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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
Sally Jenkins
The Biology Department Funny how Year 8 is doing bones now, of all the weeks. In the prep room we strip flesh off chicken wings, steep the bones in acid til they bend like rubber, and the girls shriek. Cardboard femur and tibia jointed with split...
Chris Hardy
Memento Vivere We lived here once. The rain we heard fell everywhere. Silence except the wind across the ground. It’s best to keep quiet. Words are like dead seeds, they vanish when they’re said. * New Year’s Eve without stars or...
Siobhan Logan
Misdiagnosis There’s something wrong with my head it’s too tight, it’s a round black shape on the pavement where the grand piano fell six storeys and flattened my skull There’s something wrong with the sky it’s the colour of a bruise and...
Alex Searle
Something started you to wake, leaving sockprints in the parquet, there was only the dark, until a hair sliver of light softly glowed on your feet asleep. Behind the closed door, he was there, your father, smoking quietly with himself...
Welcome Welcome Welcome Sabine Wilson-Patrick, our Newest IS&T Editing Intern
selection from Babysham (if read aloud, do so in a gentle, quiet voice of a girl who is still afraid of the dark) On loving You are concerned with being a monolith. With being a museum. Poster board, boy chested, nailed to a crucifix by water lilies....
Lauren K. Nixon
The D-Road We’ve come this way before and will again. On good days, we sing along to the radio, turned up to make the silence rattle. The packet sits in my lap until she asks. It’s a two-handed operation to fill the long vee, balance the filter. I...
Zakia Carpenter-Hall
Human Ecologies It had been such a long time... I was surprised by how gently my mother made my hair, asking if she should split the rows, my locs beginning to intertwine. She gently, as if using a miniature rake of a Japanese garden...
Hallie Oakwood
When You Must Stop a Wedding His phone pings; the morning sun glares. Kyle staggers to the bathroom mirror amidst empty bottles for inducing oblivion. Red-eyed and dishevelled, with stubble masking gray complexion and black hair in matted clumps;...
H.J. Thomas
Black Cherry Ice Cream We ate it leaning against the rail above the harbour - black cherry, melting down the cone faster than we could catch it. And you laughed, mouth red, sunlight flaring in your lashes. I watched the boats move below us - slow...
DS Maolalai
Thunderstorms. Fireworks. I'm in the spare bedroom/office. Chrysty’s in a rotten bad mood. she walks the apartment like a donkey stable. kicks holes out of drywall and violently washes up plates. she's told me get out and I've gotten, that's fine....
Stephen Keeler
How to get here Among the joys of love was when we got our first apartment on a boulevard above the trams and tree-tops and the wires that cut the street like tangram puzzles and our friends would come with olives and cheap wine they found the...
Nina Nazir
Forecast biro, gel pen & found text on paper, 2026 A city melts in the middle. A man hurries toward a changed world. People move to be near the future. A woman glimpses herself in the robes of a vision Nina Nazir is a British...
Khairina Anindya, Genevieve Beech
Khair At the feet of al-Ka‘ba you asked for a daughter. You named me Khair – Blessing. I answered inside you forcing myself into your ribs remaking you in the emptiness of your lungs. in the space he made— his shoes left in the...
Marion McCready, Vic Brooks
Bay Laurel My last will and testament is to be buried under the bay tree flourishing in my back garden. Standing there, year after year, like a planted woman taken from again and again. One day, her leaves will no longer replenish. But for now she...
Linda McKenna
Smashing Narcissus We set about him with rifle butts and spades, waiting our turn alongside our enemies, the same sunburnt flesh, the same blistered feet. Met where our camps, the same badly pitched shelters, the same lack of meat, converged. Laboured...
Abigail Ottley
She remembers the house of her husband He’s not, as they said he is: loathsome, most monstrous. He has a strange and sinister beauty. His eyes are obsidian, shot through with gold, a ruby burning in each. A noble brow, and magnificent cheekbones. You can...
Frank Phelan
Renegade Voices I am most visceral when being disarmed by a song, a lyric written and sung… in the broad New Yawk vowels of Dean Friedman. The scowl of Dylan. The scat and growl of George Ivan. Matthew Devereux's demonic staccato. Pierce Turner...
Joseph Marcel Ikhenoba on Father’s Day
The Last Key My father died with all his keys still on the ring. House key. Padlock key. The tiny brass one for the old suitcase he never opened. Office key for a job he left in 2002. A car key for a Toyota that rusted behind the house. I...
Katherine Duffy
Wake (Leaving Amorgos, Greece) The ferry pushes the sea, forces a long, white reply that speaks of where we’ve been - a hulk of rock, a prison in the time of the Colonels, now a place of painted chairs, fairy lights. I lean over, try to read the...
Audrey Cotterell
A November anniversary In a corner chapel of the abbey I lit a small candle, and sent the flame as a message only half composed to somewhere I hardly believed in. Room is restricted on the ferry: six cars, a few pedestrians and dogs, all of us...