Remain in the Present

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

The future is a rumor
that hasn’t knocked yet—
just the sound of leaves
moving outside your window,
just the smell of bread
before it browns.

But the present,
Anna, the present is this:
your hands deep in soapwater,
pulling a chipped plate from the sink
like it’s a relic from your mother’s youth.
The clink it makes against another
is a kind of music,
a kind of prayer.

The secret is not tomorrow.
It’s the way you tie your laces
without looking.
It’s the breath you take
between sorrow and sleep,
the way you stir sugar into coffee
without needing to measure.

If you hold this moment
long enough—
this sun-drenched, laundry-draped
sliver of now—
you'll find it softens.
Like dough. Like light.
And what follows
will rise because of it.

Everyone Matters

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

You won’t know it. Not then.
Not when your hand finds a stranger’s coin
beneath the church pew,
or when you stand so an old man can sit—
his knees flickering like leaves
caught in the tremble of monsoon breath.

But something records it.
Not God, perhaps. Not conscience.
Maybe the ledger is a wind
curling back what we once discarded—
a smile to the enemy in the market,
five seconds beside a friend unraveling
into something quieter than grief.

Even silence has entries:
the withheld retort,
the swallowed curse,
the warmth unsaid.
The kindness
that never made it to a Facebook post,
and so remained
pure.

Stop here.
We must honor
what never sought applause.

Still, there are threads.
We are all tangled in them,
golden, thinning, knotted
through the hands of gods or ghosts—
no one knows.

Even the man who sharpens knives
by the river, whistling old hymns
to nobody.
Even the girl who gathers gumamela
with fingers red from a story
no one asked her to tell.
Even the one who leaves
before the word goodbye
blooms fully
in the mouth of the one
she tried to forget.

Everyone matters.
And that is the terror—
that there are no small doors
to disappear through.
That is the grace—
to be seen
by something that does not
forget.

What You Gave Me, Anna

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

You told me once—
in a voice so still it felt like dusk—
that your father spent time like loose change,
as if it could be earned back
by effort or apologies
or showing up too late with cake.

You said he missed birthdays,
a play where you forgot your line,
graduation—
all for something urgent,
something sharp-suited and loud with teeth.

And always, he said,
I’ll make it up to you.
As if time were a drawer
you could open when things quiet down.
As if presence could be promised like a paycheck.

Years later, just you and him,
the sky doing that soft orange thing
like it forgave everything,
and he said—
not to you,
not even to himself,
just to the space between you—
I thought I’d have more time.

You didn’t answer.
Because what would you say to a man
who finally realized you can’t refund a childhood?

You told me this, Anna,
not with a cracked voice,
but with eyes steady—
like someone who had learned
not just to carry the story,
but to live the lesson.

And then you said:
Now I choose time.

Over pride.
Over the long email thread.
Over the voice in your head
that says you’ll call them tomorrow.

And Anna,
you didn’t just tell me a story.
You handed me a clock without hands,
a promise shaped like a second chance.

And now, because of you,
I answer my phone,
I sit longer in rooms with people I love,
I count the light before it leaves the window.

You gave me that.
You.
And the story you had to live to teach me.

What You Must Never Give Away

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

Love, if it is true,
will not ask for your silence.
It will not want
your favorite book unwritten,
your laugh dimmed
to match the pitch
of someone else’s quiet.

You may give
your mornings—
half of the pillow,
the bigger slice of mango
even though it was yours.
You may give
your old sweater,
the side of the bed
with the better view
of the moon.

But never
your name.
Never the hum
that builds in your chest
when you’re alone
and unafraid.

Love deeply,
yes—dive
into the soft dark
of their fears,
learn the language
of their quietest days.

But leave
the porch light on
inside yourself.
Keep a map folded
in your spine.

Because love is not
the ocean
that swallows.
It is the wave
that lifts—
so long
as you remember
how to swim back
to shore.

What We Fail to Praise

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

Every blessing begins
like morning light
through gauze curtains—
soft, persistent,
unnoticed until it’s gone.

It looks like
your mother’s humming
in the kitchen, the kettle’s
gentle wheeze before
the boil.
Like the hand
you reach for
without thinking.
The kind of love
that doesn’t need
to be dramatic
to matter.

