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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

 Stephanie Powell

      The iron moon, looks differently under hospital windows shakes down completely sometimes, touches the eye of the rich drunk- squatting in the alleyway for a piss It is not romantic, no. Does not bring knees to pavement- does not heal broken skin....

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Sam Garvan

      The Last Train Pulls Away That day, my mother wore her rose-print and wandered from room to room in acres of blossom. She heard a thin, far loophole in the wind sweeter than new-mown hay. Her face was lit. Out of nowhere my father come back from...

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Kevin Higgins

       Their Return The people who lived here before, we slowly abolish them by buying beaming new fridges, washer dryers, cookers with fan ovens that actually work and two year warranties, more sofas for the cat to do Tai Chi on. Yet the rooms are...

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Pen Kease

      Visual Impairment for Rowan when you trace her lines brittle teeth cheek-bones you’ll remember your mother’s face know her by her footsteps when there is cacophony speak and sounds will become ordered new ride the water row and pull until you are ...

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Michael Bloor on National Flash Fiction Day

      Stirring Ambition As they'd agreed that morning, the three old women met again at the crossroads on the heath, when the sun was sinking. They were beggars, clad in beggars' rags. War was once more in the land and beggars' pickings were thinner...

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Emily Sharkey

      The Watchmaker stomach stilted, harbour bound, sweet dreams, love – oh, these rain clouds swirl like tea leaves in an ink-stained sky hush now, a golden-toned man hums time’s tune like notes to a song like beats to a heart whilst time scatters its...

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Rob Stuart

  Rob Stuart’s poems, visual poems and short stories have been published in magazines, newspapers and webzines all over the world. He has also written the screenplays for several award-winning and internationally exhibited short films.

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Heidi Slettedahl

      Flowers and Baguettes Her shopping trolley thought she had the kind of life where flowers and baguettes would feature regularly. She was just shopping for detergent and descaler. She wanted to live up to this imagined life, even sometimes bought...

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Tessa Foley

      Assortment But he watched me eat the chocolate, One, two, three, four, cordial lime, he Sat while I settled on this bridal pebble, and then on the monopoly hat filled with chew, He was only a boy, who could unmould my thoughts just by waiting to...

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Katy Mahon

      LAUREL She keeps a vigil by lake Kournas each evening when the sun and moon are on an even keel, before their alignment shifts and tilts one upwards and the other into the arid ground. She lights a candle and recalls the chase as the flame quivers...

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Dana Miller

      High July A sunset walk in the high blue, one of those days that stretches so far you can’t believe the morning belongs to the afternoon, or that either could ever become a night. I would have been here sooner but I was busy cleaning up the mess...

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Luke Palmer

      Ian in the Student House Palmer Park Avenue, Reading, c.2003 I remember this entrance hall, long and painted darkly. There’s a cat, too, somewhere amongst the bins or out in the park across the road. The view from the bay window is not much...

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Mark Czanik

      Happen Yesterday the sea was at our shoulder but we couldn’t see it. Long after the fog had drifted over us Wolf Rock Lighthouse was still reminding us in its old fashioned, diaphragmatic way to take care of sudden precipices and overhangs, as...

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Golden Hour by Celestine Stilwell

      Golden Hour Over great absences speckled with birds wings, a spell is lifted – dusk like a recited dance. Routine splashes gold on chimneys and paves cobblestones with colour. Breath hangs between footfalls in gasps. Stacked houses watch through...

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Jennifer Lee Novotney

      Prayer Shawl My friend handed me a handmade prayer shawl but the truth was I hadn’t prayed in a very long time. The garment was thickly knitted like something my grandmother would have made. I put it around my shoulders immediately feeling safer...

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Avleen

      untitled dreaming of donne’s saints and becoming them in a world that urinates money to live is a torture standing on sticks and licking clocks with no time to hold each other’s’ faces planting cacti between our teeth to smile and say yes to doing...

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Sue Wallace-Shaddad

      Into the Furnace Show us your metal, they say as if I was threaded through with a girder of steel, a strut of unbending resolve. Times are difficult, they say: babes without silver spoons, the unalloyed pain of those without jobs, income. It’s a...

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Tim Kiely Reviews Portrait of Colossus by Samatar Elmi

Portrait of Colossus by Samatar Elmi Flipped Eye Publishing, 2021 ISBN: 9781905233618 £4.00 From the first poem of Samatar Elmi’s debut pamphlet, we know that this Colossus is also imagined as an immigrant: ‘fixed in stride across wandering oceans, / a bridge’. It...

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