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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
Zakia Carpenter-Hall
Human Ecologies It had been such a long time... I was surprised by how gently my mother made my hair, asking if she should split the rows, my locs beginning to intertwine. She gently, as if using a miniature rake of a Japanese garden...
Hallie Oakwood
When You Must Stop a Wedding His phone pings; the morning sun glares. Kyle staggers to the bathroom mirror amidst empty bottles for inducing oblivion. Red-eyed and dishevelled, with stubble masking gray complexion and black hair in matted clumps;...
H.J. Thomas
Black Cherry Ice Cream We ate it leaning against the rail above the harbour - black cherry, melting down the cone faster than we could catch it. And you laughed, mouth red, sunlight flaring in your lashes. I watched the boats move below us - slow...
DS Maolalai
Thunderstorms. Fireworks. I'm in the spare bedroom/office. Chrysty’s in a rotten bad mood. she walks the apartment like a donkey stable. kicks holes out of drywall and violently washes up plates. she's told me get out and I've gotten, that's fine....
Stephen Keeler
How to get here Among the joys of love was when we got our first apartment on a boulevard above the trams and tree-tops and the wires that cut the street like tangram puzzles and our friends would come with olives and cheap wine they found the...
Nina Nazir
Forecast biro, gel pen & found text on paper, 2026 A city melts in the middle. A man hurries toward a changed world. People move to be near the future. A woman glimpses herself in the robes of a vision Nina Nazir is a British...
Khairina Anindya, Genevieve Beech
Khair At the feet of al-Ka‘ba you asked for a daughter. You named me Khair – Blessing. I answered inside you forcing myself into your ribs remaking you in the emptiness of your lungs. in the space he made— his shoes left in the...
Marion McCready, Vic Brooks
Bay Laurel My last will and testament is to be buried under the bay tree flourishing in my back garden. Standing there, year after year, like a planted woman taken from again and again. One day, her leaves will no longer replenish. But for now she...
Linda McKenna
Smashing Narcissus We set about him with rifle butts and spades, waiting our turn alongside our enemies, the same sunburnt flesh, the same blistered feet. Met where our camps, the same badly pitched shelters, the same lack of meat, converged. Laboured...
Abigail Ottley
She remembers the house of her husband He’s not, as they said he is: loathsome, most monstrous. He has a strange and sinister beauty. His eyes are obsidian, shot through with gold, a ruby burning in each. A noble brow, and magnificent cheekbones. You can...
Frank Phelan
Renegade Voices I am most visceral when being disarmed by a song, a lyric written and sung… in the broad New Yawk vowels of Dean Friedman. The scowl of Dylan. The scat and growl of George Ivan. Matthew Devereux's demonic staccato. Pierce Turner...
Joseph Marcel Ikhenoba on Father’s Day
The Last Key My father died with all his keys still on the ring. House key. Padlock key. The tiny brass one for the old suitcase he never opened. Office key for a job he left in 2002. A car key for a Toyota that rusted behind the house. I...
Katherine Duffy
Wake (Leaving Amorgos, Greece) The ferry pushes the sea, forces a long, white reply that speaks of where we’ve been - a hulk of rock, a prison in the time of the Colonels, now a place of painted chairs, fairy lights. I lean over, try to read the...
Audrey Cotterell
A November anniversary In a corner chapel of the abbey I lit a small candle, and sent the flame as a message only half composed to somewhere I hardly believed in. Room is restricted on the ferry: six cars, a few pedestrians and dogs, all of us...
Dylan Foster
Sabbatical there's not much you can do when the planets are telling you to stop and gravity, who only wants the best from us, says get down to the ground, that you are wanted, and so you obey, become as asphalt or fertiliser. you press yourself...
Sairah Ashan Reviews ‘Unsafe’ by Karen McCarthy Woolf
When Karen McCarthy Woolf begins Unsafe with an epigraph from Romantic poet John Clare, the son of a farmer who witnessed the rights to the countryside transfer from common people to private landowners, we are promised a grapple with the...
Jeff Skinner
Hamlet in the Scanner Can’t hear yourself think only the bass line of a heart thumping. Your head’s clamped. You can’t move. A panic button slicks a palm, a soft wet plum. You could be bounded in a nutshell and count yourself a king of infinite...
Chalice Am Bergris
The Insanity Ensemble It is not like an egg cracking or an exquisite shiver of shattered glass. It is not a supercelery bone snap or a wired ballerina bend. A cortisol swoosh floods your certainty a prefrontal cortex throb threatens thunder. A...
Piers Haben
High-Visibility The precondition for being a ghost is not only death but faith in an afterlife. Kit Fan. When I lost loved ones last year I thought my childhood fears would return. Sleeping in mum’s house waiting for the seen and felt, the...
‘Patterned with cows’ by Jackson is IS&T’s May 2026 Pick of the Month. Read and hear it here!
The mixture of love, longing, nostalgia and its undercurrent of exasperation perfectly sums up the emotions involved in dealing with the loss and attendant tasks and duties when our parents die. Losing a parent can be an overwhelming and complex process. The initial...