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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
Adam Horovitz
A Taste of Apocalypse Such stillness in the air. The attic window is a cupped ear set to alert the house to subtle shifts in atmosphere: auguries; signs; any tiny notice of cataclysmic change. All it amplifies today is a lone jay’s irritated...
Jenny Mitchell
What Part of Me? Sun demands a front row seat above the graveyard through the trees when my mother’s placed in soil, surrounded by her friends’ small talk – She must have sent the rays for us. Women in their Sunday best, men in greying suits...
M. P. Pratheesh
Gravity half winged bird, (it cannot fly) broken house, (death and dust) land left behind, (a room of dreams) half of a stone, (a wound) M.P. Pratheesh has published several collections of poetry and personal essays in Malayalam. His texts and...
L Kiew
Amphibian Land has dried its eyes, grown hard hands and interrogates each arrival: Where are you from, really from? Are you skinlight, sunhatched, from beyond the serried trees? Answer these. The borders are closing. I wear a different skin,...
David Redfield
Losing It after Yehuda Amichai If we think we are right the sun may never set; if we know we are right then beasts could take our place; if we say we are right the towers will always fall; and if, after all after all we've thought, known, said and...
Read and hear April 2024’s Pick of the Month: ‘Limbo’ by Anna Mindel Crawford
'Deft, dark, brilliantly written' This poem appealed on so many layers: A remembered experience of children’s parties, with either fondness or dismay. Childhood memories and an unsettling sense of being in limbo. A limbo that we all are unnerved by, a ‘what happens...
Helen Evans
Things I did then that I hadn’t done before Asked the neighbours if they wanted anything in my online weekly shop and Bought yeast, flour, long-life milk and 70-per-cent-alcohol hand sanitiser and Cut my own hair, even the bits round the back I...
Ilias Tsagas
https://youtu.be/1wCeTnPjtao Free A yellow patch against the cement of the yard his beautiful song the surprise visit of an escaped bird. Ilias Tsagas is a Greek poet writing in English as a second language. His poems have appeared in journals...
Noel King
The Queen of Limerick City In the photo-booth Eva gets self conscious, blinking when the flash pops. “It’s not me,” she screams out loud as the photo pops out. It isn’t; is a picture of an older woman with dark, not blond hair. Eva starts to...
George Vincent
The Boy and the Beach The boy was lost and he went to the beach on his own. He walked along the beach and he was scared of everything: of himself, of the sand and the sun and sea. He walked with his head down. As an even younger boy he came to the...
Kirsty Crawford
Quiet, Elizabeth Elizabeth is hiding in the cupboard under the sink Small enough to fold between cream cleaner and floor polish Too big to keep elbows away from wire wool Knees away from the slick puddle of the U bend Nose away from the liquitab...
Sophie Thompson
Dragons get their smoke from the poke man There are few sounds sadder than the plinky-plonk of Greensleeves from a passing ice cream van. Mickey Mouse’s face plastered on its arse, rainwater rivulets streaking down his grimy cheeks. Processing...
Katie Beswick
Acts of Repair Did you hear about the rose that grew from a crack in the concrete? (Tupac Shakur) You wouldn’t believe how quick they grew — Our babies were men now. Lifting bags of concrete they rebuilt cities, slab by slab, reinforcing cracks....
Sally St Clair
The Scorpion and the Egg I'd asked for this not to be recorded; this failure on my part, to be a good parent; this failure over the egg, my handing him a scorpion instead, my thoughtlessness. How can I explain that my mind was elsewhere? That I...
Olivier Faivre
Monkey Mathematics A monkey grabs one nut here, one nut there, and two more over there. He counts them with care. One two three four nuts —what a bounty! He rubs his belly, opens the nutshells deli- cately and eats the seeds oh-so- slowly: four...
HLR
Self-Portrait at 30 - VIII. Be reasonable I find six errors in the proofreading manual & the irony doesn’t tickle me. I am enraged by typos, poor formatting, missing commas. This is my Big Girl Job, the one I always wanted — editing books,...
Angela Howarth Martinot
Consulting the Doctor What seems to be the problem ? He asks in that slightly condescending tone. Seems, I think, Seems. It seems, I say, that I have a problem with my inner fish, or my inner fish has a problem with me. My Eustachian...
Bianca Pina
Consistency My Dad once dismissed a friend as a hypocrite, which I took to be an induction to the truth. Lately though, I think the things I love in you I love because they’re grossly inconsistent. Your signature smell is rose, your delicate petal...
Ian Badcoe
Everything We are eating dessert when the urge overcomes her to scrawl mathematics, the night ticks on —I drink my whisky, her Merlot grows warm— until, sudden-smiling, she holds out a paper: a simple equation with nothing crossed out; laid out...
Dila Toplusoy Günay
Ay Anneanne After The Moon Woman (1942) by Jackson Pollock Ay Dede is what the moon was called in the bedtime stories I was told as a child who at the time had no idea that the moon could never be anyone's grandpa, no matter what Turkish mythology...