But blessings ignored
become
rooms you forget to enter.
They gather dust
in corners,
turn sour in jars.
Even warmth,
left untouched,
will mold.

The voice you once
heard each day
becomes a silence
too loud to sleep through.
The kindness you shrugged off
will learn
to withhold itself.

And one day,
what used to be light
returns as shadow—
not because it changed,
but because
you closed your eyes
too often
when it tried to shine.

So name what is good
before it turns
its back.
Say thank you
before the blessing
learns to leave.

The Marvel and the Spoon

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

The secret is not
in arriving at the ruins
before sunrise, nor
in learning how to pronounce
the names of gods
etched into the stone.

It is in knowing
how to lift a spoon
without spilling its oil—
a trick of the wrist,
a small devotion.

You must walk
through the world with awe
coiled in your chest like string
and still remember the rice
left cooking at home,
the plants you forgot to water,
the letter half-written
on your desk.

It’s easy to lose yourself
in marvels—
in the stained-glass hush
of cathedrals, in the neon
blur of night trains
crossing cities
you’ll never name.

But what good is wonder
if you drop the life
you carry?

Happiness is this:
watching a bird rise
above the rooftops
while your hand—
calm, deliberate—
steadies the spoon.
Neither spills.
Both matter.

The Heart Follows Barefoot

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

You can change your sheets,
your city, the side of the bed
you sleep on. You can throw
his jacket out, delete
the thread, cut your hair
in a new moon and still—
the heart will follow,
barefoot,
without asking permission.

It will wait in the kitchen,
in the way you reach
for a second cup,
though no one is there
to ask if you want sugar.
It will hum in your throat
when a stranger wears
his cologne.

You can run to the coast,
call it reinvention,
walk until your blisters
become maps—
but the heart is not
so easily lost.

It speaks in migraines.
In the itch of a name
you’ve sworn never to say.
It remembers the way
his voice folded
around your name
like cloth in a drawer.
You hear it
in the pause
between two raindrops.

So listen—
not because you want to,
but because silence
costs more
than staying.

The heart does not forget.
It only waits
until you are quiet
enough
to hear it say:
Begin again.

What Love Makes of Us

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

When we love,
we begin folding the laundry
a little slower—shirts turned inside out
made right again, the collar smoothed,
creases coaxed into surrender.

We stir coffee with both hands,
as if balance could be tasted.
We remember birthdays,
but more than that,
we remember how they like their silence—
dimmed like a bedside lamp,
not switched off completely.

We begin to say I'm sorry
without the armor
of explanation. We stop
talking over their sadness,
and learn instead
to make room in our laps
for the weight of it.

Love makes us rearrange the bookshelf,
keep the plants alive.
It teaches us to read
between sighs, to trace
a shoulder as if it were
a sentence unraveling.

And slowly,
we find that we are no longer
who we were before the loving.
Not saints, not poets—
but better in the ways that count:
gentler in goodbye,
quicker to return,
willing to stay
even when the door is open
and the world calls us
by our old names.

A Future Meant to Be Moved

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

after a whisper misheard as prophecy

God, if He speaks of
the future, does so
as if peeling a fruit
that bruises at the touch. Not
often, and never for beauty.

Only
when the days ahead
arrive too early—smelling of rust,
or milk gone sour in the heat—
does He part the threadbare
veil and say: Look.

Not this will happen,
but this is what waits
if you do nothing—
if you let your body follow
its shadow too long.

The vision is a crow
on a clothesline. Black
thread on blue sky.
It perches, not to scare,
but to ask: How long
before you change the ending?

The future is
not marble. It is
water in a cracked glass.
Spillable. Remade
with the tilt of a hand.

So listen carefully.
The whisper you thought was
a warning may have been
an invitation. The kind
that arrives folded
in the corners of sleep,
unsigned, but waiting
for your name.

What We Don’t See

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

It is always easier to point.
To say, Why is the roof slanted like that?
Why is the painting dull?
Why is she still selling eggs at the corner
when she’s old enough to rest her bones?

But we don’t see the night the roof was built.
How it rained hard, and the father
hammered faster,
his boy handing nails one by one
like small gifts.

We don’t see how the painter
stood by the window,
listening to dogs bark at nothing,
and still painted,
not because she thought it would be loved,
but because it was the only way
she knew how to keep breathing.

