“pine block” by Brian Stocks, CC BY-ND 2.0
Unreliable Watch
(after Karin Gottshall)
“The pieces of the clock lie scattered”
—Charles Simic
What if I unclasped you, lifted
you from my wrist, eased
apart your bright ribs,
anointed your small turning bones? You must be
of my lineage, so exasperating, so dear
I forgive you before I understand you. If I could
study your hesitations, your inward flinches,
perhaps I could read the day by your trembling. There
were ages without watches. Monks
once measured catastrophe
by the number of whispered prayers
they could utter before the earth stilled. You are like
that
though with you the hours are the tragedy. You stretch them
thin, trying to keep them calm. Sometimes
they bruise so badly, you hurry them along,
as though speed were mercy.
I hold you to my ear. I accuse you.
What I hear is weather-
yet I could defend you:
you are not broken,
only wind-struck,
a small wrist-bound chime
tolling your uneven music,
counting, as best you can,
these complicated hours.
A Girl Once Whispered
A girl once whispered
that if she hummed loudly enough
the walls of the corridor couldn’t lean in,
the most fragile logic I ever held
for keeping the throat open.
What I wonder today
tracing the jagged geometry of a city’s edge
is if safety is a matter of pace.
A triumph! To leave the shadow
panting behind you at the rusted gate
while you float free into a room of sudden jasmine,
white petals that have never known a bolt,
no matter how tightly the door was shut.
But the air here is a dual citizen.
It carries the scent of the garden
and the sharp, metallic salt of the fence.
Is the space safe because we arrived,
or because we are ready to leave?
Perhaps the only sanctuary
is the syllabic light we carry,
a single word, held like a smooth stone,
small enough to fit in a pocket,
large enough to house a world.
from Quintet for Quasimodo
We arrive singly
and remain that way,
balanced on the world’s pulse.
A thin brightness
fixes us here,
brief,
indifferent.
Then, without warning
or consent,
the dark.
Ismail Bala is a poet, translator, and critic whose work bridges classical poetics and modern sensibility, and whose mentorship has shaped a generation of emerging African poets. Born and educated to university level in Kano, he did his postgraduate studies at Oxford. His poems have been translated into Latvian, Belarusian, Nepalese, Slovenian, French and Polish. He is a Fellow of the International Writing Programme of the University of Iowa. He is the author of Line of Sight (Praxis, 2020), A Span of Something (INKspired, 2024), Ivory Night (KSR, 2024), Memory of Departure (Masobe, 2026), Mad About Her Shrimp (Mwanaka, 2026), and The Architecture of Curtains (Cat Courtyard, forthcoming).
