The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt)

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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 restraint. The city flashes by; a boyfrie...

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 is always felt.

There’s also a quiet ...

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 insec...

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...

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 ...

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, without ever having asked for it.

Here, swe...

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 from the domestic to the mythical. Towa...

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, almost gentle — drawings, masks, Morris...

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 play Rummy with their families,” “offende...

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 electricity / to one another, like a secre...

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 striking is the precision of its gaze. Dun...

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 madness” Nour situates the self as bot...

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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 static. WhatsApp pings, bells, flutes, a...

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 images mimic the way fatigue distorts p...

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 time. Boats drift, butterflies settl...

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 ro...

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.

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 Ma...

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 of threat and wonder. The living room te...