Shows
The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt)Lessons Learned in Prison by Dominique DunneEditorial Note by Max WallisThis 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 eviden...
2025-11-0100 min
The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt)In the Prison Gardens by Dominique DunneEditorial Note by Max WallisAcross 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...
2025-11-0100 min
The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt)Father by Dominique DunneEditorial Note by Max WallisIf 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...
2025-10-3000 min
The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt)Mother by Dominique DunneEditorial Note by Max WallisWhat 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...
2025-10-2900 min