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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

Helen Akers

      Window of tolerance we’re trying to construct a frame for this highly reactive impulsive emotion the nurse is looking into it     meanwhile we must find something cold to hold    lick it we’re trying to expand the tolerance – think of a moth...

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Steph Morris

Eupatorium maculatum     Acer pseudoplatanus     Quercus robur     About the plant poems: They were sketched from life in a notebook. Later I created riso prints with two or three colours based on the sketches. I tried to make the words...

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Jenny Robb

    Strange Brew Anne dances to the beat of my childish heart, sings to cobwebbed spiders. She is nanny number five, my own Mary Poppins. By the light of a wolf moon, my father turns mad. Anne whispers to a girl in the wind, and a friend blows into my life....

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Diane Webster

      Revenge Squirrels dream of a cougar, a cougar given permission to crouch like an assassin awaiting its prey, its target; a cougar concealed in the squirrel tree. Squirrels scowl, chitter at the woman who once fed them corn and bread until she met...

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Bill Jones

      Three Jackdaws Three jackdaws walked widdershins around the birdfeeding station. A fat woodpigeon, pompous, hieratic, tried to undo their magic by walking from four to six. For a moment, the two birdfeeders, full of seeds and nuts, were the...

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Zumwalt

    take this I see how you see us in meetings: merchandise to slip off the shelf. Your eyes on the cameras overhead as you turn sideways to hide pilfering your deposits into your many pockets. Monday, Henderson talked about how to energize our sales team...

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Anya Reeve

      Walnut Stubborn, we closed our fists To better ward away the brume From inner life, our threads of blood. The cold an outward skin to glove A sacred, futured inwardness. Year’s end will scuff and scrape. Grey ice, slush. Men worry The postal; fish...

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John Grey

      Your Town stuck between no place and nowhere it’s more of a gathering than a town and if there’s beer aplenty so much the better – back-slapping piss-taking bonhomie by the breath-full – all are good anything is possible everybody’s stuck here –...

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Lesley Curwen

    Valentia Light There are storms on the way. Look, look upwind. How we crave light. The southwesterly seethes. It is coming in, the fierce ocean. There is no defence against the rock’s teeth, only light. And the waves, a cross-hatched expanse whose white...

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Antony Dunn

      Plainsong Have you heard the one about how I’m hoping to bow out – playing guitar for the Cure on a wide stage – the riff pure as wind-bells in the twilight, the crowd stretching beyond sight into the dark and the rain – smiling, not ageing, not...

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Alex Scarborough

      Hiking I measure distance in Spotify playlists so I can’t be trusted with maps. How long until this becomes exhausting? You pace out the metres and minutes, you take three steps ahead as I want to ask if the ridges in your face would soften...

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Myra Schneider

      Cloud Forget the invisible network of servers which stores and manages or mismanages data in the unending sky far above our heads, and ignore the shroud-grey layers louring today – they seem to have sucked all the colour out of this world which...

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Sef

    Sef is an artist and writer searching for poetics of transformation in the everyday. https://substack.com/@seaandfog instagram: @seaandfog

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Wayne F. Burke

      seagull flying over NO VACANCY beach motel * faces on a school bus: petals of flowers unopened * golden finches rise & fall like notes of a symphony before my bicycle     Wayne F. Burke's haiku, and associated forms, have been widely...

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Jon Miller

      Moving In The upper floor of the old byre a darkness made of owl-stare— its blink drinks you in. A scythe hung under the last gasp of a rafter. An armchair sprouts the beards of men who died in it. The skylight a cataract woven by funnel-spiders;...

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Zain Rishi on Meredith MacLeod Davidson

    In Praise of transpiration by Meredith MacLeod Davidson From the opening poem of Meredith MacLeod Davidson’s transpiration, we find ourselves in a landscape haunted by cycles of loss. ‘Anchorless / a boat bangs against sea-weathered pylons,' and this...

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Salvatore Difalco

      Eek, Eyck No green swell this evening will detach me from my hat. No hand held out gingerly will bend my frozen elbow. Next door, the goldfinch on the box turns and chirps. Hounds outside hunt fox or men who play God. My face is not as pale as...

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Annah Atane

      Bloody September Boko Haram fighters staged gun and suicide bomb attacks on a military camp outside the University of Maiduguri in Nigeria’s northeastern Borno state ~ TheDefensePost That night, the stars had slept. The wind silent as something...

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