Hello
you have found your way here from an old link.
You can search here to find things or browse by category or post.
You can also visit the IS&T archive
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...
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...
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...
‘The Gods Are Addicts’ by Topher Allen is the IS&T Pick of the Month for May 2022. Read & hear it here!
Creative thinking outside the box ...describes perfectly the effect that Topher Allen’s ‘The Gods Are Addicts’ had on voters and it is for this reason, as well as the poet’s voice, his perspective, 'fiery imagery and subversion of religious tropes’, that it is the...
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...
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...
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....
Live zoom reading with Tom Sastry, Michael W. Thomas, Frank Dullaghan
Please join us on zoom for live readings Sunday 12th June at the new summer time of 7.30pm BST. This is part of our monthly award-winning ‘Live from the Butchery’ series, hosted by Helen Ivory and Martin Figura from their home (an old CoOp butcher’s shop),...
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...
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...
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...
Chris Hardy, in praise of ‘A Triptych of Birds and A Few Loose Feathers’ by Pratibha Castle
At the start of this powerful first collection we encounter careful, affectionate observations of animals, flowers and birds: cuckoo, red kite, heron, wren, sparrow, ‘incense of wild thyme, garlic, blooming beneath my feet’, (SOUTH DOWNS) around an...
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...
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...
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...
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...
Jubilee Suite: Poem from Momtaza Mehra and Image from Tasia Graham (from Runaways London)
Forgotten journey of the enslaved Tasia Graham © Reclamations by Momtaza Mehri No longer child No longer Monday’s firstborn No longer carrying the day’s exultations No longer embraced by broad-leaved belt of forest No longer at the lush edge of the edge...
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...
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...
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...