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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
Jay Délise
The Love Poems I finally took the trash out, sent that email, and had enough clean dishes to eat a meal at the table but there was no time to write the poem Before you woke up this morning I slipped into the cool autumn air in search of the...
Gwen Sayers
Simulacra I was six when I shifted a curtain in a dark room at the waxwork museum and peered through glass at a woman I remember hooks and chains her tattered skirts pale lips crimson stains I thought of her first time I lifted black tarpaulin...
John Bowen
The Upminster Train We met on the District Line from Wimbledon to Upminster. Chatted all through Southfields. Hands held by Putney Bridge. Our first kiss at a sudden lurch near Parson’s Green. In love as we pulled in at Fulham Broadway. It was all...
Dennis Tomlinson
The Lea at Hertford Around me everything is peaceful. The river flows, willows trail in it and children walk by. Nothing of her suicide abides. Dennis Tomlinson lives in London. His poems have been published recently in Shot...
Rachel Wild
Zina I remember your laugh, a cackle, irrepressible and sometimes never ending, echoing down the stairs. Wooden stairs, or were they covered in lino, scuffed by hundreds of feet up and down in that damaged old house. There were eight of us living...
Barbara Cumbers
Because you’ve never seen one, you ask me about stag beetles What can I tell you now that they’re so rare? Every childhood May or June they came at dawn and dusk, mostly in ones and twos, sometimes formation clouds buzzing, black belly-drop, fuzzy...
Christopher Barnes
ALMANACS 21. Your optics’ fuzz is merciful. Value speckles on mirrors. Above par days have routed. Profess want of upset - Grizzled hairs invade, marauding. 24. Festoon pine 'til glitzy. Shroud bounty in vivid overlays. Letterbox cards will roll....
L Kiew
L Kiew is a Chinese-Malaysian based in London, and works as a charity sector leader and accountant. Her debut pamphlet The Unquiet was published by Offord Road Books (2019). She was a 2019/2020 London Library Emerging...
Jane Salmons
Swan Song after David Lynch a sownder of gliding swans white horses frothing in stardust exploding paper mice a cat bowing in soft-focus before a tassle of gloves a rustle of harps knowing applause misted by a lens Jane Salmons lives in...
Jinny Fisher
Containment I drive your lemon yellow Smart ForTwo six hundred miles home from your flat— stuffed to the roof, my suitcase crammed on top, your miniature car swells to welcome a pile of your leavings, rescued from Junk-It Ltd. house clearance:...
Manon Ceridwen James
A Parishioner Complains at a Parish Church Council When We Move the Time of Evensong You have changed the Bible you have changed the words in the service you have brought in girls to serve at the altar and women can now be sidesmen and any minute...
John Newton Webb
A dental technician rips up a postcard of dental puns Have you known the suffering wrought by damaged mouths? Or the solemn joy of healing? Have you reckoned with the uses of dental records? Think through the murdered and the long dead; think of things...
Simon Alderwick
coffee and the interconnectedness of all things i like the darkness of it, the bitterness, the ring of light reflected on the surface. i like the story. the crushed beans. the crop growing on the side of a mountain. i like the journey, but in...
Alistair Noon
Escape from the Novinskaya Women’s Prison, Moscow, 1909 Let’s imagine the doors that scraped the freshly cemented floors as a gaggle of raindrops escaped from a gutter, the timetabled chores in the crypts for their needles and cradles, the chapels...
Eve Chancellor
The Woods The teacher sighed, as the snow piled up outside, mountain after mountain. The children listened, as the North wind howled, winter after winter. ‘That will be all for today, children,’ the teacher said. The students rushed over to pegs,...
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...
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...
Listen to Abigail Flint read ‘Self portrait as Blackpool’, the IS&T December 2021 Pick of the Month.
So evocative and vivid Lovers of all things seaside and Blackpool pushed Abigail Flint’s ‘Self portait as Blackpool’ to the fore and she emerged as the winning Pick of the Month poet with her ‘startlingly original’ poem in what was a very close competition....
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...
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...