Welcome to The Daily Aftershock Writing Prompt—a daily invitation to write from the edges of aftermath, memory, rupture, and repair.

Each day, you'll receive a short, charged prompt designed to crack something open. There are no rules, only resonance. Use these however you need: to begin a poem, to open your diary, to find your voice again.

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

Suggestions:

* A smashed phone screen still lighting up.

* A plant that was nearly composted but regrew from the stem.

* A piece of clothing patched again and again.

* A burnt pan. A rusted hinge. A jigsaw puzzle missing pieces.

* Something seemingly ruined… still in use.

Don't force it to end neatly. Let the object speak in fragments, changes, repairs. Let its recovery be as awkward, halting, or beautiful as your own.

Welcome to The Daily Aftershock Writing Prompt—a daily invitation to write from the edges of aftermath, memory, rupture, and repair.

Each day, you'll receive a short, charged prompt designed to crack something open. There are no rules, only resonance. Use these however you need: to begin a poem, to open your diary, to find your voice again.

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

Think about endings. What do you they mean? What do we see? What about endings that start new beginnings? Or bring old feelings back? What about doorways, thresholds, opening wounds and closing pasts?

Tesco and the End of Light

by The Max Stacks - by Max Wallis

You’ve heard it for years—the tick-tick flicker

Thanks for reading The Aftershock Review! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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

Welcome to The Daily Aftershock Writing Prompt—a daily invitation to write from the edges of aftermath, memory, rupture, and repair.

Each day, you'll receive a short, charged prompt designed to crack something open. There are no rules, only resonance. Use these however you need: to begin a poem, to open your diary, to find your voice again.

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

Here’s a poem by me:

Today is another morning / not like the rest / it’s been a year / and more / and every day / it’s even more / since I didn’t die / and even more / since I didn’t die before that / and even more / since I was born / and came out / of the ultimate / safe space / a kind of death / isn’t that / what the Daoists say / we die / every night / then we / are / reborn / and birth / was the first eviction / the first light too bright / the first breath that hurt / lungs ballooning like they’d never done it before / because they hadn’t / and maybe / we’ve been catching our breath ever since / all this time / just trying to breathe properly / ever since we were forced / out of the sea / out of the warmth / into a world with edges / names / numbers / clocks / and colours we weren’t ready to see / and how strange / that this is what we call the beginning / a tear / a scream / a shudder / a cord cut / and everyone cheers / as if rupture is the same thing / as arrival / but maybe it is / because what is it / when we die / but what we were / before / we were / alive / not something / not anything / not light or dark / just / not / and even that / is too much / because / not is still a word / and silence / is still a sound / when you name it / and language is just noise / with rules / and shape / and god / how we cling to it / like it's a raft / like it’ll save us / when all it does is label the water / we’re drowning in / and we can’t know noise / before we bail / out of the waters / of our mothers / screaming / cold / separate / whole / and split / in the same / impossible / breath.

I wrote this thinking about how many times we get born in a lifetime. Not just once, at the start, but every time we nearly don’t make it and somehow do. Every time we claw our way back to breath. Every time we choose to stay.

Birth isn’t clean. It’s violent. It’s rupture. It’s a scream, a cut, a too-bright light. We call it the beginning but it’s also the first ending, the first separation, the first time we’re asked to survive something impossible. Maybe everything since then has just been trying to breathe right again.

This poem came from that space. The feeling that even language, even poetry, is something we grab onto in the wreckage. Something that helps us name the water, even if we’re still drowning in it.

Thanks for reading The Aftershock Review! This post is public so feel free to share it.

TODAY’S PROMPT: WRITE ABOUT BIRTH

Write about the moment before. Before the breath. Before the name.Write the first hurt. The first silence. The first time you were seen.

Write what birth really felt likeor write the first time you came back to life.Write about the moment you didn’t die.

We don’t have to start at the beginning.We can start at the break.

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

Welcome to The Daily Aftershock Writing Prompt—a daily invitation to write from the edges of aftermath, memory, rupture, and repair.

Each day, you'll receive a short, charged prompt designed to crack something open. There are no rules, only resonance. Use these however you need: to begin a poem, to open your diary, to find your voice again.

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

What if one small moment, missing a train, answering a call, saying yes instead of no, changed everything?

