The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt)

Editorial Note by Max WallisWhat I love most about Dale Booton’s poems is the unpalatability of them — and I mean that as praise!There is a quiet defiance in the way these poems refuse to make themselves agreeable. “Beauty” announces itself as an abstract noun and then immediately dismantles the idea that beauty can be stable, desirable, or even coherent. The slashes aren’t decorative; they feel like thinking under pressure, like a body trying to speak before it has fully decided what it is allowed to say. The poem moves in clumps, in tugs. It drags itself forward. It refuses the clean line, the polished turn. Even the word palatable appears like something caught in the throat — a recognition of how often bodies are asked to soften themselves for the comfort of others.The poem understands what it is to be looked at, to be translated by someone else’s appetite. It doesn’t ask to be admired. It insists on being felt in its resistance.Wide Awake:“Wide Awake” carries that resistance into the mouth. Lemon, split gums, bitterness seeping; the imagery is intimate and slightly uncomfortable. Love and pain sit beside one another without explanation, without hierarchy. The poem doesn’t attempt to separate them or resolve them into clarity. Instead, it lingers in the slow unfurling of a labyrinth, in the irritation that won’t quite subside. The city becomes a cracked nail, something picked at until it bleeds. It’s such a small, bodily metaphor, and yet it opens into something larger: the way restlessness becomes its own landscape.Outside:By the time we reach “Outside”, the interior has spilled into the world. Ambulance wails thread through sleep. Breath becomes visible in the cold air. The coming of morning doesn’t promise redemption; it bleaches. It exposes. The city lights are biscuit crumbs across brick tables — tender, almost domestic — but there’s still that sense of imbalance, of see-saw streets and rainfall pushing itself against whatever it can hold.What holds these poems together is not a single theme but a shared refusal to resolve. They do not rush toward epiphany. They do not perform neat catharsis. They stay with the abrasion… of being watched, of wanting, of not being able to untangle love from harm, of lying awake while the world insists on continuing.There is a line in “Beauty” that lingers long after reading: there is so much / of me / that wants / out. It doesn’t arrive as a declaration of freedom. It arrives as a fact. And that feels honest.In a moment where so much writing feels pressured to be easily consumed, easily shared, easily praised, these poems hold onto their roughness. They leave an aftertaste. They resist being smoothed down.That resistance is where their beauty lies. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aftershockpoetry.substack.com/subscribe

Serum VO below:Editorial Note by Max WallisDavid Tait’s Taxi and Serum sit inside that charged space where queer life is both ordinary and illicit; tender and edged with risk. These are not grand declarations. They are moments: a hand resting too long in the back of a cab, the smell of tissues in a bin bag, a text sent at 3am when sleep isn’t happening.What I love about these poems is their restraint. The city flashes by; a boyfriend snores in the next room. Nothing explodes. And yet everything is happening. Desire here is threaded through secrecy, through glances at the driver’s eyes, through the knowledge that intimacy is both hidden and loud.This section of Issue One gathers poems that ask what we carry forward from queer histories — the codes, the caution, the thrill — and what we refuse. Tait’s work reminds us that sometimes the inheritance is not a manifesto but a touch, a tunnel, a text message we shouldn’t send and send anyway.In other news submissions are about to close for Issue Three: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aftershockpoetry.substack.com/subscribe

Editorial Note by Max WallisIn Soledad Santana’s third and final poem from Issue One the body is not a metaphor, it’s the mechanism. A grey hair becomes thread, becomes fuse, becomes something passed hand to hand, wrist to waist, mother to child. The poem never explains this. It just does it, again and again, until repetition itself becomes the point. What we inherit is not always chosen, but it is always felt.There’s also a quiet political pressure running underneath. The language of foetal clots, pavement, country. What is discarded, paved over, and lumped together. The poem refuses sentimentality, but it doesn’t let go of belief either. I love how the ending turns downwards, into the ground. Not redemption exactly. More a stubborn insistence that something survives, even if it’s buried, even if it takes time to burn its way back up.Perhaps, really, it’s about how love can be a chain and still be a way through.Soledad Santana is a Venezuelan, London-based poet, feminist community organiser, and human rights researcher. She’s a current member of the Barbican Young Poets programme. She has co-created various zines, including Tangled Tongues / Lenguas Enredadas, which examines the politics of monolingual publications and self-translation, and collates Spanglish poetry and short fiction.Recently, she’s interested in the new Latin American gothic. Instagram: @Lasoledadsantana This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aftershockpoetry.substack.com/subscribe

