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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
Heidi Beck
Self-Portrait as Road Runner You with your elaborate schemes of entrapment, your hunting parties, moonshine and shot-gun weddings, your Sunday-school socials for girls to glue bird seed and pasta on prayer plaques, sew aprons with Singers– this...
Catherine Godlewsky
Winter Commute I. I have not known how to shape This poem— I found it, drowsy, Quarter-to-six in winter In the cold of an unfinished floor And the cold of the tap And the cold of my pale extremities Exposed on all these fronts I found it in the...
On the Twelfth Day of Christmas, we bring you Elizabeth Gibson and Roma Havers
Weighing yourself in the dark at Christmas in your parents’ house You do not know how to weigh yourself at Christmas in your parents’ house, now it is no longer yours. You are used to standing naked each day in your flat with closed blinds. The...
On the Eleventh Day of Christmas, we bring you Alle Bloom and Mariam Saidan
Knots When I remember the white paint of the door frame it's not my tiny 8-year-old hands that grip it, steadying the spinning top of my chest. It's not with those hands I feel the squeak of paint under fingertips, not with that thumb I brush the...
On the Tenth Day of Christmas we bring you Jean O’Brien, Paul Stephenson, Ruth Aylett, Sarah Mnatzaganian
Left Over Christmas Trees Paper never refuses ink, no matter how hard the words it just absorbs. In the same way the eye never refuses the blue of sky, the fish water, the bird never spurns air. In the wind leaves of eucalyptus show their silver...
Debbie Strange
Lightfall lightfall so, too snow Debbie Strange (Canada) is a chronically ill short-form poet and visual artist whose creative passions connect her more closely to the world and to herself. Thousands of her poems and...
On the Ninth Day of Christmas we bring you Scott Elder, Lynn Valentine, Sue Finch
The Ninth Day It could have been any day—you in the doorway one hand in your pocket one still on the wheel the road: a fluster of birds your daughter: at one end lick- ing her wounds you at the other Lord of the Doorway—but it...
On the Eighth Day of Christmas we bring you D.A. Prince, Frances Boyle, Maggie Mackay
Redbreast hawk-bait fool of a bird, top-branch, easy pick-off; careless busker; lonely crowd-pleaser, air-ruffled; one long itch and riff of song; leafless pitcher, head-turner, tuned in to tree-top maps of competitors; Mr Tomato-Soup-On-A-Stick,...
On the Seventh Day of Christmas we bring you Pam Thompson, Mary Mulholland, Oliver Comins
Advice To One Who Is Single A Golden Shovel ‘True love. Is it normal? Is it serious? Is it practical? What does the world get, Warrior? Two people who exist in a world of their own.’ From The Celtic Book of Days The last night in...
Kayleigh Jayshree
https://youtu.be/NMUDokIFlcw The Moth Poem She sees the little lost one everywhere, eyes on the dead moths curled on her windowsill. I see what was: rosy maple moths like Battenbergs on her fingertips, A weaver’s wave moth in the countryside the day she broke...
On the Sixth Day of Christmas we bring you Alison Binney, Kathy Pimlot, Elaine Westnott-O’Brien
Muscle Memory Three weeks earlier I’d said My dad has Alzheimer’s to the sashed woman in the porch who swept me past the kiosk through the transept to the vestry. The first time I’d said it aloud: I sounded older, as if I knew just what you...
Debbie Strange
The soft click the soft click of a reindeer's hooves... northern lights Debbie Strange (Canada) is a chronically ill short-form poet and visual artist whose creative passions connect her more closely to the world and to herself. Thousands of her poems and...
On the Fifth Day of Christmas we bring you Helen Grant, Lydia Kennaway, Kath Mckay
Nest of Christmas The lane flows with the light of Christmas morning that feels like a yolk breaking, maybe because we are breaking the world’s shell. It lights up single spider webs like silver silk and my dog leads the way through frosty mud. My...
On the Fourth Day of Christmas we bring you Rob Walton, Abigail Ottley, Ian Parks
It’s the most Raymond’s kids loved going round the neighbours with all the fancy lights. In November Raymond’s kids started to ask questions, drop hints. He put a Wanted on the local Stuff For Nothing Facebook page and got loads of odds and sods...
On the Third Day of Christmas we bring you Anne Symons, Lydia Macpherson, Sue Butler
Time of year Mistletoe hung by the front door and you had to kiss whoever was standing under it. That was one of the Christmas rules like watching the Queen at 3 o’clock. It was the uncles with wet mouths that she didn’t like. How did they do it?...
Tim Kiely reviews ‘We Saw It All Happen’ by Julian Bishop
Review of We Saw It All Happen by Julian Bishop Writing successful ecopoetry is harder than it looks. Precise definitions of ‘ecopoetry’ (as opposed to nature poetry more broadly) vary. In general this is a poetics which will propose or attempt to navigate a...
On the Second Day of Christmas we bring you Julie Maclean, Gill Connors, Ankit Raj Ojha
A Post-Colonial Cool Yule to y’All Australia detained asylum seekers on Christmas Island until 2018. It was named in 1643 after William Mynors of the East India Company sighted it on Christmas Day. Have you seen the red crab women of Christmas...
Mark Czanik
Embrace after an Elmwood sculpture by Richard Lawrence His hands hook her waist as if pulling her from a flower. She closes her eyes in the little cave she finds under his chin. Let this blizzard bury them together, fill the footprints they won’t leave, his...
Marc Woodward
https://youtu.be/m6EidDaC79A When Joe Went Out Late to shut away the poultry after weeks of rain he knew where the pony was by the sound of its hooves sucking in the mud.Foxes still kill in downpours. Maybe they keep closer to the bones of the hedge or...
On the First Day of Christmas we bring you Sarah Davies, Sophia Argyris , Iris Anne Lewis
Not my partridge not my pear tree I Google tells me the partridge is Christ, ready for the wound. The temporary pluckers are digging for lead in the flesh. The urban dictionary says I’ll never be that cool. Ii And I read, because you were reading...