VERSE TRAPS RETURNS!
All Thirty Prompts. Right Now. No Waiting.
Poet Chaotique is now also Podcast Chaotique!
Listen to my dulcet tones rambling through all of the nonsense below and send words of encouragement. I’m already regretting having said I’ll read the prompts in an ASMR-style Nigella Lawson voice.
Here’s a thing about poets…
We, well, some of us, will “happily” write seventeen drafts of a poem about grief. Or spend three weeks on a villanelle about how we remember the softness of our grandmother’s hands. What about a sestina about the specific slantwise quality of light sneaking through the blinds on an October evening? And then we will absolutely, categorically, under no circumstances, write the poem we actually want to write.
You know the one!
The one that — starts in the mouth and doesn’t stop to apologise / knows exactly what it needs you to do and doggedly ekes it out of you / never quite explains why and how it’s technically about a peach / that begins innocently and then... / you wrote at 2am by the glare of your phone, moved to a folder called misc, moved again to another folder inside that called drafts, and then into a folder inside that called no, because something about it felt a little overwhelming / too honest / too hungry / too specifically, embarrassingly, gloriously, irrevocably, correctly you.
Well, that’s actually the Verse Traps origin story. It’s also now an annual tradition, apparently.
If you instantly thought of a poem you have written and never dared share, I implore you to do so. If you haven’t written one yet, yet, but you immediately thought of something you keep thinking of writing about but still haven’t, then I have much good news for you!
Verse Traps: After Dark is for that poem.
All of them. This June. No workshop. No apology necessary. No technically it’s a metaphor (it just bloody isn’t!) The darkness is here to save you, not to stop you. That permission slip is real, & the door is left on the latch, just in case, and it leads to a corridor of endless doors & windows that goes a long, long, long way down.
Come in. Come loudly. All are welcome.
What is a Verse Trap?!
A Verse Trap is, put alarmingly simply, the poetry equivalent of a thirst trap.
You know the thirst trap. (If you don’t, pop over to Threads for an hour and treat yourself!) It’s that photo captioned new haircut where the mirror is clearly showing something else entirely in the background. That Instagram story that’s technically a sunset but is, unmistakably, doing something else, usually but not always saucy, with the light. It says one thing. It shows another. The gap between what’s said and what’s shown is charged — everyone can feel it, nobody’s naming it, and that’s precisely, deliciously the point.
A Verse Trap does that on the page. On purpose. Yeah, I know, right?? With full awareness and zero apology. It’s never about just exposure, but double exposure. Poems, like their writers, contain multitudes.
It’s the poem technically about a specific piece of stone fruit that is clearly, erotically, irreversibly not about fruit, OR the poem talking about a room that is obviously about a person, OR the poem about something that requires a physical warm-up, adequate mental preparation, & the intimate self-punctuation of making your favourite drink — and look, maybe it is about the drink, sometimes, and maybe it’s something else entirely, and the Verse Trap is the poem that holds both truths simultaneously and lets the reader choose which one they need most in the moment.
It’s layered. It’s loaded. It’s dressed for every theme at the fancy dress party. It’s funny until it catches in the throat. It’s the trap beneath the trap.
Declare yourself the quintessential silence / friction / trouble / creature of your own making immediately, and let’s get to it!! What are you waiting for??
if you think silence / friction / trouble / creature isn’t also a poetry prompt in disguise, you’re mad, mad I tell you!!
You’ve been writing these moments your whole life. The charge is always there. This Pride Month, we dare to name it, lean into & against it, and let the fruit be the fruit and also everything else be a fruit too. Don’t worry, I’ll mop up after you’ve all gone home again.
VERSE TRAPS 2026: Why After Dark?
Because the best poems happen when you stop micro-managing yourself on the page, or anywhere else for that matter! We’re doubling down/over in the dark and letting it take us.
The dark has always been queered time. The underground bar with no sign. The neon-quenched nightclub above an old bank accessed by a shady back alley. The hidden backrooms, side streets, snickleways, & dressing rooms. The sauna & the cruising ground. The late night walk as the only available geography, not just because we were pushed there, though we were, definitively, historically, but because darkness does something to legibility. Dissolves the performance. Blurs the lines. Tickles the punctuation into submission. After dark, the acceptable version of yourself clocks out, and something rawer, stranger, and more authentic takes the wheel.
This is where the poems live! Not the tidy ones, but the ones that drip & decay beautifully in all their stupid / tender / raw / intimate / funny / devastating refusal to be reduced down to only one thing. Make your language orbit the very thing rather than arriving right at it, because the orbit is where the voltage is, and sometimes we need the walk back for thinking & writing time.
In my PhD research, I keep returning to the word desirance — the erotic charge that runs through language, through objects, through cities, through the quality of attention you bring to a low-lit June evening, a pulsating encounter, the temperature of a surface that has been warm from someone else’s body. Not about sex specifically, but about the palpable electricity of full attention, the art of noticing, of being so attuned to a thing that you could power a small village. That static becomes the poem.
