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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
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...
Susan Castillo Street
Witches Brooms and Winter Roses This year is nearly over. We walk arm in arm, hear the sound of sirens incessant background dirge. On our street, three cases. One next door, one across the way. Another, three doors down. No dead so far. Stubborn...
Hilary Menos
Collation It’s Izabelle’s funeral collation so we’re driving into Gaillac wearing proper clothes. I’m driving, you are listening to some mad YouTuber who claims that water has memory because if you say nice things to one tub of water and nasty...
The Anatomy of an Art Student by Callum James
(click on each image to enlarge) Callum James is a book-dealer with a specialisation in queer literature. He grew up on an island and still lives near the sea. He writes about...
Sam Hickford
A Willow-Tree in Hiroshima Softly & impossibly, her roots still beckon growth. It is a slow hope she is drawing. Their ends were swift - echoes in the floorboards. I am reliving it, since I am solitary. A thrawning suffocation grabs the sky so...
Julian Dobson
Wave We have learned to wave distantly through glowing windows glimpsing a well-placed bookcase or houseplant imagining the corners of a room their piled-up flotsam we have learned not to ask what happens at the watershed we observe flows ...
Emma Storr reviews ‘The Peregrine Falcons of York Minster’ by Carole Bromley
Carole Bromley’s fourth collection contains poignant and reflective poems that demonstrate her skills of close observation, humour and pathos. She is also admirable in her bravery and lack of self-pity. In Meditation on Death, the last poem...
Sue Spiers
The Glow I recognise the tingle at my nape my face melts, oxters darken, make-up slides, instantly wet through layers meant to cope. Tissues, useless until the wave subsides, my bright red fan announces to the place the hormone flush that’s difficult to...
Elizabeth Gibson
The golden hare I colour in a hare for my Mam for her birthday, hop between radio channels and pencil shades: red to maroon, blue to indigo, brown to russet, softest gold for the hare and the glow around it. It is long in body and limb and ear,...
James Bradley
Anti-Aubade Your sobs disrupt the sound of Robert Lowell reading his ‘Old Flame’ from the app on my phone. I sit on the balcony finishing a final cigarette and try to enjoy it. Leaves crackle in the darkness just outside the panes. The orange ember...
Sally Michaelson on Holocaust Memorial Day
from The Lorch Family Magic Trick Adolf Althoff is used to riding tigers so when Gestapo soldiers come looking for Irene he plies them with Schnapps while Irene squeezes into a passage tight as a magician’s box – contracting in size until she is...
Anna Saunders
Telling the Bees Little vials into which the sun has poured I tell you all I know about the failing crop, a marriage party, a stricken cow. Last summer I tied a ribbon to the top of your home, whispered with a sweet tongue that a new master had come....
Andrew Nightingale
How it feels to be a bat There are the headaches, then the feverish sense of darkness. Taste, none but the crackly limbs of gnats. Hate is a constant on the radar and immense blank surfaces block the call by which I come to belong in the shape of a...