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.

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, 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 Wallis

PS These orders went to singapore, arran, southampton and more today!

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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. 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.

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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, 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.

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,” “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.

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 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.

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. 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.

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 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.

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Dr 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.

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 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:

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 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 Martha

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.