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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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....

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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...

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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...

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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. ...

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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...

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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      ...

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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...

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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,...

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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...

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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 &...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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