Pangyrus

“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.

Image by Geronimo Giqueaux on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.

“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.

Image by Aleksandr Gorlov on unsplash.com, licensed under CC 2.0.