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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
Sim Pereira-Madder
The Rules of Spacetime in Dimensions Above Three Tom Giles once asked me if I had tools and at that time I didn’t because I was fifteen maybe sixteen but he was Adam’s big brother with a new flat so he was old and he knew things. He told us we...
Molly Knox
Molly Knox is an MA Music study at Durham University. She is a poet and theatre-maker. Some of their recent work can be read in Magma, The Braag, The Gentian, and Stone of Madness.
Ervin Brown for Day three of our Invisible and Visible Disabilities feature and for the last day of Autism Acceptance month
Surfing Light If the third grade taught any ideology, it’s that fighting back is futile. A boy, curiously named Majestic, had just finished shrieking in my ear, removing the grasp on my face from his sticky fingers. The noise bellowed like a saw to my...
Pascal Vine and – – – ajae – – – for our Invisible and Visible Disabilities Feature
Play Dead Chronic fuck slug Chronic floor sleeping Chronic fist seething Chronic food swallowing Chronic feuding skin Chronic foreseen surrender Chronic failure synonym Chronic sel(f)-inlictednes(s) Chronic found inner-piece(s) Chronic...
Ellie Spirrett and Erin Coppin for our invisible and visible disabilities feature
How Much For This? Your body hangs like a dartboard. Clothes snake the slippery floor ready to bite. A curtain holds you back imperfectly as a Tetris block. This is the first time you have been out in three weeks. Today sits like a joker between...
Will Snelling
New Year Fog The garden shudders, brushed with ice, its edges slightly blurred away by cloud unfolding over the grass. The sun just doesn’t want to try to bring the day into the world, preferring to hold its watery eye half-way closed above the...
Jonathan Croose
CW: Car accident and loss of life. Death Knock. A fen road took them, sometime in the early hours, when the mist hung over the muddy dykes and the reeds sighed with grief and the handsaw lifted, on solemn beats of its grey and shrouded wings. They left...
Gordon Scapens
ELECTED For safe keeping they split the truth into manageable pieces. They hid some between silence and promise, let it grow to myth. Hid some between action and contrived headline changing its shape. Hid some between hearing and interpretation,...
Gary Jude
The Blue Whale (Natural History Museum, London) The mandibles look like the tusks of some gigantic bull elephant bagged by hunters posing for a photograph in pith helmets next to a tent and a wind up phonograph. I reckon the Titanic’s...
David Keyworth
Keep Going Aldgate had its usual smell of dirty metal and coffee. I jumped from platform to carriage. I squeezed beside a Tate Britain poster, clutched the grab-handle. When I chanced a glance, I saw I was the only one standing. Everyone else was...
Winifred Mok, Sandra Noel, Özge Lena and Alannah Taylor for Earth Day
mercury rising we groan as the mercury hikes climbing with the ball of fire the Hot Weather Warning surrenders its flag feels like 40 and it’s only May Day we survive in gasps between air-conditioned bubbles like goldfish the elderly populate...
Csilla Toldy for Earth Day
https://youtu.be/fEf33VW1W_I My head is the earth My head is the earth, my skin the air dusk is my hair. I am the earth - I open myself and make love with the sky. On my horizon we touch and eternity cascades on me with the night/light. Axis Mundi...
Cal O’Reilly
Portbou After Mary Jean Chan Reminded of my body by the climb I feel the sun, its love and anger, a baked red brick rubbed on the back of my calves. Hiking in a binder was a shit idea, My lungs reach to surface, come short. There’s a sweat mirage...
‘A Bad Spell’ by Lynn Valentine is the IS&T Pick of the Month for March. Read it! Listen to it!
This poem is pure enchantment. The captivating vocabulary intensely immersive imagery had the hairs on the back of my neck prickled from the outset. Voters loved the imagery, the descriptive power of this poem. They found it evocative, eerie, heart-wrenching. And for...
Lucy Dixcart
It Starts Before Birth Your tadpole-self, displayed to strangers for a thumbs-up. Then childhood illnesses, faithfully documented. Late-night rows, embalmed in messaging apps. Missteps preserved for future employers. Lost loves, transfigured into...
Charlotte Holm
Little Kit Precious leveret gently slumber in your nest of brushed red velvet Charlotte Holm is a textile artist living in East Yorkshire. She recently started writing poetry and is excited about combining this with her love of textiles to create...
Cheltenham Poetry Festival Feature
Keen to develop your writing and stagecraft? Ink Sweat & Tears asks three top poets to share some tips by Tim Relf Finding time to write is a big hurdle for most people, says Holly Winter-Hughes. 'I used to have a romantic notion that my best material had...
Anna Mindel Crawford
Limbo We have our eyes on the chairs, ready for when the music stops. Nobody wants to be in the space where a seat had been before. The limbo stick goes lower again. Those left in, contort their spines to hover in the gap, avoid collapse. I cover...
Sue Proffitt
Sue Proffitt lives by the coast in South Devon, UK. She has an M.A. in Creative Writing and has been published in a number of magazines, anthologies and competitions. She has two poetry collections published: Open After Dark (Oversteps, 2017) and The Lock-Picker...
Daniel Rye
Fuglafjørður I This curved town exhales fishy breath gusted in tons from berthed trawlers gashing the quay the north hauled to land groceries shopped into cars with studded tyres grinding their knuckles home lit by Christmas lights rigging a...