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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
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
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...
On the Twelfth Day of Christmas, we bring you Elle Dillion-Reams, Nu Dawn and My Hairy Vag
Christmas Poem Worries of the year wrapped up In non recyclable plastic paper Black Friday Sale hall of unmissable deals Our care for one another must be revealed in how we BUY for one another Spend Spend Spend We tend to the sealed boxes bright Hang The...
On the Eleventh Day of Christmas, we bring you Kathryn Alderman, Joanne Key, Fiona Larkin
New Year 2022 Lips kissed at midnight, we skitter home, twist off rimy pavements like kittens on black ice, think how returning takes forever. We try to squint at the twelvemonth ahead but our eyeballs are bobbed plums, rollicking spirit-levels...
On the Tenth Day of Christmas, we bring you Sue Burge, Marie-Louise Eyres, Sue Finch
Clara is just another girl, dreaming in her deep pink world of sugar mice and sugar plums. Young enough to fall for the charms of clockwork and blue-eyed dolls with ballerina sherbet swirls of layered net; light enough to sit on uncles’ laps,...
Live zoom reading with Kim Moore, Jeremy Dixon, Christopher Horton
Please join us on zoom for live readings from Kim Moore, Jeremy Dixon and Christopher Horton on 2nd January 2022, at 4pm UTC This is part of our monthly award-winning ‘Live from the Butchery’ series, hosted by Helen Ivory and Martin Figura from their home (an...
On the Ninth Day of Christmas, we bring you Adam Warne, Ken Evans, Marcelle Newbold
Nativity ‘Lullay, lullay.’ Can you hear her sing, so far from here, crouched on bloodied straw, beside the phlegmatic ox? ‘Lullay, lullay, my little child, may we know peace tonight.’ She sings, and learns, against her weary heart, the peace he...
On the Eighth Day of Christmas, we bring you Leslie Ingram, Sarah James, Ruth Aylett
Elbow Room We travel home (ignoring that we lost it years ago) in time for turkey, mistletoe, for ear-worms to re-cast the brain. We check out the reindeer hanging on the third branch up, its always spot, now single antlered and rubbed free of...
On the Seventh Day of Christmas, we bring you Laura McKee, Claire Walker, Louisa Campbell
mid-winter ice storm Lake Mendota photos of Joni Mitchell by Joel Bernstein no river but this lake and not getting carried away she tested if it would hold her across the whole iced breadth of it etched ever widening circles arms stretched out...
On the Sixth Day of Christmas, we bring you Gillian Laker, Julie Maclean, Amlanjyoti Goswami
The Twelvey Night Mummers I must have been nearly nine when the Green Man and good Saint George deranged our winter parish. A gilded Turk and terrifying horse, the doctor with his bottle and bag, coaxed something very old to curl around the...
On the Fifth Day of Christmas, we bring you Finola Scott, K.S Moore, Scott Elder
Christmas Magic The moths have got to Jesus, chewed holes in his swaddling robes. Mary as ever is trying to stay calm though Joseph is showing the strain. Children adore the cloud-soft lambs, the sparkly angels my Mum crafted. Each year there's...
On the Fourth Day of Christmas, we bring you Oliver Comins, Maggie Mackay, Bob Cooper
24th December Late Shift, Christmas Eve Twelve reindeer wander among these lean trees. Muffled light, seeping through layers of conifer, is reaching them as snowflakes, floating gently to settle on backs and over their dappled grazing. Above them,...
On the Third Day of Christmas, we bring you Carole Bromley, Janet Dean, Pat Edwards
Silver Lining after Billy Collins What a relief it is not to be boarding that Qantas plane, the hours of boredom, the cramp, the endless movies and then that sudden view of Sydney Opera House. How much better to be pounding the streets wearing a...
On the Second Day of Christmas, we bring you Sean Smith, Rose Anderson and David Van-Cauter
Christmas Tree The chainsaw, a hive of angry wasps, chewed the bark and something tall and graceful collapsed with a low groan as its needles pricked the earth. Below, the city lights were plugged into the socket of the bay as we loaded the tree...
Christmas Word & Image from Pletts and Berger
In Light Honey, I think that to say is in light. (At Night the States, Alice Notley) Tonight, the bellied arcs bear pearls. The borrowed luminescent studs of drowning ferris wheels flare and unfold black upon herself. I walk, name you,...