Pangyrus, Cambridge, MA (2026)

08/24/2026

“I am from Ukraine and feel a deep connection to its land and cultural legacy. Though I grew up in a Russian-speaking environment, I now take Ukrainian lessons online with an instructor who lives in Lviv. She is a wonderful teacher and human, and we have become friends.

Lviv is in western Ukraine, and it is not bombed as often as other cities we hear about in the media. Still, people are wounded and die from Russia’s attacks; many lost a family member who fought at the front. I admire my friend, who is always ready with a joke for some of the darkest events we are living through, but I also worry for her, and for Ukrainians more broadly. It isn’t easy to put up a brave front and carry on with your life in the face of war fatigue.

Poetry is one way to approach what resists ordinary language. As part of the Ukrainian diaspora and a person who has friends living in Ukraine, I am tired of putting on a smile every day. Poetry gives permission to talk about these issues and reflect on one Ukrainian woman who is living through this calamity. Imagery, in particular, provides ways to verbalize the subtle yet real ways in which war is present in my conversations with my friend,” — Olga Livshin on her poem “Guilty Ballad.”

Read more on our website at pangyrus.com.

Image by Surgey Gussev on flickr.com, licensed under CC 2.0.

08/16/2026

“I have a tendency (ala my hero Frank O’Hara) to jot poems and stories down and then haphazardly store them away / forget about them. But after a brief Google Docs investigation, I saw this poem was time stamped November 2025: a period of time when I was fighting, making up with, and having s*x with my partner, as well as reading the short play cycle Glass. Kill. Bluebeard. Imp. The second play (Kill) features a God of ambiguous denomination sitting on a cloud recounting the endless cycles of violence and tragedy found within Greek drama. I became tickled by the idea of Eros, or whatever you would call the deity of love and amorous feelings, watching two intelligent, mercurial, hard-drinking q***r people fall out, and then find ways to remind each other why they fell in love in the first place.
This explanation probably doesn’t include every element that went into the composition of this poem, but usually some combination of life events + what I’m reading is the standard equation for a successful piece of work,” — Jack Sullivan on his poem “Danse.”

Read more on our website at pangyrus.com.

Image by Constanza Rossi Vibbot on pexels.com, licensed under CC 2.0.

08/13/2026

“Written during a difficult time when each day carried with it, unavoidably, considerable stress and worry, “the land ocked sub rban” is a playful exploration of the daydream as a temporary, recurring reprieve. The idea of becoming an expert on a specific animal species by living alongside them and sharing their environment has always appealed to me — ever since reading Jane Goodall’s In The Shadow of Man as a teenager, I have daydreamed about studying great apes or some other notable species in the wild. Formally, I liked the idea of the daydream intruding on and shaping the act of writing and the written work itself. I enjoy using manipulations of form and structure to call attention to a poem (or any creative writing) as a constructed object built out of component parts, and as a way to change the reading and reading-comprehension experience; I like it best when these formal choices spring from and connect to the internal logic and meaning of the work itself. In the writing of it, the poem’s playfulness and wry humor served as a welcome counterpoint to the challenges I was experiencing; more than daydreaming, humor and writing have always helped me to cope with and move through and past difficult times,” — Nathaniel Lachenmeyer on his poem “the land ocked sub rban.”

Read more on our website at pangyrus.com.

Image by hyper7pro on commons.wikimedia.org, licensed under CC 2.0.

08/08/2026

“I began this poem while on an artists’ residency in Costa Rica, for which I had packed several old journals in hopes of finding new inspiration in their pages. Though this poem has gone through many iterations since, it began as a playful experiment in found poetry, in which I strung together a number of images, memories, and phrases I lifted from those journals, and added some new images and experiences I was having in Costa Rica, like the lizard on the ceiling.

My relationship to my brother and his death by su***de appears in many of my poems. The couplets in this poem emphasize that relationship,” — Pamela Wax on her poem “The Ghost of a City in My Bones.”

Read more on our website at pangyrus.com.

Image by Basheer Tome on flickr.com, licensed under CC 2.0.

08/03/2026

“Before Matt got in his car at the curb to follow the ambulance, I hurried out to him, handed him a scrap of paper on which I’d scribbled my cell phone number, and said, ‘If I can do anything… anything at all.’

Our eyes held briefly. I didn’t know Matt well because he’d gone off to college soon after moving in. He was a lawyer who lived about an hour away and wasn’t around much; Dr. Taylor rarely mentioned him.

‘His right foot,’ Matt blurted. ‘The paramedic told me he’s almost sure it will have to be removed.’ His gaze was stony, expressionless. ‘I mean the front part, anyway. It’s completely black. No circulation… none.’

I whispered, ‘Good Lord.’

‘Yeah,’ Matt rubbed at his goatee. ‘All those years of smoking and drinking catching up to him again.’ He glanced down at the number I’d given him. ‘Thanks for this… I’ll let you know.’

