Pangyrus, Cambridge, MA (2026)

05/29/2026

“My poem, ‘Long Live the Queen,’ appears in its fourth or fifth iteration, yet the only constant between drafts is the first line: ‘Mother, do you remember?’ Fittingly, this line serves as a memory, some vestige of my past that continues to stay with me, whether I like it or not. Without choice of what memories resurface, this poem explores themes of love, loss, and lineage, through the lens of relationships I had with the women in my life at the time of writing — my mother and romantic partner. The poem’s concrete form has no real significance, on the other hand, and I can only say that this was the shape the poem took as I put fingers to keyboard. On some level, each subsequent shift was an expression of my feelings that the poem was growing distant, and that I needed to grasp it and reign it in to find an appropriate ending,” — Matthew Zhao on his poem “Long Live the Queen,” which we published on Mother’s Day.

Read more on our website at pangyrus.com.

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05/25/2026

“It wasn’t right for Rangel’s body to be frozen at the mortuary, but how was José to know that it was waiting for him to release it from forced suspension. The thought occurred to him that he had enough problems after his marriage had unraveled to become involved. He was like a fish swimming with its school, swallowing water and shifting shapes with no direction of its own.

The colonel had droned on about honoring men in uniform who had sacrificed their lives for civilians to have their freedoms. He had been describing the fraternal organization’s efforts to preserve the rights of forgotten service members.

‘I didn’t even know he had been in the military,’ José said. ‘He never mentioned it.’ Then, he was the one leaving a gap between thoughts: ‘Are you sure you have the right guy?’

‘Yes, absolutely: Rangel Wilson Ollarte, Private First Class. Honorably discharged on March 24, 1956. Born in San Germán, Puerto Rico, in 1931. He enlisted in August 1949. He was part of the 65th Infantry Regiment of the United States Army and fought bravely in the Chosin Reservoir. He had earned decorations for marksmanship, national defense service and good conduct. We have compared facial characteristics and dental records with the military registry and have crossmatched with information from the V.A. hospital and other federal and state government files, including the Social Security contributions from work with the nonprofit. He was one of our heroes, sir. No doubt about it,’” — an excerpt from Víctor Manuel Ramos’ story “In Memoriam.”

Read the full piece on our website at pangyrus.com.

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05/25/2026

“I live by Oak Grove cemetery in Medford, MA, and often walk by the statue in the poem, so I finally decided to research it a bit. I read that the statue was the source of some controversy because the soldier (standing on his weapon) seems to be triumphing over the warlike instinct as much as over any foe. This led me to thinking about our current military conflicts and how, as Blake lamented, ‘the hapless Soldiers sigh / Runs in blood down Palace walls.’

I don’t think I am alone in my frustration with my country’s willingness to send fresh generations of soldiers off to war, and so the poem tries to reflect on the cyclical nature of needless violence, and to make room for the private, personal griefs that are made visible in a cemetery, either by the visitors to the graves, or by the decorations they leave.

Although the poem is in free verse, I wanted to rein it in a bit and give it some formal touches, so you’ll find some architecture in the stanzas and the use of parallel structure. I wanted the gravitas of the content to be echoed a bit by the form,” — Max Heinegg on his poem “Cemetery Salt.”

Read more on our website at pangyrus.com.

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05/23/2026

“The nannies clustered on two benches and snuck drags off v**e pens. The stay-at-home moms claimed the other two benches, made hushed comments about the va**ng, called, ‘Jeremy, put that down,’ or, ‘Stop hitting your sister, Terrence,’ before turning their attention back to their phones. Three dads in baseball caps pressed their backs to the chain link fence that held us captive, took long sips from steaming travel mugs. They made small talk about yard work and renovations, stared at our nannies’ legs.

We gathered near the slide, waited for our adults to tell us to play, but they didn’t notice the tight knot we’d formed, how we bent our heads toward one another, our furtive whispers.