We don’t see the woman
counting coins by candlelight,
stirring rice slowly,
waiting for her son to come home
from a shift where no one learned his name.

People will always say things.
They will speak from their clean shoes,
from windows with whole curtains,
not knowing what a torn cloth
can still cover.

But the one who struggled
—he remembers—
how he prayed for a tiny miracle,
how he cried alone
when the day finally gave in,
like a tight jar opening.

Those tears?
Not of weakness.
Of release. Of having held on
longer than anyone knew.

Criticism is cheap.
It does not cost breath,
or bruises,
or bowed heads at 3 a.m.

But one day—
life taps even the loudest mouths.
And when it does,
they will learn
how heavy it is to carry something invisible
through a world that only sees
what’s already finished.

And then they, too,
will grow quiet.

When I Leave

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

When the first
living thing
trembled—bare-skinned,
slick with its own
birth—I was there,
not touching,
only waiting.

It blinked at
light like
a question.

I sat beside it
on the warm belly
of the world,
listened to
the first breath
being borrowed.

I’ve always waited.
Beside spores blooming
on old bread,
beside fishermen
sinking into sea
like coins in
a broken pocket.

I watched girls
braid hair
under trees,
and later,
watched the same trees
become crosses.
I held no judgment.
Only time.

When the last
thing lives
its last hour—
whether beetle
or child or
star gone tired
of burning—
I will wait again.

No horn,
no thunder.
Just the scraping
of one chair
against wood,
the dimming
of a single
room lamp.

I will stack
the chairs,
wipe down
the counter,
turn off
the last switch
with the care
of someone
who’s closed
this café
a thousand times
before.

And then,
with keys
in my palm
and quiet
in my bones,

I will lock
the universe
behind me.
And leave.

What Everybody Gets

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

You get what everybody gets.
You get a lifetime—
not a palace,
not even a plot
you can stand on
without remembering
it will give way.

A lifetime is
a cup chipped
at the rim,
your father's old
umbrella turned inside out
in the rain.

It is the softness
of laundry still warm
from the line,
and the sharp
taste of mango skin
bitten too close
to the seed.

You walk through it
barefoot, mostly,
on gravel roads,
stepping over
things you once
called dreams.

No maps,
only the memory
of your mother humming
while shelling beans,
the sound of a jeep
pulling away
before you
could say—wait.

And if you are lucky,
you learn
the trick:
that time does not
ask to be filled
with brilliance—
only attention.

That it is enough
to have held
a face
in your hands
long enough
to memorize its
vanishing.

That even a cracked
porcelain bowl
can hold
the sky—
if you look
the right way.

The Hill Beyond the Water

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

It rises not suddenly, no—Balaan Bukid—
but slowly, as though memory itself
had taken shape in a hill, in a path lined
with dust and roots and the slow-footed breath
of pilgrims, as though the land were
waiting, always waiting,
for the weight of someone to walk it again.

You ascend—how long?
You do not know. The sea lies behind you,
and across it, the city flares—
steel-limbed and light-ridden,
its windows catching the sun like
snatches of a language you no longer speak,
though once you tried. You tried.

There are towers now in Iloilo.
Tall things. Certain things.
Unquestioning in their rise.
They do not know
of the silence in this place,
the candles melted to their knees
on stone, the rustle of guava leaves
touched only by the wind and the slow
prayers of women who speak
not to be heard
but because they must.

You think—here is a kind of stillness
no architect will ever know.
No city planner will blueprint the rhythm
of soft sandals against rock, or the hush
that follows the fifth mystery of sorrow,
or the girl placing her palm
on the door of the chapel
as if asking permission
to enter not a place
but a memory
she doesn’t yet understand.

You sit beneath a tree,
its bark rough as the hands of your lola
when she peeled kamote with a knife
too small for the task, but always enough.
The leaves cast shadows on your knees
like a page half-written. You do not
write anything down. You listen.

And it is there, in that quiet—
in that place the city cannot reach—
that the lesson reveals itself, not as a sentence,
not even as a thought, but as a presence.
The way the light falls on your skin
without needing to announce itself.
The way the wind remembers your name
when even you have forgotten it.

