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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
Scarlett Ward Bennett
Space Two astronauts take off into space and not a single person notices the earth contract as they do so. They are birthed free from terra firma and propel themselves into orbit and perhaps mother nature is too tired to strain now so the umbilicus is...
Surprise by Mariam Varsimashvili
Surprise by Mariam Varsimashvili (illustrations and animation created by Sleep Never Comes To Me) Open the rock. There, by the river where a streak of blood is so thin it cannot be alarming. Split the rock in half and you will find cooked ham, bubbling white...
Ella Sadie Guthrie
Heartbreaker We are all just works in progress, muscles aching and eczema breaking skin Our minds playing tricks on us from Our last relationships. I confided this in the pub and you called me a heartbreaker, helping me eat yellow cheese off cold chips....
Steve Xerri
The Year in Thirteen Moons i gardener's forgotten fork a pronged Excalibur locked in iron ground, round pond a mirror to the ice moon ii pollen-yellow catkin moon, a token of death loosening its grip : frost gone, sap on the move iii mass of gelatinous...
Sophia Charalambous
Before I saw India I was a banyan tree – roots multiplying, pampered leaves. I would often sit and think about the shape of things, swastikas, shri yantras, and how many shapes are memorised and how many are inherited. I imagined the thousands of shades...
‘Vanishing Mother’ by Jenny Mitchell is the IS&T Pick of the Month for January 2021
The subject matter is important and is expressed with grace and craft - the pressure of whiteness and what passes for beauty. A comment that encapsulates why Jenny Mitchell’s deeply personal yet universal and multi-layered ‘Vanishing Mother’ is the Ink Sweat...
Maria-Sophia Christodoulou
Matinal Fears I’m going to mess your life up— taping my thumb to my finger. I’m a big foot kind of bitch god, my father is scared to ask me the truth. I cannot wake from meat dreams, orange pulp fighting my maternal instinct. Let’s calm ourselves, wash...
Word & Image from Helen Pletts and Romit Berger on Valentine’s Day
my mother is with the stars my mother is with the stars the missing buckle on Orion's belt holding my favourite constellation in check – the Universe will be organised against its will – my Earth in chaos, still Helen Pletts (www.helenpletts.com)...
Elaine Baker
Haberdasher After Pascale Petit I found out where my heart is that he’s cut out with his tiny scissors. He stitched it to a t-shirt with her name on. Back in New York they spend the weekend together, wandering down avenues that all look the same. She...
June Wentland
Migraine day Two charged wires, that shouldn’t meet, are touching and – deeply – a tenderness of bright red ulcer pulses. The sky is the colour of unrequited fights and love bites. The magpies are nervy. The weather – saw-toothed and pissed – is...
L Kiew
Glacier I overspill the high corries where the snow accumulates, breaks down, suffers ablation. Over the decades, the millennia, ice slows and fankles due to my weight. My skin extrudes nunataks, shears away to crevasses; I extend glassy gantries over...
James McDermott
TAMAGOTCHI the tamagotchi was a key chain sized egg shaped computer with screen three buttons the tamagotchis were small aliens like me who had put down an egg on Earth to see what life was like the player had to raise the...
Karishma Sangtani
In Memory of Bhau I have just woken up on a stern mattress in the living room again. I sit up, my hands pressing the night out of my body. There is that devoted din of a ceiling fan, blowing clumps of dust between the sofas. And spread across the walls,...
Leah Larwood
From under the wardrobe the naked bulb on the ceiling is an oddly lit glass balloon, bobbing riskily upside down in the winter sky. There’s an unfriendly quality in my shoulder; I’m packed like a fugitive’s suitcase, roughly. Buried under hanged clothes...
Anatoly Kudryavitsky
Looking Upwards These stones overhead, comets juggling omens... What’s the distance between nothing and no other thing? We eye the sky thinking of a science to replace it with. Has anybody flown to holiness from a language? To bliss from...
Fokkina McDonnel
what will you do now you’re alone in the sun ask your shadow to leave you for a while send your shadow to market where it can frighten chickens, the women selling red powder let your shadow enter the forest of tall trees stroke the snouts of grunting...
Annie Freud, Jane Burn, Anja Konig – Live Zoom Reading
Please join us on zoom for live readings from Annie Freud, Jane Burn and Anja Konig on Sunday 7th February at 4pm GMT This is part of our monthly ‘Live from the Butchery’ series, hosted by Helen Ivory and Martin Figura from their home (an old CoOp...
The Vultures of Prometheus by Ruth Aylett
The Vultures of Prometheus by Ruth Aylett Nobody asked us if we liked liver especially a man’s, especially a demi-god’s. Eyes are much tastier, but we aren’t allowed to blind, part of the punishment is to see us coming. And this diet is disgustingly monotonous,...
Cheryl Pearson
How To Write A Poem First, forget the moon. Forget your lover. I want you blind to weather. Stars. All kinds of water. Start with I, with you. With what you know. No reimaginings. No Salomes with milky thighs, serrated knives. No penitent Medusas....
Jill Abram
Did Philippe Petit come to Heptonstall? At the top of the mill chimney some hundred feet above the stream, level with my eyes and my open mouth is a man in a leotard. It is purple, gleaming neon against lichen on stones to which he clings, brighter even than...