Shows
The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt)Playcircle by Martha SpracklandThe 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 Max WallisMartha Sprackland’s Playcircle hums with both tenderness and alarm — a choreography of care performed on the edge of collapse. A doctor’s office becomes a kind of stage; the body, an instrument trying to tune itself against static. WhatsApp pings, bells, flutes, and pulse merge in a rhythm of overstimulation: the modern soundscape of survival.The poem moves like a collective hallucination: parents, childr...
2025-10-2201 min
The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt)Hazard Perception by Martha SpracklandEditorial Note by Max WallisIn Hazard Perception, Martha Sprackland recasts the road’s sudden dangers: kerbs, erratic bicycles, stags leaping from the verge as the psychic terrain of motherhood. Hazards are everywhere, made sharper by exhaustion: “the baby woke fourteen times last night,” thought turns sluggish, the brain itself “a lettuce completely eaten by slugs.” The poem’s hallucinatory images mimic the way fatigue distorts perception, how care leaves the body porous to threat.What begins with absurd humour: ponies on a dual carriageway, cartoon-like collisions darkens into a vision of inheritance: the child grown, guidi...
2025-09-2801 min