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Hear poet Ben Ray read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Ben Ray back next the poet Poet, reviewer and workshopper Ben Ray is a patron of the Cheltenham Poetry Festival, and a winner of the 2019 New Poets Prize. His most recent collection is The Kindness of the Eel , and his writing has appeared in a wide range of publications including Poetry Wales and The Oxford Review of Books . the poems Epska pjesma for a new millennium 00:00 / 01:19 You wanted to be an epic poem in the drafting to sit with Marko, Branković, Crnojević but our palimpsest homeland had forgotten poetry gifting us only hoarse voices, bloody footprints. We stayed at your house, frustrated we could not make history: but you had inherited from a vanished world distant stories, new borders that tightened round the neck and a rusted can of tear gas from some atrocity. Like good citizens we shut the doors, pierced the cap and inflicted our country upon ourselves pushing / staring / turning / running / choking / children vaulting over chintz sofas in desperation then outside, gasping laughing – you tore your chest open found three hearts: around the third, the snake was still sleeping In October 2000 huge protests broke out in Serbia's capital, Belgrade, against the perceived authoritarianism of the Serbian government, resulting in the overthrow of President Slobodan Milošević. The protests saw a high level of youth engagement. Sinning with Captain Birdseye 00:00 / 01:04 It really wasn’t necessary. They were just two fish fingers left sulking in soggy packaging. But that was the point. An act of Antoinette extravagance, a hubristic vote of confidence in modern society. Was there ever a better expression of disaster capitalism than turning on a whole fridge freezer just for them? No shame: only God can judge their private fishy palace for two, heated with North Sea oil to help them feel at home (Even Anthropocene bad boys have a heart). Then, of course, the breathless question on the crowd’s lips: to eat one and leave the other alone in that icy void? The act of a maniac the act of a daredevil. But look at them now. So settled. So happy. Do you not believe in redemption? Joke’s on you I have a tiramisu in my chest freezer I am a market square after everyone has left 00:00 / 01:16 I am a market square after everyone has left all made of loose veg and plastic wrapping, that pervasive pioneer of untouched spaces. My breath invigorates paper bags across slabs rustles drain-locked receipts into chorus: I am the one who pulls up the cobbles to trip the cyclists. The heart of a lettuce has never looked so lonely nor the leaves of an artichoke so fragile than when I wear them, dressing down in casual wear that would melt your heart. If carrots had eyes, they would be Disney-round and doleful as they roll down the orphanages of roadsides fulfilling tragic character arcs as they’re pulped underfoot. I am a market square after everyone has left grand words like desolation and loss are too big for my ordinary leftover onion-skin self, this paper-bag floor-level life – where dashed organic-grown hopes are swept up by street cleaners and next Sunday always seems so far away Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Suyin Du Bois read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Suyin Du Bois back next the poet Suyin Du Bois (she/her) is a poet of mixed Chinese-Malaysian and Belgian heritage. She lives in London, and studied for her BA in English Literature and Creative Writing at the University of Warwick. In her most recent writing, Suyin has explored her multi-cultural heritage and life through food. Her poems have appeared in Propel Magazine , Freeze Ray Poetry , Zindabad and Stanzas , and she was anthologised in Fourteen Publishing's Bi+ Lines: An Anthology of Contemporary Bi+ Poets . When not obsessing over word choices, Suyin spends her time building an early-stage start-up that aims to give NHS hospital staff 24/7 access to nutritious, affordable food. the poems Ode to Kaya 00:00 / 01:45 Egg jam first on my young tongue, palm sugar sweet, coconut milk rich. Thick layers on charred toast, salted butter cubes between, melting in Penang sweat. My Goh Ee Poh stood for hours stirring you in that double-boiled heat. Exports to be swaddled, twisted into pink and green plastic bags, nestled amongst swimming costumes and sundresses, rituals to ward off mid-air leaks in the 14 hours from one home to the other. Back in England your layers thinned, our knives more sparing after each spread. After Goh Ee Poh