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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...

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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...

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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’...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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....

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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