After trauma, there is still poetry.

dirty laundry
 

DIRTY LAUNDRY
A Pocket Aftershock pamphlet

Edited by Gerry Potter

 

This pamphlet is a clothesline strung across the backyards of our lives: queer pants, grief shirts, sequinned trauma vests, all pegged out in the wind. Dirty Laundry isn’t about shame. It’s about showing the stains and saying: yes, that’s mine, and isn’t it fabulous?

 

We want your unwashed truths, your sullied Sunday bests, your threadbare costumes still clinging to sweat and glitter from nights that should’ve broken you but didn’t. We want poetry that struts, bawls, spits, prays, and gurns. Work that reeks of real life and hard living, of sex and collapse and resurrection via eyeliner.

 

This is a call for the unapologetically queer, the defiantly poor, the artist who’s scrubbed floors, the performer who’s done drag in back rooms with broken bulbs. For those raised on council estate magic and back-alley gospel. For those who’ve survived austerity, addiction, or being fabulous in the face of everything.

 

Bring us:

Club toilets as cathedrals.
Boys with their mam’s lipstick still on.
Rage wrapped in tulle.
Prayers said to your reflection at 3AM, pissed and luminous.
The smell of old chip fat in your hair, and how it reminds you of nan.
The high-camp tragedy of your best mate ghosting you after Pride.
The hymn of the housing estate, belted from your diaphragm.

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This is about refusing erasure. About saying: here I am, starched or stained, and I am not

your palatable, posterchild queer.

 

So pull it out the basket. Turn it inside out. Hold it up to the light.

 

We’ll peg it to the page.

 

Dirty Laundry is part of Pocket Aftershock, a mini-pamphlet series from The Aftershock Review platforming bold, raw and radically honest poetry.

 

About the editor:

Gerry Potter is a poet, playwright and veteran of queer performance. A working-class scouser and former drag persona Chloe Poems, Gerry is known for his theatre verse and no-holds-barred poems of sex, grief, community and Liverpool survival. He is the author of multiple collections from Flapjack Press and remains a blazing, unashamed voice in contemporary queer poetry.

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Only 15-20 poems will be selected for this pamphlet. We expect a large number of submissions. All poems will be read by the editor of the Aftershock Review and their work considered for other issues in conjunction with this.

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