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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
Kapka Nilan
After the Tribe When she left, the winds picked up and the bloated sun filled the horizon with fire, the sky turning ochre. She hurried in the heat, leaving behind what she called a tribe, not a homeland. She still remembers the scale of the...
Patrick Deeley
The Speed of the Earth He sees a stainless-steel spoon burned off at the base, a bunch of wild flowers dropped, a builder’s padded glove plastered flat, a car slumped in black ashes and glass. He imagines his classmates singing out the bargain...
Jessamine O’Connor
https://youtu.be/yg9U-RFc-5A Nerve Music Sometimes I’m jittery like this jittering nervousness appears as a tremor from somewhere distant far away inside and I’m on edge but maybe on edge is advantageous where things happen the best...
Eliot North
Homunculus Explaining to my little man about proportion, he responds with feeling: a picture of daddy with thousands of fingers. Sensory and motor cortex guiding the felt-tip pen, big tongue lolling as he draws. A little man with huge hands,...
Jeanette Burton
What is this, a family outing? Yes, dad, that’s exactly what this is, I want to say to him as I open the car door, climb into the front seat, remembering those marvellous trips to the tip at Loscoe. My brother, aged nine, threading himself through...
CS Crowe
Lines He lived next to the funeral home with his three daughters. A cherry picker beeps in the distance. I cannot see it, but I know the light is red. Who brings roses to a funeral? Rain rolls down window glass, but not here, only somewhere in the...
Carole Bromley
The Last Person on Earth I don’t know why I went, I’d already heard about the time a colleague’s husband turned up at the staff barbecue and punched him. We met at The Prince of Wales but he refused to go in because a sixth former was working at...
Lisa Falshaw
A mother teaches her Neurodiverse child colours What colour is the dog? The dog is brown. Can you see the brown dog? What colour is the cat? The cat is black. Can you see the black cat? What colour is the school? The school is too-bright primary...
Paul Murgatroyd
Some Hope I am a clown performing slapstick at a funeral, Cassandra whispering to Narcissus, an ant on the lawn at a posh garden party mooning policemen with pepper sprays, I am a blunt pencil snarling death-threats at the deaf (while hoping for...
Hayden Hyams
The rain is expected to stop in 8 minutes and start again in 29 minutes I am lying on grass There is blue sky above me And an aeroplane And a fly I am a David Hockney painting (Minus the fly) I work as a volunteer at Oxfam putting donated clothes...
In Praise of… David Pollard on ‘The Whole Island’ by Simon Maddrell
At the Edge of Language Simon Maddrell, The Whole Island There are some diamonds that are mostly black because their unique crystalline structure absorbs most of the light. Change your perspective as you look at them and it seems that different parts...
Jude Mason
The Small and Many Forms of Sadness I have compiled an incomplete list of the small and many forms of sadness that can be experienced by humans. The sadness of cracking the spine of a new book. The sadness of odd socks. The sadness of attempting...
Bryan Marshall
The Lung Men Look at the faint rain twisting itself into the ground, making dry things resign themselves to different states of damp. Watch silent doors opening, closing, think of climbed stairs, rooms reached. Hear minds unslam, shadows chewing soft...
Fokkina McDonnell
Aposematism / Honest warning signals 1 I begged my boss to let me do the interview with the fire historian. I have form, I told him. I’ve been close to fires in Brussels, in Sydney, in Manchester. Woke on a Sunday morning to the sound of breaking...
Poetry from UEA MA Scholars 2023/2024: Badriya Abdullah and Dana Collins
Badriya Abdullah is the fifth student to be awarded the University of East Anglia's Birch Family Scholarship set up to support UK-based poetry MA students from the Black, Asian, Latinx and other global majority communities. This was established by IS&T publisher...
Dawn Sands
Interview Response after Yaël Farber Nothing I can tell you to answer your question — all I can muster is that it was that production of King Lear, Edgar emerging raw and fresh and naked from the storm, unrecognisable even to himself, his father blind and suicidal but...
Christian Donovan
Small hours chat (after The Poet or Half-past Three by Marc Chagall 1911-12) O celebrated bard, you should know espresso mixed with drags of Gauloise won’t steady your head. Your pondweed face betrays chaos, lays bare a wretched heart, while cubist-dissected skin...
Shamik Banerjee
Half Past Eleven Much like a burnt-out farmer flumping down upon his ache-allaying, tender bed past toiling in the unforgiving sun, Ma does the same when stove-led tasks are done, heat-pillaged, sapped, and flabby at the head, with arms full splayed. Throughout her...
Janet Lees
https://youtu.be/q0nStafY1GI Nine Moons Physic The moon changes size Tonight it is small and high white and hard as a pill While you dream of stone trees under the ground it drops from the sky into the glass beside your bed dissolves with a bone-saw sigh The water...
Rose Lennard
Lot’s Daughters Visit Their Mother Each year we climbed to that place high above the ruins. The first time, our almost-twins bundled in shawls, we found her tall, unyielding, testament to all those she had loved and known: kith, kin, home: the cursed we left behind....