Soledad Santana’s second poem from Issue One is unsettling in its calm. It takes place in a room we recognise, with objects we think we understand, and lets them slip out of register. What should be small and incidental begins to feel deliberate. What should be affectionate begins to bruise.The poem pays close attention to sequence and consequence. Each action leaves something behind, whether that’s heat, light, or trace. The insects are not symbols to be decoded but lives interrupted, noticed just long enough for their erasure to matter. By the end, the poem offers no commentary, only a trail. The reader is left with evidence rather than explanation, and the uncomfortable knowledge that nothing here was accidental. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aftershockpoetry.substack.com/subscribe

Some poems don’t so much argue but stand their ground.Rushika Wick’s The Saddest Factory enters Issue One’s Section VI - A Furious and Tender Reckoning at the point where fury turns inward, where political catastrophe is no longer abstract but lived in the body, minute by minute. Written in the aftermath of the US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the poem refuses spectacle. What I love most is that it embodies the events. It attends to the logistics of harm: the waiting room, the pen, the form, the phone in the hand. What is stripped away here is not only rights, but language itself.The power of this poem lies in its refusal to reduce grief to slogan or symbol. Wick understands that damage often arrives quietly, through clipboards and posters, through polite questions that echo like mausoleums. The speaker moves through a system designed to be neutral and efficient while everything inside them is unravelling. Even tenderness, the remembered eyes of a dog, the domestic relics hidden under a bed, feels fragile, smuggled in against the steady pressure of attrition.The Aftershock Review is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Section VI gathers poems that reckon with harm without abandoning care. Wick’s poem is furious not because it shouts, but because it notices. It asks the hardest question in the room: where is the language for restoration? The poem leaves us with the knowledge that too often there is none. Only the number on the wall, and a stranger on the other end of the line, trying to explain how to go on.This is a poem that understands survival as something procedural, bodily, unfinished, and insists that attention itself is a form of resistance.You can buy Issue One here: Here’s Rushika reading it below, too:The Aftershock Review is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aftershockpoetry.substack.com/subscribe