The best poems are desirant. They want. They pose. They strut. They end when the day begins, and talk until the night agrees. After Dark is precisely the permission to want loudly on the page. To write from the body. To let the second stanza do what it clearly wants to do. And if the third stanza starts with the sound of a zipper, I will never, ever stop it. And neither should you.
GRAB YOUR PERMISSION SLIP
& POP YER LIL BOOTIES ON:
It’s Time To Dance!
You know you don’t often write poems like this.
Not nearly as often as you should, anyway.
I know. I know you write “proper poems”. Careful little things. Poems your fellow workshop attendees would recognise and lovingly suggest edits on. Poems your mother could read without either of you having to do something complicated with your faces. Poems your father could read and still not talk about it either way.
That’s the poem I’m asking for. The world needs a little more straaange!!
The exact moment of permission is this: something can be funny and devastating at the same time. Horny & tender. Stupid & true. Destructive, sloppy, loud, soft, furious, euphoric, rich, intimate, ridiculous, holy — often all in the same poem, sometimes all in the same unbroken line. Joy is no less serious than grief. The poem that makes someone laugh and then puts the knife down on the kitchen counter to make sandwiches for our picnic later is doing far more work than the poem that just lands the knife.
Salt-Rimmed Breath on Jazz-Thigh Gospel — my latest collection, was described by my MoodMilk co-conspirator Pixie as “probably the most bisexual poetry collection ever written” (established fact, non-negotiable) is an argument for exactly this. That the hungry poem is the honest poem. And that desirance is not a distraction from the real work. It is the real work. It always was. It’s the Verse Traps origin story, again.
Write the poems in the miscellaneous folder. Write the ones your workshop never saw. Write them dripping, write them stupid, write them hungry. And if it ends up technically about a tomato — brilliant! Nobody is fooled. Everyone is delighted. That’s the trap. I’ll take mine with extra sauce but that’s personal preference. But don’t feel obliged!
How does this work
& what do you want from me?!
— I hear you cry
This year is going to be a little different.
All thirty prompts are below — right now, today, all of them! Go check if you don’t believe me! Right… now, welcome back. This year, it is not a daily challenge or a scramble to find the post somewhere on social media. It’s a month-long invitation to sit with an idea, notice where the sensation sits in your body, and join the dots between words on a page until the feeling shifts. Pick what calls to you. Ignore what doesn’t. Come back to the ones you weren’t ready for on day one and find by day seventeen you absolutely are. You do you.
Write a poem. Write several. Write something that isn’t “technically” a poem but clearly is. Share it during June using #VerseTraps2026 and tagging @PoetChaotique — that’s how the archive builds, how this finds its people, how the poems travel.
Every Sunday in June, there’s also an After Dark post — one per week, five across the month. Each weekly post unlocks a new section of the prompts with its own theme, its own set of Flux Points. The sections and their themes reveal themselves week by week — you’ll get the full picture as June unfolds. So keep coming back for more!
Daily across Instagram, Threads, and Notes: each prompt as a visual, and a poem of mine alongside it. I’m writing into this with you. All month. In/from/out of the dark.
No competition this year. No prizes. Just the poems, the archive, and the specific pleasure of doing something feral and tender and deliberately excessive each day during Pride Month. Think of it less like a submissions window and more like a door left on the latch. Come and go freely!
And for anyone who took the challenge above to write THAT poem and doesn’t think it matches up to any of the prompts, share it anyway. This can be your Wild Card poem for the season, the joker in the pack, and I cannot wait to read what you’re dying to share!
So make sure to subscribe so you don’t miss any of these moments! Wink, wink!!
*drumroll* please…
ALL Thirty Prompts!
#VerseTraps2026 | tag @PoetChaotique
build a world with only what’s in your pockets (right now)
the audacity of a specific fruit (deploy it metaphorically, erotically, and irreversibly)
invent an alibi for something that requires one
salt / dark / hold / twice / open
Emergency Exit (open the door as the title, and escape from or towards something)
the unrepeatable pleasure of being known by your first name in a place you love
you stopped pretending you weren’t looking…
the temperature of a surface that has been warm from someone else’s body
what got left on your skin—
write from the body’s experience of a very good piece of music at maximum volume (title: a playful variation on the song’s title)
write something that would make your teenage self furious with envy
an act of magnificent self-indulgence — defend it deliciously
something about the way you— (opening phrase — spiral)
use the word tender in every possible sense
soft / borrowed / luck / burning
make a Victorian faint & a renaissance painter reach for their brushes simultaneously
write using only things you overhear
a poem for someone who is afraid — not about the fear, but what’s on the other side of it
the rules of a place that only exists at night
a room that runs on a different kind of electricity — blow a fuse!
