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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
Deborah Nash
Wish Cycle 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’...
Anna Brook
on accident (for Adrienne Rich) I want to borrow gods (as Adrienne does, though she knew better) their sad logic their templates but there’s always a tell, no? a too close accuracy not confidently misremembered studied would you be disappointed...
Nigel King
Coal House Fort Turn the mud. Bo Peep’s head tumbles out, wide-eyed, mouth a little open. There’s no sign of her body, her crook, her flock. Perhaps they’re deeper in the riverbed, or washed down to Tilbury by the tide. Drop her into the wooden...
Mohsen Hosseinkhani translated by Tahereh Forsat Safai
باز هم دوربین ها می چرخند زمین سرگیجه می گیرد و CNN بالا میآورد آمار کشته ها را این شعر را Men are the color of soil Women are sitting on the ashes And white sheets are losing their color Because of children’s blood...
Stephen Komarnyckyj
It is smell that forgets us last even if we would forget ourselves Babusyu your coffin laid on the frost I was not there Odourless and tasteless you are as water I can never...
Jo Farrant
Losing it before the UFO can find a parking spot Used to be the stain inside a makeup bag, glossed on inside cheek, socked on the stairs, Auntie at the Embassy, the sink over adverts and the sinnerman, and too much, I’ll keep going: my face, not...
Cheryl Snell
Thoughts in the Time of Collision I am all hair, glittering with diamond-glass. A forehead streaked with blood, rubies and roses crisscrossing the tangerine flaps of a ripped collar. Ripped skin. The air is blue and then bluer and then green and...
Douglas K Currier
Calm before the storm Afternoon hangs in the air, and the birds leave. Frogs begin to talk to each other, and the heat congeals. The wind picks up. That sound is not the rain, rather the tall pines across the road shaking needles, trembling. The...
Stephen Chappell
Without a Following If you could call that friend, the special one, the one you always love and know loves you, if you could and she were not also dead, she would be the one to let you go. Even so, let go, even without her you can do this, alone, if you...
Marius Grose
Presence of Trees Until the dead, sucked from leaf mould graves are rising in forest sap, to make connections inside strange green brains nothing will be crossed in, nothing will be crossed out until the dead poke holes in the sky with their bones...
Andrew Keyman
what you mean to me wiping tears with drink coasters in soho revolving around how you'll both leave and stay men in the window you kissing my jaw by the pints i didn't drink by the ashtray asking when the arrogance of thinking that anything could...
Chrissy Banks
The pink and the brown So many times I walked head down half asleep along that ordinary road to school until the day I saw the cherry trees sick of standing around bored and invisible all at once dressed up sinewy brown limbs embellished with...
Kate Horsley
Field Observations Made During an Alien Abduction 1. Research Question I’m having sex with an alien. He arrived around 2 am, stringing his hands around my neck to slip me deeper into coma, like in the movies when the woman is screaming inside but sleep...
Christopher M James
Aberfan The hillside had continued to spill onto the hand-digging first responders. Cliff Michelmore, in stark black and white, his words threading, stitching, beside himself with grief. My mother never cried so much. She’d had the two of us, had learnt...
Salil Chaturvedi
Fog Salil Chaturvedi's short fiction and poetry has been published in various online journals. His published collections, In the Sanctuary of a Poem, Love and Longing in the Anthropocene, and A Little Knowing are available on Amazon. He lives in Goa,...
Opeyemi Oluwayomi
We are no longer what blood is to the body After Tiken Jah Fakoly I They are sharing the world. This same small village of ours, where our fathers erected their huts, & buried their aged. They are destroying the sky we built with our unequal...
Heather Walker
The Second Coming It was a few days after Easter Sunday that Felicity saw Jesus. He was riding a bike, his long hair flowing like the robe around his shoulders. On one handle bar swung a Lidl bag. It was an odd sight, but his resurrection had just...
‘Annette’s Ode’ by Pamilerin Jacob is the IS&T Pick of the Month for March 2025!
'Succinct, raw, moving.' Voters loved the language of the poem, its spirituality and the risks it took. They were impressed by the imagery, its rhythm, its line changes. But mainly they loved how it connected them to their mothers, to their parents, to their heritage....
Rhian Thomas
How to write a poem about a mountain On the ridge we stop to catch ourselves, leaning against crags to view the drop. You tell me how you envy my sweeping vistas, my heritage of paths that cut clean through wind. I shush your maundering and press on...
Jane Lomas
Gilded by a Thousand Sorrows She follows me, with the flutter of a duster, around the house. A bony question mark, hips grinding like a worn out piston working fur-lined slippers against the old oak boards. Lungs working in out, in out, chuff-chuff,...