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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...

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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...

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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....

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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,...

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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...

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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...

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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...

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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,...

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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....

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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...

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