grew too frail, aunties and uncles gifted us store-bought surrogates. You were labelled Kaya . Our cupboards filled with your empties, aides-mémoire of indulgence repurposed to house fragrant rice, Chinese mushrooms, our longing for Nonya flavours. By the time pandan leaves arrive in Chinatown, I am grown up, have my own kitchen where I can stand for hours. But Goh Ee Poh has long since condensed into photographs, so I sweeten my never-asked regret, trace down someone else’s heirloom recipe. You are needy, threaten lumps, failure, but I stir and stir like her, until my spoon draws the right depths of lineage. I lift a heap of you into my mouth, tongue your clotted grainy sweetness. The First Mouthful 00:00 / 01:41 In the back corner of Pulau Tikus market, tucked in behind uncles pressing fresh santan, trays of kueh steamed overnight, gutted fish, beside batik dresses and the energetic ladling of hawker sellers, I sit still– watch tiny bubbles on the surface of my koay teow th’ng. I’m not sure what’s woken me so early: jet lag or my stomach aching for hot soup in the heat, for kopi strong and Carnation-swirled, for the kinship of their steam. I pull fine white noodles from the broth’s well-oiled clarity, wind them into the flat base of my spoon, chopstick up: a slither of duck, crunchy pork lard, one wide-blinked iris of chilli padi to top the pile. Nudging the spoon back into the liquid so it wells up around this first mouthful, I catch the curious eye of the uncle at the next table. Where are you from? Wah eh mama si Penang lang. The words mis-intoned, or too unexpected from this face, he frowns. The rooster on the side of my bowl hasn’t yet crowed me fully awake, so I say London and we both smile. I turn back, slurp my spoonful down – feel the quick slip of the koay teow, the stock radiating through me, the chilli biting at my throat. On The First Cold Day of Winter, You Ask for Rusks 00:00 / 01:30 Tannie Noeline’s recipe calls for true boeremeisie quantities, so I adapt each measure by awkward fractions— still the batter laps the lip of my bowl as I wed flour to crushed bran to buttermilk. The last step says dry . I had to google it the first time, and even on the thirteenth I worry when to take them out of the oven, leave them in overnight. In the morning, our house smells of a hunger that’s spread wide since our last trip back to your childhood home, my windfall one. We don’t wait. We dunk rough chopped rusks into our coffee, and you tell me once more about your Ouma’s aniseed beskuit, so tall and arid, they’d absorb half a mug in one dip, hang sodden only long enough for your mouth to get under its fall. We reminisce about road trips between Hermanus and Bothaville, how I make us pause at every padstal, seek out the most tempting treats – banana and bran, pumpkin seed and apricot – how every homemade rusk tempts us. You remind me that mine are your favourite, and I reply Jy is my gunsteling . And we keep going until the bottom of our mugs is a beach of sunflower seeds and crumbs with the tide sucked out. Publishing credits Ode to Kaya: Propel Magazine (Issue One) The First Mouthful: Bi+ Lines: An Anthology of Contemporary Bi+ Poets (Fourteen Publishing) On The First Cold Day of Winter, You Ask for Rusks: exclusive first publication by iamb

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

Hear poet Jeremy Wikeley read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jeremy Wikeley back next the poet Jeremy Wikeley is a writer and poet. His poems, essays and reviews have appeared online and in print in publications including New Welsh Review , The Observer , Poetry Birmingham Literary Journal and The Friday Poem . Jeremy's poems have also been anthologised in three collections from The Emma Press. Originally from Romsey in Hamsphire, Jeremy now lives in London, where he works in the arts. the poems Train to Cambridge After Louis MacNeice 00:00 / 00:48 Beyond the window the sky is turning pink and it’s more surprising than that song I wrote about how surprised I was that the sky was turning pink. It’s turning slowly, like it’s enjoying itself, as if there’s no hurry. The evening is encouraging the sky to follow it, and the sky is following, in its own time, pink and pacing itself while the train and I are racing to get ahead of the turning of the world only to find no matter how hard we try to push ourselves we are always a sleeper behind the evening as he strides along outside, crushing the sun under his thumb, mixing red dust with wet clouds and swiping dark streaks across the cheeks of the sky. The Vandals Remove the