Terrence slapped his sister again, hard enough for a sharp crack to sound, just to see if their mom would notice. This time, his sister screamed, ‘Mommy,’ but the mom didn’t move. She said, ‘I won’t warn you again, Terrence,’ but we knew she would. She always did. Though sometimes she made him sit on the ground at her feet for three minutes. She set a timer, called it a time-out, continued her conversation about reliable babysitters and potty-training techniques,” — an excerpt from “Recreational Riot” by Laura Leigh Morris.

Read the full story on our website at pangyrus.com.

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05/23/2026

“Friendship is one of life’s greatest blessings. I was lucky to have a very dear longtime friend in the late poet Jennifer Martelli, who passed from pancreatic cancer on September 25, 2025. Jenn’s passing was one of the most painful experiences in my life and at the same time inspired me to write for and about her. In the weeks following her death, I wrote a couple of dozen elegies in different forms. This one came to me one morning in the hot tub looking up at the sky and seeing in the clouds, bones. The bones became the central metaphor for the poem. I chose the sonnet form because Jenn and I both love it obsessively. It was a moment of contemplation about our bodies returning to the earth that lent itself well to the sonnet form. It was remarkable how body-like the clouds were, and they brought Jenn to mind, especially once I saw the snake skeleton, as Jenn famously feared them. At the time I wrote this, I didn’t know what had become of Jenn’s bones, and that question came to me as I contemplated the cloud-bones, and connected me to sky and earth, where ultimately, we all end up,” — Subhaga Crystal Bacon on her poem “As if We Tossed Them in a Cup.”

Read more on our website at pangyrus.com.

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05/15/2026

“In ‘Confessions of a Slutty Virgin,’ May’s first-person account shows herself as a teenage girl navigating the treacherous halls of school with chatter of a ‘hot list,’ in which she isn’t named, doesn’t want to be named, yet has conflicting feelings about not being named. This reminds me of being a teenager, in the era before cellphones, standing in our kitchen talking on the beige wall phone, trying to stretch the cord as far as possible so my feminist mother wouldn’t overhear me as I tried to get intel about the list boys in our school had made, rating each girl — the beginning of my confusing struggle with the male gaze.

May continues to parallel my own adolescent thinking in the title essay. ‘As a teenager, it seemed to me that being desirable to boys was an annoying, arduous process of playing a trick — present them with a fantastic image and then work constantly to maintain it: arrange yourself into something they’d like.’ She writes how young girls are set up to ‘cannibalize each other,’ reminding me of when I asked my mother if I was prettier than one of my friends. She told me it didn’t matter and that she wouldn’t answer such a question. But am I? I pressed. I was trying to rank within my own ranks,” — an excerpt from Anna Mantzaris’ review of “Some Girls,” an essay collection by Emily May.

Read the full essay on our website at pangyrus.com.

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05/15/2026

”All my life, I had always dreaded my father’s brown, leather belt which doubles as a tool for punishment. The welt it leaves on the body that becomes a permanent scar, speaks to my hatred for this accessorized waistband. “WOUND ENTRY” is poem that calls back so much childhood memories, living in a patriarchal society — governed by testosterone, & the futile intervention of women in taming this raging hormone. This mediation exercise is slightly marked with the use of em-dashes — penetrating tensed spaces. The recollection process of childhood memory shaped the framework of the way this poem unfolds on the page (coming first as one large surge, before the gradual shedding of details and subsequent mono-stitch), leading to both an expansion and contraction of narrative. The intermittent quatrains in this poem serve as a constant reminder of the belt’s recoil, with its back and forth lashing against the skin,” — Nnadi Samuel on his poem “WOUND ENTRY.”

Read more on our website at pangyrus.com.

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05/13/2026

“I followed our moving van over Boston’s Tobin Bridge from Gloucester, Massachusetts. I was newly divorced; my four-year-old boy was belted into his car seat. I had no experience raising a child alone, no job, and little money. My mother’s lifelong advice swam in my head: Never get married. Never have kids. And if you don’t know what to do, say the Hail Mary until you find the strength to hang on. I had done the marriage — it flopped. I’d had a child — the best thing I’d ever done.
Hang on, I told myself as we swung into the city. When I saw the blue skyscrapers I felt Boston welcome us. Here we would have a chance at a new life.

