy dog folds of your skin. Yeah, I wanna live there, man. Woof! Woof! Baroompta-doo-da – walkin' hand in hand with Puppy Dog Man … Pyjamas in the Snow 00:00 / 02:07 Free postcards were scattered all over New York then, filed in metal displays on the walls of clubs and coffee shops, and I’d collect them and tuck them away in my journal, stumbling around like a 1996 Hansel and Gretel reject, and it was January and everywhere was lit like a still from a Blondie video, and sometimes I’d order a Hazelnut Latte and a Sour Cream Mini Bundt Cake, and I’d write home using one of these postcards, back when home-whilst-travelling was a strange place, an exotic village elsewhere, a solipsist’s mirage, a narcissist’s daydream, and then I’d go to the Post Office on East 34th Street and watch these postcards take flight, because I was living life in Technicolor then, but, oh, that boy back at the hostel was a strange one, and he slept in the bed opposite mine in the dorm, and he’d talk about how much he missed ‘The Bay’ and I’d look puzzled, and he asked me why I’d never been to Ireland, and he laughed when I replied, 'Because it’s so far away,' and he seemed homesick and lost, and very sad, so I showed him my postcards, and one was RuPaul’s face in close-up, and he said, 'She’s gorgeous!' – but he’d turn shifty most evenings when a note was stuck to the door because he was late paying for his bed, and the word REMINDER would sit at the top of the page in cold black font, and then he’d disappear for a time and come back later looking dishevelled and used, and then the note on the door would disappear, and one day it was time to pack and head to JFK, and he wasn’t there so I left the RuPaul postcard on his pillow, and I never said goodbye – and back then Jackie 60 nightclub had a hotline you’d call, yeah, it was listed in Time Out , and one night I stood in a phone booth in the lobby of the hostel, and a recorded voice said the theme that week was Scotland and the dress code was ‘tartan tartan tartan’ and, oh, how I wish I’d gone to Jackie 60 in my tartan pyjamas, walking through Manhattan in the snow, but I never did. Celluloid Clown 00:00 / 01:11 'Your poem isn’t a fit for us,' the email read. I recall him emerging; black biro, yellow Post-it. I recall the usual questions: 'To and or to ampersand ?' etc., etc. What is to become of him, I wonder? He doesn’t fit anywhere, it seems. Still, he remains my three-line darling; long-lost relative of that scrawled first draft. 'Your poem isn’t a fit for us,' the email read. Yes, I know he ended up like a circus clown from some campy old film. You know the type of character: always a criminal in hiding (for what are celluloid clowns really, but painted criminals?). 'Your poem isn’t a fit for us,' the email read. In his final scene, he is led to the jailhouse. He hands over his dog (a Boston Terrier) to a young girl and says, 'Take care of him, Cheryl, he’s a good ‘un.' Then he walks away – fade to black. Publishing credits Puppy Dog Man / Celluloid Clown: exclusive first publication by iamb Pyjamas in the Snow: Anser Journal S h a r e