I’ve been in bed for days — which, historically, has not been a promising sign for me. My body tends to associate “back to bed” with “things are about to go very wrong” or, rather: “Hell is here, and you’re going to have to buckle-up.” PTSD taught it that. My brief stint in hospital taught it that. Those long months of recovery where the ceiling felt more like a lid hammered shut on life, and one that would never be lifted.And yet this time, the culprit wasn’t psychological collapse but something far less dramatic: honest-to-God manflu. Snot, coughing fits, a temperature. For once, my body handed me symptoms I could trust — visible evidence instead of dread, instead of night terrors, instead of the what-ifs and whys of a life relived over and over again when you do not want to be reliving it. It was something that for once didn’t require a trauma glossary or a risk assessment or psych evaluation to understand. Instead it was the damp inevitabilty of manflu.There were small mercies in the evidence around me: the phlegm, the phlegm, the curling, ripped, red-green-yellow Lemsip sachets piling like confetti by the kettle.Snot, for once, wasn’t because my sinuses were shredded by cocaine.My chest didn’t rattle because I’d smoked twenty cigarettes the night before.And my immune system wasn’t a casualty of litres of vodka.This was simply a cold.A democratic, boring, biological cold.But I spent a long time in bed for different reasons. Addiction is one of the most full-on commitments a person can make — a devotional practice of self-erasure. And my whole post-addiction identity is built on the opposite: work, community, writing, reading, publishing, showing up, holding the centre when for so long that centre fell.So lying in bed again carries an ache. Not fear of relapse but the phantom memory of the life where bed was the only geography I had. A place that blurred the days into each other until they stopped being days at all.And yet: this time is different. This is not collapse. This is convalescence.It reminds me of what Issue One taught us… that illness is never just illness; it is metaphor, history, a weather system inside the body. When Claire Snook writes “touch grounds me… a cup, a foot on the floor” in Seizure 1, she names exactly what I feel today: how the smallest, realest objects become proof you’re still here. Or Di Slaney, in Lay my head on fleeces, longing for the warm bodies of sheep during a seizure because the animal world carries a steadiness we can’t always muster. ‘If I have another seizure, put me with / the sheep. They won’t stand on me’And in Issue Two, Lydia Unsworth’s transient ischaemic attack when she references “Mr Jelly on stilts” — lets humour lean into terror without breaking it. Or Stef Pixner’s woman “fantastic in a red dress… blazing” before diagnosis dims her glow. These poems understand how illness tilts the room, how the body becomes an unreliable narrator, in fact, but they also understand endurance, the clarity that arrives after the fright.So here I am, in my grey silk bedding, noticing the same small proofs Aftershock poets also notice: the hum of the radiator, the cat shifting twice before committing to my hip. Ginger on my tongue. Lemsip gold. The benign boredom of being unwell.Once, this would have undone me. I used to confuse tiredness with danger. Fatigue with relapse. Stillness with a return of the dark.Recovery has taught me to distinguish them.A cold is just a cold. A bed is just a bed. Not a disappearance. Not the preamble to catastrophe.There is a poetry to this kind of illness — the safe kind — and it’s one that Aftershock has been writing across two issues: the body whispering, not screaming. The body inconveniencing you, not endangering you. The body asking for rest, not rescue.Sometimes recovery isn’t heroic. Sometimes it’s simply this: the radical act of lying down without fear. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aftershockpoetry.substack.com/subscribe

Editorial Note by Max WallisIn Pollard’s second poem in Issue One, Spoils, she returns to one of her most quietly devastating territories: the sweetness we’re taught to accept but can’t quite swallow. The poem begins in honey, golden, excessive, a substance that feels both earned and unearned at once, and moves quickly into the wider question of what we inherit, materially and emotionally, without ever having asked for it.Here, sweetness is labour: the hive, the blooms, the careful work of other lives. And yet it is also something the speaker can hardly bear. Pollard threads that ambivalence through the maternal moment at the poem’s centre, where a child in late-afternoon light extinguishes her candles with the kind of effortless grace adults forget how to believe in. It’s a scene suffused with tenderness, but shadowed by the knowledge that joy doesn’t always arrive in a form we know how to keep.By the time we reach the shelves lined with “little jars,” the poem has become an inquiry into the very act of making—poems as stores of sweetness, poems as perishables, poems as offerings whose future readers aren’t guaranteed. Pollard writes into that anxiety with unusual frankness: that preservation is not the same as permanence, and even our most careful hoardings have a date by which they must be opened or lost.Spoils sits exactly where Issue One wanted to begin… at the point where beauty and unease hold one another upright, where joy threatens to turn, and where the poem becomes a vessel for what we are afraid to taste in real time.I’ve been thinking a lot today about what writing poetry is. Based on this Bluesky by Rishi Dastiday (also in Issue One): It made me think and respond:What is it to write poetry? It is soft hope, breath made paper, part unpeeling, part armour, part wish, part prayer. A mosaic that appears only when the pieces of us settle. Sometimes the poem asks; sometimes the reader answers; often the answer is simply the act of making.I think Clare’s poem does likewise.Max WallisPS These orders went to singapore, arran, southampton and more today!The Aftershock Review is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aftershockpoetry.substack.com/subscribe

