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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
Margaret Baldock
Hurst Reservoir In the sharpness of a January wind we stepped down, feeling with neoprened feet for the safety of the edge. Bags and clothes huddled on a plastic picnic sheet. We launched, lovingly into dark and silky water unknown yet benign....
Krishh Biswal
Sanctum Without God You did not ask for knees — They found the floor themselves. Not from command, But gravity. Your name became architecture. Something vaulted. Something echoing. Something built to make small sounds feel holy. I stopped calling...
Tamara Salih
Buried That winter the snow kept rising, a slow white wall climbing the windows, each morning untouched, the whole world muffled under it. A hush so complete it felt like a hand pressed gently over the mouth. I pulled on my snow pants, my jacket....
Alicia Byrne Keane
Bureaucracies of Water I've been reading about ghost apples. They are a real phenomenon, like how everyone we can see on the wide street outside this building is still living, managing thus far, attending appointments, the fissures in their teeth...
Gareth Culshaw
THE APPRENTICE OF GROUNDHOG DAY I tried to work from a van. Sitting in the passenger seat listening to a guy whistle. His frown, a cloud he lost when his mother died. Each wrinkle he laid as mortar on a wall. More bricks, more weight. I’d watch...
Jennie Howitt
wild cows Those full udders will slowly burst spitting milk onto the grass strands. Will roll down to feed the roots below. Then the weeds will follow. Weeds will grow next spring. Weeds will unfold as bulbous udders without holes – un-milked –...
Matt Bryden
Killing Time at the cider farm, eight minutes before handover, we strike on feeding the donkeys – and sprint towards the orchard, only realising in the 5:23 dusk that this is winter, the boughs fruitless, donkeys stabled – that beside ourselves...
Colin Pink
Thorny (One Sided Conversations No4) after seeing Akram Khan’s Giselle 18 Jan 2026 to embrace you is like clasping a fist full of briars if your mouth was an envelope I’d lick it shut you can push all you like against the wall between the living...
Simon Williams
Hummingbird Hawk Moth What were these fairies called before we knew of hummingbirds? Bumblebee moth because of the size? Reed-nose moth because of the proboscis? I fancy Garden-sprite, Hoverling, tiny Vanguard from the Realm of Humm, Flit-wing,...
Elizabeth Barton
On Diamond Hill I didn’t think of you once as I climbed past stunted willows straggles of gorse there was no burning bush but when light poured through each stone step glittered and I heard crystals of song spilling from pipits’ throats it wasn’t...
Susan Jane Sims on Mothering Sunday
Lavoisier’s Law For Mark Matter cannot be created and it cannot be destroyed. I think of this as I pour the almost white ash from the green plastic container that came in the post into the vibrant red metal urn I have ready. I place it on your...
Daniel Sluman
Ceilings just as the night sky shifts beyond the minds of the animals outside the ceilings we are pressed beneath change in aspect & colour each evening they drop a little closer in rooms that carry us from one year to the next we float below water stains...
Vivienne Tregenza
Earth-bound The gardener has mown the lawn where the bluebells grew… If you looked carefully maybe you’d see an indentation where a woman lay down for half an hour one May afternoon on that sea of tranquillity and floated for a while outside her...
Farah Ali
Notes from nature on how to survive this: 1. Learn crypsis and mimesis be a gecko or a mossy frog 2. Method actors sway like dead-leaf mantises on branches 3. Spikes are effective, mollusc shells cumbersome 4. Warning! sea urchins maim and poison...
James Benger
Out of the Ash We tore it all down just to watch it burn, standing in that alley of forgotten refuse. No one wanted it, no one needed it, so boombox and cigarettes, bottles and pipes, we ran riot with the fire, unrestrained screams and smoke...
Graham Clifford
Poem as Instruction for How to Respond to an Insult First, know it. Really inspect every word like a woodsman would hold a finch upside down, and blow on the soft feathers to reveal its sex (even then, it's fifty fifty). Don't be too quick to bat...
Gill Horitz
Cyclamen I woke to workers with blades along the verge, yellow-jacketed to signify contracted rights to hack and scythe died-back bracken and living saplings to a brown shrivel. What a story to be part of, forlorn in the telling of nature...
Anita Karla Kelly, CE Collins, Clare Painter on International Women’s Day
Eve’s Bite In the beginning of the end she bit the thing she wasn’t meant to bite. Apple stuck in her throat, one bite taken, then swallowed whole. Seeds wait in stomach for sprout, roots climb through veins, branch pushes through her mouth. White...
‘At the Barbers’ by Stephen Chappell is the IS&T Pick of the Month for February 2026. Read and Hear It Here!
succinct, modest, affecting portrait of a good but constrained life It takes great skill to make the ordinary extraordinary and the well observed and considered 'At the Barbers' by Stephen Chappell has done just that. It is for this reason and many more that voters...
Elaine Baker
To my Ovaries My cahoonas. My muscular daisies. Potent white olives. You make me sick. My mute twins on tricycles. Femme fatales. Relay racers. Nightmares wished upon stars. In my brain you’re pendula on speed. My climax on the horror film screen....