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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
Katie Beswick
Splice Asemic Triptych Asemic (adjective): using lines and symbols that look like writing, but do not have any meaning. Katie Beswick is a writer from south east London. Recent poems appear in Rattle, Dust Poetry Magazine, The Waxed Lemon and The Haibun Journal. Her...
George Sandifer-Smith
A Farmer’s Son Watches Galaxies Turn, Groes Bach Spring 1833 – mists folding their sheets in the fields. Isaac Roberts feels the turned earth, his father’s farm an island in the hurtling Milky Way – splashes of cream across the churning ocean...
Sharon Phillips
Baldwin St, mid-November Wet tarmac blinks red and gold, names shine outside the Gaumont. Stop dreaming, you’ll get lost. I trot to keep up, past the chip shop, past a big man bellowing Mind out! as he shifts a stack of crates, past Carwardine’s...
Bill Greenwell
Driving lesson Before the first turn of the key, before adjusting the mirror, before releasing the handbrake even, Dad said: there are two things you need to know. The first, he said, is double-declutching. It’s got me out of many a scrape. It...
Matt Gilbert
If you didn’t know what a storm is This thing will enter your perception with a swagger. Kick open doors, slam wood to wall, shake rooms, with the impatient knock of nature. Alive, but not exactly, as it fills the frame, flicker-lit by lightning....
Rebecca Gethin
This morning the room is bright with snowlight and everything seems illuminated differently. I have to trust the robin’s snatches of song like drips from a melting icicle, the starling’s rush of wingbeats overhead. Narcissi’s tender green shoots...
Lorraine Carey
Her Yorkshire Puddings Every Sunday he insists on beef from Boggs’s butchers, a forty minute drive away. Mother has no respite from that blasted gas oven, her apron, or the vegetable peeler. Her Yorkshire puddings disastrous, until she fakes it...
Gabriel Moreno
Hard To Say What He Did It's hard to say what he did, my father. His shoulders portaged crates, he captained boats in the night, chocolate eggs would appear which smelt of ChefChaouen. He taught me to listen out for bells and police sirens. He...
Henry Wilkinson
An Orange in the Dark I rolled an orange across daybreak; I waited for the moon to ripen. I held you close, felt your ear in my palm As I paced the candle-lit coffee table. The biscuits had gone stale again As buses crept under the open window—...
On the twelfth day of Christmas, we bring you KB Ballentine, J.S. Watts and Terry Dyson
Turn, Turn, Turn Again as wind whispers your name. Summer’s breaking down and a starker calling comes – leaves saturated with sunset before surrendering. Turn as a gray owl brushes past, baring branches groaning in midnight’s wind. Turn, turn as sun and...
On the eleventh day of Christmas, we bring you Helen Laycock, Ruth Aylett and Debbie Strange
Celebration Overnight, the dour hill has been piped; in its place, a thickly iced, shimmering slice of pink-lit diamond-cake. And now, drizzled with a jewelled tumbletrickle of sprinkles, I can hear it squealing, unable to contain its joy at this...
Debbie Strange
a new year we will meet again on the other side Debbie Strange is a chronically ill short-form poet and artist whose work has been widely published internationally. Her award-winning haiku collection, 'Random Blue Sparks', is forthcoming from...
On the tenth day of Christmas, we bring you Jenny McRobert, Angela Topping and Maria C. McCarthy
We play Candy Crush We run upstairs and trace our fingers over Ariana Grande’s face. We hold fruit sweets to the light like crown jewels, we gum-up our fingers with orange segments from the market, zesty with possibility. We play Candy Crush. In...
On the ninth day of Christmas, we bring you Caroline Smith, Bec Mackenzie and David Keyworth
Christmas Games After the lunch he gets his folder of Christmas games. Ten copies he writes out each year. The file is spilling like a drooping accordion that swings down and open as he makes his way through rooms, looking for people to play. But...
On the eighth day of Christmas, we bring you Em Gray, Abigail Ottley and Emma Simon
Weird Thank you for the knickers but I think I prefer the ones that cover my tummy and how the elastic feels round my waist. I started last summer. I was wearing my white indoor jeans and feeling kind of both tired and sparky so I lay on my bed...
On the seventh day of Christmas, we bring you Sue Burge, Erica Hesketh and Max Wallis
Once there was nothing sweeter than snow Do you remember Penguin biscuits? Their bright wrappers enveloping our first knowledge of flightlessness. What are snow angels called when there is no snow? Mud demons, grass ghosts, sand sprites. Once...
Debbie Strange
26th December in the Quiet That comes Debbie Strange is a chronically ill short-form poet and artist whose work has been widely published internationally. Her award-winning haiku collection, 'Random Blue Sparks', is forthcoming from Snapshot...
On the sixth day of Christmas, we bring you Amy Rafferty, Tim Kiely and D.A.Prince
Eighteen Years of Advents Gone Because My Father is Now a Crow We pick up where you left off, searching still, choosing random cards from a dealer’s deck: twenty-one crows in a night-time tree, deep within the dark, with all that chatter all that...
Christmas & New Year’s Message from IS&T
Once again at the end of another year, we cannot acknowledge Christmas without looking to that part of the world where it all began. All we can do is hope that the genocide in and decimations of Gaza will stop, the illegal incursions into the West Bank end, the...
On the fifth day of Christmas, we bring you Paul McGrane, Kevin Reid and Helen Evans
Spreading the word As regular as Santa Claus, she’d call around at Christmas, the next-door neighbour and my Sunday school teacher, Mrs Williams. My mother sent me searching for the matching cup and saucer, television off for the only time that...