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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
Michael Bloor
Fell at the First Fence Liam limped listlessly into the lift. It was empty. He pressed the button for the seventh floor (Safetyseal Export Sales). There was the usual hiatus, while the mechanism seemed to consider his request. Liam weighed LIFE in...
Shelley Roche-Jacques
Removing the Bouquet The Station Team staff room is just behind Lost Property. There’s a doorway, without a door, connecting the two. If someone rings the bell at Lost Property reception when you’re on a tea break you have to make a judgement call...
Neil Fulwood
Greetings and Salutations “I’ll know that civilisation has completely collapsed when bus drivers stop waving to each other.” - Joanne Limburg Idle thoughts of a bus driver number something-or-other in a series of the infinite: what if the beaky...
Steve Griffiths
New craft I'm taking delivery of a house that flies. Wish us well, and hope it will respond to our touch. The tyres hum on the tarmac, then no longer as all the senses lift. Pull back the stick. The passing light sets you to navigate. Looking down...
Sarah Davies
E47 I like that morning is a verb - everything doing and being, hiving at the tangled docking stations of perhaps- a hypothetical, taglog Tense, like channelling the multitasking buzzibees, North Circular - overloading zero hours, burned-out...
Michael Estabrook
Glass For obvious reasons the first rule in any art gallery or museum is don’t touch the art even if the works seem to be behind glass Is that really glass he asks the guard we’ve never seen that before and we’ve been to the Louvre in Paris and...
Sekhar Banerjee
Goethals Football field, Kurseong I watch a lonesome Tibetan horse grazing on the Goethals football field ; solitary clouds chew sadness all morning here, as if, it is their staple food at breakfast The starving fog licks the whole body of the...
Niall M Oliver
The Unholy Spirit If Jesus was the type to enjoy a drink, then the porcelain version pinned at our front door would surely be happier than he looks Beneath his feet, a round finger bowl, eternally brimming with holy water. Never a dry-dip in this...
Word & Image from Jane Salmons
Black Coffee and Cigarettes Close to the leaf a black raven In nature what would happen normally is that dogs chase cats Of course the zebra looks to the sky They were naming them after household objects: the telephone, the aspidistra, the cuckoo clock They...
Vote for your August 2020 Pick of the Month
It's Pick of the Month time and the shortlist for August 2020 has a definite family feel about it. Are you drawn to either John Grey or Sam Hickford as they try to make connections in 'To a Father I Never Knew' and 'Familiar Tissue', or appreciate, and identify with,...
Claire Aster
Red wine fruit flies You came for the pear molasses on my kitchen shelf three tummies full of fruity goodness recklessly rolling around in this deep lagoon without any thought of how you might get out. Claire Aster has always been a...
David Belcher
Ask to know your people better When my father goes to Edinburgh, the hilly streets and crowds of tourists make him grouchy. This is his mother’s country. She is not there, he cannot touch the things she touched but he sees and hears what made the...
Robert Hirschfield
Cheating At Cards She slaps down her three shadows on the table and runs off with my shadow. Robert Hirschfield's poems have appeared in Salamander, Grasslimb, Noon (Japan), The Moth (Ireland), Pamplemousse and other magazines. More...
Sophie Herxheimer and Rishi Dastidar
Join us for a live zoom reading from Sophie Herxheimer and Rishi Dastidar with Support from Kevin Reid in our new occasional 'Live from the Butchery' series, hosted by Helen Ivory and Martin Figura from their home. The reading will take place on Sunday...
Ilhem Issaoui
My unromantic poem for this unromantic time as the world is asleep like a spiral shell or like the maddening stairs It takes time and effort to unfurl It happens naturally though, for most, Through nature's imperative Once we are old, though, we...
Thomas Day
Last Act It felt like the finale: the magic cloak skit bunglingly executed, given the ultimate twist, the audience killing themselves laughing – the master of mistiming surpasses himself. But it lingered on a shade too long: the gurn, the...
Daniel Richardson
Clocking on at the Sawmill After a successful breakfast of flapjacks and black coffee the Buddhist clocking on at the sawmill 250,000 board feet to cut and trim the moon still bright in the sky the sun rising wearing his big red shirt and his...
Z. D. Dicks
Distress call A red tractor hovers over its white rims scalping around small splinted trees and I suppress a sneeze at the green over rust fence as the beast grumbles Under amber pulse flashes in glass skull neon skinned a...
Deborah Harvey reviews ‘Two Girls and a Beehive : Poems about the art and lives of Stanley Spencer and Hilda Carline Spencer’ Rosie Jackson and Graham Burchell
I confess to having a personal interest in the art and the life of Stanley Spencer that is entirely fanciful, born of the fact that he and my grandmother, Hilda, both worked in war hospitals in Bristol during the first world war. ‘They could have met,’ I...
Erika Kamlert
Your other name The river, fat and glistening green, slithers through the city through the church yard, covered in windflowers Their petal confetti tore up winter so that spring arrived empty and unwritten with a naked, confessing light Only oval...