Ark of the Covenant (as told by the Ark) 00:00 / 00:33 Carnage! And then we were rocked across the Mediterranean – a box in a box in a box … over the chopping winter sea until a strange tongue told us we’d come to Carthage. And they plonked us down on the edge of the quay, as if we were any old package. Which we are! A box in a box in a box … under tarpaulin on African docks in Carthage. Poetry in Wartime 00:00 / 01:08 If this was a war I could be sad for myself. What bad luck (I’d say) to get caught up in this. So, the inevitable conscription into the most statistically dangerous wing of the armed forces (half the bombers didn’t make it back) would be more bad luck, like the hole in the kitchen ceiling. If this was a war, I would be worried about dying, not other people dying and the very possibility might make the uncertainty tolerable. If it were a war, every survivor would have a different set of stories, or at least there would be enough variation in our experiences for them to bear the repetition. As it is, nothing we do seems very important and because we don’t know what’s working, we don’t know what’s worth it, or what kind of world will come next. All I know is I will have to live in it. And it’s right, it’s right, it’s right. I’m not saying it’s not right. But like everything right, it is unbearable. Publishing credits Train to Cambridge: In Transit: Poems of Travel (The Emma Press) The Vandals Remove the Ark of the Covenant (as told by the Ark): exclusive first publication by iamb Poetry in Wartime: From the Silence of the Stacks, New Voices Rise, Vol. 1 (The London Library)

Hear poet Michael McGill read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. 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

Hear poet Emma Kemp read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. 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

Hear poet Lauren Thomas read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Lauren Thomas back next the poet An MA student in Poetry Writing with Newcastle University at The Poetry School, London, Lauren Thomas has had work in various print and online publications. Her poems have appeared in Nine Pens' Hair Raising Anthology , Black Bough Poetry's second Christmas/Winter anthology , and most recently, in Lighthouse Journal and Magma . Lauren's pamphlet, Silver Hare Tales , was published in 2021. the poems Garden’s End 00:00 / 01:02 Once I found a fallen body under leaves, beneath the pear, kneeling at the garden’s end with others in the dark. I’d always feared those shadow trees, the tenet of their bark, their hard rust fruit with nothing but the pull and barb of wasps and browning apples bruised and thick with slugs. I shifted on the ancient moss, regarded the sharp ends of grass. Her wings were spread as if to touch the purple edges of this place. Eyelids closed, her slowing breath, holding less than songs. I put her in a cardboard box offered up the vivid pink umbilic twists of worms. Murmured drops of milk as words, whispered less than prayers. Far away my mother’s voice, was calling to the garden’s end. I thought of salvaging our lost and sunlight trapped inside green glass. Ysbyty Ifan 00:00 / 01:17 Ancient backcloth upland moor, shifting with the currents of a restless wind Beneath quiver-grass parched runnels, lie brass rubbings potted into ground A bronze-agronomist cured and historied within the glug and clag of peatland bog His green shallow-pool whispers flow through leather bones, chambered underground Iterations rotted into earthtongues, gills and seeds. A carbon keep, embogged We patch the purple-orange hummocks so that muddied river crossings can rewind Time speckles gold upon the Plover, returns Whorl-Snails and sculpts the bog Back to ewer. Stagnant moss births fruiting bodies, rafting spinner silk enwinds With Sundews trapping raptors, feeding rooting bonnets. This is when the earth regrounds Upland bog. Oxidised Pitkins pink the wind. History sings through the quenched ground L'Origine Du Monde After Zena Assi 00:00 / 01:00 We found her floating in a stream folded like an origamied boat: a woman made of paper. Her closed eyes did not reveal the truth — her green roots trailing anchors in the red-rushed water. We thought she had been left for dead after they had picked her up and sewed her shut to stop the sound of sea. We lay her flooded body underneath a weeping tree, casting light upon a bird cage hanging there in homage to her bones. Cold wet fingers flayed her printed skin like peeling robes from a drowned daughter like lifting memory from stone. We gazed