Editorial Note by Max WallisWhat does it mean to be resilient when what you crave most is permission to stop pretending? In The Craving, Clare Pollard writes from the quiet exhaustion of motherhood: the need to hold everything together, the refusal to be seen breaking. Her humour is wry and deliberate: rejection emails, locked bathrooms, the polished insistence of I’m fine.Then the poem tilts from the domestic to the mythical. Toward “an enchanted castle” and its golden fruit, shimmering with the forbidden relief of letting go. That fruit becomes the impossible bargain between care and collapse, self-preservation and surrender. It’s here that Pollard lays bare the hunger beneath endurance and the tenderness caught in the very act of suppression.The poem’s closing defiance of No, you can’t make me rings with both fury and fatigue: a mother’s protest against the expectation to be endlessly strong, and the faint mercy of still standing, because, as Pollard says earlier: I’m really absolutely fine.Clare Pollard’s most recent books are the children’s novel The Untameables and the adult novel The Modern Fairies. She has published five collections of poetry with Bloodaxe, with her sixth, Lives of the Female Poets, forthcoming in 2025. Her poem ‘Pollen’ was nominated for the Forward Prize for Best Single Poem.www.aftershockreview.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aftershockpoetry.substack.com/subscribe

Editorial Note by Max WallisThis final poem closes Dunne’s sequence with quiet devastation. Where Mother exposed injustice and Father held distance, Lessons Learned in Prison becomes an act of paternal and perhaps therapeutic exchange: a daughter and father trading art across walls, both remaking what connection remains.Dunne writes the unbearable with calm precision. The imagery is domestic, almost gentle — drawings, masks, Morrissey tapes — yet beneath it runs the ache of role reversal. The father becomes the student; the child, the keeper of his work. Each gift between them is both tenderness and evidence, an attempt to bridge the distance that punishment insists upon.The final lines turn the mirror: “as one by one you pinned my childhood / on your prison wall.”It’s an ending that collapses time, in fact: love preserved as memory, art, guilt, and survival. Dunne’s restraint allows what’s unsaid to ring louder than any declaration. Across these four poems, she builds a portrait not of crime, but of care endured: the fragile un-eraseable bond between parent and child, even when the world has taken everything else.Dominique Dunne is a former Barbican poet and poetry producer for the Shake the Dust Festival at Southbank Centre. She has supported Kae Tempest, performed at Ronnie Scott’s, and delivered a TEDx talk on original writing. Dominique holds a BA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and has taught poetry to both children and adults. Writing from personal experience on heartache and joy, she believes that ‘Poetry can bridge the gap between the personal and the universal.’ Currently, she works as a creative career coach, helping young people break into the arts. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aftershockpoetry.substack.com/subscribe

Editorial Note by Max WallisAcross Dunne’s sequence, we move from the mother’s humiliation to the child’s car journey toward the father’s absence. By the time we reach In the Prison Gardens, love exists only within visitation hours… a ritual of limited touch, a tenderness fenced by rules.The poem is devastating in its restraint. Dunne frames the setting with almost documentary calm: “lifers play Rummy with their families,” “offenders have picnics with their children.” The world she enters is both ordinary and impossible: a place where the worst people are allowed moments of grace, and where she must find her own.The final image — “on a perfect lawn” — carries all the ache of what’s unsaid. Perfection here means control, containment, an unnatural order imposed upon grief. Yet within that manicured space, a daughter’s love reaches through the system, however briefly.Dunne writes the unwriteable: how love survives its own disfigurement, how memory keeps touching what the body can’t.Dominique Dunne is a former Barbican poet and poetry producer for the Shake the Dust Festival at Southbank Centre. She has supported Kae Tempest, performed at Ronnie Scott’s, and delivered a TEDx talk on original writing. Dominique holds a BA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and has taught poetry to both children and adults. Writing from personal experience on heartache and joy, she believes that ‘Poetry can bridge the gap between the personal and the universal.’ Currently, she works as a creative career coach, helping young people break into the arts. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aftershockpoetry.substack.com/subscribe

