Reflections of Choice

by Roger B. Rueda 

I am the cold glass
above the sink in a rented room.
Not a holy thing—just a face-holder,
a silent watcher of what your fingers do
to a stranger’s body or a broken toothbrush.

I don’t choose. I hold. I show.
You come to me wet, crying, half-shaved,
your cheek pink with apology or rage,
and I give it back.
I don’t ask why you said it.
I don’t ask what she said to you.
I just shine it back, the vein
in your neck twitching like a cable
tight with decision.

You want me to lie sometimes.
You want me to blur the blood
from your mouth when you yelled,
to fog the glance you gave your son
when he dropped your name like a plate.
But I don’t blink.

If you are kind,
I show your hands cupping the cat’s face
like it’s a loaf of warm bread.
If you are cruel,
I show the smudge on your temple
where you hit the wall, or worse,
the place where you didn’t.

Every choice is a body-part
leaving its fingerprint on me—
not metaphor,
but real—the oil of it, the salt.
I keep your truths. I keep your shame.
When you smirk, when you break,
I am the old lover who sees it all
but doesn’t stop you.

This is not punishment.
This is gravity.
This is light bouncing back
to where it began.

So come to me.
Not to admire yourself—
but to know.

Every time you act,
you breathe a line across my face.
I will carry it,
until even you
cannot look away.

The Man Who Is Always There

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

I have seen him more than I have seen
my own reflection—he arrives before the curtains
rise, already folding chairs, already
passing out leaflets like communion. He stands
in photographs like a watermark,
never the subject, but always
within reach. At every flood,
at every fire, he crouches next
to the loss, as if proximity
were the same as compassion.

He wears the same expression—a soft
sorrow, like a waiter at a funeral.
He is not elected on ideas
but on attendance. Not a senator,
but a placeholder in human form. A symbol
of presence, a relic that breathes.

He does not speak much, and when he does,
his words are simple, almost holy.
I’m here. I haven’t left.
And that is enough for many.
In a country where the system
collapses like a bridge in monsoon,
the man who stands beside the rubble
becomes more than man—he becomes
memory’s crutch, the shape of dependability
etched into the air.

We no longer look for leaders
who can argue, draft, or dream.
We want those who linger.
Who can survive in the smoke
of any disaster, and reappear
at the next ribbon, the next relief pack,
like a summoned spirit.

He builds nothing. But he is
in every photograph. He casts
no laws, but his presence
fills a vacuum so wide
we mistake it for love.

He is the body that remains
after the ceremony, sweeping
confetti into a dustpan.
He is not power. He is the man
who follows power like a shadow
follows light, never claiming,
only reflecting—until the reflection
becomes enough.

In this land of leaving,
he stays. In a world
where most vanish
after the vow,
he becomes the vow itself.

What the Broth Knew

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

I held the bowl in my hands like I used to hold my brother’s face
after he fell from the mango tree—warm, wet,
something inside rattling.
The broth was still trembling
from the walk home, covered in plastic,
the plastic bag sweating through its sides,
leaving a circle of oil on my notebook.

I peeled it open—no ceremony,
just the smell of boiled bones rising
like the scent from under my Lola’s arms
when she used to carry me,
after she had spent all morning
slaughtering chickens, her palms
still red with the memory of feathers.

The liver slid to the side, dark and damp
like the inner cheek of someone
who’s bitten their tongue.
The bone marrow, fat-rich,
clung to the hollow
like breath in a paper bag.
I had to suck it out—
loud, indecent, the way I once cried
into a stranger’s shoulder
on a bus to Jaro
the day after my father left
and didn’t call.

There was no garnish—
just the broth, salted
like a wrist licked clean.
The noodles were soft,
the kind that give up first,
folding into themselves
like my cousin, curled in the back room
after her first heartbreak.

I crushed the chicharon
with my fist,
watched the dust settle
into the soup like the ashes
of someone I wasn’t ready to bury.
The oil stuck to my skin.
I licked it off.
It tasted like old cabinets
and sun-warmed linoleum floors.

I didn’t pray. I didn’t speak.
I ate. I took everything the bowl gave me,
even the parts that made me gag.
The texture of spleen,
the way the cartilage cracked—
how memory lived
in the gristle.

Outside, the neighbors were lighting fireworks
for someone’s birthday.
Inside, my mouth was full
of heat and longing.
My tongue burned
but I didn’t stop.

This is how I learn to keep going:
not with strength,
but with spoonfuls.
With breath sucked
through lips slick with fat.
With the taste of blood
and soy and ghosts.

I finished it alone,
the broth cooling
in the crook of my body.