what the morning after owes the night before
write a geography of desire — include the coastline, the snow-dipped mountains, the disputed territories, home
place your body in the middle of a crowded dance floor, a pride march, a busy café with a hot barista — write a poem from sight to smell to sound to sensation
write your own erotic summer gospel — make it a list poem, make it a hymn, make it a hallelujah for every body that shows up, including your own
the space between (make up a word for the title to describe the gap)
delight / promise / weight / yours
a poem that runs on the fuel of things nearly said
wear something not designed to be worn, or use something designed to be worn for another purpose entirely — wrong answers only
write a poem in which specific punctuation marks are specific physical actions — a / is one thing, a — is another, a . is another — tell nobody which is which, then punctuate the process of making your favourite drink
write a poem to a baby queer in 2026 — tell them our stories, tell them your story, tell them what they need to know and also what they want to hear
so, which one are you starting with immediately??
READ MORE TO WRITE MORE!
A smattering of poets whose work is desirant, palimpsextual, charged, and doing at least two things simultaneously at all times. Primers. Get the nervous system into the right register before you write. Mine them for inspiration.
Andrew McMillan — physical / pandemonium • Ocean Vuong — Night Sky with Exit Wounds • sam sax — Madness / Bury It • Frank O'Hara — Meditations in an Emergency • C.P. Cavafy — everything! • Richard Siken — Crush • Sappho — If Not, Winter (translated Anne Carson) • Danez Smith — Don't Call Us Dead • Richard Scott — Soho • Diane di Prima — Loba • Wayne Koestenbaum — anything, everything, immediately! • Peter Scalpello — Limbic • Seán Hewitt — All Down Darkness Wide • Federico García Lorca — Poet in New York • Allen Ginsberg — Howl and Other Poems • CAConrad — While Standing in Line for Death • Andrea Abi-Karam — Villainy • Yrsa Daley-Ward — bone • Walt Whitman — Leaves of Grass • Hera Lindsay Bird — Hera Lindsay Bird • Eileen Myles — Inferno • Joelle Taylor — C+nto & Othered Poems • Gertrude Stein — Tender Buttons • Catullus — (translated by Anne Carson in Nox, or Peter Green's translation for the full filth) • Andrew Garfield — just kidding… but also, we’d all totally read that!
Also, there is a metric fuckton of poets on Substack, and there are bound to be quite a few who belong on that list too. Go find them and come back and tell me!
Each After Dark post will go a little deeper into some poets for that week’s theme and what their work does that yours might like to borrow from. These are your queer poetry guides. Read them when the writing isn’t coming. Read them instead of writing. Read them until something unlocks. Or even unzips. I don’t know your process! Just read them. And then share them far & wide & deep!
Also, I’ll be showcasing some of the poets from last year’s Verse Traps in each weekly post! So keep your eye out for those!
What are you waiting for??
The archive is open and hungry. It has been starving since last June, and it will be again after this one. The poems you write this month will still be in the archive when someone types #VerseTraps2026 longingly into a search bar at 2am in a year that hasn’t happened yet and finds themselves enrobed in it — finds the poem that was secretly for them, written by a stranger, aching across time and space. That’s what archives like mine are made for.
That’s why we do it. The trap closes, and the thing it catches is always real.
This pride month: be the youest you that ever youd.
Write from the body. Write from out the dark. Write from in the dark. Write really near the dark but far enough away that your shadows don’t touch. Get over yourself and let your shadow have the night off, it’s probably seen some ridiculous shit too, and it never gets a word in edgeways. Write the geography of your desire. Write the hymn. Write the letter to the baby queer who needs it. Write to yourself. You need it too.
Write them hungry.
Write them thirsty.
I’ll see you in the afterdark.
RST xo
footnotes
Desirance (n.) — ongoing, unresolved desire toward something you’re studying, making, or writing. Not the desire that gets satisfied and goes home. The desire that stays, keeps looking, follows the charge rather than the predetermined route. In conventional research, this kind of attunement gets managed out as distortion. Here, it’s the whole instrument. The incompletion is the point.
Palimpsextual (adj.) — the practice of reading and writing queer meaning onto surfaces that weren’t designed to contain it, producing a layered reading where the official version and the queered/queer-coded one coexist, neither cancelling the other out. Three words collapsed into one: palimpsest (the surface written over but never fully erased), sex (desire and embodiment as irreducible to the way history gets told), and text (the surfaces through which history is transmitted and suppressed). A palimpsextual reading holds both layers simultaneously. It reads through the grain rather than against it.
you have a lovely fac—voice for radio <3
for real, i would recommend making a drink, and listening to this with notebook and fountain pen in hand as an opening ceremony to verse traps. get in the vibe. enter the darkness. it's an immersive experience!
The archive is starving! And so are your readers!! Thank you for ringing this back! I am so excited and so overwhelmed with joy! You are a gifttt