Hello
you have found your way here from an old link.
You can search here to find things or browse by category or post.
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
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,...
On the First Day of Christmas, we bring you Eithar Almosibeah, Numan Awan and Casey Brennan
Christmas gatherings I've lost my manners this quarantine. My ability to keep the curtains of my mouth stretched open for a smile suffered. My social skills, a turned off faucet in those months of longing for connection. Words refused to stream...
Janet Harper
bee I am all hum and thrum whirr sibilate vibrate zip zoom and swoop purr murmur hover manoeuvre bombilate and susurrate pulse race oscillate escalate and dive reverberate I am all bee Janet Harper’s...
JLM Morton
More Facts About Blue If I were to ask you to guess the world’s most wanted colour Not a chest of it reached England without the stain of human Darkened as if by bruising. In the womb of the vat there is life Gnosis at temporal frequency in...
Rose Lennard
Entwined Like honeysuckle tendrils she leans in to him and he to her young pliant bodies long smooth fingers interlaced heads together, murmuring like a small stream over rounded pebbles. She touches lips to his forehead and when they shift...
Julian Bishop
The Last Days Of The Giraffe She stared down from her beige towerblock onto an alien plain: zig-zag of roofs, wingless cranes, zebra crossings and a sea of litter - the new neighbours behaved like bushpigs. Once she used to hoof it down the Thames...
The Air We Held Between Us by T.S. IDIOT
WARNING: FLICKERING IMAGES https://youtu.be/lVcLgpabYY4 The Air We Held Between Us last time i was here, you were too and that used to hurt this hope for something solid, slowly disappearing. but i'm ok, now and i hope you are too. i really hope you're...
Tom Kelly
When they go they will still text you give an unexpected call keeping it brief, before a meeting but the phone is dead and it is the first time I have used that word. You will still shout up the stairs ring the bell there is no-one there key...
Ra Sh reviews Sanjeev Sethi’s Wee Book ‘Bleb’
In just 31 wee poems of 10 lines each, Sanjeev Sethi, an Indian poet, creates a monumental work of grace from raw feelings. The themes are all too familiar, but the little chambers they reside in are unique. Heavy furniture goes out of the window as rooms are...
Hiba Heba
Cloudage I see you. Like me, you’re misshapen; a swamp in a dwelling. We merge; a suture quivers through us, the way nightmares take long strides on still waters. We’re camping under the mellow lilts of our alibi; the breath checks out. ...
Listen to Subitha Baghirathan’s ‘Sari shop, Easton’ our the IS&T November Pick of the Month.
Beautiful, evocative and hits all my senses The words ‘evocative’ and ‘beautiful’ were used over and over again to describe Subitha Baghirathan's ‘Sari shop, Easton’ and it is for this reason and the poem’s sense of place that this vibrant work is the IS&T...