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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
Gordan Struić
To no one After you deleted your profile, I had no number. No email. No name to search. Just a blinking cursor where you used to reply. Still — I kept writing. Sometimes just: “Hi.” Or “Would you have answered today?” Or “I don’t know what I’m doing.” Or...
In Praise Of…: Setareh Ebrahimi reviews ‘Where the Land Forgets Itself’ by Connor Sansby
Where the Land Forgets Itself is Connor Sansby’s second full-length collection of poetry. It’s packed with strong publication credits, including 'Marine Snow', which won the 2024 Rosemary McLeish Prize. Often using experimental language and structure, Where the Land...
Margaret Poynor-Clark
Releasing My Stays Inside my bedroom I take a fresh blade pull off my jumper, examine the ladder in front of the mirror cut through my laces rung by rung, watch my grey marbled flesh emerge from its carapace, fold by fold. I'm letting go, I’m...
Deborah Nash
Mashed 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’...
Jenny Hockey
That’s when she went to ground, after she disobeyed, painted her plastic tea set red, hidden away in the playhouse they built down where bindweed draped, where people not like us lived behind the hedge, heard but not seen, that’s where she went to...
Sue Proffitt
All of it It’s thirty-four years since you let go and we were pulled on downstream, a Sunday then too. My brother texts me: remembering happy times with father. Yes, but how to separate them from the rest, and do I want to? You and I have had many...
Louella Lester on National Flash Fiction Day
Keep an Eye Out That’s what the father said before he went for a nap, but it wasn’t clear who he was actually talking to as he climbed the stairs. Well, that was stupid of him wasn’t it—leaving a teenage boy, a cat, and a pile of freshly caught...
‘Wallpaper’ by Joseph Blythe is the May 2025 Pick of the Month. Hear it read here now!
Vivid, precisely imagined, powerful ‘Wallpaper’ calls out to a troubled world, its potent imagery and raw language both striking and disturbing; and for this reason Joseph Blythe's poem is the Pick of the Month for May 2025. Joseph Blythe’s prose and poetry has been...
Nick Cooke
Tidy Me Not If when you go to the barber today He asks if you’d like him to ‘tidy up your ears’, Think of all the wildest sprawling vegetation That will never be tidied, or trimmed, by clippers or shears, But keeps on growing in the light of a...
Edward Alport
Too High to Reach The tree will not let go. High up, out of reach, on a branch, no, more a twig, a little wizened, shrunken face leers down. It clings to the tree and the tree clings back. The apple of its eye. Not a healthy embrace, then. More...
Colin Pink
Fork not the kind you eat with but useful to turn the soil root out potatoes or carrots or anything that likes to lurk beneath the earth schlupp sturdy tines slide into soil its wooden handle heats up in your hand, swopping kinetic energy...
Linda Ford
My Father Bought a Signal Box dismantled it piece by piece then sold the wood, as a job lot. He found railway station drawings a monogrammed letter opener and a gold-nibbed ink pen which contained a withered bladder with the remnants of midnight...
Ryan O’Neill
at the drop-and-go we hug and i act cool as the american fridge ice shattering on kitchen tiles lift my case from the boot practice my cold show face drain emotion like wine from the christmas market we bought crepes at dropped a claw over a...
David Thompson
I no longer prioritise, I choose who to disappoint that day I’m a cardboard loo roll with one sheet left wet grounds scraped from the coffee pot a biro tip scratching at paper in circles. Scrolling through my inbox I hold down the shift key, select all...
Marcelle Newbold
Hope lies like the edge of a teaspoon, upward facing, a thickness perhaps enough solidness to knife through a banana or other soft fruit for safety for a baby or to get under the edge of the surface tension of the skin of a grape to start a peel....
Britta Giersche
3am a wooden door slams shut in my brain a man perishes in a space the size of his grave from malnutrition eighty years ago (I travel on my mother’s electric waves that held their spoken words’ shape) I am sorry that the thud left a hole in your...
Maxine Flasher-Düzgüneş
4.21.21 my friend sends me, Brooklyn a reminder uncounted she guides me softly through many-miles forever towards nothing the hedges grow in-between metal gates but pictures bridge the rivers they spread over March like Tama Impala, lost in it and grates that...
Abby Crawford
Stonevale When I was born the house was full of stones, an old blacksmiths shed. Rubble became walls, became home. I used a brush as tall as me to brush debris, dust, oyster shells. In my blue gingham dress and boots. We lived down from the...
Rachael Clyne
Homeland And if a land loses its people and they are exiled will a land feel their absence will it dream of their calloused feet on its warm skin will it grieve the touch of hands familiar with the ways of its...
Tom Nutting
We Were Seeds Found poem from trans rights protest and counter-protest on College Green, Bristol, Saturdays 19th & 26th April 2025. The counter protest was quickly drowned out. I. God created man and woman — Let us piss in peace! Only a man...