Shows
The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt)Twenties by Jenny PagdinEditorial Note by Max WallisWith Twenties, Jenny Pagdin moves from clinical waiting rooms and homesick interiors to the raw chaos of young adulthood. The poem is a catalogue of what is carried and endured: clutter and mould, street smells of dough and spliffs, the threat of police and A&E, sex, sickness, and survival. Its lines tumble in a rush, mimicking the relentless onslaught of experience, where humour and horror jostle… “the sieve which doubled up as colander” against “the sipping my friend’s pint glass of sick.” Pagdin’s gift lies in her ability to hold contradic...
2025-08-3101 min
The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt)A&E by Jenny PagdinEditorial Note by Max WallisIn her third poem, A&E, Jenny Pagdin leaves the private hush of dread and homesickness for the fluorescent limbo of hospital night. “Ambulatory Majors” becomes a geography - “the vista-less hinterland / we’re all called to from time to time” - while those who love us drift “over the sea of sleep.” Pagdin’s eye is exact and humane: short-shorts, fleecy housecoats, “cake-mix basins” clutched like talismans. Thought itself turns moth-like, batting at a “strip-light moon.” The speaker waits on “royal-blue plastic” as her mother disappears behind the curtain, time marked by “stars… like clock hands”...
2025-08-3000 min
The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt)Hypochondria of the heart by Jenny PagdinBuy the magazine here!Editorial Note by Max WallisContinuing section IV’s theme of PSYCHOSIS / SURVIVAL / HALLUCINATIONS is Jenny Pagdin with her second poem, Hypochondria of the heart. Here Pagdin extends the theme of suspended unease first struck in Before we got the news. Where the earlier poem holds us in the static crackle before catastrophe, this one turns inward, to a homesickness that cannot be resolved. The old diagnosis becomes a way of naming exile within the body: a conscript’s heartbeat against stone, a child’s fevered cry for home, an adult sensin...
2025-08-2600 min
The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt)Before we got the news by Jenny PagdinEditorial Note by Max WallisIn Before we got the news, Jenny Pagdin captures the strange suspension before devastation takes form. First, “a dead tone, the line gone down” a failure of connection that becomes a metaphor for helplessness. The imagery is both technological and bodily: filaments, tinfoil, white noise, night terrors. It evokes the way shock lodges in the nervous system, how the body anticipates rupture even before the mind knows. The final image of rain falling “onto a dull sea” refuses resolution, offering only repetition and weight. This is a poem of stasis and fracture, a moment...
2025-08-2300 min