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The archive is a separate site formed from all the posts from that original Ink Sweat & Tears website, it consists of everything we have published up to the end of 2019.
Recent posts
Martin Yates
Martyr We’d starve sooner than eat with you, or drink; we’d vomit up, spit out, the bribes you bring and will not slake our thirst or break this fast. The stars, more sensitive than us, will blink; we strain our foolish ears to hear them sing,...
Mirkka Jokelainen
out for a walk first come the trees their frames different in every season today the blinding brightness of new green cutting through the grim skies then come the houses and their doors a purple one a turquoise among the...
Zoë Sîobhan Howarth-Lowe
Sea Bed I cannot sleep. Tonight, the invisible crabs are pinching my nightdress, pouring sand into the folds of the cloth. I can not sleep, they say tonight, there are too many fish in the ocean. They are insisting, clicking and pinching,...
Carol J Forrester
When I Find You In Tesco, Around Half Eleven Tuesday Morning In the canned food section reaching for tinned beans, basket hung from one hand, the other splayed open stretched to the shelf. All of you lifting upwards, feet coming off the acrylic...
Lucy Cage
It’s Not The End I’m Frightened Of But The Unravelling My cat wobbles from mat to bowl to bed, a wonky sashay from which there’s no recovery. She’s past sunlit sprawls, there’s just skulking, sleeping, the disconsolate matting of fur. Anxieties...
Revisiting Runaways London
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSG5IkAWgFs&t=8s Since 21st October of last year when we launched Runaways London, the project has gone from strength to strength. In late March, poets Gboyega Odubanjo and Abena Essah were part of a Lloyds of London...
Cara L McKee
Sometimes I Radiate Sometimes I radiate, clouds form in my hair and you breathe from me. I am beech and birch, I am oak ash scrubland, I am waking up. Since I’ve been planted here I’ve been keen to remind you that I come from elsewhere. I don’t...
Paul Stephenson
Self-Portrait as Grammar Revision Some of my dogs are rich. I hurry not to buy such expensive cars. The dentist jumps highest and my friends can bark loudly. Today I feel like toothache. For my birthday I would like that tree. I shall come to your...
The IS&T April 2022 Pick of the Month
VOTING HAS NOW CLOSED: APRIL'S PICK WILL BE ANNOUNCED IN THE NEXT FEW DAYS. Every poet has their own heaven and their own hell; sometimes they are the same. Whose poem, then, will you choose for the IS&T April 2022 Pick of the Month? Will it be the tension...
Karan Chambers
Stripping the Carcass Stripping meat from the leftover chicken turns my stomach – separating sagging skin from gristle; detaching spinal column from shrivelled vertebrae and bleach-white bone. But I was taught by my mother not to be wasteful, as...
Steve Perfect
Two close voices 1 If I remember when the full moon rose while sunlight still warmed the evening’s outline from below I don’t picture you in the scene but understand that you were everywhere each closing bud each bird settling to roost each...
Salil Chaturvedi
Parched sparrow Does it ever happen to you? A sparrow appears in your dreams Beak open, mouth parched Waterless desperation in its eyes Night after night of a parched sparrow You wake up one morning with nothing on your mind except the memory of some dry...
Zoom Live From the Butchery Reading with Dzifa Benson, Hannah Jane Walker and The Repeat Beat Poet
Please join us on zoom for live readings from Dzifa Benson, Hannah Jane Walker and the new IS&T editing intern The Repeat Beat Poet. This is part of our monthly award-winning ‘Live from the Butchery’ series, hosted by Helen Ivory and Martin Figura from their...
Jacob Mckibbin
Noticeable The greatest quality of the only person who has ever noticed me is that they think that I’m noticeable. In school everything that made me noticeable made me a target: the birthmark on my face that everyone in my class gave a different...
Kate Rigby
You’ve got a pop belly, mama. Like when you had that baby. It’s a pot belly, she said. And there was no baby. I thought it was pop, because babies just pop out. She didn’t say any more, though when I was very little she said I popped out like a...
J V Birch
J V Birch lives in Adelaide. Her poems have been anthologised, exhibited and published in Australia, the UK, Canada and the US. She has three chapbooks with Ginninderra Press and a full-length collection, more than here.
Peter Daniels
The Key of Dreams That’s not René Magritte with his apple on his hat not holding a pipe. While he’s not there, he’s been dispensing French words chalked in a clear cursive hand, because words make good pictures. He’s no fool and in his sober...
Susanne Lansman
People in glass houses A woman couldn’t make up her mind what character she wanted to be in her story. One moment she wanted to be kind and good the next she wanted to be distant and thoughtless unable to see or hear anything clearly. If she...
Cliff Yates
Science Remember, Sir, when I blocked the sink with paper towels and turned on the tap and you noticed only when it poured over the side and splashed on the floor and you swore, ran over, pulled up your sleeve and plunged in your arm up to the...
Alex Josephy
For a Journey to the Forest in Time of Snow Purse, dirk, night-cap, kerchief, shoeing-horn, buget, and shoes; Spear, nails, hood, halter, sadle-cloth, spurs, hat, withy horse-comb; Bow, arrow, sword, buckler, horn, brush, gloves, string, and thy...