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 voices of warning. The avian thread became impossible to ignore. So a whole section of the issue now belongs to them.

Today’s prompt is simple:

Write the bird that will not leave you alone.

It could be one you see daily, or one you only glimpse in memory. Let it speak. Let it carry your grief, your rage, your tenderness. Write it not as a symbol but as a presence that insists on being heard.

Give flight to trauma.

Let it have wings.

Let it shiver in the cold wet rain.

Let it be beady-eyed, and brittle-boned.

Let it be both predator and prey.

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