I nodded. The rain fell like a veil in the gloaming as I watched him climb in his car and pull away,” — an excerpt from William Cass’ story “Not Ready Yet.”

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

Image by Earl Wilcox on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.

07/26/2026

“The speaker of this poem is dealing with the rebellion of their own body and exploring what it means to be disabled. In the first line, the speaker is struck by the idea that their disability is eighteen years old, and amid this form of rebellion, they are also grappling with rebellion after growing up in a household of manual laborers with strong Christian influences. How does one decide what to take and what to leave behind from their upbringing, family, and religion? What does it mean to search for new ways of understanding the world? The final line of the poem is the speaker accepting that it’s both their own hand rebelling against a restrictive upbringing and their own hand (body) rebelling against itself through illness,” — Anna Drasko on her poem “Socket.”

Read more on our website at pangyrus.com.

Image by Pierre Goiffon on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.

07/26/2026

“Magazine work is a different beast, but for literary writing, I often don’t know what I’m going to write until I hit the keyboard. I don’t have a process, as such, b/c I’ve been disabled w/ the degenerative neuro-immuno illness Myalgic Encephalomyelitis throughout my career and I’ve had cancer for the past nine years so, when I’m able to write, I just write. My body forces me to spend huge swaths of time lying flat and unable to move, so I always strike when the proverbial iron is hot. Healthy writers sometimes get a little precious about their desk, room, location, et al, and it’s, like, man, none of that has anything to do w/ the end result. Also? The old adage ‘It’s never too late!’ is true: I didn’t publish my first poem until 10 months ago when I was 58 and now I’ve had dozens accepted. Never let anyone impose limits on your art. All good wishes! You’ve got this, friend,” — Litsa Dremousis on her poem “Bank Imbalance.”

Image by Jp Valery on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.

07/14/2026

“The record player is a robot. You place the disc on the top of the post with the nub, and it drops onto the spinner by itself. Then the arm with the needle jerks across like Frankenstein and makes the crackling noise before the music starts. For the songs about the sun, you need to flip the disc over. The boy does this for Alma, the au pair, because it is bad luck for her to stop dancing. She twirls through the silent interval barefoot, striped by the light through the blinds, then beckons to him when the music re-starts. He joins her but cannot make his legs sway like hers and does not know when his arms should go over his head. He decides to thump around instead like a dinosaur, knees bent, jaw thrust out. Then this seems wrong, too, so he sits back on the straw chair in his swim trunks.

Mustard is not a real name for a man, but there are two of them. There is the dirty old man who is rude to the Queen. He is a mister and mean and keeps money up his nose and his song comes on immediately after the Sun King although they are nothing alike. Then there is the man from the game, with the yellow moustache and the swoopy yellow neck. He is a colonel but more like a king, because the character card shows his head separated by a thin black gash from the plastic part that props it up. When they sing about the Sun King, the boy thinks of the colonel, who is also the color of the sun — not laughing or happy, but when they say everybody is that way, they could mean everyone except him, laughing at him, with his sad flushed wounded face,” — an excerpt from Duncan Greenlaw’s story “Sun King.”

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

Image by Mathias Reding on pexels.com, licensed under CC 2.0.

07/12/2026

“First of all, I cheated. What I mean is that I went to see the toadlets knowing that I would want to write about them. Having an intention is never a good plan for a poem. At least I didn’t know where the poem would go. I often start by describing what I see, as I did here, and then just keep writing and hoping that the poem can tell me where it wants to go. I did a little research to learn the word ‘tubercles,’ debated whether it was too esoteric to use, decided I wanted to use it. I stole ‘single necessity’ from Anne Dillard’s ‘the perfect freedom of single necessity’ from her essay ‘Living Like Weasels’ in her beautiful book ‘Teaching a Stone to Talk’. That phrase has long lingered in a back channel of my mind. The surprise, or turn, in the writing of the poem came when I connected the phrase about the toadlets ‘making a dash for it’ with the fact, which I’d forgotten until then, that my husband and I have a plot in this cemetery and where, on our inscribed granite slab, the dash between our birth and death dates has been held open. That little dash that carries the gravity of our brief lives,” — Wendy Drexler on her poem “Toadlet Migration at Halcyon Pond.

Read more on our website at pangyrus.com.

Image by Bostonian13 on Wikimedia Commons, licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0.

07/11/2026

“Dear Desmond,

Our editorial staff thanks you sincerely for sending ‘When to Panic’ to Intrepid Inkblot. We consider it a privilege to review your short fiction. We admired the story’s skillful imagery, and the decision to end with your narrator, Janie, debating in her idling car, over whether to merge onto the highway entrance ramp and depart her hometown forever, or pull into her former lover’s driveway for a reconciliatory dinner,” — an excerpt from Matthew Pitt’s piece “When to Panic.”

Read the full ‘rejection letter’ on our website at pangyrus.com

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