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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
On the Eleventh Day of Christmas, we bring you Gareth Writer-Davies, Josie Moon, Sue Finch and Sam Garvan
Twelfth Night the weather through the draped window dreich the fire spits and greetings cards make a merry flame as I the audient listen to the sermon of the grate that a living room is empty unless you let in a little light Gareth...
A Poem from our New Intern: Memoona Zahid
Postcards from Murree, Pakistan after Nina Mingya Powles 1. We drink milky hot tea from dainty teacups, pastel porcelain. With it, the mist rising in the mountains around us, and petrichor. The sound of children playing, the tips of their shoes pattering...
On the Tenth Day of Christmas, we bring you Antony Owen, Mandy Macdonald and Ramona Herdman
Christmas in the wasteland For Prof R Klein Bird foot snow arrows east Sun is oblong yolk spilt over elms I see Hiroshima setting and all is silent now. I see you in snow drift apparitions Bride not to be scattered to five winds I feel the chilblain frost and think of...
Muntjac by Helen Pletts and Romit Berger
Helen Pletts (www.helenpletts.com) (Instagram @helen.pletts) Working collaboratively as Word & Image by Pletts & Berger with illustrator Romit Berger, since 2011 (published exclusively online by www.inksweatandtears.co.uk). Helen’s poetry was...
On the Ninth Day of Christmas, we bring you Josephine Corcoran, Nicholas McGaughey and Jack Houston
Parenting Book I wrote it down when they woke me at 3am to tell me they didn’t like ham anymore, only jam and cheese. How on the toilet is the best place to sing. I kept a notebook for years: the sore throat bad as three arrows sticking...
On the Eighth Day of Christmas, we bring you Andrea Holland, Sue Burge and Angela Topping
Domain The fork garden is planted by hallmark, by taxonomic value from the tines down. Frost plates the handle, silver lip at the edge of soil, dug out in winter, dug out of winter, bringing up root and louse. If dirt bound and iced in the fork...
On the Seventh Day of Christmas, we bring you ML Eyres, Anna Blasiak and Finola Scott
Christmas Ritual, 1. After lunch she whispers to the carved mahogany table legs feels around for the mouse cut into the back of the armchair where her grandmother reads paperback mysteries. She names that mouse Moses. Then she slides away from the...
On the Sixth Day of Christmas, we bring you Amlanjyoti Goswami, Lesley Ingram and Jane Simmons
Mad Santa Someone was here, no not me. Someone who wears pink slippers And paints the walls red Who upturns the upholstery. And downs a few swigs at the breakfast table, Tethers around the edge of the circle, asking to be out. Someone with a hood...
On the Fifth Day of Christmas, we bring you Tracey Rhys, Kate Noakes and Carole Bromley
Interior, with Child Soon enough, we were holed up in snow. So much to be glad for, our baby between us in the bed. We hummed carols, lit the tree. Such an ochre month. We lay with curtains open, sky a wash of Prussian blue, chimneys smoking, ice creaking on branches....
On the Fourth Day of Christmas, we bring you Joanne Key, Joanna Ingham and Gill McEvoy
Mister Bloody Christmas Mam taught me to send his name up the chimney, let it draw away before clawing it back through embers and ash, or to simply stand for hours in the kitchen, peeling, raw hands plunged into a bowl of sorrow, thinking of him....
Streets of the Abandoned City
Poem from Helen Ivory's chapbook Maps of the Abandoned City, published by SurVision. Performed, illustrated and recorded by Roger Foyster. Helen Ivory is a poet and visual artist. Her fifth Bloodaxe collection is The Anatomical Venus (2019). She edits IS&T and...
On the Third Day of Christmas, we bring you Lorraine Carey, Rachel Burns and Maggie Mackay
Christmas Firs The mountain road coiled, dipped in places, a saggy asphalt snake. Bends cuddled frosty drifts, crusting with darkness and a swift drop in temperature. We watched somersaulting snowflakes from portholes of erased condensation, our gloves and coat cuffs...
On the Second Day of Christmas we bring you David Bleiman, Susie Wild and Barry Fentiman Hall
Simply having… You’re only in Tesco for the milk, already angry, having to scrape the car before your first coffee, and then to hear Band Aid and Slade before the end of November. By the time you get home you are almost calm until you see...
On the First Day of Christmas, we bring you Debbie Strange, Kirsten Luckins, Pascal Vine and Caroline Hammond
Debbie Strange is an internationally published short-form poet and haiga artist living in Canada. Her most recent book, The Language of Loss: Haiku & Tanka Conversations, won the Sable Books 2019 International Women's Haiku Contest. Dear Sophie, 20th...
Charlie Hill
Consolation poem In a meadow of red campion beside a wood in mossy quiet, a boy and girl leap into the air, wave sticks, make Maurice Sendak faces, are suspended forever between earth and sky. Charlie Hill is a critically...
Lucy Maxwell Scott
Lobster If my father were home, the larder would be full of brown paper bags bursting with over-ripe mangoes, purple-tipped artichokes, dead pheasant hanging, packets of stinking cheese, figs split and spilling seed, and sometimes I would be...
Chin Li
Afternoon Walk I went out for my afternoon walk, and dreamed of no man’s land: a Bir Tawil, a terra nullius fort; I went out for my afternoon walk: orchids bloomed on pseudobulbs ― pink, yellow and vanilla to sport; I went out for my afternoon...
Chris Rice
Referendum I throw the ballpoint pen away. She hits the carpet with her stick and says she wants it back. I offer her another one but, no, she wants the one she’s always used. I check my watch and roll my eyes and marvel at her stubbornness, her...
Congratulations to Mariam Saidan who is our IS&T Pick of the Month poet for November 2020
'this poem is of a few words but very deep feelings' Voters loved its beauty, its simplicity and its truth and this is why, from a superb group of shortlisted poems, Mariam Saidan's 'Lies' is the Ink Sweat & Tears Pick of the Month for November 2020. Mariam is...
Lucien Linwood
Things They Tell You your mom tells you when you’re six years old that if one person says something is wrong with you get a second opinion but if two people say the same thing consider that they might be right she tells you people can see inside of you they’ll figure...