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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

Pletts & Berger

      Chernobyl : past, present and future tense   It all feels sepia; liquidator-faces filling the coach windows dust in the air, that grainy hue that will etch into their bones, scrape its mark on their lungs, turn their complexions a...

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Meg Pokrass 

      The Forest This has something to do with the adoption of that unwanted animal, right there in the living room. Her husband watching telly, drinking beer, not looking at the animal dancing around. The animal gazing into her eyes, finding her...

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Noel King

      Burying the Husband As your hearse stretches the road we walk, trying to be respectful. My shoulders heave an ease at their freedom, my bruises will heal now there’ll be no fresh hits. Our feet turn, our bodies sideways themselves through the gap...

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Hannah Linden

      By the Time I Learn about the New York School Poets I Can Walk Around their Neighbourhood Without Leaving My Living Room   for SD It’s six thirty in the evening, going dark I’ve zoomed to the other side of an ocean been helped to understand what...

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Olivia Burgess

      April Showers In the spring, we wait on overblown grass, trading false promises of a golden summer. I cry at the sight of swathes of daffodils, parading their freedom in joyful orbits of propagation. I cry over exams because my heart’s poison is...

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Stephen Claughton

      Wu Zixu (after Hokusai) The warrior, Wu Zixu, tries his hand at writing poetry. Perhaps he thinks it won’t be exacting enough. Cocking his head to one side, he dips his pen in the ink, while at the same time holding a brass pot above his head....

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Meg Arnot

      * her black eye . . . red scarf muffles the sting of the north wind * muddy gaiters – Coniston Water in my wardrobe * lamb in the talons of a white-tailed eagle time of the tide     Meg Arnot’s haiku/senryu and tanka have been published...

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Pat Edwards

      Various kinds of pin and their uses This pin is for piercing the tube before we medicate the cat in the fur on her neck. She hates us for doing this, senses we are coming for her with our toxins. This one is a safety pin. I open it, slide five or...

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Marty McKenna

      i excuse myself from you tonight. there is low cloud on the fields as the sway carries these hands between this and the next stop. i’ve fallen for an other, make eye contact; deliver it through sight. i recognise my place by the trees; wonder...

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Lisa Perkins

      Oktoberfest Gretel nurses a knot at a table for two in a dive bar in Berlin. Bloated shadows crawl above the industry of night. He’s late. Nerves ripple crumbs, popcorn for the crows. Habit makes a ghostly work of worry, she orders something...

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Corinna Keefe

      Good God Corner, Harlech It’s all Good God Corners around here all hairpin bends and sharp breaths in perpendiculars and parallels that pull you out to sea a riptide of light reaching down from the hills toppling the little train into the water. I...

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Runaways London

  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nSG5IkAWgFs&t=8s   Royal Charters in 1600 and 1660 established the East India Company and the Royal African Company and between them these two bodies probably wrought more misery and devastation in Asia and Africa than...

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Jubilee Suite: Sanah Ahsan

    fresher  At the freshers week party bodies pack sweaty into free-floating balloons. A chorus of down it from thirst you almost know. You unwillingly gulp the cold. Mum worked Saturdays to afford you here. Puke crawls up the back of your throat. Swallow...

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Jubilee Suite: Gboyega Odubanjo

    Obit. (After César Vallejo) i will die in london in the neighbourhood i grew up in outside the town hall on the high street. i will have been stabbed and my killer will look just like me so no-one will look for him. my body will remain dead in daylight...

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Jubilee Suite: Jayda David

      The Queen is a Bloodclart the queen is a Bloodclart dissect the monarchy, pull it apart, reveal the truth that they wish they could conceal; raping, pillaging, stealing, imperialism, colonialism, racism. they protect those with the same face as...

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Jubilee Suite: The Repeat Beat Poet

      Tommy Builds A Cocktail   Tommy spied a sun-dried palm tree in an untouched garden with crusty dark skin and cracks riddling all along its side, weeping out of its shell he aimed for a branch and down a coconut fell  it didn’t implode on...

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