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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
Vic Pickup
Operation Alphaman It took a great effort and I had to bite hard on the stick to push the subcostal muscles aside. The skin had parted easily under my knife, though keeping the blood at bay with no one to swab the wound was difficult. This was...
Julian Brasington
When one has lived a long time (After Galway Kinnell) When one has lived a long time alone and not alone your time become someone’s history and you have grown tired of yet another war and the world has it in for you simply for being wrong nation...
Jason Conway
I heard a rumour that Pandora moonlights She wears sunglasses in the lounge knives flexed and ready for battle It’s not Sunday but lambs need carving She’s a weapon of disruption unleashed to worm rumours where words have no walls Paid for all the...
Julia Biggs
At The Ballet IV almost unbearable and brutally tender, every muscle stands quivering with inconceivable humanity Julia Biggs is a poet, writer and freelance art historian. She lives in Cambridge, UK. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in Black Bough...
Rachael Clyne
Torn On one side– my heritage on the other side– their heritage on both sides– carnage everywhere– endless grief. To lift the weight sitting in my chest. I need to be away from people. In an edgeland of drab fields and ditches, I seek solace, not...
Nick Browne
Nick Browne is an established novelist and aspiring poet. Nick’s poetry has been accepted for publication by Acumen, Ink Sweat & Tears, Blue Nib, Snakeskin, Archaeology Today, Anthropecene, Wivanhoe, Lunar Magazine and Dreich and been anthologised in Bollocks to...
Sally Michaelson
The Ledger In the left hand column she writes He’s married in the right hand column she writes My skin is beached against the stone wall of you in the left hand column she writes He sets his alarm for 1715 In the right hand column she writes When...
Read and hear it here! ‘Lovely Feet’ by Maureen Jivani is IS&T’s final Pick of the Month for 2023!
Lyricism, surreal beauty, authentic capturing of love & loss Maureen Jivani's poem had a universal resonance. Voters said it brought to mind their first hospital visit, playing with a newborn baby, a mother with a dying daughter. They found the poem, haunting,...
Rizwan Akhtar
Lovers and Trees In the evening trees become sad I climbed on them like a metaphor, later it transpired they were our anthropological versions organic companions shadowing imagine how many lovers have sat under them moaning the mysteries how many...
Theo Stone
Into the Hills He found himself in the mountains because he had no intention of being near the beach. It was summer and he was dry. With friends, he had seen the sea, water, the Thames, so many times over the past weeks that he had driven himself...
Alexandra Corrin
Six weeks after diagnosis I stayed away out of respect for your daughters. You followed the hearse with your father and the girls. He couldn’t stay within the boundaries of himself. Her friend Angie broke down reading, the celebrant had to help....
John Barron
Thought Experiment The clock has lost all its numbers. I wake inside an Einstein thought experiment, where my bones defy gravity and get sucked what some call “up.” I’ve only time to grab from beside the bed where we’re sleeping our copy of Rovelli’s...
Mick Corrigan
My List Poem of the All-Important Trish, Kindness, A small family of wildflowers announcing themselves in an abandoned pot, Morning sun warming barley fields at Castletown House Estate, A grounded fledgling glaring defiance as I gently inquire of...
Mike Jenkins
Not a found poem But a purchased one - To find Ewrop on a single cup Despite the English on top - Re use duce cycle Birziklatu Genbruge Endurvinna And then the more familiar - Recycle Recycler Recycleren Recyceln Till there Sharing the plastic...
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...