Welcome to “Poetry at The Arts Fuse.” A new poem every Thursday.

Low Tide, Ryder Beach
Truro, MA

We are the colonists today
gathering
more than we need:
gray-black stones striated with silver
one nearly turquoise and craggy
another quartz pink
so brilliant in their beds of wet grit
we dig them up, take them with us to our towel,
watch them as they dry.
We choose only the few that still beam
an inner something beyond their watery reflections
while the others, now too far
from the tides to take them in again
will dull in sands to be pressed and buried.

Julia Lisella’s latest collection of poems, Our Lively Kingdom (Bordighera Press), was named a finalist in the 2023 Paterson Book Prize and Grand Prize Finalist and Poetry Honorable Mention for the Eric Hoffer Book Award. Her other collections include Always, Terrain, and the chapbook, Love Song Hiroshima. Her poems have appeared in Ploughshares, Alaska Quarterly, Pangyrus, Lily Poetry Review, Nimrod, Mom Egg Review, and many others. She has received writing residencies at MacDowell, Millay and the Vermont Center for the Arts. She teaches at Regis College and co-curates the IAWA Literary Reading Series in Boston. For more, see www.julialisellapoetry.com

Note: Hey poets! We seek submissions of excellent poetry from across the length and breadth of contemporary poetics. See submission guidelines here. The arbiter of the feature is the magazine’s poetry editor, John Mulrooney.

— Arts Fuse editor Bill Marx