This Pride we’re spotlighting some of the queer poets from The Aftershock Review: Issue One. We’re starting with Dale Booton (@dale.booton).

Dale’s poem Wide Awake doesn’t soothe. It stings.

“I chew the night’s garnish/squelch questions like lemon around my teeth/until the bitterness seeps into split gums”

This is what aftermath looks like when you keep going. When the city frays. When love and pain blur into one another and you’re left awake with the wreckage.

“love/pain I have been unable/to tell them apart for so long too long really”

From streets “splintered into obscurity” to the “fiddling niggle yanked bleeding”, Dale’s poem doesn’t offer resolution. It just tells the truth.

You’ll find it in Section VII: Queer Inheritance / Queer Disclaim.

You’ll feel it long after the page.

https://www.aftershockreview.com/product-page/issue-1-the-aftershock-review

Dale Booton (he/him) is a queer poet from Birmingham. His poetry appears in The North and Magma, and in anthologies by Broken Sleep Books, Verve, Muswell Press, and Pan Macmillan. His pamphlets include Walking Contagions (Polari Press) and On This Stretch of Queerland (Fourteen Poems). He was runner-up in the 2024 Poetry Business International Book and Pamphlet Competition.

📖 The Aftershock Review: Issue One

🏳️‍🌈 Dale Booton and more in Section VII

#Pride2025 #TheAftershockReview #DaleBooton #QueerPoetry #LGBTQLit #SurvivalIsQueer

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