In April 2003, just weeks after the US-led invasion of Iraq, Alexandrian poet and painter Ahmed Morsi (b.1930) addresses a poem to a river, after losing all “living friends” in Baghdad with whom he can inquire about the state of the city. In “Risalah ila Nahr” (Poem to a River), the poet mourns the destruction of Iraqi capital and all that this represented, but also the city that had been his first home away from home and a hub in his intellectual trajectory. In 1955, Morsi moved to Baghdad for two years to teach English in a private high school in al-‘Aquliyya. This brief stint had a lasting impact on his intellectual and creative life. He quickly found his way to a café in Rashid Street, a popular meeting place for writers and artists, and began life-long friendships and collaborations with ‘Abd al-Wahab al-Bayyati, Yusuf al-‘Ani, and Fu’ad al-Takarli. It was on the pages of Iraqi al-Akhbar that Morsi first developed his skills as a critic and the Society of Iraqi Artists hosted his first international solo-show. This paper traces the various articulations of Morsi’s continued conversation with his Iraqi interlocutors—from Cairo and after 1974, New York—in subsequent decades, through translation and publication projects, on the pages (and covers) of the short-lived Gallery 68, and in exhibition spaces. In doing so, it addresses important moments of intra-Arab exchange, largely overlooked in literary and art histories. In what ways does Iraqi artists’ and writers’ engagement with Egypt’s cultural scene—via Morsi—highlight a different set of intellectual networks that may pass through, and yet are not beholden to Western capitals? Similarly, how can we trace the continued reverberations of Morsi’s Baghdad sojourn in his later works? And are the cities of Alexandria and Baghdad mourned and remembered in ways that continue to make connections possible where they have ceased to exist?