VERSE TRAPS #1: UNCHAINED HARMONY

flux points: unclaspings

Jun 01, 2026

Article voiceover

0:00

-20:34

…for any keen-eyed verse-trappin’ hunger machines out there dying to be quenched on Verse Traps content, i’m sorry this has arrived a day late. Saturday was York Pride, so as you can imagine, I was rather preoccupied collecting lots of data and inspiration for the month, and Sunday was Walt Whitman’s birthday, so naturally I spent the majority of it naked & editing a poetry collection. Photos to follow. Just kidding… Or am I?

Watch out for Flux Points!

desiratic attunements for the keen verse trapper

So, this is where we go at it all a little more slantwise. It’s never just simple with me, I know! In short, a prompt tells you what to write toward, but a Flux Point changes what you’re writing from. Each week, I’ll be sharing some ideas that might slightly adjust the lens, turn up the contrast, or turn on a blacklight for one or more of the prompts. (And absolutely not at all under any circumstances for some of the others.) You can mix prompts and fluxes as you wish; they’re only attunements, and not necessarily essential, it’s just a different perspective, a little plaything in the intimate art of noticing.

These are not more prompts. They’re not craft advice. They’re not suggestions for making your poem better or more publishable. They are optional moments of embodied attention — small, deliberate acts of misalignment that shift you out of the performing self and into the body’s register before you begin writing. A poetics of attention. Desiratic north stars for writing after dark.

With poetry, there’s always the potential for another register entirely. The “writing-so-fast-you-can’t-censor-it” register / the “brain that doesn’t write first, it’s a hand’s job only” register / the “that’s the body’s speaking I am but a sexy conduit” register — the one that doesn’t need to ask permission. It knows better than you do. Let it go out and play, you rotten sod!

Each After Dark post this pride month will bring its own set of Flux moments, each set with its own name, because every week of After Dark has a different kind of dark, and a different kind of unlocking necessary, and you will be able to play with as many or as few as you like.

We’re in. It’s started!

June!! The dark!! The prompts!!

I am barely holding it together!!

UNCHAINED HARMONY is week one’s thematic hinge, and I need you to understand that I have been sitting on some of these prompts since I started entertaining the idea of doing this all again back in January, like a very bisexual dragon curled up on a hoard of charged objects and loaded fruit emojis. Like all bisexuals really. We do love our trinkets. And now the waiting is over, and we are HERE, the specific electricity of Pride Month is already in the air, and in the body, and in the carefully orchestrated alibi you’ve been intently rehearsing. Pack your best waders, we’re going on a poetic deep dive this month!

This week is about the mouth that starts before the mind knows it has agreed to anything. The object clasped in the pocket that is clearly more than just an object to somebody, maybe even you. That name spoken gently by someone who decides its meaning as it crosses their lips. An emergency exit can also be an emergency entrance; it’s all a question of which direction you’re running in. Let The Bodies Hit The Floor & It’s Raining Men could be the same event viewed from wildly different perspectives. Just like The Piña Colada Song & Babushka. You could even be a villain in someone else’s story. But y’know, like a sexy, sultry villain.

Aren’t you glad to be back??

We are in the company of some extraordinary poets this month, Whitman cataloguing the whole magnificent ungovernable body, CAConrad doing somatic rituals before each poem because something must happen in the body before the poem can happen on the page, Tommy Pico’s IRL going past where it “should” stop. The list goes on and on and on, queer bodies are bloody everywhere! Isn’t it fantastic?! This is the embodied tradition we’re often writing into. So, this is the esteemed company we’re keeping this week. I find it genuinely, overwhelmingly, embarrassingly exciting to be sharing any kind of common poetic ground with anyone, let alone these iconic, poetic loons & queerdos, and I’m not going to pretend otherwise.

The queer body has always known precisely what these kinds of prompts are really asking of it. We have read most, if not all, rooms before entering them & often communicated in this subterranean register below language — the glance, the gesture, the particular way of standing near someone, feeling the charge we cannot quite put into words. And now’s your chance! We carry every room we’ve ever stood in into the room we’re standing in now. Every charged exit. Every look that quickly becomes a decision. The history of desire lives in the body before it lives anywhere else, and the poem that comes from there — that’s the one. That’s the verse trap! It’s time to siphon off a little of your excess static and share it with the baby queers.

