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
Anna Vercambre
How many handfuls of mush today? On a good day it’s 13, on a bad day it’s more like 79. Shall we build you out of cardboard? Shall we build you out of tin cans? Maybe tin cans would be more durable. Last time the cardboard got wet. You are no less...
Welcome Sofía Masondo, our New Editing Intern
Offals The flavours of home are off-putting. Offals, glands, chitterlings; this last one, we call chinchulínes, my favourite. I always liked the name, the word’s aftertaste greasy like a swallow flying to better places leaving the ovenbird behind to build its...
Sue Johns
Old Growth His wife heeds risk from a distance. For country dwellers the strains of a chainsaw are seldom an annoyance, unless too close at hand, they affirm a place amongst birdsong. To keep an engine thrumming, to perform the perfect cleft how...
Freya Cook, Amii Griffith and The Mollusc Dimension on our fourth and final day of our Pride Feature
Love Poem to June After Paul Monette if every window filled with light it would refract ten thousand rainbows at least twelve would hit you and if i say you are beautiful in this light you would say this is your light the only one you want to be...
Aisha Odette and Carmilla for the Third Day of our Pride Feature
Aisha Odette is a poet in her twenties from Lancashire. When not working her busy job in healthcare, she can be found writing letters to long-distance friends, and reading by the sea. Aisha Odette is her nom de plume. She can be found on instagram...
Beth Davies, Fee Marshall and Fiona Broadhurst for Day 2 of our Pride Feature
Beth Davies’ debut pamphlet, The Pretence of Understanding, was published by The Poetry Business in 2023 after winning the 2022 New Poets Prize. Beth also won second place in the 2022 Magdalena Young Poets’ Prize. Her website...
Lara Mae Simpson and Siobhan Dunlop for Day 1 of our Pride Feature
How to Love the Word “Lesbian” We took the bus in tutus & fairy wings, gripped on to the cowboy hat trying to fly from your curls in July's breeze. In Trafalgar Square, floats of rainbow companies waltzed by & we rolled our eyes, couldn’t...
Paul Stephenson
The Conversation It’s been quite a while now and… You know we get on like a house… August twelfth, a year ago, can you… I bet you thank your lucky… Things have evolved, haven’t… Can you believe we’re both still… You know how in Prague when… Did...
Scott C. Holstad
Surviving Six Shooter I was sent from the Glendale jail down to the L.A. Twin Towers, the Los Angeles County Jail for those with medicinal needs. I was Bipolar and on 14 prescription meds including two strong anti-psychotics. LAC was the only...
In Praise of…: Anna Saunders Reviews ‘Blood Alluvium’ by S. Preston Duncan
‘There is that kind of heat / in some hands’, S. Preston Duncan writes in his richly lyric poem ‘You Don’t Steal from the Witch’s Garden’ – and this extraordinary poet could be speaking of his own poetry – which blazes with a rare and precious artistic fire. In...
Hannah Linden
Agnosthesia for MH She gives me a word to look up in a dictionary of obscure sorrows. I, who try to decipher echoes from other people’s reaction to my words throw down a bucket into the well recognise water when people tell me how sad––how...
Rebecca Klassen
Liana 1) Liana vines are rooted in the earth and use trees to climb towards the canopy. Mum sews in her armchair, the embroidery hoop in one hand like a tambourine as she plays it with cotton, the needle’s tempo remaining steady when Dad gets...
Nelly Bryce
Longing After Hafiz Longing curls its legs up on the sofa in our house. There’s a dip there now. How I long to turn us into a day trip. You belong in that chair over there asking what happened with that text and where I bought this jumper, whether...
Cameron Tricker
Mercurial Mornings See the local estate agent crooks Ten a penny Smoking their rollies, washed down with protein Pigeons with emerald necks Mealworm toes Clucking ‘round bins Unfazed by the likes of you Or me Taxi drivers Caffeinated Menagerie of...
Elizabeth Osmond
Doctors in difficulty after Helen Mort A trainee in difficulty is one whose progress is causing concern or who is not meeting curricular requirements. This may be due to ill health, life events, difficulties with learning or through less than...
Jay Whittaker
My early days with junk food When we got home from junior school, Mum was still working. We would go to the cupboard where multi-packs of Fine Fare’s basic crisps were sorted into old shoe boxes, one for each child. Although Mum said those should...
Kate Maxwell
Lightheaded Sick of steadying the base of the ladder while you ascend to fix or fell sculpting, tweaking real and here when mostly I feel hardly real and hardly here. I’d rather be inside pretending I’m not pretending commentary inside my head is...
Jim Murdoch
In the Event of [ ] Read Poem Most things have their uses, some have value or worth and a rare few acquire some purpose and even meaning. Some things we hold in trust, some we forget we even own and then there’re those items we hang onto...
Andrew McDonnell on Father’s Day
Somewhere to get to The light is growing in the East the headlights skim the road that runs beside the flooded fields we’re a month off blossom when it comes I will drape myself in the year’s renewal and ask how many times I will see my little...
Luke Reilly on National Flash Fiction Day
Fag Break A meek and graceful man dressed in a loose-fitting suit paces across the roof of the Four Seasons hotel. He smokes a cigarette and watches the Seoul skyline. He inhales. Beneath his skin, the smoke stains his lungs, thickens the blood....