Dunne writes the unwriteable: how love survives its own disfigurement, how memory keeps touching what the body can’t. aftershockpoetry.substack.com/p/in-the-pri...

The final image — “on a perfect lawn” — carries all the ache of what’s unsaid. Perfection here means control, containment, an unnatural order imposed upon grief. Yet within that manicured space, a daughter’s love reaches through the system, however briefly.

The world she enters is both ordinary and impossible: a place where the worst people are allowed moments of grace, and where she must find her own.

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.”

wonderful, Ian!

Across her four poems in this issue Petit creates a sequence of maternal hauntings and survival visions. Each expands private trauma into ecological myth, so that memory is never flat but alive, unstable, and vast.