Editorial Note by Max WallisIf Mother exposed the violence of public scrutiny, Father turns inward, to a child’s gaze pressed against the glass of memory. There is a quiet pilgrimage here: three hours of nausea and games, the pylons and cats’ eyes transforming the motorway into a living conduit of connection.Dunne captures the way children mythologise distance. Her imagery: pylons “passing electricity / to one another, like a secret” bridges what the law has broken. Even the landscape seems complicit in this fragile communication, the water towers breathing in and out as though keeping time with love’s endurance.The poem’s final revelation is devastating in its understatement: the longed-for reunion mediated by “a translucent screen, and four prison guards.” Yet what remains is not despair but a small, steady faith in attention itself — the child’s noticing as an act of survival. Dunne writes with restraint and grace, transforming absence into illumination.Dominique Dunne is a former Barbican poet and poetry producer for the Shake the Dust Festival at Southbank Centre. She has supported Kae Tempest, performed at Ronnie Scott’s, and delivered a TEDx talk on original writing. Dominique holds a BA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and has taught poetry to both children and adults. Writing from personal experience on heartache and joy, she believes that ‘Poetry can bridge the gap between the personal and the universal.’ Currently, she works as a creative career coach, helping young people break into the arts. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aftershockpoetry.substack.com/subscribe

Editorial Note by Max WallisWhat a poem this is, dear readers. Dunne’s Mother revisits a family story with unflinching clarity — a father imprisoned after a string of bank robberies, a mother wrongfully suspected and humiliated. The poem begins in rumour, with police dubbing the couple “Bonnie and Clyde”, and moves inward, to the mother’s body: a site of both evidence and accusation.What’s striking is the precision of its gaze. Dunne writes not from melodrama but from memory’s still room: each detail exact, each image carrying the weight of what can’t be said aloud. The strip-search becomes emblematic of how women - and indeed mothers - are criminalised for surviving. The Caesarean scar, the breast milk, the cold cell: they form a counter-narrative to the state’s gaze: a language of endurance.Mother is not a plea or protest, but a document of love under siege. It exposes cruelty without spectacle, finding poetry in the quiet act of holding a child amid harm. Dunne’s restraint is its own defiance — a refusal to let shame speak last.Dominique Dunne is a former Barbican poet and poetry producer for the Shake the Dust Festival at Southbank Centre. She has supported Kae Tempest, performed at Ronnie Scott’s, and delivered a TEDx talk on original writing. Dominique holds a BA in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University and has taught poetry to both children and adults. Writing from personal experience on heartache and joy, she believes that ‘Poetry can bridge the gap between the personal and the universal.’ Currently, she works as a creative career coach, helping young people break into the arts. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aftershockpoetry.substack.com/subscribe

Editorial Note by Max WallisGolnoosh Nour’s Burnt Divinities quite aptly burns at the intersection of inheritance and identity. Moving between myth, language, and lineage, the poem asks what it means to carry the sins—or sorrows—of our ancestors, and whether grief can ever truly be translated.From the opening declaration: “I am blessed, made of two extremes: my mother’s / death and my father’s madness” Nour situates the self as both divine and damned, glitter and garbage. The voice shifts between confession and incantation, haunted by familial karma and ancient history, the white dog biting the void.Greek myth becomes a mirror for Persian memory: the Acropolis in flames, the red scorpion’s shattered sting. Yet in its closing gesture, the poem resists despair. It reaches toward laughter, childhood, and the possibility of release: “Our pain isn’t ours!” Nour’s poem offers both rebellion and relief: a reclamation of joy from inherited ruin.You can buy all issues of The Aftershock Review on our website: www.aftershockreview.comDr Golnoosh Nour is a British Iranian writer and lecturer. She is the author of The Ministry of Guidance (2020) and Rocksong (2021) – both shortlisted for the Polari Prize. Golnoosh’s poetry pamphlet Impure Thoughts came out in 2022, and was shortlisted for the Live Canon Pamphlet Competition. She has also been published by Granta and Vintage.The Aftershock Review is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aftershockpoetry.substack.com/subscribe