When you walk back down,
Iloilo gleams across the strait.
So busy. So bright. So sure of itself.
But you know, now,
what it does not—
that something older than ambition
waits just across the water,
and it has no need to rise.

It only needs
to remain.

I Simply Quit

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

for Lucifer in Sandman

I do not rebel.
There was no thunder
when I left—only
the slow unraveling
of light behind me,
like thread pulled from
an old barong.

No war. No fire.
Just the hush
of wings folding themselves
into silence.

Heaven did not
ask for love.
It asked for
the posture of it—
knees bent on marble,
eyes lowered
like servants in old churches
who polish
what they do not
believe in.

Worship was never
a hymn. It was
obedience
in a language I forgot
how to speak.

And so
I removed the crown
they nailed
to my head,
left it
on the step
beside the lilies,
still wet
with the dew
of borrowed divinity.

No speeches.
No storm.
Only
the sound
of my own feet
on cloudstone,
walking away
from gold
that no longer glowed.

This is not rebellion.
I did not throw
a single flame.
I simply
left—
the way some men
leave the altar
before the bride
enters,
the way some angels
look at perfection
and think:
there must be more
than this.

They Did Not Know the Nails

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

They did not know the nails—
my children.
They knew the sound of birds
that sang anyway.
They knew the coins I pressed into their palms
when they begged for sweet dates,
they knew the dust that stuck
to their calves when they ran barefoot
toward the bakery,
they knew how to cry without shame
and sleep without prayer.

They were there—
I swear they were—
at the edge of the crowd,
beneath a wall’s shadow,
my boy with his chipped cup
half-full of goat’s milk,
my girl with the scarf I embroidered with roses,
both watching the sky darken
like a brow furrowed in disappointment.

They did not know what it meant
when the man screamed Eloi, Eloi,
did not understand why the men
with helmets laughed.

But they felt it—
I saw it.

The way her fingers clenched
the bread too tightly,
the way his eyes followed
the shaking knees
of the man on the cross
as if he had seen such tremors
in his grandfather’s body
the night we had no food.

Children do not need
theological terms.
They see what is true
without needing it to be explained.

The guards spat.
The elders smirked.
The women sobbed in that beautiful
controlled collapse of bone and cloth.
But my children—
they just looked.

And they wept
without sound,
as if their bodies remembered
something older than them,
as if they had carried sorrow
in their ribs
long before they were born.

I think the man saw them.
I think, as his blood clung
to his side like a child
afraid of being left behind,
he saw their faces.
And I think it gave him
a reason to stay,
for one more breath.

They did not know
the weight of sin.
But they recognized love
when it was bleeding in public.

A Calvary Without Horns or Halos

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

There are no tyrants
where there are no slaves, Rizal wrote—
on a day perhaps not unlike this:
the afternoon light
caught in the blue necks of beer bottles,
the plaza emptied of children,
the sky taut
like the skin of a drum before mourning.

It is Good Friday.
The radio hushes between pasyon chants.
A fly paces the rim
of the vinegar bowl on the kitchen table.
Somewhere in Quiapo, a procession slows,
the crowd thinned by sun and fatigue,
barefoot men dragging
crosses carved from driftwood
and second-hand nails.

Christ does not speak.
He has said everything
with his body:
open hands,
a ribcage like a broken balustrade,
a face leaning forward
as if listening
to the ache of the world.

Rizal, in a cell whose walls
sweat limestone and dusk,
understood this:
that power does not fall
unless something
refuses to kneel.
That empires are built
not only by guns
but by people
learning to keep quiet
at mealtime.

In El Filibusterismo,
Simoun dies in the house of a priest,
his gold unspent,
his vengeance unfinished.
No earthquakes split the sky.
No angels arrive with fire.
Only silence,
and the heavy breathing
of the old man
who will bury him.

This too is Calvary.
Not just the hill,
but every street
where mercy looks like weakness,
and every prayer
offered to survive
instead of to change.

“There are no tyrants
where there are no slaves.”
What Rizal meant
was that tyranny
does not always wear a sword—
sometimes it smiles
through clean uniforms,
asks for your name,
hands you change
with exact fingers.

Christ did not die
because it was holy.
He died
because the world hated
anything
it could not bribe.

Dreams Are Real

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

Dreams are real—
but not like
the weight of carabao hooves
pressing into wet earth,
not like the rattle
of old keys in your lola’s palm
as she opens
the prayer room
no one enters now.

