The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt)

Editorial Note by Max Wallis What 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...

Serum VO below: Editorial Note by Max Wallis David 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 res...

Editorial Note by Max Wallis In 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...

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 tha...

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 lov...

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...

Editorial Note by Max Wallis In 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, witho...

Editorial Note by Max Wallis What 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...

Editorial Note by Max Wallis This 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, al...

Editorial Note by Max Wallis Across 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 pla...

Editorial Note by Max Wallis If 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 elect...

Editorial Note by Max Wallis What 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 strik...

Editorial Note by Max Wallis Golnoosh 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 m...

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 Wallis Martha 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 sta...

Editorial Note by Max Wallis In 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 ima...

Read with permission by Max Wallis Editorial 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...

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...

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...

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...

Editorial Note by Max Wallis Pascale 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 o...

Write a poem that refuses to behave. One that can’t be read in a straight line. One that only exists if something is crossed out, folded, ripped, blacked over. One that makes the reader do something physical — turn the page sideways, skip a line, double back. The challenge is to make the poem itself misbehave , so the act of reading becomes part of the meaning. What happens when you break the form...

Editorial Note by Max Wallis In My Mother’s Provençal Dress , Pascale Petit returns to one of her great themes: the mother’s presence lingering in absence, a fabric of love and accusation stitched into the landscape itself. The poem begins with theft – “I stole my mother’s Provençal dress while she was in hospital” – but what follows is not just an act of rebellion. The speaker inhabits the dress...

What’s in your DNA? And what isn’t? DNA is a script, but not the whole story. Epigenetics reminds us that life leaves annotations on the script — chemical tags called methyl groups that attach to the DNA, turning certain genes up or down, on or off. A famine, a war, a long season of stress: each can leave a methylated mark, a reminder etched into the body that may echo for generations. The Aftersh...

Editorial Note by Max Wallis In The C Word Diaries, Dr Anna Percy’s second poem in Issue One, we are thrown back into the beginnings of the pandemic, and the unknown tension of a world we were about to lose. It is mid March 2020, days before 23 March when lockdown is announced. The poem keeps close to what that week felt like at street level. Parcels on doorsteps. Empty shelves. Quarantine rules f...

I have a soft spot for birds in poetry. But the way I theme The Aftershock Review is never prescriptive. It comes about organically, as if the poems themselves decide what the issue wants to hold. For Issue Two, something unexpected happened: birds arrived. They kept landing in the submissions. Blackbirds, crows, great tits. Not as decoration, but as companions to grief, as emblems of survival, as...