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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
Anna Bowles
Akademichna Street is bombed-out flats, is the hot-pink Sweet Bakery Café, is straggly new-planted trees, is infantry quaffing cappuccino, is the community hub spilling ragged donations, is fuchsia velvet armchairs, is the balcony with the...
Michiya
Through Both The second time something slips from his hand, he does not move right away. He studies the distance between intention and consequence. It looks smaller than it behaves. A nurse passes the doorway without stopping. There is no urgency...
Philip Athans
Neveralways —him— Never shows up late to a single thing he’s invited to Always brings the most thoughtful and carefully curated and perfect gift Never shows up early and never once overstays his welcome Always appears well groomed and clean and...
Michelle Diaz
The Fallen Angel This is just a woman, sticking her life back together after years spent recovering. But the sky blackens, everything grows dark and minor. Unasked for, he appears again. What instruments does the demon use? Metal spoons on...
Rona Luo
inefficient use of resources Respect Is Rainful Rona Luo is a queer, neurodivergent poet and acupuncturist. Her visual poetry has been exhibited at the Southbank Centre, and her writing has appeared in Magma, Propel, fourteen poems, The...
Autumn Richardson
Hive What you are – bodied light, a store of oil a hive of warm blood chemicals flooding a brain, calculating a furnace filament of awareness in a palpating dark a treeless dark a stone-edged dark coal river dark. Flesh and its impermanence....
In Praise of: Melissa Todd reviews ‘Memento Mori’ by Gareth Writer-Davies
With a collection titled Memento Mori, you’d expect poems that dwell solemnly on death. Gareth Writer-Davies certainly keeps mortality in view, but this collection is distinguished by its insistence that death is encountered, not as an abstraction, but through...
Rebecca Parfitt
End of a World In the back of the taxi on my way to the hospital, thighs clenched together, the driver asked me, You visiting someone there? Yes, I said. I am visiting a friend. When I get there, I will tell my friend that I was watching The...
Samarth Agarwal
Object M16- The Pillars of Creation He who created all things, and bears up the pillars of creation, hath now become so weak, that He must be carried by a woman! - Charles Spurgeon * Here — in the absolute zero of space — fireworks! Look how the...
Jenny Scoones
After, We unlearn how it felt to touch And resume our separate days in shirts and trousers, Like hazmats against the sun and its longing, The moon with its underbelly pulls. On the pillow I turn away from you, Burn sage to ward off the memory. ...
Matt Bryden
Lightly a god, if he wishes, can save a man, even from far off Now a blanket is spread, offerings of chutney and shin bones, a taper held to the fire that heats the tar beneath our boats. A phial of bathwater discolours on a shelf, unemptied...
Kit Duke
Photograph, 2008 See the statue: grain flecked ridged with carvings the smooth intonations of eyes set quietly into the face See me: four years old palms to the stone and my face tipped slightly forwards ...
Marcelo Medone
One of These Days (I'm Going To) buy myself a giant, high-calorie tub of chocolate ice cream with nuts and raisins and eat it without feeling guilty, thoroughly clean my bathroom and leave it smelling like lavender, drink a strong double espresso...
Janet Hatherley
In my cookery exam, we have to prepare a family meal This is summer and Mum can’t put out her trot line with its hooks because of swimmers so I buy three mackerel from the fishmonger. I cycle to the school bus stop one arm on the handlebar,...
Neil Harris and Mimi
https://youtu.be/c1aXXfsfNDk The cat is a pony. The cat is a pony, Her nape is a mane. The cat she is tiny but belies her size. She gallops, turning floors and stairs to thunderous drums. This cat is a pony. She shreds the top of carpet treads to make grass. A...
Jane Ayres
Deathbed Fantasia as now melts & nowhere goes nowhere we wash up breathless a box of blue light star-cushioned harvesting morphine-thick razorlick-blueberry-pinch &...
Annette Iles
You Again across the street I am washed off my feet my heart splashes up into pieces as if someone has thrown a stone into the pool of me all these years I thought myself dry ground but I am a stream a loch a river brim full sequinned with...
Marie Isabel Matthews-Schlinzig
Grief shows me just another sunset Dusk is dancing & all the visual technologies at hand feel overwhelmed: mobile eye, pit pastels, graphic card. It’s down to language, then, imagine. Above parade pearlescent clouds looking more...
Antonia Saunders in Praise of ‘Tips for Collectors of the Macabre’ by Jennie E. Owen
The poems in Jennie E. Owen's The Horses Still Run (Dragon Fly Eleven, 2024) were imbued with an ambient fear – a low, persistent hum beneath the surface, an unease with a world out of step, both ecologically and socially. Fear remains central in Owen's most...
Antony Owen
Meaningless sex Twenty- something sex are bodies. thrown down like sophomore prose. Unedited nonsense that almost meant little. Look at our quarry of pointless stars. Davy-lamps in solar system of death Noone writes about God when she rested. I...