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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
Patrick Deeley
The Inspiring As you rummage of a morning among dust-furred personal effects jumbled in an old wooden suitcase under a bed and seeming to belong to no-one, you find a woman about whom the world, if it ever supposed at all, supposed only...
Deborah Nash
Cross Hot Burns Deborah Nash lives in Brighton, S.E. England. She studied visual art in Nanjing, China and Bourges, France, and now works as a freelance journalist. Her short stories appear in Litro, The Mechanic Institutes’...
Terry Jones
Lines Written in Early Spring The Lake District Tourist Board has had no input into what you are now reading, but I so miss Cumbria in Holy Week; late March or early April; snow on the tops or a cold sun vying with a cold wind; congregations of chaotic...
Mary Mulholland
Red as a fairytale Who will pick the apples now she's gone? Orchards of eaters, cookers, some red-fleshed that she’d harvest and lay on racks, then gather those on the ground, struggle down with bag-loads to dump on my doorstep. No note. As if...
Samantha Carr
The Girl with Goldfish Under Her Skin She has few secrets with her translucent map skin of blue underground rivers visible to scale. Contours of overlapping knots oblivious to each other and to you – mesmerised by the girl with goldfish under her...
Alison Patrick
Cepaea nemoralis A dozen snail shells exposed on dry soil in the archangel’s cut brown stalks. Banded like fairground sweets and helter-skelters, but forget all those frivolous stripey things. These are brittle, open-mouthed vacancies, void of the...
Arlene Jackson
I Can but Try Hello Tamara, it’s lovely to hear your voice stretching out across the Atlantic, from your eco pod of wellness into my quiet space, where things are not so well today. But it is today. New and fresh. I have made it through from...
Julie Egdell
Notes from the Constanta train station At the shore of impossibility last moments come to nothing all our plans die in the salt air of another new day on the black sea. There is a sadness in the way we leave the ocean in summer that no cocaine...
Elena Chamberlain
My trans friends and I just want to go swimming in cold water without a thousand eyes watching. to dunk our very own heads under and feel as the breathing world is wiped out. to get an ice cream from a van in the park and watch it drip down the...
Regina Weinert
Nothing much It was the snatch of a dream, someone said this is not what you do in the desert, it was one precise thing, not a list, and I had to find my way back to it. They always ask you now, don’t they, to remember how it felt. I only heard...
Deborah Karl-Brandt
The Peace of Winter With every book I sell, with every piece of clothing I give away, with every one of my old toys I bury deep into the trash bin, I feel a bone deep tiredness creeping into my soul. I know, I know, I have to let go. But please...
Philip Dunkerley
Everything Changes Goiás Velho, Brazil (for Terezinha Pereira da Silva) We leave early, drive for two and a half hours, park, find the church where you were married. Later, in town, an information officer listens, searches assiduously through the...
Marc Janssen
Salem January IV The sky opens Blinking its single slackened eye. It grumbly gets up. Before shuttering again and whatever blue was there Is gone. It’s gone again. What is there left to say about Marc Janssen? Maybe, his verse is...
Sigune Schnabel tr. Simon Lèbe
Mother She cut letters out of me, which quietly and unnoticed danced red poems. In the autumn wind, they fell at her feet and rustled decay. Since then, my name wears holes. I counted myself off on five fingers and planted my remains in the...
In Praise of.. : Alison Hramiak Reviews ‘Songs For Wo(Men)’ by Mugabi Byenka
From the start of this very honest and reflective book, you are drawn in to the journey represented in the pages. The story starts with a meeting between Dick and Mugabi, and this weaves an innovative thread through the collection – a carefully thought out seam of...
April Fool’s Day Greetings, from IS&T!
Tricks , Etc. Poisson D'Avril Helen Ivory is poet and visual artist. She edits IS&T and teaches for Arvon. Her sixth Bloodaxe collection Constructing a Witch (2024) was a PBS Winter Recommendation. She won a Cholmondeley Award from the...
Beatriu Delaveda
Nothing goes without saying Beatriu Delaveda is the pseudonym of a writer who used to live in Chester and has publiished five books as well as two chapbooks of visual poetry. The poetry, fiction, and...
Pat Edwards
Photo of a man lighting up in the snow In the wrong shoes, no gloves, his dark coat and hat are greyed with snow. He is in white-out, stopped in his tracks, dying for the comfort of a fag. He makes a chalice around the flame, hands becoming shield so he can...
Pamilerin Jacob
Annette's Ode Slithering through incisor-gap, English leapt from your lips to mine, a string between you & me, ringed with hot coals we slide back & forth in the air like abacus beads. Coals that warm & warn: lighting the way as best they...
Fatihah Quadri Eniola
How It Ends There is an album of all the men your mother have loved. It sits every night in the deep silence of the basement. Tonight, your mother burns the album, she pours fire into her longing. Every memory carries a flame, every man with his own ash....