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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
Jonah Corren
Unravelling Fields like tapestry Fields like patchwork quilt Fields like ripples over water Fields like sunspots on lens Fields floating clouds shifting with wind shapes always changing an old stone wall diced onion in a frying pan ...
Gail McConnell on Father’s Day
Untitled / Villanelle I have often longed to see my mother in the doorway.’- Grace Paley Because having a father made me want a father. - Sandra Newman I have often longed to see my mother tap-dance in a top hat like she did before he died –...
Claire Booker reviews ‘John Dust’: poems by Louise Warren, ink drawings by John Duffin
Poetry comes from a deeply personal inner landscape. But what happens when external geographies bring their own emotional and social clout to the party? Enter John Dust – the riveting personification of Louise Warren’s native Somerset. Dust feels...
Izzy Lamb
Void It was before dawn when I saw him hurtle behind an asteroid illuminating my telescope with the flash of a cheap bathroom bulb too hot and burst under stress. And you can flip the switch but the cosmos told him to hide so he’ll nick himself...
David Olsen
Blue Light A pain in my leg wakes me at 4. I stand to stretch out the cramp. Blue light pulses on the ceiling. I part the drapes. Across the street an ambulance ticks. In a pool of light from a street lamp, an old man is trundled out, an oxygen...
Mark A. Murphy
If You / Then We If you are leaving Mohr and Mohme for Brighton then we are iron and steam and if you are walking alone at night then we are moon and Dog Star and if you are suffering with first-night nerves then we are Hamlet and Ophelia and if...
Mary Ford Neal is the IS&T Pick of the Month poet for May 2020
One of our voters when asked 'Tell us why this gets your vote' after selecting Mary Ford Neal's poem simply replied 'Jane' and that really sums up this poem of the same name being chosen as May 2020's Pick of the Month. We all know Janes; we might be a little in awe...
Julian Brasington
Home to the Hebrides Where are you running to what are you looking for rooting in other people’s abandonments scraping time off the earth into spoil for stone some sign of burning a flicker of bone someone’s life to ponder their gut to digest...
Joseph Cooper
medusa the narcissist self-preservation is really something ongoing and terminal they loved taxes they loved death certain things create an emotional reaction self-contemplation is coldly detached apparently the inevitable end of introspection led...
#GreenforGrenfell
Finola Scott
Tell me again in this ragged midnight that intimacy will endure waters aren't rising and tomorrow the fritillary butterfly will graze my garden tell me that passion is not merely nocturnal but a tsunami of connection no stormy tea-cup but the...
Word & Image by Helen Pletts and Romit Berger
shopdown blue-harbour azure-surety a single box of old cotswold legbar sterile jewels in the fragile heart of the fluttering-gloved hands and butterfly-face masks Helen Pletts (www.helenpletts.com) (Instagram @helen.pletts) Working...
Gary Jude
Birds Everyone held a bird, except you. A policeman eyed you suspiciously. You followed the crowd into the square. When the clock struck noon, everyone lifted their bird aloft. Some snapped necks and wings, or let their bird fly. A wife watched...
Fiona Theokritoff
Smickling I am as useless as a coronet, have lost a shoal of bloodied runts. Who shall assist me? Perhaps a ripe and red-faced peasant with more brats than she can raise. I need her shoes, I need a charm to stick what quickens to its cage. Perhaps...
Mark Valentine
The Road to Chalvington at Dusk Cast out from Eden he journeyed along the roads of dog-rose in the cloaky overcoat of good tweed and lit a cigarette cupped against the wind so that his fingers glowed and took that first best draught of it and...
Time Once More to Vote for the IS&T Pick of the Month. What Will it be for May?
The uncertainty, confusion and yearning that we are feeling because of the Covid-19 pandemic, has been joined by anger, frustration and devastation experienced in response to the killing of George Floyd at the end of May. And the poems on our May #PickoftheMonth...
Alan Dunnett
Descent Into Hades In order to discover what took place, I eventually made a descent by slow ratcheting, hard and easy, caught at last by the moment despite warnings and my own considerations. Your face appears before me and your will, unbent at...
Padrika Tarrant on National Flash Fiction day
An Escape In the back room’s desiccated atmosphere, the spiders stole one another’s shoes and sang their clever songs with their elbows folded. The shelf of hats stood to stiff attention, three coal black and a female in splendid blue that came...
Abigail Ardelle Zammit
Her Future Husband Appears to Her in the Shape of a Hawk after Victoria Brookland She never knows by which door he enters, but suddenly he is inside her. Her red underdress of hoops and holes stands stiff as a lightning pole. In her ribs, the...
Tom Kelly
No Easy Answer Raymond Chandler’s having a drink in his LA apartment. Light borrowed from an Edward Hopper painting; near-harsh reading lamp beacons on his desk where a trilby makes a salute to half-eaten shadows. Sitting on a stiff-backed chair...