They are real
the way a spoon remembers
the warmth of rice porridge,
the way a name echoes
in the silence after
a song your father
once hummed
when the electricity
was out.

They come to you
in fragments:
your childhood dog,
a fish leaping
from a tin basin,
the girl you almost loved
holding a salt lamp
in a dark corridor
you’ve never walked.

Sometimes, a joke
slips in—
a pun so stupid
you wake up laughing.
Sometimes, it’s a mango
on your desk,
yellowing with sorrow
you didn’t know
you were still holding.

A dream asks for nothing
but permission—
to return.
It wears
your old fears like
a shawl,
steps barefoot
across the room
where your mother
used to wait for you
with silence
and champorado.

You let it in
because even now
you hope it brings
the version of yourself
that might have said
yes—
or stayed.

The Cross at Balaan Bukid

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

They said it happened
at three in the afternoon—
that hour when the hill hushes
under the sun’s heavy hand,
when even the fire tree near the seventh station
holds its petals,
and the banana vendor
at the base of Balaan Bukid
starts folding his cloth,
his voice now only a murmur
to no one in particular.

You have climbed that hill.
Not once, but every Holy Week
since you could walk without holding
your lola’s hand.
She used to wrap your feet
in old shirts torn into rags
because you couldn’t afford tsinelas.
You carried boiled eggs in a tin pail,
and on your back
the quiet weight
of not knowing
why this mattered—only that it did.

They say the cross
is where eternity meets dirt.
O’Connor called it
the intersection of the timeless
with time.
But to you, it is just
an old wooden post
leaning near the chapel,
blackened by candle smoke,
draped with limp white cloth
and plastic flowers
sun-bleached to gray.

Jesus does not shine.
His arms stretch,
tied like sugarcane bundles
hauled from Hoskyn
in harvest months.
His face looks down,
not in peace—
but in something like exhaustion.

No thunder.
Just the steady hum
of the fan in the chapel.
A woman beside you
presses a rosary to her lips,
her other hand trembling
over a candle
that will not stay lit.

Still—
still something breaks.
You feel it in your knees
as they press
against the cold tile,
in the way the wind
climbs the hill slower this year,
as if it, too,
were remembering.

You don’t understand it.
You don’t try to.
But something in you
opens anyway,
like a guava split by sun.

You remember what Rizal said—
“There are no tyrants
where there are no slaves.”
And suddenly you see it:
Christ was not punished
for being holy.
He was punished
for standing straight
before the crooked.

Here, on this hill in Jordan,
with your palms still sticky
from touching wax,
with your breath shallow
from the climb,
you understand
that the cross
is not a monument.

It is a mirror.
It waits for you
to ask what you’ve
been afraid to say.
It does not shine.
It does not speak.
But it listens.

And that
is enough.

No Cathedral of Curiosity

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

You are not here
to gather proof like pebbles—
not the brittle crunch of bone-like coral
under a child’s heel by the seawall,
not facts lined in your palm
like scavenged shells,
too smooth to bleed.

Nor to press
your ear
to the altar of reason—
as if marble could mutter secrets,
as if the cold hush of stone
could ever rival the tremor
of a mother’s breath held
at bedside.

Hoping it will whisper
something measurable—
like pulse, like rainfall,
like how long silence lasts
between two lovers
after a lie.

The world
has taught you
to bring a clipboard
into every mystery—
to name each shadow
by its geometry,
to circle holiness
with a red pen
until it confesses.

To reduce divinity
to data—
like counting the ridges
on a rosary bead,
or weighing incense smoke
in grams.

But not here.
Not now.
This hush
does not yield to science,
only to stillness.

You are not summoned
to this place
to verify miracles—
no signatures here,
only fingerprints in wax
on a spent votive.

To file reports
on the temperature
of the light—
the way morning slides
through capiz,
gold with absence.

Or the velocity
of silence—
how it spreads
like spilled oil
across the nave.

This is not
a cathedral of curiosity—
not a chamber of questions
grinning with teeth.

It is a space
stripped of spectacle—
no thunder,
only the creak
of wood remembering
footfall.

Where the air itself
has knelt
for centuries—
heavy with candle soot,
the perfume of old prayer
clinging
to rafters.