The Aftershock Review is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Editorial Note by Max WallisMartha Sprackland’s Playcircle hums with both tenderness and alarm — a choreography of care performed on the edge of collapse. A doctor’s office becomes a kind of stage; the body, an instrument trying to tune itself against static. WhatsApp pings, bells, flutes, and pulse merge in a rhythm of overstimulation: the modern soundscape of survival.The poem moves like a collective hallucination: parents, children, patients, friends, all bound in the same uncertain ritual. Its broken music asks, perhaps, what connection costs us. And how we keep ringing, even off the hook.Sprackland captures that haunted overlap between play and panic, where touch and technology blur, and the simplest act — “pick up” — becomes both invocation and plea.Martha Sprackland is an editor, writer and translator. Her debut collection of poems, CITADEL (Pavilion, 2020), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Costa Poetry Award. Her new translation of the poems and prose of sixteenth-century Spanish mystic St John of the Cross is forthcoming from Penguin Classics. Follow her here: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aftershockpoetry.substack.com/subscribe

Editorial Note by Max WallisIn Hazard Perception, Martha Sprackland recasts the road’s sudden dangers: kerbs, erratic bicycles, stags leaping from the verge as the psychic terrain of motherhood. Hazards are everywhere, made sharper by exhaustion: “the baby woke fourteen times last night,” thought turns sluggish, the brain itself “a lettuce completely eaten by slugs.” The poem’s hallucinatory images mimic the way fatigue distorts perception, how care leaves the body porous to threat.What begins with absurd humour: ponies on a dual carriageway, cartoon-like collisions darkens into a vision of inheritance: the child grown, guiding the parent to the hospital, both staring at “the backlit picture of your brain.” Here, hazard perception is no longer a test of the road but of life itself: how to notice, endure, and keep moving even as the future bristles with danger.Sprackland shows that to mother is to live among hazards: surreal, comic, terrifying and yet to persist anyway.The Aftershock Review is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.About MarthaMartha Sprackland is an editor, writer and translator. Her debut collection of poems, CITADEL (Pavilion, 2020), was shortlisted for the Forward Prize for Best First Collection and the Costa Poetry Award. Her new translation of the poems and prose of sixteenth-century Spanish mystic St John of the Cross is forthcoming from Penguin Classics. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aftershockpoetry.substack.com/subscribe

Read with permission by Max WallisEditorial Note by Max Angi Holden’s Son is a poem of tenderness complicated by the world’s gaze. What begins as an intimate moment - a grown son’s affectionate embrace, his “childlike grin and wave” - is quickly reframed by a stranger’s blunt intrusion: What’s the matter with him? The poem catches this collision between love and stigma, and in doing so, it slows time. Boats drift, butterflies settle, water cascades… the scene becomes almost unbearably heightened as the speaker absorbs the question.The woman’s self-justification, “I’m a professional … Special needs,” exposes the casual cruelty of authority cloaked in expertise. Against this, the son’s kiss is radiant, “like a touch of sun,” anchoring the poem in love rather than diagnosis. The final line refuses neat definition, holding the tension between explanation and resistance, between spectrum and spectrum: light, colour, autism, and love.Holden’s poem is both defence and celebration, insisting on the dignity of difference. It reminds us that poetry, like parenting, sometimes means holding the silence around what cannot — and should not — be reduced to a label.The Aftershock Review is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.Angi Holden is a retired lecturer, whose poetry and prose explore differing perspectives of relationships and identity, within a broader context of memory. She has been writing most of her life, most recently at a desk so covered in leaves and feathers collected by her grandchildren that it resembles a nature table. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aftershockpoetry.substack.com/subscribe

