The shortest hand is the heaviest.
The skinniest hand ticks like a bomb.
The medium hand is what everyone watches
to know when class will be over.

We can act as if its power is godlike
but its weakness is in its batteries,
and like a nurse, once a year, it’s me
who stands on a chair and tenderly changes them.

Nellie Bridge is a poet and high school teacher living in Sofia, Bulgaria. A bilingual chapbook of poems, Poemas Sueltos, was published in 2019 for the Festival Internacional de Poesia in Santiago, Chile. Individual poems have appeared in Pleiades, EcoTheo Review, New Delta Review, Rattapallax, and other journals.