at her beauty, peered inside to see how she was made. Her catacombs all glittering and lined with live grenades. Publishing credits Garden's End: Silver Hare Tales (Blood Moon Poetry) Ysbyty Ifan: Magma (Issue 81 – Anthropocene) L’Origine Du Monde: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Jenny Byrne read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Jenny Byrne back next the poet A newcomer to writing, Dublin-based Jenny Byrne had her first poem published in 2020. Her poems have appeared in The Galway Review , Impspired , Dust Poetry Magazine , Drawn to the Light Press and The Madrigal – though Jenny still thinks her biggest achievement is being a mum to two lovely people. the poems Danseuse 00:00 / 01:25 I do not want to lament the day you died, each year, purging up the aisle of expectation to kneel and prostrate I am ready for the day to come and know there is no must, no proper, no should I may trace a fingertip across your scarf of orchid silk, allow jewels to glisten in my palm, scatter photos, hold linen to my face and breathe you in — less of you with time; but still, a tiger knows her cubs, animal instinct reciprocates This pace, once chaotic, stumbling, shape-shifting to satisfy others has slowed, is gentle; with desire to gratify fading I move, a rising relevé in satin slippers to my tentative, delicate rhythm I may look back from time to time as I lead myself forward towards my skyline I think you would raise a celestial hand, urging me onward. Love (Classified) 00:00 / 00:45 I don't write about love it's ours, it's private. Where we are queen and king passions force bloody battles some won many lost We grieve poultice womb wounds with salt purging the demented Orchid roots reach toward light and air epiphytes survive supported freely I don't write about love, it's ours, it's private. Sapere aude 00:00 / 00:59 The wise child omniscient, sensing, absorbing full up, engorged, overflowing No reprieve, corridors closed, dam bulging, deluge certain walks within the gilded mausoleum, sham, chaos mire Instinct knows what can and cannot be said perception is reality they say a ten-year-old cannot play with perception Sensitivity has no place in dysfunction systems are not made to be broken wise children, bearing all weights, eventually crumble. Publishing credits Danseuse: The Madrigal (Vol. 2) Love (Classified): Impspired (Issue 11) Sapere aude: The Galway Review

Hear poet Khalisa Rae read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Khalisa Rae back next the poet Khalisa Rae is a poet, activist and journalist in Durham, NC. Author of Real Girls Have Real Problems , she has poems in Frontier , Rust and Moth , Damaged Goods , Hellebore , Flypaper Lit , Sundog Lit , PANK and Luna Luna , among others. Khalisa has won several poetry prizes, and serves as founder of the Think and Ink BIPOC Collective, and the Women of Color Speak Reading series. Khalisa is also Writing Center Director at Shaw University. Her debut collection Ghost in a Black Girl's Throat is forthcoming from Red Hen Press in April 2021. the poems Reclaiming our Phenomenal Bones For Maya 00:00 / 01:15 When did we lose our phenomenal? I think we left it on the back stoop, abandoned it like a baby on steps for anyone to pick up and call their own. I think we tucked it under our tongues, let it dissolve, and melt away. But the taste of it still lingers. I think we spread our phenomenal across beds, in the backs of cars where we opened it for anyone who said the magic word. I think we smeared it on countertops and couches, and made it like jam or a marmalade to lick off for satisfaction. But woman you have been phenomenal and everlasting since the beginning of time, since the Nile and cradle of civilization and Lucy. Your phenomenal bones are proof that you were once here. And breathing. And everything. Our brown bosoms have brought nations to their knees. Our open mouths have made even the most powerful cower. Our brick and mortar skin has always been a phenomenal destination—brown-stone thighs, hand-crafted cathedrals of a waist, sweltering temple lips, a museum of a mind, we will find our phenomenal when we stop looking and just be. Livestock 00:00 / 01:04 When they come for me, I am neither girl nor boy, I am neither clam nor cock. I have neither hooves nor snout. But I do have claws; I can grunt and growl and show my teeth. I do not need wings to create a windstorm, I do not need talons to break skin; I can snarl and scrape. I can unhinge my jaw to fit a head twice the size of mine inside. I can be razor-backed and spiked edge when he tries