😈🌀✨ VERSE TRAPS 2025 ✨🌀😈

A Pride Month Poetry Celebration by Poet Chaotique

Jun 01, 2025

Verse Traps 2025: June 1–30 | Exclusive to Substack Subscribers

Welcome to the trap.
Not the kind you escape from—the kind you choose to walk into, willingly, words-first.
Because that’s what pride is: A choice to speak when silence is expected.
A vow to write ourselves back into the margins that tried to erase us.

This June, I invite you—queer poets, weird hearts, allies with ink-stained fingers—to join me for Verse Traps 2025.

It’s more than a writing prompt series. It’s a living archive. A chorus of queer voices.
A spell, a rebellion, a love letter. A way to say: we were here. we are here. we will not go quietly.

💥 WHAT ARE VERSE TRAPS?

Every day in June, I’ll share a new prompt:
Some sensual, some surreal, some joyful, some sad.
Some so stupid they loop back around to brilliance.
But all rooted in the truth that queer poetry is world-building.

These are designed to spark something feral or funny or fucked-up or fabulous in you.

It’s a poetic playground, not a productivity contest.

These prompts are invitations—not demands.
They’re doorways into memory, desire, rage, softness, sweat, glitter, grief, disco, shadows, & light.

Write a line. Write a verse. Write your heart out.
This isn’t about perfection—it’s about presence.
It's about showing up for your queer self with a pen in hand.

📝 HOW TO JOIN

To enter and be considered for prizes:

Be a subscriber to this Substack (free or paid).
Share your poem(s) in response to any prompt:
- In the dedicated subscriber-only Chat thread, OR
- Directly with me via Substack Notes, email, or message.

Write as often or as little as you like.
Respond in real time, or let the prompts simmer.
The final deadline for all submissions is June 30th 2025.

This is a no-pressure space.
Miss a day? Beautiful.
Catch up all at once in a midnight frenzy? Iconic.
Only respond to the ones that make your teeth ache or your gut twist? That’s the trap doing its work.

🌈 WHY VERSE TRAPS?

Because we live out loud, or else we die in silence.
Because the world still tries to quieten us or make us small.
Because queer joy is a protest. Queer poems are spells at work.
Because we need to archive ourselves before they forcibly archive us.

This is how we survive—
through each other’s stanzas, syllables, and similes.
We build altars out of enjambment. We write our way free.

Verse Traps 2025 is a glitter-laced act of queer resistance, a month of radical softness, embodied truth, and creative communion. It’s about pride, yes—but not the sanitised kind. This is sweaty, tender, furious, funny, full-bodied queer pride.

🏆 THE PRIZES

To sweeten the sweat, there are three* major prizes:

✨ Verse Trap of the Month

Prize: 🥇 The Deluxe Verse Trap Box
→ Set of custom stickers
→ Full set of 5 A5 prints
→ 2 bookmarks
→ Set of 3 pin badges
→ Signed copy of Salt-Rimmed Breath on Jazz-Thigh Gospel
→ 1 custom poetry prompt
→ 1 custom poem written just for you
→ Detailed feedback on up to 3 of your poems (if you wish!)
→ “Holy Summer” pink tote bag

Awarded for: the poem that catches me completely off-guard—stylistically daring, emotionally raw, or just perfectly chaotic.

✨ Weird Little Glory Goblin Award

Prize: 🥈The Goblin Glory Box
→ Set of custom stickers
→ 3 A5 prints
→ 1 bookmark
→ 2 pin badges
→ Signed copy of Salt-Rimmed Breath on Jazz-Thigh Gospel
→ 1 custom poem
→ Detailed feedback on up to 3 of your poems (if you wish!)

Awarded for: the poem that is proudly, gloriously unhinged. For services to wordplay, innuendo, and double entendre. This is the prize for the piece that most makes me think “fuck!! I wish I’d written that!!!”

✨ Soft Apocalypse Award

Prize: 🥉 The Holy Ache Box
→ Set of custom stickers
→ 1 A5 print
→ 1 bookmark
→ 1 pin badge
→ Signed copy of Salt-Rimmed Breath on Jazz-Thigh Gospel

Awarded for: a piece that makes my soul ache, my teeth itch, and my stomach churn. This is the prize for the piece that most makes me think “fuck, I wish I’d written that.”

Winners will be announced in the first week of July.

*🎖️ Bonus Prizes & Shoutouts may also be awarded because I’m a chaotic bisexual and cannot be trusted to stick to only three.

🫂 COMMUNITY GUIDELINES

This is a safe, queer, kind space.
No bigotry. No cruelty. No AI-generated submissions.
Encourage one another. A like is lovely. A comment is divine. A follow is a radical act of support.
We rise by writing together.
Take care of yourself & each other. Pride Month is always a complex time for everyone. Make sure to look after yourself first and foremost.

🔥 MY BOOK, SALT-RIMMED BREATH ON JAZZ-THIGH GOSPEL

Some prompts this month are inspired by my latest collection, Salt-Rimmed Breath on Jazz-Thigh Gospel—a queer, salt-slicked offering of tenderness, hunger, mythology, and bodily wonder. Unless you’re new here, you’ve probably heard of it!
But above all, the spirit of it runs through this whole challenge. It’s for the misfits, the lovelorn, the lip-biters, the ones who want to scream or swoon or sob in verse.

Remember, you can always choose to take the silly things seriously, and the serious things sillilly. This is the first rule of Goblin Poetry Club.

🎤 READY TO WRITE?

The first prompt drops June 1st. Are you ready?
Subscribe now to access the Chat and join the archive-in-the-making.
Let’s get loud. Let’s get tender.
Let’s trap some verses and celebrate Pride with all the weird, luminous force we’ve got.

RST xo

If you’d prefer to follow along on a different social media platform, find my links below, but remember, you will need to submit on Substack to be in with a chance of winning any of the prizes.

👉 All The Links!