then, a kiss on the cheek by Soledad Santana

Three poems by Dale Booton from Issue One

Editorial Note by Max Wallis What I love most about Dale Booton’s poems is the unpalatability of them — and I mean that as praise! There is a quiet defiance in the way these poems refuse to make themselves agreeable. “Beauty” announces itself as an abstract noun and then immediately dismantles the idea that beauty can be stable, desirable, or even coherent. The slashes aren’t decorative; they feel like thinking under pressure, like a body trying to speak before it has fully decided what it is allowed to say. The poem moves in clumps, in tugs. It drags itself forward. It refuses the clean line, the polished turn. Even the word palatable appears like something caught in the throat — a recognition of how often bodies are asked to soften themselves for the comfort of others. The poem understands what it is to be looked at, to be translated by someone else’s appetite. It doesn’t ask to be admired. It insists on being felt in its resistance. Wide Awake: “Wide Awake” carries that resistance into the mouth. Lemon, split gums, bitterness seeping; the imagery is intimate and slightly uncomfortable. Love and pain sit beside one another without explanation, without hierarchy. The poem doesn’t attempt to separate them or resolve them into clarity. Instead, it lingers in the slow unfurling of a labyrinth, in the irritation that won’t quite subside. The city becomes a cracked nail, something picked at until it bleeds. It’s such a small, bodily metaphor, and yet it opens into something larger: the way restlessness becomes its own landscape. Outside: By the time we reach “Outside”, the interior has spilled into the world. Ambulance wails thread through sleep. Breath becomes visible in the cold air. The coming of morning doesn’t promise redemption; it bleaches. It exposes. The city lights are biscuit crumbs across brick tables — tender, almost domestic — but there’s still that sense of imbalance, of see-saw streets and rainfall pushing itself against whatever it can hold. What holds these poems together is not a single theme but a shared refusal to resolve. They do not rush toward epiphany. They do not perform neat catharsis. They stay with the abrasion… of being watched, of wanting, of not being able to untangle love from harm, of lying awake while the world insists on continuing. There is a line in “Beauty” that lingers long after reading: there is so much / of me / that wants / out. It doesn’t arrive as a declaration of freedom. It arrives as a fact. And that feels honest. In a moment where so much writing feels pressured to be easily consumed, easily shared, easily praised, these poems hold onto their roughness. They leave an aftertaste. They resist being smoothed down. That resistance is where their beauty lies. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aftershockpoetry.substack.com/subscribe [https://aftershockpoetry.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Two poems by David Tait from Issue One

Serum VO below: Editorial Note by Max Wallis David Tait’s Taxi and Serum sit inside that charged space where queer life is both ordinary and illicit; tender and edged with risk. These are not grand declarations. They are moments: a hand resting too long in the back of a cab, the smell of tissues in a bin bag, a text sent at 3am when sleep isn’t happening. What I love about these poems is their restraint. The city flashes by; a boyfriend snores in the next room. Nothing explodes. And yet everything is happening. Desire here is threaded through secrecy, through glances at the driver’s eyes, through the knowledge that intimacy is both hidden and loud. This section of Issue One gathers poems that ask what we carry forward from queer histories — the codes, the caution, the thrill — and what we refuse. Tait’s work reminds us that sometimes the inheritance is not a manifesto but a touch, a tunnel, a text message we shouldn’t send and send anyway. In other news submissions are about to close for Issue Three: This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aftershockpoetry.substack.com/subscribe [https://aftershockpoetry.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

Cl. Los Lirios by Soledad Santana

Editorial Note by Max Wallis In Soledad Santana’s third and final poem from Issue One [https://www.aftershockreview.com/product-page/issue-1-the-aftershock-review] the body is not a metaphor, it’s the mechanism. A grey hair becomes thread, becomes fuse, becomes something passed hand to hand, wrist to waist, mother to child. The poem never explains this. It just does it, again and again, until repetition itself becomes the point. What we inherit is not always chosen, but it is always felt. There’s also a quiet political pressure running underneath. The language of foetal clots, pavement, country. What is discarded, paved over, and lumped together. The poem refuses sentimentality, but it doesn’t let go of belief either. I love how the ending turns downwards, into the ground. Not redemption exactly. More a stubborn insistence that something survives, even if it’s buried, even if it takes time to burn its way back up. Perhaps, really, it’s about how love can be a chain and still be a way through. Soledad Santana is a Venezuelan, London-based poet, feminist community organiser, and human rights researcher. She’s a current member of the Barbican Young Poets programme. She has co-created various zines, including Tangled Tongues / Lenguas Enredadas, which examines the politics of monolingual publications and self-translation, and collates Spanglish poetry and short fiction.Recently, she’s interested in the new Latin American gothic. Instagram: @Lasoledadsantana [https://www.instagram.com/lasoledadsantana/?hl=en] This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aftershockpoetry.substack.com/subscribe [https://aftershockpoetry.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

then, a kiss on the cheek by Soledad Santana

Soledad Santana’s second poem from Issue One is unsettling in its calm. It takes place in a room we recognise, with objects we think we understand, and lets them slip out of register. What should be small and incidental begins to feel deliberate. What should be affectionate begins to bruise. The poem pays close attention to sequence and consequence. Each action leaves something behind, whether that’s heat, light, or trace. The insects are not symbols to be decoded but lives interrupted, noticed just long enough for their erasure to matter. By the end, the poem offers no commentary, only a trail. The reader is left with evidence rather than explanation, and the uncomfortable knowledge that nothing here was accidental. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aftershockpoetry.substack.com/subscribe [https://aftershockpoetry.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]

The Saddest Factory by Rushika Wick

Some poems don’t so much argue but stand their ground. Rushika Wick’s The Saddest Factory enters Issue One’s Section VI - A Furious and Tender Reckoning at the point where fury turns inward, where political catastrophe is no longer abstract but lived in the body, minute by minute. Written in the aftermath of the US Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade, the poem refuses spectacle. What I love most is that it embodies the events. It attends to the logistics of harm: the waiting room, the pen, the form, the phone in the hand. What is stripped away here is not only rights, but language itself. The power of this poem lies in its refusal to reduce grief to slogan or symbol. Wick understands that damage often arrives quietly, through clipboards and posters, through polite questions that echo like mausoleums. The speaker moves through a system designed to be neutral and efficient while everything inside them is unravelling. Even tenderness, the remembered eyes of a dog, the domestic relics hidden under a bed, feels fragile, smuggled in against the steady pressure of attrition. The Aftershock Review is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. Section VI gathers poems that reckon with harm without abandoning care. Wick’s poem is furious not because it shouts, but because it notices. It asks the hardest question in the room: where is the language for restoration? The poem leaves us with the knowledge that too often there is none. Only the number on the wall, and a stranger on the other end of the line, trying to explain how to go on. This is a poem that understands survival as something procedural, bodily, unfinished, and insists that attention itself is a form of resistance. You can buy Issue One here: Here’s Rushika reading it below, too: The Aftershock Review is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit aftershockpoetry.substack.com/subscribe [https://aftershockpoetry.substack.com/subscribe?utm_medium=podcast&utm_campaign=CTA_2]