to skin me, to unscale my silvery back, debone my brazen hen-hide. I will be foul-mouthed and crooked-necked. I will be the chicken head they know me to be, if it will save my life. When he comes for me, I will remember the coop, how they gathered the fowl girl up by the feet with warm hands and cooing. How her brown hung low when they entered her into the guillotine and severed her head. How they plucked her body until it was bare. I will remember the blood and what happens when they want to make you food. Belly-Full of Gospel 00:00 / 01:09 Each morning my grandmother rises to find her Bible still breathing, belting her favorite aria. A lion, a well, a sacrifice. Crack-of-dawn, coffee-stained, scrolls making music at 6am. Each page turn a chord she knows better than hot water cornbread and collard greens. Wailing Blessed Assurance , What a Friend to crackling bacon— all a belly-full of gospel summoning spirit to be there in the midst. Her back buckle and hand wave awaken a holy ghost— Bash-sha- Shadrach, Meshach- tongue-speaking spells cast out the demons haunting this old house. 'While I’m on this tedious journey'— a sovereign song soothing her aching, calligraphed hands. Walk with Me , she asks, inviting Him in the room. What a meditation, a ritual to welcome Holy in a place held together by broken bread. A sacred invitation to dine with her and the browning hash. Nothing but the Blood and sunrise slicing sound— stirring a tent revival lasting till nightfall across her wobbling kitchen table. Publishing credits Reclaiming our Phenomenal Bones: Homology Lit. Livestock: Flypaper Lit Belly-Full of Gospel: Sundog Lit

Hear poet James Nixon read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. James Nixon back next the poet James Nixon, who teaches at Arden University, is completing his doctoral research into the legacy of Arthur Rimbaud and hauntological poetics at Goldsmiths, University of London. He's a former Royal Holloway Emerging Writer Fellow, a Writer-in-Residence at Cove Park, and a Writer-in-Residence at Phytology, Bethnal Green. the poems Pillowtalk 00:00 / 00:50 The night is a cul-de-sac we’ve been chased into – the houses have foreign coin for eyes. The innocent quiet is not what it seems. Clerical figures carrying taxidermy for comparison roam the undercrofts of sleep slips into place like a contraption round my head. I have been alive today and not done much about it. I have drifted complacent I'm in crisis. Why your arm, slung across my chest, feels so real, I squeeze its meat to send myself some signal, clamp my body to yours. Cashier 00:00 / 01:42 ‘M A T T’. Rhymes with flat, as in deflated, as in a kept birthday balloon shrivelling & bleeding air, as in smoker’s lung. ‘M A T T’, as in not shiny, unremarkable. I don’t think you’re that, ‘M A T T’, but I can tell this shift has you feeling tragic, as in self-esteem, as in the future’s lost collateral. That I should not kiss you, ‘M A T T’, makes me want to smother you lovingly, but always with the idea of quietus in mind. ‘M A T T’ named in air quotes as if you’re hypothetical. Do people feel WELCOME wiping their feet on you ‘M A T T’? Do you wish to leave? Not just this store but this this life. Sea levels are multiplying ‘M A T T’. The planet is ready to belch all over us. Now is not the time to be passing avocados from your right hand to your left hand & mixing greys on your palette of sighs, but slinking from bed while your wife sleeps in & driving undramatic to some port town. As in lobbing your smartphone, ditching your car. As in deciding on an outgoing ferry that colour & thrill are still possible, while the sun is delivered and opened. As in an invitation. As in come away with me ‘M A T T’. The Weather 00:00 / 01:21 When my appendix was removed it was incinerated. There is nothing extra about me. The sun feathers through the blinds – my hip-scar shines like a hieroglyph. The house is climate. I test the acoustics with subtle applause and swan about the patio paved a healthy pink – hit the pool occasionally – – my heart small and hard. Alligators doze in the middle of roads beneath detergent skies. Palm trees droop like exclamations propped against the horizon. The tennis courts – A darker reflection in sliding doors at dusk looks like fire taking off its nightgown. Moths inhaled into the hurricanes of wheel arches are likely screaming on the interstate. And there are widespread riots in urban areas. But I hear blue whales have returned with calves to the Sea of Cortez. I drove through a storm at night but not recently. Sedate is the word – the weather is sedate. Publishing credits Pillowtalk: exclusive first publication by iamb Cashier: earlier draft was shortlisted for the Bristol Poetry Prize The Weather: earlier draft appeared in Ambit (Issue 234)

