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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
Rose Lennard
Lord, grant me… On hot days, the back door stands open to the garden, to sudden wing flurries, sparrow chit-chat. By evening there are bluebottles upstairs, stupidly circling, banging themselves against the place the light comes from. I have been...
Nigel Fiander Ford
HUT EXIST 32 Something child There is a muttering in the hut, a miniature sandstorm whirled out of the doorway and spiralled into the curtain of evening. The something child ent gonna change. The something ent gonna get old. That and this are my...
Linda Ford
The Fair Leaves Town The hum of early traffic resonates where skeletal rides seek egress on lorries bound for the next town, and the road opens like a wound, becomes a thoroughfare again. We view the marketplace as we would a post-festive room,...
Eugene Stevenson
Mace in Her Pocket She is used to walking unafraid of the echo off her heeled steps, moving through the parking lot in a still-dark, early morning hour. Mace in her pocket, fur coat on her back, fist wrapped around her keys, she takes a breath...
Joshua St. Claire
Two Haiku green spruce cone a globe of sap slips below the horizon * bloom of jellyfish a thousand beach umbrellas open close Joshua St. Claire is an accountant who works as a financial director for a large non-profit in...
Piers Cain
I had a dream I had a dream. I dreamt it’s time to go. It’s time to leave. It’s time to stop this game. My boss appeared, the one from years ago. Her face was pink and thick with orange paint. “Still here? They don’t pay you any more”, she said. ...
Marcia Hindson
How To Bury Someone Else’s Da Make sure to pick the proper season. July is saturated, so is November. Spring is the perpetual king of felt-tip leaks and drownings, too full already. Remember how the whiteness of Winter is able to cool heart muscle...
Helen Campbell
How to Write Software First feel. Shape the solution. No different from the flint knapper sitting with his rocks; seeing the skin scraper’s hidden form. Or the weaver woman stringing her loom. the finished kelim in her mind’s eye. Then you must...
Rosie Garland
Poem inspired by an imaginary painting by Leonora Carrington Her hair is an updraft of orange flame, expression blurred like an early photograph where the cat is a flurry of paws. She has the small feet of an infant, but calloused from a lifetime...
Oormila Vijayakrishnan Prahlad
For a brief moment the illusion of life the wind is a wild puppeteer- pulling, weighing, coaxing a last flight into the air. I cannot leave you here to the jaws of the sugar ants to the feet of those who scarcely look down at the fallen treasures they...
Dennis Tomlinson
A Life Where are the aunts of yesteryear? Where are the moles under Granny’s lawn? Where are the pickled frogs and locusts? Where are the lizards, where the kiss on the banks of the Moselle? Where is the Wall behind the Brandenburg Gate? Where is...
Tim Kiely reviews ‘Improvised Explosive Device’ by Arji Manuelpillai
Improvised Explosive Device by Arji Manuelpillai Penned in the Margins (106 pages of poetry) The first time I heard a poem by Arji Manuelpillai, he was reading from this collection on BBC Radio 3’s ‘The Verb’. The poem was called ‘Ways of Being Heard’, and I...
Phoebe T
Canary Wharf Outside, in the plaza, men march forward. Women change from trainers to work heels. Gardeners rip out rows of wilting flowers. The news scrolls like a river round the Reuters building. No Police...
Uprising & Resistance: Keith Jarrett, Remi Graves, Courtney Conrad, malakaï sargeant
UPRISING & RESISTANCE IS OUR NEW TITLE PRODUCED IN CONJUNCTION WITH SPREAD THE WORD AND BLACK BEYOND DATA'S MELLON FOUNDATION FUNDED UNDERWRITING SOULS PROJECT. These poems from featured poets Keith Jarrett, Remi Graves, Courtney Conrad and malakaï sargeant...
Uprising & Resistance: Jess Nash
This is one of Jess Nash's images from our anthology Uprising & Resistance, produced in conjunction with Spread the Word and the Black Beyond Data Mellon Foundation funded project, Underwriting Souls. These works respond to historical archives and objects from the...
Uprising & Resistance: Levi Naidu-Mitchell
This image, the central canvas or Canvas Two from Levi Naidu-Mitchell's triptych, takes place metaphorically in the Middle Passage, displaying the Mangrove tree: 'A concrete yet unruly and powerful plant, able to adapt in the worst of conditions, it acts here as a...
Patrick Wright
SEVERANCE After Aisha Khalid I hear it’s rather like a firewall that was Swedenborg & here is the womb where Mozart can’t...
VJ René
SELECT BODIES We didn’t say it coming. Preoccupied By interchangeable analogies (the jasmine Blossom burdening the Avenues, plus several other factors) We walked to the library, anxiously Equipped. The afternoon Swung on its tender,...
Caroline Prosser
Time to Go 5.03AM: Our Health starts to go at late middle age. Doctors hazard a guess at what’s wrong in the grey haze under the skin, but at some point they stop bothering. Whatever is slowing us down is left alone; the broken cogs don’t need...
Laura Gibbs
Daffodils Smarmy cunts. Hiding from me, in chattering spheres, year-round spectres of a season delayed. Budding in a darkness unknown - I will remember numbness. A yellow that melts, butter upon frost, their smooth openings jar in the aisles of...