Horology
by Hiba Tahir
Dubai spat Papa and three clocks out
six months after he arrived. Doctors here and there warned
him to avoid stress at any cost. A rustic Paris
pendulum gathered dust on our mantle. A wrist-
watch for me, glimmering operculum. After Dubai, Papa
gathered boxes in the dim hallways of my childhood
home, filled the empty bedrooms. A glow-in-the-dark
clock atop the kitchen window watched as he washed
his hands over and over, hoping to escape
our birthright: the specter that claimed older and younger
brother, both parents. Amid cicada cries, we munched
walnuts and mangos, discussed my orphaned cousins.
It’s not a matter of if, Papa said that summer,
but when.
The swelling cry of cicadas drowned out the silence
of hands halting in two clocks. There’s a species
that spends either 13 or 17 years underground
before emerging. No one understands quite how
a cicada knows to unbury itself
in exactly that time—
It just knows.
Hiba Tahir is an MFA candidate in poetry at the University of Arkansas, where she received the Carolyn Walton Cole Endowment Fund, the J. Chester and Freda S. Johnson Graduate Fellowship, and the James T. Whitehead Award. She is a 2020 recipient of an Artists 360 Grant from Mid-America Arts Alliance and a 2021 Individual Artist Fellowship from the Arkansas Arts Council. She currently serves on the editorial board of Nimrod International Journal.