Hear poet Emma Lee read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Emma Lee back next the poet Poet and reviewer Emma Lee is the author of The Significance of a Dress and Ghosts in the Desert . She was Reviews Editor for The Blue Nib , and the co-editor of Over Land, Over Sea : an anthology of poems expressing solidarity with refugees crossing the Mediterranean on small boats and rafts. Emma's poetry has featured in many print and online journals including Fevers of the Mind , Ink, Sweat & Tears , Clear Poetry and more. the poems The Bridal Dresses in Beirut 00:00 / 00:41 Each dress hangs from a noose. One is plain satin with scalloped lace, another an orgy of tulle, dreamy organza with appliqué flowers hanging from wire strung between palm trees. One is short, a shift with a tulip skirt, the sort of dress picked in a hurry to satisfy a shotgun or Article 522. The breeze breathes through them, bullies the dresses into ghosts, brides with no substance, angels bereft of their voices. What the Dust Left Uncovered After art installation The Fading Afterglow of Creation by Dave Briggs and Jack Squires 00:00 / 01:10 A screen sculpts a crumpled mass in an empty house, a 3-D image that takes the shape of what could be a heart. A sci-fi trope: machines outliving us. We all hope what will survive of us is not the pile of admin, worthless warranties, the embarrassing tweet, the spilt coffee, but our Insta life, our filtered wishes. The sculpture is not the easy outline of an emoji, but the complexity of valves, veins, a possibility of an organ, a human's engine. Here, what's left is our digital footprint, the avatar we taught to fight, scavenge, collect. Playerless it repeats the same responses, contact only from bots, a drift of binary lint. It's the unedited part of us that decided who we touched. The digital heart waits for us to breathe emotion into it, sculpting the memory of what it most wanted. The Wrapped Hedges 00:00 / 01:26 It looks as if a fog has whirled around the hedges, wrapping them in a swirl of candy floss like a fleece protecting them from frost. The implication is the hedges will be unwrapped to show a healthy growth, firm stems, perfectly green leaves, branches stretched in welcome. The covering takes on the texture of a regular weave, as if a team of spiders had worked solidly for months, but the structure is too crude to be natural, too regular to constructed by anything but a programmed machine. It reflects a grid of lines running from left to right with rectangular holes. If laid flat, it would represent a map of a housing estate, plans made by those seeking to enrich themselves on the grounds councils cannot demonstrate they have an adequate housing supply, that somehow executive, four bedroom homes, beyond the pockets of those on waiting lists, will meet and it’s fine to build in the country out of reach of public transport and amenities but it’s just these birds who will prevent building during the nesting season that are the problem. So man-made webs are their suggested solution; mimic nature to prevent it. Publishing credits The Wedding Dresses in Beruit: The Significance of a Dress (Arachne Press) What the Dust Left Uncovered: After... (December 8th 2022) The Wrapped Hedges: exclusive first publication by iamb

Hear poet Liam Bates read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Liam Bates back next the poet Originally from the Black Country and now living in Lancashire, Liam Bates is a poet whose work has appeared in Ambit , Bath Magg , Magma and elsewhere. His poems have been translated into Spanish and Latvian, and in 2023 he won a Northern Writers’ Award for ongoing work. Liam's first two pamphlets, Monomaniac and Working Animals , are available from Broken Sleep Books , as is his debut collection, Human Townsperson . the poems The Agency 00:00 / 01:20 I ate the mushroom growing on the wall of the downstairs toilet in the house we rent. I folded a thick slice of brown bread around it and gobbled the lot raw. They might try charging us extra at the end of our tenancy because the mushroom wasn’t meant for us. But in their assessment, what is? See what I have in my hands. It’s nothing. See it moving. Like devotees bowing round a colourful altar. They forbid us painting over the white but I painted anyway on the white of the sink with the rainbow of my vomit. I am thirteen again. I am hovering a