Today I want you to write a poem that begins with a moment of divergence: a version of your life that could have been, or one you’re just now stepping into.

Where does this path lead? Who do you become on the other side?

You might start with:

* “The door clicked shut, and I almost didn’t look back.”

* “In another version of me, I stayed.”

* “Spring always smells like something I nearly lost.”

Buy the magazine here.

The Aftershock Review is an intervention—a rupture in the poetry publishing scene. Survivor-led, trauma-aware, and artistically fearless, it was conceived from bed by editor Max Wallis, who was disabled throughout 2024 with complex PTSD.

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 the Editor

Some poems arrive with a hush around them. Others, like this one, carry a quiet weight that reverberates long after reading.

Mark Antony Owen’s A suicide note is not metaphor. It was written with the real intent to be found. A document of care left in the imagined aftermath of absence. It’s been years now—but the poem remains, not as evidence of despair, but as testament to the strange tenderness that can accompany suicidal thinking: the desire to make things easier for others, to soften the blow, to leave behind instructions, even comfort. To love, even in the leaving.

There’s nothing romantic about this. What strikes me most is the ordinariness of the instructions. “Comb the children’s hair.” “Book holidays.” “Carry tissues.” In the imagined wake of death, the speaker’s attention turns not to themselves but to the mess that grief will leave behind—and how to hold it. It's heartbreaking. And it’s human.

I’ve heard people say they’ve only ever thought about ending their life once. Or maybe twice. The truth, for many of us, is often closer to five. Maybe more. And when we speak of survival, as this journal so often does, we must also honour the complexity of that survival—not as a single choice, but as a choice made again and again in the face of unbearable weight.

We publish this poem with care and intention. Not to aestheticise pain. Not to offer resolution. But to say: this was real. It still is. And in the aftermath of such honesty, something else becomes possible—compassion, witness, conversation. Poetry is not a cure, but it can be a hand held out. If this poem reaches you in that dark place, let it be a bridge. You are not alone.

A suicide note

by Mark Antony Owen

Comb the children’s hair. Check there isn’t breakfast

🆘 If you’re in crisis

You are not alone. Support is available.

Samaritans – Whatever you're going through, you can talk to someone 24/7. Call 116 123 for free, email [email protected], or visit samaritans.org to find your nearest branch.

James’s Place – Free, life-saving treatment for men in suicidal crisis. Available in London, Liverpool, Newcastle, and more. Self-referral or referral by a professional. Visit jamesplace.org.uk to find help near you.

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

Mark Antony Owen

is the author of digital-first poetry project Subruria. He’s also the creator and curator of online poetry journals iamb and After…

Welcome to The Daily Aftershock Writing Prompt—a daily invitation to write from the edges of aftermath, memory, rupture, and repair.

Each day, you'll receive a short, charged prompt designed to crack something open. There are no rules, only resonance. Use these however you need: to begin a poem, to open your diary, to find your voice again.

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

Where is the tiredness today?In your knuckles? In your coccyx? In your jaw?Is it the hum behind your eyes,the salt in your sweat,the teeth grinding themselves into chalk?

Write a poem that maps tiredness as geography.Let the body be the terrain: your spine a mountain,your knees forgotten cities.Does your jaw ache with unspoken grief?Does the air feel thick, like you’re breathing broth?

Write to name the ache, not cure it.Begin with the words:“Today, the tiredness lives in…”

Thanks for reading The Aftershock Review! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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

Listen to our Daily Aftershock Podcast here: https://aftershockpoetry.substack.com/s/the-daily-aftershock-writing-prompt

A Note from the Editor:

Here, we see how memory lands like a backfist. The Immovable Stance offers no neat redemption arc, only the weight of a father's words and the off-kilter balance of inherited harm. Shotokan Karate’s fudo-dachi becomes more than a posture here: it’s the grim theatre of masculinity, of who gets to stay rooted and who is scattered. But it’s also about patriarchal unravelling, and how badness echoes through again and again.

– Max Wallis

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

The Immovable Stance

by Helen Ivory | poet | artist

Helen Ivory is a poet and visual artist. She edits IS&T and teaches for Arvon. Her six Bloodaxe collections include Waiting for Bluebeard, which centres on domestic abuse, and Constructing a Witch (2024), which is a PBS Winter Recommendation. She won a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2024.