You are here
to bow—
not because you understand,
but because something
in your marrow
recognizes the gravity
of this place.

Because
something
beyond understanding
has already touched
this ground—
like the ghost
of your grandfather’s voice
in a half-lit room.

You are here
to kneel
where the stone remembers
the weight
of other knees—
farmhands, widows, nuns
whose sins
were names they never spoke aloud.

Where prayer
has left behind
not echoes
but imprint—
like heat pressed
into linen,
a shape that lingers
long after the body.

You do not need
to know
the names
of those
who wept here
before you—
only the salt stain
they left behind
on the wood.

You do not need
to know
what they asked for,
or whether
it was given—
only the trembling
that stayed
in their hands.

It is enough
that they asked.
It is enough
that something
in them
cracked open
toward light—
like a pomegranate
split
without knife.

This is where
your questions
stop walking
ahead of you—
no more litanies
in the mirror,
no more algebra
for grace.

And begin
falling behind—
like petals
after storm,
like reasons
that no longer fit
the weight of your voice.

Where you come
not to speak,
but to listen—
not for answers,
but for the ache
beneath them—
the low hum
of the body
braced
for forgiveness.

You are here,
as Eliot wrote,
not to verify,
not to instruct yourself,
not to carry report—
but to kneel.

To remember
that reverence
is not
a function
of clarity—
but
of surrender.
Like offering your throat
to a cup of bitter broth
your mother made
without recipe,
trusting it will cure
even what you cannot name.

Maundy, Not Holy

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

It is not enough
to call the day holy—too clean
a word, too bleached in its vowels.

The kind of day this is
wore its edges dark
with oil and sweat.
In our church in Tiwi, the women
laid the linen out like a body
had just risen from it.
Someone cut the bread
with fingers still smelling
of garlic and soap.

It was Maundy, not holy.
Maundy, from mandatum,
the new commandment
spoken in the low
light of supper—love one another—
not like poetry,
but like a wound
you choose to carry.

He rose from the table
and knelt—not before God,
but before the feet of men
with calluses like shell—
washed them
with the care
you’d give to a fruit
too ripe,
as if love was not belief
but the act of dipping
your hands
into someone else’s dirt.

I think of my lola,
the way she wiped my knees
with coconut oil
when I fell outside the sari-sari,
how her silence
was its own kind of liturgy.

We forget that Maundy
was not a feast
but a lesson.
That bread wasn’t broken
for blessing,
but for sharing.
That the basin was not ceremonial,
but full of the cold water
from the clay tap
in the corner of the yard.

That he stooped—
not as symbol,
but because we had forgotten
how to do it for each other.

Maundy is the ache
of a back bent too long
without complaint.
The crackle
of fish skin on fire
at dusk.
The half-light
of a house that knows
it is always the last supper.

Call it holy,
and you forget the blood
beneath the nail.
Call it Maundy,
and you remember
he knelt first—
then said,
now you.

Glass Cat

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

It weighed like memory—
cool in the palm,
still sticky with syrup breath,
the bottle bare now,
its red ribbon script flaking
like sunburnt skin.
You could still taste the fizz
if you kissed
the rim.

And yet, in the sultry
stillness of three p.m.—
that hour when light
spills like oil
on the floor tiles—
someone began to carve.

A boy, maybe. Or a girl
with a soldering pen
and a bandage
already blooming red.
They didn’t mean to make
a cat, at first.
They only wanted
to see what else
a bottle could become.

So they heated the neck,
let it soften into snout.
Filed it, careful not
to anger the edge.
Used pliers to coax
the curve into jaw,
added goblet stems
for legs—wobbly
as a newborn calf.

The ears curled
like windblown petals.
The tail never came,
but no one missed it.

When it stood—yes,
stood—on the warped
dining table, beside
a bowl of lanzones,
and a fly circling
last night’s adobo,
it gleamed.

The ribs caught the sun
and scattered it—
as if light
were a thing you could leash.

They laughed.
The neighbors, the lola
who came to borrow rice,
the cousin wiping sweat
with the back of his arm.
Not a cruel laugh,
but the kind
you reserve
for miracles.

Who makes
a cat from a Coke bottle?
Who dares
to dream that delicate?