foot above the ground like a god. They don’t want us skating on their office block steps as if the concrete isn’t there for us. Smooth as a dream of endless falling. Shouting watchmen emerging to shoo us off the premises. What are they thinking, that they can contain this? It’s only my folded arms holding me together. If I raise my hands towards the sky, so bright and boundless I ache, a thousand canaries will take flight. Understudy 00:00 / 00:37 This again—my student has crammed his pockets with gravel and cannonballed into the reservoir. Sopping, and cold as a milestone on the bank, I take his word this isn’t about suicidal thoughts, he saw the tell-tale green and gold of treasure blinking on the bed and isn’t that what we’re doing here? Sure, but wouldn’t growing gills be covered during induction if that was all it took? Tomorrow, I’ll pull him from a different waterbody. We’ll sit in the sun getting warmer. Open Wide, a Little Wider 00:00 / 01:09 We were misled by a sat nav quirk, the circle sun at an unexpected inclination. The country’s vestigial tail, you dubbed this snaking A road. Still inevitably a wealth of luxury cars on hand ready to elbow by, tinted window undertakers, cutting us up and getting a mouthful: cunt, do your indicators not work or are we invisible? The final word flashing in their rear-view. And then we turned a corner and on the hill opposite was a line of houses, a familiar-seeming close in a town we’d never been. You said, Who do you think lives there? and I knew then someone must, a street of someones, each with their own purposeful face. I had to chew on it in a lay-by: the abundance, it won’t all fit in my head. But that’s the thing, you said, it doesn’t have to. Publishing credits All poems: Human Townsperson (Broken Sleep Books)

Hear poet Sarah Holland read poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Sarah Holland back next the poet Sarah Holland is a writer, poet and meditation teacher living in rural England. She's a regular at the writing groups and open mics held by the Poetry Pharmacy , where she also teaches mindful writing practices. This is the very first time Sarah's poems have been published. the poems Unseen 00:00 / 00:43 The sly smile of flesh knows its own beauty. Somewhere, a naked body is screaming, sweating, still. It howls when uncapped by sleeves, cold slicing bone, shocked by its own need to be covered. Now a lonely, lost landscape, blindly eroded. Tiny streams in rivulets you won’t remember weren’t always there. Your care of my nakedness is all I will ever know of love. When I’m next uncovered, I’ll no longer witness myself being seen. Dress in Stars 00:00 / 02:06 The dress is clustered with flowers join the lines between the nodes to find her stories in the eyes of the stars. Virgo Here I trace a girl standing proud in new folds of fabric paid for by her own wreath-weaving hands. The hem is hitched to her waist in a teenage tryst the stars hold her heart when broken. Draco The dress becomes lazy, lounging in corners forgotten for pyjamas and red-tipped hair and freedom and pint-size laughter. Notes are absent, margins full of rhyme. Aquarius The fabric sprawls dazed with travel on a bugged bunk-bed. See here, a map of islands, an elephant’s wrinkled ear, the currency of symbols smoke singing from the folds. The Bears Here is a woman now, buying new dresses from markets, city-chic, following rivers to return to the ring where the bear was tied to steps and she will sometimes wait. Gemini The straps sting like cuts on reddened shoulders muddied by festival swamps. Friends fade to twin with pole stars. Behind a closed door, the dress hangs limp and worn. Leo The dress has been lifted from sun-striped skin a tigress released again and again and again she curls alone into her warmth and swims the wide water. Hercules Hold the dress as carefully as that first love hang from a hook that drags the door but remember to hope. There is still space in its starred sky amongst the moss-worn patches. Gargoyles 00:00 / 01:53 I had remembered you wrong with a hoop in your ear but the curls were real that uncoiled from a cap another woman pressed to your scalp. Coffee from a market stall instantly chilled as the wind whipped the steam to the gargoyles who supped it like breath. We chose a face for each of us and perhaps that was a gift, seeing how we would soon jeer across the distance, bitterness spitting the air. I wanted you to ease me down the river on a boat you had made, wade with me across the brown water. I thought it would be glassy, our faces two stars reflected there. But we