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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
Abu Ibrahim
When young boys go missing When young boys go missing, the neighbourhood rallies a search party. We panic like a bomb’s ticking against time. Our fears, ripen to a burst, we scamper through streets, cells & prisons holding tightly to the hem...
In Praise of… Claire Dyer’s ‘The Adjustments’ by Vic Pickup
The Adjustments (Two Rivers Press, 2024) assembles a narrative from pick-pocketed moments of a life presented in backwards motion. The poems within speak of multiple losses, grief - historic and new - and yet, the reader emerges from the pages with a fullness,...
Debs Buchan
Fuel For The Fire Tish Murtha. Photographer 1956 – 2013 She never ran away or tried to escape that unholy beginning She wasn’t one to cry when she was beaten Tish was always coming home home with its broken bricks and scrap fires always the smell...
Rebecca Brown
Up She Rises Hooray and up she rises early in the morning She’s grateful to be alive with these tumours crackling in her bones Coaxes arthritic legs to take the first steps of the day There’s weight in her chest as she leans into the bin and...
Alan McGuire
Going Downtown Going downtown was pre-drinking, save money, buy confidence. Going downtown was queuing outside Walkabout, a drunken reality show. Going downtown wasn’t a release, but a rite of passage. Going downtown was therapy. Going downtown...
R.C. Thomas
The Universe Dreamed I: 16th September 2023 The Universe dreamed I'd come to its restaurant. I needed to pass the time before my train home. The restaurant bustled with galaxies intending to dine together. It felt only fair then that I give up my...
Tom Cardew
Domesticated Animals I pat its head until its face starts to flatten. Its body meets the floor, legs buckle under the weight of my enthusiasm, then groans out a kind of exhaling sound and attempts to inch itself away. ‘Don’t go,’ I tell it and...
Martin Rieser
https://youtu.be/5qhpAkGJAHY Chipko Saving the trees We came to the tree with open arms in hope, with a feel for rain, we left the forest’s endless charms and the lost words, and the new alarms for the great tree’s growing pains. We knew the wind and we...
Ryan O’Neill
Slow walk / in bits Where can we go on holidays this year,and when will we get a house if you're away for two years,and now you're crying,and it’s £4 to park for the day here,and it was dry when we started now we're soaked,and I guess this...
Jonathan Edis
The Days of Our Girls I can't look at you or make my peace with you now but you are the sun casting a shadow of me across the days of our girls Jonathan Edis is a dad, lecturer & osteopath in London. He’s in several poetry groups & a rep for...
Anna Vercambre
How many handfuls of mush today? On a good day it’s 13, on a bad day it’s more like 79. Shall we build you out of cardboard? Shall we build you out of tin cans? Maybe tin cans would be more durable. Last time the cardboard got wet. You are no less...
Welcome Sofía Masondo, our New Editing Intern
Offals The flavours of home are off-putting. Offals, glands, chitterlings; this last one, we call chinchulínes, my favourite. I always liked the name, the word’s aftertaste greasy like a swallow flying to better places leaving the ovenbird behind to build its...
Sue Johns
Old Growth His wife heeds risk from a distance. For country dwellers the strains of a chainsaw are seldom an annoyance, unless too close at hand, they affirm a place amongst birdsong. To keep an engine thrumming, to perform the perfect cleft how...
Freya Cook, Amii Griffith and The Mollusc Dimension on our fourth and final day of our Pride Feature
Love Poem to June After Paul Monette if every window filled with light it would refract ten thousand rainbows at least twelve would hit you and if i say you are beautiful in this light you would say this is your light the only one you want to be...
Aisha Odette and Carmilla for the Third Day of our Pride Feature
Aisha Odette is a poet in her twenties from Lancashire. When not working her busy job in healthcare, she can be found writing letters to long-distance friends, and reading by the sea. Aisha Odette is her nom de plume. She can be found on instagram...
Beth Davies, Fee Marshall and Fiona Broadhurst for Day 2 of our Pride Feature
Beth Davies’ debut pamphlet, The Pretence of Understanding, was published by The Poetry Business in 2023 after winning the 2022 New Poets Prize. Beth also won second place in the 2022 Magdalena Young Poets’ Prize. Her website...
Lara Mae Simpson and Siobhan Dunlop for Day 1 of our Pride Feature
How to Love the Word “Lesbian” We took the bus in tutus & fairy wings, gripped on to the cowboy hat trying to fly from your curls in July's breeze. In Trafalgar Square, floats of rainbow companies waltzed by & we rolled our eyes, couldn’t...
Paul Stephenson
The Conversation It’s been quite a while now and… You know we get on like a house… August twelfth, a year ago, can you… I bet you thank your lucky… Things have evolved, haven’t… Can you believe we’re both still… You know how in Prague when… Did...
Scott C. Holstad
Surviving Six Shooter I was sent from the Glendale jail down to the L.A. Twin Towers, the Los Angeles County Jail for those with medicinal needs. I was Bipolar and on 14 prescription meds including two strong anti-psychotics. LAC was the only...
In Praise of…: Anna Saunders Reviews ‘Blood Alluvium’ by S. Preston Duncan
‘There is that kind of heat / in some hands’, S. Preston Duncan writes in his richly lyric poem ‘You Don’t Steal from the Witch’s Garden’ – and this extraordinary poet could be speaking of his own poetry – which blazes with a rare and precious artistic fire. In...