Thanks for reading The Aftershock Review! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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 the magazine, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

A Note from the Editor:

Helen Ivory’s third poem in our inaugural issue Snow Globe holds a different kind of cold. Not the sharpness of winter, but the slow, creeping frost of neglect—the way intimacy can harden over time into something you don’t recognise. You think you’re surviving it, lighting fairy lights inside a dead hearth, sipping Cristal out of tulip glasses, waiting for warmth to return. You think it’s just a hard year. But the cold keeps gathering.

This poem knows how small cruelties pile up: how even an apology can curdle, how even love can become a kind of punishment. It asks the hardest question: was the coldness an accident, or a choice? In Snow Globe, luxury and deprivation sit side by side, flickering like fragile voltages. It’s a study in survival, not the glorious, overcoming kind, but the quiet endurance of someone who once believed they could make beauty out of anything.

Sometimes we live inside the glass too long before we realise it’s sealed.

– Max Wallis

Thanks for reading The Aftershock Review! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Snow Globe

by Helen Ivory | poet | artist

About six or seven years in

Read Helen’s other poems:

Helen Ivory is a poet and visual artist. She edits IS&T and teaches for Arvon. Her six Bloodaxe collections include Waiting for Bluebeard, which centres on domestic abuse, and Constructing a Witch (2024), which is a PBS Winter Recommendation. She won a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2024.

Thanks for reading The Aftershock Review! This post is public so feel free to share it.

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

A Note from the Editor, exclusive to Substack:

Helen Ivory’s second poem in Issue One of The Aftershock Review (£12.99) made me somersault at my desk. That Friday Afternoon accomplishes something extraordinary. It lingers in the way trauma does — how certain memories don’t survive as stories, but as textures worn into the walls and floors of a life lived in extremis.

This poem refuses to shout. It lets the violence reveal itself through small, almost routine details: the cracked windscreen, the plaster dust ground into the quarry tiles. Helen Ivory captures something chilling here — not just an incident, but a whole atmosphere of aftermath and normalisation.

A shattered windscreen becomes a quiet, devastating metaphor:

"but it’s tough to get powder off a black quarry floorif the tiles are unsealed – it just kind of wears in."

The violence doesn’t announce itself; it settles. It seeps into the surfaces of a life, wearing itself in until it becomes part of the everyday landscape. I am proud to publish a poem that knows how harm extends to the very materials we live among.

— Max WallisEditor, The Aftershock Review

That Friday Afternoon

by Helen Ivory | poet | artist

When you commanded me drive you 

Thanks for reading The Aftershock Review! This post is public so feel free to share it.

Helen Ivory is a poet and visual artist. She edits IS&T and teaches for Arvon. Her six Bloodaxe collections include Waiting for Bluebeard, which centres on domestic abuse, and Constructing a Witch (2024), which is a PBS Winter Recommendation. She won a Cholmondeley Award from the Society of Authors in 2024.

Welcome to The Daily Aftershock Writing Prompt—a daily invitation to write from the edges of aftermath, memory, rupture, and repair.

Each day, you'll receive a short, charged prompt designed to crack something open. There are no rules, only resonance. Use these however you need: to begin a poem, to open your diary, to find your voice again.

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

On Saturday we sold over £700 of magazines at the Poetry Society’s Free Verse Poetry Magazine and Book Fair. Wild. I am so grateful.

It only seems natural then today that we should write about our aftershocks. Maybe it wasn’t one dramatic event, but a whisper: a decision made quietly in a kitchen, a missed call, a door left open. Aftershocks often disguise themselves as small things until we feel the weight of them shifting our whole lives. How did it move through you?Did it rattle the windows of your certainty? Did it open a new fault line inside you — one you’re still learning to live beside? What colour would your aftershock be?Maybe a bruised purple, a pulse of deep blue, a flash of impossible red. Trust the first colour that rises — it knows something. And finally: what changed that day?Change doesn’t always look like fireworks. Sometimes it’s a new silence, a new tenderness, a decision to begin again — or to never go back.

Whatever you do - I want you to map the cracks, trace the stillness, find the reason you chose to survive.

Thanks for reading The Aftershock Review! This post is public so feel free to share it.