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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
Geoff Sawers
The Generals There must be some kind of key, some motive-piece, that explains where we are, or were, or will be. We don’t know how we know this. Maybe a map held in some archive that can never safely be released or viewed; drawn up for an...
Angela France
The Cloud Driving into low cloud everything fades to a blur, all colour and definition leached so that trees and buildings become vague shapes. The glimpse of a house light is a spark, a blink like the flicker of the broadband router and it seems...
David Van-Cauter
Lifeboat Two calls this morning – flood of tears… She cannot eat a single thing they give her. Instead it’s up to us to ship it in like cargo: bananas, sandwiches, pork pies and now consommé soup – remember that? These are the things that bind us...
Dan Stathers
Skunk Cabbage A long way from the quags of Nova Scotia, stowaway beneath the cherry laurel thicket, more triffid than cabbage, your skunk mustard and garlic to some, rotting meat to beetles. I’ve stumbled across your invasion, trespassers to the...
Sarah L Dixon’
Falling in love with a moment I fall in love with the way the sea lays salted glass, garlic cooks in its own skin. I fall in love with the way new badges sit on my hat and cardigan wars. I fall in love with sheltering from rain in pottery shop...
Simon Alderwick
see the light 1 in the beginning, there was light. and light said: let there be god. and god meant: everything touched by light. 2 and light so loved, light bled. bled so much, god bathed. bathed so much, light spilled. spilled so much, so much...
Tim Kiely
The Abbot of Kosljun Monastery Considers the Cyclopean Lamb He suppresses a shudder as he summons the brothers from the library; shows how extensive are notes they will take of the specimen the farmers brought to the island that morning, their...
Rebecca Bilkau
Travel essentials A rucksack isn’t a kitchen dresser, or a view, or a whirl of Christmas Market cinnamon, sweet almonds, or the comfort of the bells of Beata Maria leading safe home through the restless stammer of a lonely night; a rucksack...
Sylvie Jane Lewis
Water Damage Noted 06/24 An old lady enters, soak-dizzy, puts her returned book on the trolley. She’d not bothered to carry it in her bag, barely shielded it with her coat. The pages are wobbled, warped, thin skin wrinkling in fast-forward. Yes,...
Leigh Manley
Should You Wish to Imagine Poetry in Ventricular Ectopy False starts, I’m aching to roll with you, though you catch me stumbling off beat latches, stomatic downturns spoken improvised snatches of punk, hybrid bongo systole, freeze-frame lunar...
Patrick Wright
IN EVERY OVAL A FACE When you drew lines in the sand with your long white cane the lesson was that faces can be found just about anywhere. All they need is a frame. And there it was, just needed you to accentuate the slanted brows with a deft...
S.C. Flynn
TENTH VIEW OF THE SOUTHERN CROSS Araucania, Chile, 1800 AD This is no job for the young, Melipal; only old women like me will go on using one dream to explain another in this language twisted like dry tree roots. Your five lights have watched us...
Ilias Tsagas
Ilias Tsagas is a Greek poet writing in English as a second language. His poems have appeared in journals like: AMBIT, Under the Radar, Poetry Wales, streetcake, SAND, Tokyo Poetry, Plumwood Mountain and elsewhere. Ilias was a Poet-in-Residence at the European...
Lauren Sheerman
Offices matins as the sun thinks of rising i whisper good morning god into my pillow. lauds i splash well water three times on my face as a tonic & walk out into the day; out into the cloister, into the wind, into the world. prime i butter...
Curtis Brown
Property 26-2-24 After West Bank settlement marketing event… in New Jersey. Some old masters may have operated in good faith: unclear how they made their riches. Financial reports, always came back black, boxes of darker bodies conjuring profit....
Vidushi Rijuta
Chances I had nothing to lose, so I took a chance. Then a few more, like a squirrel, darting for them and then racing back. And now winter is passing, joy has had a surplus this season, and I've got my small feast of fate's dividends. Vidushi Rijuta (she/her)...
Hilary Hares
The Crofton Road home team play football with the moon They have no kit to speak of but compensate with unshakeable belief they’ll ace the cup. With this in mind, they’ve got young Sharkey Thompson up in goal. Starts well. McGarry heads a blinder, slips – a fatal...
‘I’m looking through a lattice of magnolia’ by Robin Houghton is the June 2024 Pick of the Month. Read and hear it here.
Beautiful interweaving of nature and human concerns The word ‘beautiful’ was repeated again and again in voters’ comments as this subtle, understated poem revealed the tragic death of a sister that lay at the heart of it, and it is for this reason and more that Robin...
Sue Finch
His Nose is so Visible Against the Midnight Blue The moon is a Punch in the sky. A boy is carrying a bruise. And nobody is talking to either of them about ordinary things. She says she cannot trace the shape of the puppet you are seeing in...
Heather Holcroft-Pinn
Cunning These things I know, and in knowing, can do; I am able, and my ability like my anatomy is deceitful. Canniness is seeing illusion not sin in the tip of the tongue the curve of the eye; the bodies like mine whipped for their wits. It is...