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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
Sarah Crowe
mary anning, fossil hunter she wore her dead sister’s name as a cloak to ward off the sea’s icy wrath trawled stony beaches sought curiosities with cut calloused hands chiselled and hammered jurassic rocks to display ammon’s horns, snakestones,...
Topher Allen
The Gods Are Addicts It’s better to be cremated, the only way to heaven is as smoke. Burials are the devil’s idea to harvest bones, to set them ablaze and raise hell. Volcanic eruptions are his failed attempts to ascend. Kerosene-lamps know this,...
Andrea Holland
How Young Bodies Work Grace…in that light was a promise of balance – Joy Harjo O timeline drop us here the moment you step from the subway on 23rd the boy spinning on his back / popping air O body sharpening skin into spin solo show staged on asphalt...
Clare M Coombe
In love with You played Kylie Minogue and Lady Gaga on vinyl, because it was on trend again, and not just for our dads, and we thought it was cool to know all the words to Judas, because we’d studied theology and we had PhDs. And we danced...
Mandy Macdonald
emerald earrings misfortune from nowhere stooped like a peregrine folded, weaponized slicing away before from after as clean as cutting butter or severing heads half the house is collapsed open to the weather defenceless, astounded the other half...
Susan Castillo Street reviews ‘Swimming to Albania’ by Sue Hubbard
On reading Sue Hubbard’s collection Swimming to Albania, the concept that comes to mind is saudade. A. F. G. Bell writes in his study In Portugal, published in 1912:‘The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that...
Maria C. McCarthy
I whipped the clothes off her my mother’s retelling of the quick thinking that saved my skin. I remember reaching for the handle over-edging the table, tipping, scalding, Mum’s hands pulling dress, vest, knickers, stripping fabric before it fused...
Mark Carson
Möbius Strip reducing her life to seventeen bullet points was simpler far than she’d somehow imagined and she had them graven in cursive script on a one-sided strip of her native silver given a twist by a cunning smith hammer-welded so the text is...
Alex Faulkner
Animals Lit by Neon yellow pours down like rain. yellow pours down in sheets. I know they’re out there. I know you’re out there. down here it’s warm we gape through grilles spilling yellow into quivering stripes. dark driven auto vehicle bodies...
Remembering Grant Tarbard
Poem for Grant my body is no place to be stuck in (Grant Tarbard: A Rosary of Ghosts) Each time you went away, you brought back news – how it was to look down at yourself – perfect accounts of the soul’s own grief. When you left for the last time your body was...
Finola Scott
One thousand cranes I want to learn how it feels to give birth in a tunnel in my home city to hear shelling through the night I want to draw straight lines not diagrams of molotov cocktails tourniquets or AK42 rifles or posters pleading for help I...
Mandy Beattie
Mandy Beattie’s poetry’s been published in: Poets Republic, Wordpeace, Dreich, Wee Dreich, The Haar, Purple Hermit, Wordgathering, Clearance Collection, Spilling Cocoa with Martin Amis, Marble Poetry, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Lothlorien Poetry & Book Week...
Phil Wood
Birthday Boyo No sunshine, but plenty of coal to cosy up our terrace. Gran smothers extra toast with raspberry jam, and I'm drawing Caerphilly castle. I climbed that spiral stair today to the office. I was grassed up. Dapper Jones made me empty my...
Debi Lewis
The Gap The space between unrelated things like our ears and the top of the humorous as a measure of strength a simple gap of air that stops a wheel rolling back on top of you the wider ...
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...