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

 

From After The Operation

 

Eventually it became summer

 

          We tried to move on

               and were wrong

 

We pointed to the gulls suspended

    above the sun-lit undulant sea

 

  and reminded her of the good

                     the fine things she had once said

 

            that had changed us

  Our remindings were a song

 

           we thought good

           and wrote down

 

         “Nothing is back,”

                  she said

 

         After the operation

            went on and on

 

Elizabeth T. Gray Jr. is a poet, translator, critic, and corporate consultant. Poetry collections include After the Operation (Four Way Books 2025),  Salient (New Directions 2020) and Series | India (Four Way Books, 2015). Her translations from classical and contemporary Persian include Let Us Believe in the Beginning of the Cold Season, selected poems of Forough Farrokhzad (New Directions 2022, Finalist for the PEN Prize for Poetry in Translation 2023) and The Green Sea of Heaven: Eighty Ghazals from the Diwan of Hafiz: 30^th Anniversary Edition (Monkfish Publishing 2024). She serves on the Boards of Kimbilio Fiction, World Poetry, Flood Editions, Friends of Writers, The Beloit Poetry Journal Foundation, and Human Rights and Democracy in Iran. She holds a BA and JD from Harvard University and an MFA from Warren Wilson College.  She was the founding CEO and Managing Partner of Conflict Management, Inc. and Alliance Management Partners, LLC, boutique consulting firms. www.etgrayjr.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