And when I stood,
my belly was warm,
but my hands—
they were still shaking.

Sessile Joyweed

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

My grandmother grew up in abundance—
the kind where vegetables came from fenced gardens,
not riverbanks,
not roadside ditches.
She could afford to be picky.
She knew the difference
between what was gathered and what was bought,
what grew in mud
and what came washed and waiting in woven baskets.

And still,
she chose lupo.

Sessile joyweed.
A weed with a name
too soft for the tongue,
too stubborn for the soil to forget.

She would look for it
when the tide of her mood was calm enough,
wade into the edges of rice fields,
where the water sits still and clouded
like memory.
She’d pluck it—only the young shoots—
with the same fingers that once wore gold.
Back home,
she’d rinse it
like she was waking it up from sleep,
sauté it with garlic
until the oil turned fragrant and familiar,
then drop in the prawns—
plump, pink things
that curled like question marks in the pan.

I didn’t want to eat it at first.
I was young,
I wanted food that looked like it belonged
on bright plates,
not green things that grew
where frogs laid eggs.
But she looked at me—
not with scolding,
but with a kind of pity.
As if I didn’t yet understand
what survival tastes like
when you add just enough love
to make it shine.

So I tasted it—
the bitterness,
the salt of the sea,
the sweetness of prawns
that burst like secrets in the mouth.
And something inside me
shifted.

Now she’s gone.
And I think about that dish
the way people think about lullabies—
not just for comfort,
but for proof.
Proof that love can be foraged,
not just bought.
That even the picky can be wise.
That sometimes,
a weed with prawns
can hold more memory
than a feast ever could.

She taught me that.
Not with words,
but with the sizzle of garlic,
and the silence
that always followed
the first bite.

What Is a Poem

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

A poem is what happens
when language forgets to behave.
It’s the thing you say
after you've screamed
and your throat gives out
and all you have left
is the heat in your chest
and the salt on your lip.

It is not polite.
It does not wait its turn.
It is the child
who asks about death
in the middle of dinner,
the body
remembering the hand
that once bruised it,
long after the bruise
has faded.

A poem is a splinter
you leave in—
not because you like the pain,
but because pulling it out
would mean losing
the way it reminds you
you’re still alive.

Sometimes,
a poem is the breath
between what you meant to say
and what you actually said—
the place where the lie
almost didn’t make it.

It is not a trick.
It is not a performance.
It is the blood
you wipe off your fingers
before you shake someone’s hand.

A poem
is what I write
when I can’t look someone I love
in the eye.
It is the dress I wear
after the door slams.
It is the letter
I never sent,
but folded
like a burial cloth
and kept
in the drawer
with my mother’s scarf.

A poem is the opposite of forgetting.
It is the body remembering
what the mouth was too afraid
to name.

And when it’s real,
a poem does not comfort.
It enters you
like a needle—
then leaves the thread.

Forty-Six

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

I am forty-six,
and I keep forgetting to thank the coffee cup—
the chipped one with the crack
like a line on a palm—
for holding the bitter heat of morning
without complaint.

I forget to thank my knees
for still folding,
my teeth
for mostly staying,
my mother’s hands
for teaching mine how to break garlic
open like a prayer.

I forget to say
to the man I once loved:
It wasn’t your fault I changed.
To the child I never had:
I made room for you anyway.
To the mirror:
You were kinder than I gave you credit for.

At forty-six,
I still dream,
but the dreams have gotten quieter—
no more fame,
no cities named after me.
Just the wish
for a night of sleep without worry,
for my body to be still
without ache or guilt.

Sometimes I look at the life I’ve made
and ask,
Was this it?
Not in bitterness,
but in awe—
the way you might stare at a bird’s nest
made entirely from trash
and still call it beautiful.

I have lived
some days like songs,
some like arguments,
some like waiting rooms
with bad lighting.
I’ve buried too many versions
of myself
to pretend death hasn’t already
been practicing
on me.

But I am still here—
eating tangerines over the sink,
smelling like soap and rain,
writing my name
in every grocery list
as if it matters.

I have not thanked the silence
that held me
when no one else could.
I have not thanked the broken thing
inside me
for its devotion
to mending itself
over and over.

To live at forty-six
is to know
that dying
is not a question
but a slope.
That every breath
is a decision
we make
without ceremony.

And maybe
that’s the grace of it—
not in grandeur,
but in this:
that I still kiss the spoon
before stirring,
still keep a toothbrush
for guests
who may never come,
still whisper
thank you
to no one
at all.

