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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
John Tustin
The Balance Now is not the time for Grandiloquence. Now is not the time To gorge on suppositions, Weigh alleged propositions Or become trapped in the miasma Of the imaginary. No. Now is the time To ascertain How much time alone is too much And how...
Alwyn Marriage
The frogβs princess Iβll start my story with the sad prologue of my ball sinking in the palace lake and being rescued by a talking frog. I thought I was dreaming, though I was awake, when he offered to retrieve my precious ball: a speedy dive is...
VOTE. VOTE. VOTE. Choose your Pick of the Month for July 2022
Holidays mean that our Pick of the Month Vote for July arrives slightly later than usual. But the quality of the poems have not suffered in the heat and are as moving, as evocative and as fierce as they always are. And these works are all, almost without exception,...
Josie Moon
Frost Moon The frost moon, herald of winter rises over sea, slack before it heaves and turns true north, back to Arctic. On this shore I give it a fistful of sand, ask that I will hold fast, as fragments of crab, razor clam and glass sift between...
Yuanbing Zhang translates Yuan Hongri
Another Me From The Heavens If blue is namely white and black is namely red and gold is transparent as crystal and light makes the soul smile forgetting the sun moon and stars and you were filled with wisdom, drunk for thousands of years and back...
Frank Dullaghan
Giraffes Itβs the way the dark between stars is filled with light that may never reach us. Itβs the way our local Running Man is accompanied by his imaginary friend who keeps up a lively conversation. Itβs the way my one-year-old grandson looks at...
Gemma Harland
DΓ©jΓ Vu Once more I'm caught on the sly hook of your voice and hauled out gasping into a toxic world. Lifetimes billow and vanish like haunted clouds: I race through the woods, but your word-arrows find me; I soar overhead, you shoot me...
Harlan Yarbrough
An Orphanβs Progress Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Β Geoffroy, no longer young and a man of importance, could have ridden in a luxurious coach.Β He chose to walk, because he enjoyed walking.Β If Zarafa was going to walk he would walk with her.Β No strolling,...
Hassan Melehy
Doctrinal Shuffle In the nakedness of civic planning a few secular aims overwhelm whatever any god could have deemed the key components of human subsistenceβ none of us knew what was coming next, not being privy to the lofty paper-pushing that...
Neil Fulwood
PHEW! WHAT A SCORCHER Headlines regurgitate last yearβs βhottest since wheneverβ claims, two-page spreads bulked out with photos of lolly-guzzling toddlers, sun-worshippers already reddened and some TikTok wannabe in a string bikini. Meanwhile,...
Anne Bailey
One side of a conversation over breakfast The flowers, no they were petals, were suspended over my head. I think they were singing a quiet song to themselves. They were white, each one in its own space. They were stationary but fluttering. I was...
Carla Scarano DβAntonio
Imaginarium βI am a smiling womanβ Sylvia Plath, Lady Lazarus And it came to me that stones, trees and water live in a circle trace their souls stain the landscape, itβs a luxury you can lead your life without choosing and yet determined to leave...
Bryan Marshall
Some Crows So little happens that I tell you everything twice. The crow, I swear, followed my eye behind the door, knew to leave me something delicate and silver. Another crow, a different one, I swear, took up with its beak some chant or other,...
Gareth Writer-Davies
Purblind & Font in the odds βnβ ends drawer one might find what one is looking for amongst the biros and string purblind spectacles you might find anything half-remembered by the mindβs claw lemon rind what the hell was that for? there must...
Jonathan Edis
Jonathan Edis is a full-time dad, international lecturer & osteopath from Essex, living in south London. Heβs in several poetry groups & is a rep for Forest Hill Stanza. This is his first published poem for ages.
Chris Kinsey
Walking the Ring Road A sprig of hawthorn brushes away gritty city miles β back to gran banishing me and may blossom from the house β Smell of death. Smell of death. Iβm running back to the trees clouding the field edge, burrowing up from the...
Peter Kenny
One hundred geraniums  No steampunk engine, no onyx dashboard, no timepiece whirring as the world unwinds⦠I ride a dry leaf to travel in time. Citrusy astringency in my palm hot-wires one hundred dead geraniums in my hippocampi, to blaze again...
Sue Finch
Clambake I had not heard of it the night its title was spelt out in tiles on the oujia board. The question lingered on the air like smoke from a blown-out candle, Is there anyone there? Β My thighs clenched, dreading a reply. A pause then before...
Robin Lindsay Wilson
Postcard he squealed around bends drinking until he sideswiped the Castle Douglas sign his golf umbrella was a shield between gift shops and departure but it hooked at strange faces and hurt his arthritic hand he almost bought a travel-rug and...
Lisa Oliver
Unsaid We sit inΒ the glare of the morning sun A mug of tea in our respective hands I perch at your side all pyjamas and messy hair I am 5 years old again but you are the one propped against pillows From the bed we can see the woods we walked and I...