That’s the thing

that catches

fire / the light / its little death / feelings / in the throat

Allen Ginsberg turns one hundred in three days. angelheaded hipsters burning for the ancient heavenly connection to the starry dynamo in the machinery of night — he was writing about us lot, obviously. He was always writing about us. We are still in the supermarket eyeing up the fresh produce suggestively. That howl forever continues ricocheting, and this month, we get to add our voices to the mix.

Now. Four Flux Points. One for each sense we’re tuning. A complete reset — the nervous system brought into full desiratic attention, the body calibrated before the poem begins its heady descent. Apply them freely to any prompt. Combine liberally. Go strange. These are not instructions. They are invitations to arrive somewhere more diagonally with a half-dead potted plant under one arm.

Think of it like this: the prompt is the mousetrap — spring-loaded, perfectly placed, doing exactly what it says on the tin. The Flux Point is the cheese. Or, to keep this firmly in Verse Traps territory: the prompt is the well-placed mirror and the casually removed item of clothing. The Flux Point is the camera angle that makes the whole thing land.

Try one. See what it does to the poem.

See what it does to you!

the things I carry are always heavier than the things I’ve left behind

— CAConrad, While Standing in Line for Death

“I had to make up all the words myself. The way they taste, the way they sound in the air. I passed through the narrow gate, stumbled in, stumbled around for a while, and stumbled back out. I made this place for you. A place for to love me. If this isn’t a kingdom then I don’t know what is.”

— Richard Siken, Crush

a delicate fire has overrun my flesh

— Sappho, Fragment 31 (tr. Anne Carson)

“The ceremony of nighttime,
the cauldron of echoes, smells,
the Earth's shadow over itself—
curates an intimate thought
process, a witchy kind
of attention. The sun is
too canine for me. Drooling
and jumping and expects thanks
for just being.”

— Tommy Pico, IRL

“…the road through a poem is a series of lines, like a constellation, all interconnected. Poems take place in the realm of chance, where the self and the universal combine, where life exists. I can’t suggest to you that going through a line that is more like a constellation than a road is easy—or that the blurring of the self and the universal doesn’t shred a poet a little bit in the process. The terrain of a poem is unmapped.”

— Dorothea Lasky

You don’t have to use all of them. You don’t have to use any of them. But if something isn’t quite landing, if the background noise in your mind is running a little too loud, if the poem you actually want to write is still busy languishing in the TBC folder — start here. Start with the charge. The unchained thing doesn’t announce itself.

Now taste the poem waiting on the edge of your teeth, lick your lips as an invitation.

VERSE TRAPPERS OF 2025

Last year, Verse Traps was a small Pride Month poetry competition with a selection of prizes. I’m doing things a little differently this year, and so instead of spending the month trying to get you to send in submissions to win copies of my last book, I’m going to dedicate a portion of each post to a Verse Trapper from last year. Think of it as a sort of who are they? where are they now? & what are they wearing??

And if you wanna be a Verse Trapper of 2026 in a 2027 post, write a poem! It’s really that simple. This could be you, though admittedly, I cannot guarantee you’ll look as fabulous as Nymphish doing it! Martinis not provided.

This week, it’s the turn of Nymphish from Diva Star dot Nymphish, who won my prize for Verse Trapper of the Month, with the poem Hard Rock Ho(tel). They’ve sent over some selections from a recent poem, now available in the first Diva Star dot Nymphish zine, and some thoughts on gender identity & emotional truths.

over to NYMPHISH!

“ an ode to my smooth brain, coming of age in a half

cave, half knowing of fire”

the iconic wonder-creature of poetry that is Nymphish!

“ what if

we had let ourselves linger, for just a moment?

that’s why i became a poet. so i would never actually

have to hear you say no.”

- Quotes both taken from the poem During The Witching Hour, available now in Issue One of the Diva Star dot Nymphish Zine!

Lately, I’ve found myself increasingly interested in the juxtapositions between factual and emotional truths. I’m using poetry as a foundation to stretch the truth as far as I can; a truth taffy puller. I always describe my own artistic vision as girl centric, but my relationship with my own femininity is similar to my relationship with the truth: it changes shape upon every recollection.

The zine version of Diva Star dot Nymphish is available now as a digital release. For updates & future releases, please consider becoming a free subscriber on Substack, and show your support on Ko-fi: ko-fi.com/nymphish.

subscribe to Diva Star dot Nymphish