Let the bent spoon, the weather, the camera, the car, or the hospital bed say sorry. What would it mean?

Today write a list poem or prose poem about who or what haunts you. Make them a cast of characters. Where do they live?

A Note from the Editor, Max Wallis

In How Our Love Ends, Joseph Fasano brings his characteristically cinematic lyricism to bear on the quiet catastrophe of parting. Here, love’s dissolution is neither rupture nor drama, but a final, tender surrender. A red dress. A blue suit. A single silent touch in the kitchen. Fasano sketches the end of a shared life not through argument or betrayal but through ceremony and near-mythic ache. The poem’s final image, “the deep-grooved gloves of falconers / that have learned the infinite difference / between giving up and letting something go”—encapsulates not just the poem’s emotional restraint, but its hard-earned wisdom. It’s a devastatingly adult ending. No blame. No flare. Just the moonlit truth that love, however raw, can sometimes only be released, not rescued.

Buy a copy of the mag to read more.

More from Joseph here:

Explore the comfort of necessary illusions… something you told yourself to survive, even if it wasn’t true.

Read more below:

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

Dear Daily Aftershock readers and podcast listeners, the next week of prompts will be short ones as I deal with other Aftershock work and stuff in my personal life.

Today I want you to write a poem based on a rule you broke, and what it gave you.

This could be literal, like breaking Lockdown in search of friends or family or company.

Or it could be emotional: letting someone new love you, when you thought all was lost.

Forget the morality involved in these things and instead find the poem that begs to be written within it.

In other news I will begin changing the past podcasts to paid so if you want full access please consider upgrading!

It’s Dr. Anna Percy here with Day 49 of the Daily Aftershock and a brand new prompt for you.

You may have heard of the form cento in poetry. Traditionally, you borrow a line from a different poet for each line. But today, I’d like you to make a self cento, a cento made entirely from your own words.

Use your own poetry, notebooks, text messages, Facebook statuses, Instagram captions, even a bit of a shopping list. The more unexpected and creative the source material, the more interesting the result.

Just take a line from whatever source you choose. If you’ve written a lot of poems, maybe take a line from each title or the final line of different poems.

Do whatever feels right. The only rule is that every line must come from something you’ve written.

You might want to pick a number, say 10 lines, or go with 14 lines to create a sonnet. If you do that, you can try manoeuvring in a volta, a turn in the poem, around line 10 or 12.

That’s it. That’s the form: the self cento.

Build a poem out of yourself.

Today consider this poem by Linda Gregg:

NEW YORK ADDRESS

The sun had just gone outand I was walking three miles to get home.I wanted to die.I couldn’t think of words and I had no futureand I was coming down hard on everything.My walk was terrible.I didn’t seem to have a heart at alland my whole past seemed filled up.So I started answering all the questionsregardless of consequence:Yes I hate dark. No I love light. Yes I won’t speak.No I will write. Yes I will breed. No I won’t love.Yes I will bless. No I won’t close. Yes I won’t give.Love is on the other side of the lake.It is painful because the dark makes you hearthe water more. I accept all that.And that we are not allowed romance but only its distance.Having finished with it all, now I am not listening.I wait for the silence to resume.

From AlmaGraywolf, 2002.

Those central five lines are phenomenal.

So today I ask you to ask yourself those same questions.

The Aftershock Review is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Today, I want you to write a psalm to your body.

Not a perfect body. Not a past body. The body you’re in today.

This isn’t about gratitude, unless it is.

It doesn’t have to be healing. Or loving. Or soft.

It just has to be yours. Write like your body is listening… from the arch of your foot to the molar you cracked last year.

Start with a sentence that begins: "O body..." or "You are..." or "I do not..." Let it be holy. Let it be unholy. Let it curse. Let it sing. Let it ask for something back.

For example, a quick draft for you:

O body, cathedral of static and bone,

The Aftershock Review is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

It’s Dr Anna Percy here with your prompt for Day 46 of the Daily Aftershock.

You may have heard of an ekphrastic poem, a poem written in response to a work of art. The most famous example is John Keats’ Ode to a Grecian Urn.

But ekphrasis isn’t limited to visual art, it can respond to any art form.

Today, I encourage you to free write to a song.

Choose one with rich lyrics and strong imagery.

Some of my own published poems have been written in response to Kate Bush or Patti Smith. Leonard Cohen is another great example.

Anyone with lyrical depth or even lyrics that aren’t “interesting” in the traditional sense can work.

What if you're into minimalist techno? Maybe you'll get something out of that.

The idea is to write for the length of the song.

And you're not to worry about line breaks.

You're not to worry about your handwriting.

You're not to think about spelling, punctuation, or stopping or crossing out.

You write for the length of the song.

You can write in response to the song or you can write whatever you like, whatever comes into your head.

The idea is to use this as a different form of input for your writing and get you into the practice of free writing without having to worry about looking at a clock or setting a timer.

You just write until the song is done and just let it flow.

And just think of this as maybe running laps rather than writing a poem.

In The Trees from Jumping into a Waterfall by Dr Anna Percy

Recorded at All Fm in May 2025 by Dr Anna Percy with Ruth O'Reilly