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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
Oz Hardwick
Horticulture for the Transcendental Age It’s the ghost of my mother again, glow-handed, and draped in the hair she cut off before I was born. She is cradling an aspidistra, or what could, indeed, should be and aspidistra, because of course I have no idea...
McLord Selasi
Fugue at 2:17 a.m. The fridge clicks its cold heart. Outside, foxes yowl like their throats are made of gravel and old songs. This hour does not require a name. It is known by its absences: no text reply, no sleep deep enough to soften the inner stammer....
Warren Mortimer
when we moved from morecambe out of the garage dark whose door we raised with a thimble of power before the spring kicked in like how our mothers’ mothers brought light to fading eyelids with smelling salts we sniffled to the...
Jena Woodhouse
Granules in the Hourglass Syllables cascade through time, granules in an hourglass, to recombine, cohere into a word, a phrase, poetic line. Language reinvents itself, coruscates in signs on walls; falls silent, mute as clay and stone on tablets that...
Martin Rieser
…tell it slant The river is an old demon & my heart is an infirm creature The river is sure of its way & my heart is capable of lies. The river is incapable of lies & my heart is beating, beat on beat. The river flows from high to low...
Sreeja Naskar
everything i love is out to sea glass-tooth morning. salt mouth. i left the stove on just to feel wanted. the sea wrote back once— in lowercase. smudged. untranslated. i drank it anyway. // the sun fell behind me like a dog you didn’t name. didn’t...
Gordan Struić
To no one After you deleted your profile, I had no number. No email. No name to search. Just a blinking cursor where you used to reply. Still — I kept writing. Sometimes just: “Hi.” Or “Would you have answered today?” Or “I don’t know what I’m doing.” Or...
In Praise Of…: Setareh Ebrahimi reviews ‘Where the Land Forgets Itself’ by Connor Sansby
Where the Land Forgets Itself is Connor Sansby’s second full-length collection of poetry. It’s packed with strong publication credits, including 'Marine Snow', which won the 2024 Rosemary McLeish Prize. Often using experimental language and structure, Where the Land...
Margaret Poynor-Clark
Releasing My Stays Inside my bedroom I take a fresh blade pull off my jumper, examine the ladder in front of the mirror cut through my laces rung by rung, watch my grey marbled flesh emerge from its carapace, fold by fold. I'm letting go, I’m...
Deborah Nash
Mashed 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’...
Jenny Hockey
That’s when she went to ground, after she disobeyed, painted her plastic tea set red, hidden away in the playhouse they built down where bindweed draped, where people not like us lived behind the hedge, heard but not seen, that’s where she went to...
Sue Proffitt
All of it It’s thirty-four years since you let go and we were pulled on downstream, a Sunday then too. My brother texts me: remembering happy times with father. Yes, but how to separate them from the rest, and do I want to? You and I have had many...
Louella Lester on National Flash Fiction Day
Keep an Eye Out That’s what the father said before he went for a nap, but it wasn’t clear who he was actually talking to as he climbed the stairs. Well, that was stupid of him wasn’t it—leaving a teenage boy, a cat, and a pile of freshly caught...
‘Wallpaper’ by Joseph Blythe is the May 2025 Pick of the Month. Hear it read here now!
Vivid, precisely imagined, powerful ‘Wallpaper’ calls out to a troubled world, its potent imagery and raw language both striking and disturbing; and for this reason Joseph Blythe's poem is the Pick of the Month for May 2025. Joseph Blythe’s prose and poetry has been...
Nick Cooke
Tidy Me Not If when you go to the barber today He asks if you’d like him to ‘tidy up your ears’, Think of all the wildest sprawling vegetation That will never be tidied, or trimmed, by clippers or shears, But keeps on growing in the light of a...
Edward Alport
Too High to Reach The tree will not let go. High up, out of reach, on a branch, no, more a twig, a little wizened, shrunken face leers down. It clings to the tree and the tree clings back. The apple of its eye. Not a healthy embrace, then. More...
Colin Pink
Fork not the kind you eat with but useful to turn the soil root out potatoes or carrots or anything that likes to lurk beneath the earth schlupp sturdy tines slide into soil its wooden handle heats up in your hand, swopping kinetic energy...
Linda Ford
My Father Bought a Signal Box dismantled it piece by piece then sold the wood, as a job lot. He found railway station drawings a monogrammed letter opener and a gold-nibbed ink pen which contained a withered bladder with the remnants of midnight...
Ryan O’Neill
at the drop-and-go we hug and i act cool as the american fridge ice shattering on kitchen tiles lift my case from the boot practice my cold show face drain emotion like wine from the christmas market we bought crepes at dropped a claw over a...
David Thompson
I no longer prioritise, I choose who to disappoint that day I’m a cardboard loo roll with one sheet left wet grounds scraped from the coffee pot a biro tip scratching at paper in circles. Scrolling through my inbox I hold down the shift key, select all...