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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
Critique, Dissent, and Resistance: A Suite of Poems for the Jubilee
At its height, the British empire was the largest in history, and for over a century, was the foremost global power. By 1913 the British Empire controlled 412 million people, 23% of the world's population at the time, and by 1920, it covered 35 million km2...
Jubilee Suite: Hansika Jethani
Rallying Cry they ask me where i am from / and i do not know how to answer / because how do i tell them the story of my truths / when the all the sentences attached to them / have been conveniently buried / before they could reach the mouths of...
Thea Smiley
The Carousel See the painted horses galloping in circles- I am one of them, struck through the belly with a swizzle stick, a gold pole as golden ...
Benedicte Kusendila
ESTUARY It is only the sun spitting rays Just the indefinite flight of a balloon that let go of its child It is only squinting, just a nod Just the chatter of a flock on the wire, hurried South It is only the last call Just glass breaking the...
Sonia Burns
Stash Your spaces silently narrow - slowly clogging arteries, plaque formed out of photographs, boxes stacked and shelves furred up, records, CDs, DVDs. Kitchen stuffed with cookery books, spiralisers, coffee machines and avocado-half-holders;...
Sarah Crowe
mary anning, fossil hunter she wore her dead sister’s name as a cloak to ward off the sea’s icy wrath trawled stony beaches sought curiosities with cut calloused hands chiselled and hammered jurassic rocks to display ammon’s horns, snakestones,...
Topher Allen
The Gods Are Addicts It’s better to be cremated, the only way to heaven is as smoke. Burials are the devil’s idea to harvest bones, to set them ablaze and raise hell. Volcanic eruptions are his failed attempts to ascend. Kerosene-lamps know this,...
Andrea Holland
How Young Bodies Work Grace…in that light was a promise of balance – Joy Harjo O timeline drop us here the moment you step from the subway on 23rd the boy spinning on his back / popping air O body sharpening skin into spin solo show staged on asphalt...
Clare M Coombe
In love with You played Kylie Minogue and Lady Gaga on vinyl, because it was on trend again, and not just for our dads, and we thought it was cool to know all the words to Judas, because we’d studied theology and we had PhDs. And we danced...
Mandy Macdonald
emerald earrings misfortune from nowhere stooped like a peregrine folded, weaponized slicing away before from after as clean as cutting butter or severing heads half the house is collapsed open to the weather defenceless, astounded the other half...
Susan Castillo Street reviews ‘Swimming to Albania’ by Sue Hubbard
On reading Sue Hubbard’s collection Swimming to Albania, the concept that comes to mind is saudade. A. F. G. Bell writes in his study In Portugal, published in 1912:‘The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that...
Maria C. McCarthy
I whipped the clothes off her my mother’s retelling of the quick thinking that saved my skin. I remember reaching for the handle over-edging the table, tipping, scalding, Mum’s hands pulling dress, vest, knickers, stripping fabric before it fused...
Mark Carson
Möbius Strip reducing her life to seventeen bullet points was simpler far than she’d somehow imagined and she had them graven in cursive script on a one-sided strip of her native silver given a twist by a cunning smith hammer-welded so the text is...
Alex Faulkner
Animals Lit by Neon yellow pours down like rain. yellow pours down in sheets. I know they’re out there. I know you’re out there. down here it’s warm we gape through grilles spilling yellow into quivering stripes. dark driven auto vehicle bodies...
Remembering Grant Tarbard
Poem for Grant my body is no place to be stuck in (Grant Tarbard: A Rosary of Ghosts) Each time you went away, you brought back news – how it was to look down at yourself – perfect accounts of the soul’s own grief. When you left for the last time your body was...
Finola Scott
One thousand cranes I want to learn how it feels to give birth in a tunnel in my home city to hear shelling through the night I want to draw straight lines not diagrams of molotov cocktails tourniquets or AK42 rifles or posters pleading for help I...
Mandy Beattie
Mandy Beattie’s poetry’s been published in: Poets Republic, Wordpeace, Dreich, Wee Dreich, The Haar, Purple Hermit, Wordgathering, Clearance Collection, Spilling Cocoa with Martin Amis, Marble Poetry, Last Stanza Poetry Journal, Lothlorien Poetry & Book Week...
Phil Wood
Birthday Boyo No sunshine, but plenty of coal to cosy up our terrace. Gran smothers extra toast with raspberry jam, and I'm drawing Caerphilly castle. I climbed that spiral stair today to the office. I was grassed up. Dapper Jones made me empty my...
Debi Lewis
The Gap The space between unrelated things like our ears and the top of the humorous as a measure of strength a simple gap of air that stops a wheel rolling back on top of you the wider ...
Martin Yates
Martyr We’d starve sooner than eat with you, or drink; we’d vomit up, spit out, the bribes you bring and will not slake our thirst or break this fast. The stars, more sensitive than us, will blink; we strain our foolish ears to hear them sing,...