In Pascale Petit’s final, fourth, poem, What Eagle Saw, Petit turns her focus skyward. The eagle hovers above the neonatal ward, her vision both forensic and mythic, maternal and ecological. War and armistice across a battleground of the body, the family unit and the environment itself.Petit’s images fuse the anatomical with the ecological. “She saw into the chests of newborns / where the twigs of lungs were torn.” Hearts become roses, veins rivers that dry to deserts, skins crack to release scorpions. This is the surrealist trauma poetics that defines Petit’s work: the body re-imagined as landscape, its injuries rendered as forests, gardens, rivers, deserts.The eagle is witness. She calls for “an armistice between all the birds,” but cannot unsee what her laser vision has revealed. The act of looking itself becomes a wound, impossible to erase. That is the poet’s role too: to stare into the unbearable and transform it into myth that can be carried.Across her four poems in this issue Petit creates a sequence of maternal hauntings and survival visions. Each expands private trauma into ecological myth, so that memory is never flat but alive, unstable, and vast. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aftershockpoetry.substack.com/subscribe

Eliot wrote: “These fragments I have shored against my ruins.”What does it mean to live among fragments, to call survival itself a kind of architecture?Write a piece that gathers your fragments. Begin with something broken or incomplete… a line overheard on the train, a memory cut short, a half-kept promise. Let it stand as a fragment. Then, one by one, add to it until you glimpse the shape of a ruin you can live inside. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aftershockpoetry.substack.com/subscribe

New research suggests the reason we might sleep is because our mitochondria are leaky, tiny sparks of energy spilling out, signalling the body to shut down and repair. Sleep, then, is less mercy than circuitry: a fuse that saves us from burning out.Today, write about the fuse that saves you. What shuts you down before the overload? What small, unseen system keeps you alive?Here’s my poem, After Mitochondria:After Mitochondria by Max Wallis My body is a breaker, tripped by its own wiring. My cells leak light, electrons scatter, secrets I can no longer hold in. Sleep comes, but not mercy the cut of power, a forced surrender. Circuits snap, the system quiets itself. I think of smaller animals, hearts beating too fast to last. I think of myself how fatigue is soldered into the body I live in, how every night I am asked to shut down to survive. How the brain defragments while I sleep as though dreams stitch me a new tomorrow. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aftershockpoetry.substack.com/subscribe

Editorial Note by Max WallisPascale Petit’s second poem in Issue One, House of Puberty, moves deeper into the territory glimpsed in My Mother’s Provençal Dress. If the first poem placed the mother within a vineyard sewn into fabric, here the house itself is transformed into a rainforest, a hallucinatory world where trauma finds its truest shape.A Welsh mining village terrace becomes a jungle of threat and wonder. The living room teems with caimans, leafcutter ants, anteaters, peccaries. The mother’s mind is carried away by insects; her body speaks in macaws and monkeys; her rocking chair becomes a sandbar where the daughter is both witness and unwilling rescuer.The Aftershock Review is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.This is Petit’s method. The imaginative world of the Amazon overlays the ordinary estate, creating a double vision in which madness and survival are inseparable. Termite nests erupt in the carpet, harpy eagles crash through ceilings, tapirs are crushed under logging trucks. The child sits amid the chaos, naming the roadkill as if language itself might stem the destruction.Petit’s poetics are feral yet meticulous. The ecological metaphors echo the mother’s refrain: “I shouldn’t have had children, shouldn’t have this trans-Amazon highway carved up my belly.” The daughter’s body, the mother’s body, the body of the rainforest are all violated, all resisting, all burning. This is not metaphor as decoration but metaphor as survival; a poetics that contains the unbearable without diminishing its charge.Then comes the break in the fever dream: “Why did I do nothing? Why did I just sit there / wanting to be normal?” After so much mythical language, these lines fall heavy with shame and longing. The neighbours’ houses stand in quiet contrast, their children relaxed. To want normality is both an ache and an impossibility.Petit is one of the foremost surrealist trauma poets writing today. Her landscapes are not backdrops but embodiments of psychological states, each animal and tree carrying the charge of survival. The scar of childbirth becomes the scar of deforestation. The rainforest burns in the living room as memory itself combusts.This poem is not simply about the past. It is a survival text, a myth that breathes even as it burns.The Aftershock Review is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aftershockpoetry.substack.com/subscribe