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you have found your way here from an old link.

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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

Sue Spiers

      February 6th  You are naked when I meet you, but then, so am I. I’d been waiting months for this occasion, after a delay we meet a week later. Dark hair is slathered on your forehead unruly with gross pomade. Your voice is a gurgle like creaking...

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Sue Wallace-Shaddad

      Meditation on Shape I’ve been seeing breasts today. In the park, lavender is shorn into tidy humps and the lawn undulates creating two perfect peaks between some trees. A road sign, tipped over, nestles in leaves, warning that bumps lie ahead, its...

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Jackie Wills

      Dressmaker at the market I stop at the dressmaker's stall to ask what she does with leftovers. We discuss bunting - it's a slow day. I buy a £10 bag of scraps, swatches, snippets, interrupted patterns and borders. The bag taps a morse of promises...

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Donna Campbell

      A Murder of Crows I feed the crows that loiter in my back garden. The young ones know no manners and fail to bring me gifts like their older kin. They bring glittery things, discarded wishbones, rusted metal, random objects no doubt each with a...

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Joseph Rodgers

      Snowlight A window glowing with snowlight and we’re running. Take care not to make me your caretaker. I’m just that tube you suddenly share a tunnel with before we charge into our own darknesses or are whisked into them. Stop the whistle, the...

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Jim Murdoch

      Weeds   Needs must and so they do. Without hesitation or regret. Maslow at least got that right. Love is not a need per se. The need for love (real or imagined) is the need. Like hunger or thirst. Flowers are beautiful. Most flowers. Weeds...

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Elisabeth Sennitt Clough

      paradise farm don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining the for sale by auction sign says paradise farm but i know this is the yard of the house i grew up in i’m an adult tourist in my fen-poor childhood where the past crunches beneath me like...

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Freyja Jones

      Every time the doctor sighs looks me in the face, a faint smile playing around his lips eyes sketching scars into my cheeks as if I am    nothing more than a shrunken pea another idiotic woman  a googler a giver-upper a hypochondriac who loves the...

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IS&T Welcomes its Fourth Editing Intern and First for 2022: Leah Jun Oh

    creature comfort goat-eyed and fragile                                         I lay my head in your lap. seven days                                          I have struggled        braying         spitting against the grain                         my...

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Erica Hesketh

      Placenta in the beginning spiral arteries unwound a river thundered to the site where the capsule was buried, flesh into flesh, bathing the villi in blood: our first exchange within days a structure sprang up along the outermost wall, a trading...

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Pat Edwards reviews ‘Be Feared’ by Jane Burn

  Living in such a digital age, it is increasingly rare to not at least know something about a writer even before we read their work. I wanted to try to approach this collection by Jane Burn as if I was in a vacuum, unaware of what I know of her from social media...

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Hannah Welfare

      Firstborn My hands Are bird wings Against the soft percussion Of his heartbeat A caesarean scar Cradles my pelvis Beneath my sexless breasts Each new day Paints his vision His hand curls towards A glove A book made of rags A spoon carved from bone...

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