And what was it, really—
if not the proof
that beauty arrives
only when you’re not
looking for it?

It didn’t meow.
It didn’t move.
But it stayed,
glass spine arched
toward the heat
like a prayer
you didn’t mean
to finish.

In Tiwi When I Was All of Seven

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

for D.E.

The tilapia came quick—
flickers of silver biting the hook
like they too were hungry for company.
By noon, the pail sang with their weight,
scales catching the sun like broken glass.

We stopped by the river,
your hands gutting the fish with a rhythm
that made even blood feel like ritual.
The river hummed beside us.
Our fingers smelled of earth and gills.

By dusk we walked home—
blades of sugarcane brushing our knees,

each stalk whispering stories

we were too young to understand.

The nipah shed waited, patient and smoke-scarred.
You lit the fire like you’d done it all your life,
arranged the fish over flame—
the crackle, a kind of hymn,
their skins blistering into gold.
We ate them straight from the pan,
burned our tongues a little, laughed a lot.

I remember thinking:
this is what grace must taste like—
not the fish, but your silence beside me,
your way of entering my joy

without needing to speak.

Frogs

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

They leap as if the air were made
of velvet: two frogs, their backs iridescent
with the hush of rain. Not so much grace
as it is calculation—the way they land
like practiced dancers in the shallows,
their limbs folding into prayer. You’d think
them royalty, their eyes laced with dew,
the kind that turns even pity into
a polished stone.

In the pond's hush, others pause—
some to marvel, some to sneer. The watchers
know better than to trust movement
that makes no ripple. These frogs,
so adept at stillness, host games
that never declare a winner.

They ask for golden minds, rainbow skin—
gifts no frog possesses. But still,
they gather the hopeful in lily-thick circles,
humming promise after promise
until someone forgets they were meant
to leap, not kneel.

And when the queen glides past,
her crown askew with algae,
they lower their voices, sweeten
their throats with flattery: “Your reign
is rain, your voice the dusk’s own prayer.”
They offer not devotion, but mimicry.

Before the old, they bloat into bellow,
inflate with their own importance,
as if their skin could hold a kingdom
of croaks. They dismiss the weary,
those whose limbs ache with memory,
whose bones recall the first rain.

But inside, it’s hunger—sharp as a hooked nail—
that drives them. Their tongues flick lies
like lanterns, each brighter than the last,
blinding the queen with their honey-light.
They dream not of peace,
but of vaults, of coins buried beneath
the cattails, of ponds ruled by silence.

When the monsoon arrives—
the great unmasking—
the mud lifts, the lilies part,
and all pretense melts like sugar
in heat. Their throne collapses—
a reed plucked too soon.

What remains is this:
the quiet frog in the corner,
who did not vie, did not spit,
but leapt gently across
a reed and lit it like a wick.

That frog—the lantern-bearer—
becomes the compass. Not ruler,
but guide. Not power,
but path.