were just tourists, disappointed by the churn of the silt and the slime and the mud, a memory punishing itself again and again. The bridge suspended us over floods that might have carried us to fences, flowers. We didn’t know we’d be sucked under, crushed by the wheels of a tour bus as a gargoyle cackled, ringing from a city’s tall tower. I scratch into stone with my nail I don’t want to write these poems anymore but my blood obscures the words. I want to cup you in my palm feel your breath mist my skin. We played house in a home I thought had two beds. I still feel the warmth in our current as I flick fragments of stone into the ripples, sneers etched over smiles, but even though I’ve been here before, we are forever gargoyles. Publishing credits All poems: exclusive first publication by iamb

Poet Lisa Kelly reads three poems exclusively for iamb. If you like The Poetry Archive, this poetry site is for you. Lisa Kelly back next the poet Lisa Kelly has single-sided deafness. She is also half Danish. Her first collection, A Map Towards Fluency , was published by Carcanet in 2019. Her poems have appeared in Stairs and Whispers: D/deaf and Disabled Poets Write Back (Nine Arches Press) and Carcanet’s New Poetries VII. Her pamphlets are Philip Levine’s Good Ear (Stonewood Press) and Bloodhound (Hearing Eye). She sometimes hosts poetry evenings at the Torriano Meeting House in London, and is the Chair of Magma Poetry. the poems from The IKEA Back Catalogue Delivery to ASPELUND 00:00 / 00:58 Don’t lose your way in the snow to ASPELUND like being trapped in a white wardrobe, ARVINN. Arrive intact at this Norwegian Arctic city, reveal yourself, like a folding chair, to the city. Hey presto! Like magic, you appear in ASPELUND no longer up against the wall. Out of the wardrobe, ARVINN, you can shrug off the ward robe of white, which gapes like the wide roads of this city, and take up space. ARVINN, this city is not ASPELUND, ASPELUND is a stub, as a toe strikes against a wardrobe in a city. Aphid Reproduction as Unpunctuated White Noise 00:00 / 01:22 . a full stop is an aphid not a comma nor an embryo an aphid is a full stop is a nymph not a womb holding a comma nor a question mark asks nothing of a slash or a backslash bulges with parentheses bears afterthought after afterthought as a full stop parthenogenetic filled with full stops without stopping without comma without pausing full stop after full stop never comma not a comma until all the space is taken with full stop upon full stop not a comma and a full stop develops wings flies off ! an exclamation mark is an aphid on the wing not a full stop not a comma nor an embryo an aphid is an exclamation mark not a womb holding a comma nor a question mark asks nothing of a slash or a backslash bulges with parentheses bears afterthought after afterthought as a full stop parthenogenetic not an exclamation mark not a comma but a full stop filled with exclamation marks filled with full stops bears exclamation marks filled with full stops until summer heat has happened and love is in the air . an aphid is a male on the wing not a full stop is an exclamation mark and an aphid is a female on the wing not a full stop is an exclamation mark gives birth to a full stop without wings mates with an exclamation mark and lays a full stop a full stop is an egg not an aphid but an egg and the egg it is dormant is a full stop not a pause not a comma nor an embryo but a full stop in the winter without wings an egg is a full stop until spring and it hatches a full stop is an aphid not a full stop Sea Wall 00:00 / 01:20 The sea is maddening, cannot be calmed. I have tried throwing life buoys, rafts, all manner of rope. Once I crushed sleeping pills and slipped them overboard, but it cried for more salt. I have to build a wall to save the sea from itself – constantly crashing, destroying castles, leaking into the land, festering in pools of its own brine. Loss of sediment and sense. I have to hold the line. Others argue about options. Option one, do nothing. Option two, rock groynes and beach recharge. Option three, fishtail rock groynes, rock revetment and beach recharge. Once a wall is in mind, it must be built. Norwegian rock is best, cut from mountains with diamond saws, never blasted. It is cut strong in strong blocks. The wall is on its way from the Larvik Quarry. The sea knows what to expect. Publishing credits Delivery to ASPELUND: Anthropocene Sea Wall: The New European Aphid Reproduction as Unpunctuated White Noise: A Map Toward Fluency (Carcanet) Share

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