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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

Cherry Doyle

      / on the days / blood rushes at the corner of a nail / you cannot keep your jumper off the door handle / table tackles leg / expect the bruise in two days’ time / pansies nodding in speckles of rain / dish en route from dishwasher to shelf thinks...

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Jennie E. Owen

      Then tragedy makes children of us all and in that last moment the dead shrug, shake off their boots, shuffle off jackets and shirts, watch astounded as their dresses grow and drop to their feet. Their bags, their glasses, car keys and phones...

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Martin Figura for Mental Health Awareness Week

  This poem was sparked by my own care experience and more recent indirect involvement. The poem itself does not require analysis, beyond what lay behind me writing it. Two years ago I was invited by Lemn Sissay to be part of a feature in The Observer at the...

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Julie Stevens for Mental Health Awareness Week

      You Ask Me if I’ve Had a Nice Day Are these the words you want me to say about how my day became a raging river crashing through my bones? Its giant stones thumped my body like the fall of a hammer. Does that terrify you? Have you managed a day...

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Deborah Nash

                                 Wish Cycle     Deborah Nash lives in Brighton, S.E. England. She studied visual art in Nanjing, China and Bourges, France, and now works as a freelance journalist. Her short stories appear in Litro, The Mechanic Institutes’...

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Anna Brook

      on accident (for Adrienne Rich) I want to borrow gods (as Adrienne does, though she knew better) their sad logic their templates but there’s always a tell, no? a too close accuracy not confidently misremembered studied would you be disappointed...

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Nigel King

      Coal House Fort Turn the mud. Bo Peep’s head tumbles out, wide-eyed, mouth a little open. There’s no sign of her body, her crook, her flock. Perhaps they’re deeper in the riverbed, or washed down to Tilbury by the tide. Drop her into the wooden...

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Mohsen Hosseinkhani translated by Tahereh Forsat Safai

        باز هم  دوربین ها می چرخند زمین سرگیجه می گیرد و  CNN بالا می‌آورد آمار کشته ها را این شعر را       Men are the color of soil Women are sitting on the ashes And white sheets are losing their color Because of children’s blood...

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Stephen Komarnyckyj

      It is smell that forgets us last      even if we would forget ourselves Babusyu your coffin laid on the frost             I was not there   Odourless and tasteless  you are                  as water I can never...

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Jo Farrant

      Losing it before the UFO can find a parking spot Used to be the stain inside a makeup bag, glossed on inside cheek, socked on the stairs, Auntie at the Embassy, the sink over adverts and the sinnerman, and too much, I’ll keep going: my face, not...

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Cheryl Snell

      Thoughts in the Time of Collision I am all hair, glittering with diamond-glass. A forehead streaked with blood, rubies and roses crisscrossing the tangerine flaps of a ripped collar. Ripped skin. The air is blue and then bluer and then green and...

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Douglas K Currier

      Calm before the storm Afternoon hangs in the air, and the birds leave. Frogs begin to talk to each other, and the heat congeals. The wind picks up. That sound is not the rain, rather the tall pines across the road shaking needles, trembling. The...

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Stephen Chappell

    Without a Following If you could call that friend, the special one, the one you always love and know loves you, if you could and she were not also dead, she would be the one to let you go. Even so, let go, even without her you can do this, alone, if you...

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Marius Grose

      Presence of Trees Until the dead, sucked from leaf mould graves are rising in forest sap, to make connections inside strange green brains nothing will be crossed in, nothing will be crossed out until the dead poke holes in the sky with their bones...

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