The Box

a poem by Roger B Rueda

The box has stiff sides—
like the cardboard used in appliance boxes,
its corners worn from moving house too often.
Inside, it is dark,
too dark to see the postcard
from your cousin in Davao,
or the paper rose your mother folded
from a sachet of laundry powder.
It smells faintly of mildew—
the kind that clings to damp hymnals
stored in the chapel’s forgotten cabinet.
And birthdays.
Not yours. The ones you pretended
weren’t happening.
The box holds no light.
It eats sound like thick curtains
in your aunt’s spare bedroom.
But yes,
your imagination is bright—
a kite cobbled together
from your old math notebook,
its margins ripped clean,
its spine stitched with
thread pilfered from Lola’s sewing kit,
the one with a lid shaped like a tomato
and a rusted pair of scissors
you weren’t allowed to touch.
The kite flickers above the rice field
where the scarecrow outlasted
all the children.
It strains against the wind,
a long string wrapped around
your ink-smudged fingers.
Your palm, still damp
with the heat of hours spent alone,
tightens—
you hold the string
like you once held
your brother’s last smile,
like a secret
you have yet to speak aloud.
You flip through old report cards
and laminated certificates
as if they were magazines
left on a barbershop bench—
pages creased,
smelling faintly of bay rum and floor wax.
The images—
bright, falsely confident—
never quite matching the person
you remember.
Each crease,
each forgotten chasm,
a folder of bruised thoughts
and rain-stamped recollections:
your mother’s voice,
cracked open during typhoon season,
your father’s coat,
still damp
after every job interview
that led nowhere.
The garden
you planted in your throat
blooms unevenly—
half jasmine,
half rust.
Each poem
smelling of sidewalk rain
and the faint iron of a bitten tongue.
You speak—
always—
in coffee shops with chipped tables,
as if syntax could save you,
as if every sentence
were an exorcism.
You quote lines taped
to the back of your bedroom door:
Nietzsche beside a fortune cookie,
Emily Dickinson next to
“Buy eggs.”
But by morning,
they curl like old receipts.
You guess at meanings
in the smallest of things:
the way your father paused mid-sentence
that night he forgot your birthday,
the weight of coins in your pocket
after trading your last allowance
for a pirated copy
of Wuthering Heights.
Still, you offer them like communion—
a crumb of metaphor,
a drop of dusk
placed gently on the tongue
of someone who still believes
you mean every word.
You think you’re telling a story—
made of moths and secondhand books,
each sentence
fluttering toward the same lamp
until they burn themselves holy.
You pose—
shoulders stiff,
mouth closed like a prayer
folded wrong.
The mirror sees past
your imitation of divinity—
sees the borrowed diction,
the ghost of someone
trying to mean more than they say.
You speak in borrowed truths—
as if all the world’s wisdom
were etched on index cards
in gold ink,
as if truth never bled
through cheap paper.
Your tongue cuts quick—
like the scissors left
on the dining table
after Lola made curtains
from your mother’s old uniform.
They glint beside the pan de sal—
sharp enough
to slice both bread
and conversation.
Your words fall
like monsoon rain
on galvanized iron.
The sound carries—
even after silence
has tried
to erase it.
Outside,
the box is wrapped
in a glossy pink gift wrapper
from SM Department Store—
creased at the edges,
a leftover from your sister’s debut.
The ribbon, roseate,
folded like the final sentence
in a love letter
whose ends were burned
so no one could reread it.
Beside it:
a Galaxy Note 4, cracked like your map
to a future you didn’t pursue.
Your bag,
soft from use,
slumps with receipts and regrets.
Later,
the birthday party begins.
Paper hats tilt
like broken halos.
The cake is lit.
Someone sings.
No one notices
you are crying.

The Man Who Killed Demons

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

There was once
a man who killed demons—
not the kind that hide
in myth,
but the ones who smiled
as they walked children home
only to steal their shadows.

He did not kill
for medals
or God
or some anthem
his mouth could not believe.
He did it
because no one else would
and the streets kept forgetting
how to stay dry.

Every day,
they wore their collars
clean.
Their hands smelled
of perfume
and fresh receipts.
They dined
under soft lamps
while an angel bled out
on a bus floor.

The demons fed
on easy things—
a girl in uniform,
a boy who could not run fast enough,
an old woman
with rosary beads
and no voice left to scream.

And no one
said
a thing.

The queens of justice—
always dressed in the grammar
of fairness—
sat in glass towers
where the world looked
blurred,
too far
to hear the crying.

Then came the man—
his hands not made for violence,
but for planting.
His back bore the memory
of rain,
his eyes the weight
of every name
left off the news.

Someone gave him
a borrowed power—
not meant to last.
Like a match
lit in the dark
to scare off
everything cruel.

He did not knock.
He did not wait
for papers
or prayers.
He went
to their doors—
some still dripping
with the milk
of their own children—
and silenced them.

The demons vanished,
and with them,
the fear.

The streets grew
quiet.
You could hear
a sari-sari owner
sweeping again.
Children played
with no ghosts trailing them.

But peace
does not please
the queens.

They cried
for the demons—
said their deaths
were too sharp,
too sudden,
too much.

Not once
did they name
the boy
who had to die
for quiet
to return.

They called the man
a monster.
A wound.
An embarrassment
to procedure.

But what is justice
when its mouth
won’t open
unless the wrong ones
are bleeding?

Still,
somewhere in the city—
a girl wakes
to her first morning
without a scream.

And the man—
forgotten
but for whispers—
stands alone
beside a cracked wall
that still stands
because someone,
for one burning moment,
refused to let
the house fall.