Shows
The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt)What Eagle Saw by Pascale PetitIn Pascale Petit’s final, fourth, poem, What Eagle Saw, Petit turns her focus skyward. The eagle hovers above the neonatal ward, her vision both forensic and mythic, maternal and ecological. War and armistice across a battleground of the body, the family unit and the environment itself.Petit’s images fuse the anatomical with the ecological. “She saw into the chests of newborns / where the twigs of lungs were torn.” Hearts become roses, veins rivers that dry to deserts, skins crack to release scorpions. This is the surrealist trauma poetics that defines Petit’s work: the body re-imagine...
2025-09-2602 min
The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt)House of Puberty by Pascale PetitEditorial Note by Max WallisPascale Petit’s second poem in Issue One, House of Puberty, moves deeper into the territory glimpsed in My Mother’s Provençal Dress. If the first poem placed the mother within a vineyard sewn into fabric, here the house itself is transformed into a rainforest, a hallucinatory world where trauma finds its truest shape.A Welsh mining village terrace becomes a jungle of threat and wonder. The living room teems with caimans, leafcutter ants, anteaters, peccaries. The mother’s mind is carried away by insects; her body speaks in macaws...
2025-09-1302 min
The Daily Aftershock (Writing Prompt)My Mother's Provençal Dress by Pascale PetitEditorial Note by Max WallisIn My Mother’s Provençal Dress, Pascale Petit returns to one of her great themes: the mother’s presence lingering in absence, a fabric of love and accusation stitched into the landscape itself.The poem begins with theft – “I stole my mother’s Provençal dress while she was in hospital” – but what follows is not just an act of rebellion. The speaker inhabits the dress like a vineyard, a landscape stitched from kermes oak and cicada-thrum. It is a garment, but also inheritance, burden, and escape.The poem refuses...
2025-09-1002 min