I rented a tiny attic apartment under the eaves of a Victorian house. The floors were dark and scratched. The kitchen had one tiny window so high I couldn’t see out of it, yet it let in the roar of traffic below. I thought I would cry at its ugliness, but it was all I could afford. ‘Hang on,’ I told myself. ‘I’ll fix it up.’

To my surprise, the postage-stamp apartment was two blocks from one of the greatest athletic events in the world — the Boston Marathon. I held my boy’s chubby hand the first time we crossed Beacon Street to watch. College students barbecued while others hung out of windows roaring, ‘Run! Run!’ Music blared from restaurants and radios. Everyone was smiling and chanting, ‘Run!’

As the day grew longer, the shouts got stronger, with all of Brookline yelling, ‘Hang on. You can do it, hang on!’ My son and I felt triumphant, too,” — an excerpt from Rosie Sultan’s essay “The Art of Letting Go.”

Read the full story on our website at pangyrus.com.

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05/13/2026

“July 13, 1993. A big day, but Wally immediately flubbed the plan and wound up sleeping on a picnic table by the river. Not so easy at sixty-four. Unsurprisingly, it stank like river. Or something that died and gassed out a little closer to his sleeping bag than the river. Still, there was a moon overhead and fireflies in the high grass when he woke after midnight. That was nice. The road had its charms and warts and now he was here to see them all. Or smell them, as the case may be.

The plan was to hitchhike out of Shakopee, Minnesota, and make it to Mankato by nightfall. Here’s how he flubbed it: when the nice young couple picked him up in their minivan, he started talking mindlessly and rambled into the childhood memory of a hitchhiker who preyed on high school students in Wisconsin. Probably a myth, but that was that. They dropped him off with a nervous excuse. The driver refused to look at him as he tripped out the sliding door. He watched the taillights fade and walked to the roadside rest without another offer. It was a learning process, being on the road,” — an excerpt from Mark Christopherson’s fiction piece “Forty Days on the California Trail.”

Read the full story on our website at pangyrus.com.

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04/28/2026

“To relay the steps of making this poem would be a bore because it came of sitting over a river on the edge of a bridge — that’s it. In my Junior year of undergrad I became increasingly preoccupied with meditation. Simultaneously, a great love for physical labor followed suit. This poem is about this very pruning of the mind, likened to the long and arduous process of building a deck, particularly digging the footings. Before one can track either fresh shoots or malignant growth, there needs to be something beneath, by which you can find your footing among the clutter. In order to build something that lasts, you must first excavate. The poem urges readers to find their center, then dig it out. The fields, loose and wet should call to mind the mind itself. There is nothing more fertile, and if you have no intentionality, the greenery will consume the whole thing. The stream-of-consciousness nature of the lines that follow the finding of the footings should allow the reader to see a wash of images and information, cascading along, out of the hole as the dirt is shoveled. When all the images are past and the deck itself is done, the final stanza reminds us what’s built and cultivated is never final, and the footings themselves soon have no relation to what you have left. In some new way, the process will excavate itself again before the building can begin. That’s where you come in,” — Jayce Elliott on his poem “Digging for a Veranda.”

Read more on our website at pangyrus.com.

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04/23/2026

“I do not collect anything tangible, only the fleeting feelings and textures of motherhood, moments I turn over in my mind like a rock in my hand, smoothing them and looking for their meaning.

***

My oldest, Luke, has grown so much that we’ve hit the stage where people ask if he’s taller than me. Standing side by side, his eyeline matches mine. One day, we’re out in the front yard of our home in suburban Detroit and my neighbor, Meghan, mom of four boys younger than mine, lines us up to see. Luke moves close and tips his chin to the late afternoon sky, ready to overtake me, wanting to claim the title of tallest. And maybe he is taller. Meghan uses her hand to touch each of our heads, and the results are inconclusive.
Time has slipped away, day by day, bedtime by bedtime, birthday by birthday, and now we’re here, with my boy looking me eye to eye. Brown into brown,” — an excerpt from Krista Jahnke’s essay “What We Collect.”

Read the full essay on our website at pangyrus.com.

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