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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...
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...
Max Wallis on ‘The Aftershock Review’ for Mental Health Awareness Week
What Happens After the Aftershock? In February 2024, I took an Uber to a bridge in London. I was planning to die. Instead, I got out and walked to St Paul’s, where I was detained and sectioned. I remember the shame. The dizziness. I remember thinking I’d...
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...
by Elena Chamberlain is the April 2025 Pick of the Month. Read and hear it here!
Queer positivity It was so moving! I feel a bit numb upon finishing it. Sometimes a poem just captures a moment. Elena Chamberlain’s was originally published just over a week before the Supreme Court ruling that the legal definition of a woman is based on biological...
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...
Fianna Russell Dodwell for Mental Health Awareness Week
We understand that some of you are having difficulty seeing the image properly. Try right clicking and saving it or opening in a new tab. Commentary: This poem is different from my usual visual work, which has several constellations or voices, and...
William Manning for Mental Health Awareness Week
Living Flashback My room is infested with bedbugs I'm covered in bites, not love bites I have to spend the night on the low secure unit That I've only just been discharged from. The paranoid nurse who signs me in thinks I've been tricked And that...
Stephanie Aspin on ‘Why Words Help’ for Mental Health Awareness Week
Why Words Help Let’s accept then (whether you accept this premise or not) that all psychological well-being rests on our capacity to assemble a narrative that situates our experiences within a landscape that makes sense. When our lives begin as disparate...
Nicole Carter for Mental Health Awareness Week
https://youtu.be/vn9SqQmJfqg Tell People Why They Should Care Often, I feel a deep, deep sadness inside; frustration, anger converted into depression for the way the World is, (and always will be?) Trust, broken. Rape, war, poverty, Climate Change,...
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’...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...