Pangyrus

“This poem originated from a dream. I often harvest the content of my dreams crafting poems built on my best recollection of whatever my subconscious presented to me while sleeping. In writing dream poems there’s always a tension between my desire to stick to the script of my memory vs. aesthetic and other considerations. In this case, the final product is very close to my memory of the dream. The location was the ranch house I grew up in. My efforts to process the tenor of contemporary life with daily assaults on privacy, bodily autonomy, and human rights are reflected in poem which evokes feelings of being intruded upon and violated in my once safe family home. The title came to me after writing the first draft. It is a reference to the famous poem, “They Came First” by the German pastor Martin Niemoller which condemns the complicity of N**i era intellectuals, clergy, and others for not speaking out against the persecution of Jews, trade unionists, socialists, and communists. Other undesirables were also persecuted, but the poignancy of his confession remains. Sadly, with the passage of time the list of scapegoated groups by people in power has only grown longer,” — David Janey on his poem “They Came First for Our Dreams.”

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“When it comes to poetry, the creative process is often a mystery to me. In this instance, I sat down to write knowing I wanted water to figure prominently in the poem. I had notions of the way it changes shape and volume to fit into whatever container or the way it flows to fit whatever space. Of course, notions of surface and depth also seemed important. The more I thought about water, the more it seemed the perfect metaphor to talk about identity, the shifting nature of the self. And that’s what I thought the poem would be about.

My poetry writing process is a painful one. I often spend the first couple hours writing down words and phrases that seem to go together. I usually don’t even know what they mean…but I’m listening on an intuitive level for connections between words and phrases — either sound connections or connections on connotative levels of meaning. It’s only when the pressure cooker of time kicks in, that the poem either starts to coalesce or scatters into the air. In this case, I felt the poem coalesce when it surprised me with the phrase “People are dying/ with nowhere to lie.” At that point, I knew the poem was about more than the shifting nature of self. It was about community…and the pain I often feel watching the news to see the horrors our government seems to continually inflict on others….and I knew the poem had become bigger, more inclusive, pushing toward the way in which water contains all things, the way in which we contain each other. How in suffering we are all one,” — Peter Grandbois on his poem “When I look into water.”

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“As I’ve traveled through different channels of my life, each one inevitably brings me back to the ocean. I am most centered and do my best work when I can breathe salty air, contemplate tides, recognize the music of gulls and rumbling waves, and stand with my feet in sand. I wrote ‘Menopause’ by the ocean at Split Rock Cove in South Thomaston, Maine. I believe my writing has shifted with the wisdom of menopause, which can be a time of great self-hatred for women. We find ourselves shape-shifting once again and questioning as if we have returned to our adolescent selves: Am I fat? Am I ugly? Do I care what others think? Learning what it means to live as an older woman means accepting both physical and mental changes. This poem is the courage to embrace and celebrate aging. And to find our own strength, even through challenging times and the threat of the modern world invading our peace,” — Linda Lamenza on her poem “Menopause.”

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“My mom went to the dog psychic because she was in a season of impasse, and she was afraid that it was not just one season but all of them. She had done this to herself: she’d cultivated a dead-end marriage; she had chosen a profession with no chance of promotion; she had moved herself into a nice house at the end of a cul-de-sac for comfort and yes, perhaps a little bit for gluttony, for sin, and now she was terrified that she would atone for it,” — an excerpt from Rachel Whalen’s story “The Dog Psychic.”

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“This poem is part of a project I’m working on in which each section is inspired by an episode of the BBC documentary Planet Earth. One long poem (‘Mountains,’ for example) or multiple poems make up each section. ‘The Gates Open’ is part of the ‘Seasonal Forests’ section. In May 2023, just after my book, Apocalypse on the Linoleum, came out with Lily Poetry Review Press, I insanely signed up for 30/30 with Tupelo Press, which meant writing a new draft every day of the month. Each new poem would go up online, so there was a real pressure to not only write every day, but make it decent enough to be seen in public. After the month was over, Tupelo would take down that month’s poems and start over. ‘The Gates Open’ began as one of those drafts. I sat on the steps of the farmhouse porch and thumb-typed on my phone while the party went on around me. Minutes before the midnight deadline, I sent the draft into the ether, and in the morning, still enamored with my output, sent it to my friend who’d hosted the farm fundraiser and answered my questions about cheese. Two years later, I was still tinkering with it, and up until recently, I hadn’t nailed down the title, which references a mystical (Kabbalistic) belief that on Shabbat, the gates to the divine realm open and we receive a second soul, which allows us to open ourselves to the mystery and to delight in the kiss of divine light that floods in. I’m still grateful for the push to write so much in such a short time — I still have some unworked first drafts from that month, sitting in a folder, waiting for their moment,” — Josette Akresh-Gonzales on her poem “The Gates Open.”

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“This poem is about mothering a child who suffers from the disease of addiction. Rather predictably, it uses the language of warfare. The war, however, is an internal one — and the resulting fire only serves as fuel for the engine of motherhood. Trying to control the situation is illogical, but quitting is never an option. The short stanzas are deliberate — to accentuate the sputtering argument with self, with my child, with the universe itself,” — Annemarie Whilton on her poem “I Am Never Tired.”

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“Poetry is a glass that allows me to peer at the fine webs of detail that hang between people and moments. This piece began while watching someone I love laugh. The sun struck a ridge on their front tooth, and I realized how many times I’d watched them full-mouth laugh, yet never noticed the beauty of this small detail. I adore all the oddities and stretches of a person that only spring to life in proximity. When these images wedge into my memory, writing lets them unspool like plastic film. I write to feel close,” — Sofia Bagdade on her poem “Tape Recorder.”

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“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.

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“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.”

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“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.”

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