Julie Stevens back next the poet Julie Stevens writes poems that cover many themes, often engaging with or involving the problems of disability. Her work can be found in journals such as Ink Sweat & Tears , The Honest Ulsterman and Strix , as well as in volumes from Broken Sleep Books and Indigo Dreams Publishing. Julie has published three pamphlets with The Hedgehog Poetry Press – Journey Through the Fire , Step into the Dark and Balancing Act – plus her chapbook Quicksand with Dreich. the poems Piano Practice 00:00 / 01:31 It’s never black and white. Each note may wrap you in the skin of a newborn, scratch at years with a harrowing call or send you humming through the doors at work. When she played, the piano sent time scurrying to find hours that the day had lost, pages that were never read and light now dimming, losing centre stage. A master of the keys was her doing waking a night with the clutch of Brahms, Debussy winding through each morning’s stretch and another three hours packed with fingers alight. For years it was always her bringing the whip to my young hands, a bleeding insight into notes that waited, a battle to race with those elegant turns. They’d stand behind singing words to celebrate call on me to find music to cheer, but all I felt was the sting of their breath shooting syllables into broken fingers. Why I Don’t Like Kippers 00:00 / 01:17 I sensed they were coming when the stench rose up the staircase − a flood of foul-smelling slime that knew just how to net me. Noxious flapping, dives and smoky fins around they went, swamped today’s sweet breath. She urged me to try this ocean sick, swore a healthy body should be full of gills, that I should swim by her side, copy her ways, hook a life with only her in charge. A wave of hate saw me jump through portholes, my belly would retch, whilst on this sea bed. A call from downstairs made me slide on scales, washed me nearer my salty seat. I sat, I moaned, found the perfect bowl of cereal, but my spoon was always full of stinking kippers. Them 00:00 / 00:54 I lived with the volume high, anchored between their protests and stillness, which never turned them off. I lived with my head buried. I didn’t want to take their problems with me, nor judge and deliver the awful verdict. The shouting floored the house. The sudden lurch of a room knocked me into a bedroom cell. I lived with their weapons, their fights; conflicts were nailed down hard in my head. The fear of what could come next was always present. It lived with me, but the real me was never there. Publishing credits Piano Practice / Why I Don't Like Kippers: Journey Through the Fire (The Hedgehog Poetry Press) Them: Flights (Issue Nine) S h a r e

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

wave seventeen spring 2024 Carol J Forrester David Pecotić Eilín de Paor Helen Kay Ilisha Thiru Purcell Iris Anne Lewis Jonathan Humble Lesley Curwen Margaret Dennehy Nina Parmenter Sarah Holland Steve Smart Sue Spiers Thomas McColl Tracey Rhys

Richard Jeffrey Newman back next the poet Richard Jeffrey Newman is the author of Words for What Those Men Have Done and The Silence of Men , as well as the translation, The Teller of Tales: Stories from Ferdowsi's Shahameh . Richard curates the First Tuesdays reading series in Jackson Heights, New York, and is on the Board of Newtown Literary . He's also Professor of English at Nassau Community College, where he recently stepped down to focus on his writing after a decade of service to his faculty union. the poems Just Beyond Your Reach 00:00 / 00:54 The prayer you say is neither seed nor plow, nor is it rain to quench your soul’s old thirst. The parched and blistered field your tongue is now bespeaks the long neglect about to burst, like rotten fruit thrown to chase from the stage a comic leaving dead words at your feet; and she, or maybe he, responds with rage, shrinking the room until the single seat that’s left is where you’re planted. Confront your god, shimmering and luscious, there, his skin— or is it hers?—a proffered gift, a prod to every hunger you have called a sin. Welcome each new taste; spread wide; bow low. Lose yourself till loss is all you know. This Sentence Is A Metaphor For Bridge #20 00:00 / 00:55 Imagine hell unfenced, yourself the unburned center of all that burning, every prayer you’ve ever said undone line by line, until the empty page is all you have. Enter there the path in you that is only a path, gather its shadows into a dance, a movement that ends with love, that keeps on moving till love becomes the rhythm, and you the fire, and the dance, the life you’ve chosen to make your loving possible. You thought you had to be the clench you’ve held where none but you could feel it. Give yourself instead to all that rises. Fill that cloudless sky with laughter. After Drought 00:00 / 00:58 Knees rooted in the bed on either side of your belly, my body’s a stalk of wheat bent in summer wind, a bamboo shoot rising, an orchid, and then all at once a cloud swelling, a swallow sculpting air, a freed white dove. You pull me down, but you are hot beneath me, and the gust that is my own heat lifts me away: I’m not ready. Outside, footsteps, voices. Two men. Giggling, we pull the sheet around us till they pass, but if someone does see, what will they have seen? A couple making love. No. More than that: they will have seen the coming of the rain; they will have seen us bathe in it, and they will say Amen. Publishing credits Just Beyond Your Reach / This Sentence Is A Metaphor for Bridge #20: exclusive first publication by iamb After Drought: The Silence of Men (CavanKerry Press) S h a r e