Without Poetry

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

You gave me the name Gorio,
and then you placed me beside a pen—
not of words,
but of pigs.
You made my house a thin plank wall away
from filth,
as if the stink was part of my skin,
as if poverty wasn’t already
its own kind of rot.

You wrote me with cracked heels,
hands like bark,
and a silence that stretched
longer than the days
between pay.
You gave me Boy,
my son,
his nose curling at the air
I breathed,
at the life I chose
so he could one day leave it.

And maybe that’s what hurt the most—
you showed him looking at me
like I was the pig.
Like Gorio was the smell,
the stain,
the shame.

But you forgot, Leoncio—
I was not born in a sty.
I was born with a name,
with laughter once,
with dreams that looked
a lot like his
until I learned
how fast hunger
chews through them.

You made me quiet,
made me swallow his anger
like bile that never leaves the throat.
You never let me scream back.
Not even once.
And yet, I fed him.
Fed those pigs.
Fed the debt that bit my heel
each morning I rose
before the light.

What is a father, Leoncio,
if not a man who gives his dignity
to keep his child’s future
clean?

I am Gorio.
Not a hero.
Not a beast.
Just a man
who learned to love
through work that nobody honors,
through skin that split in silence.
You made them see my dirt.
Now let them see my grace.

Write me again,
Leoncio—
but this time,
let Boy remember
that I loved him
without poetry,
without words—
but with everything
my body
could still give.

Buried Beneath the Trees of Mawab

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

You made me walk that road again,
Leoncio—
dust thick on my boots,
gunlight still flickering
behind my eyelids.
You wrote Mawab
like it was a place,
but you and I both know
it’s a wound
that pretends to be a town.

You gave me a name, Peping,
but no absolution.
I carried that rifle,
my fingers still warm
from touching her—
Nenang, with her river-washed hair,
her silence thicker
than the jungle,
her hands peeling camote
like it was a ritual
against grief.

I held her
the way a man
holds onto something
he knows will disappear.
You gave me that,
and then you took her away.

You think war makes men hard.
But it makes us
mushy inside,
full of pulp and apology
and the kind of guilt
that keeps you
from sleeping
even when the crickets
have forgiven you.

I didn’t want to return.
But you pushed me,
made me walk again
on that cracked earth,
where the blood’s already been
soaked in
too many times
to tell who it belonged to.

You could’ve let me die
like the others—
fast, forgettable,
a shadow swallowed
by gunpowder.
But no.
You made me remember.

You made me carry
the weight
of one woman’s laughter
and an entire mountain
of silence.
You made me ache
with memory,
which is worse
than dying, Leoncio.

Because now,
even in peace,
I cannot forget
how war
taught me to love—
and how love
left me with
no one
to come back to.

The Year Between Us

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

My aunt is only a year older than me.
When we were children, that year felt like a flicker—
a leaf between pages,
a secret we didn’t mind keeping.
We were close in the way
only cousins raised like siblings
can be—barefoot, half-wild,
always sun-warmed and sweet-stained.

I remember the afternoons
we spent picking Kerson fruit
in their backyard.
We climbed the low limbs
as if they were the rungs of our future,
plucking the red, plump beads
that burst on our tongues
with a joy no candy could match.
We’d eat until our lips were stained,
our fingers sticky,
our laughter careless and whole.
Between bites,
we talked about what we’d become.

She’d be a nurse, she said.
I’d be someone who wrote things
down before they disappeared.
And we did it—
we reached out,
and the world gave in.

But dreams come with trade-offs
no one warns you about.

Now she lives in Texas.
Not just lives—
she stays there.
She works the night shift,
heals strangers’ wounds,
and doesn’t answer
when I ask about coming home.

She does not talk to anyone,
my aunt, who once shouted
across fields just to tell me
a dragonfly landed on her shoulder.
Now she disappears between months,
her voice locked away
in some linen-scented hospital corridor,
in a home that smells like sterility
and not once of Kerson fruit.

I sulk.
Because I miss her.
Because I do not know
what exactly broke—
only that it did.

And maybe she misses me too
in the quiet way people do
when they’re haunted
not by tragedy,
but by the golden weight
of memory.

She hides
in white rooms and shift rotations,
in foreign streets that ask nothing
of her past.
Maybe Texas is not home,
but a place where
no one reminds her
of what we once were.

Still,
life is a joker—
and we are
its punchline.

Children once bonded by fruit
and futures,
now reduced
to silence.

In the Glow of Our Afternoons

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

There were once Korean children
who ran into my life
like sun into windows—
all feet, all laughter,
all vowels bright as mango light.

They called me teacher,
but really—
I was the one learning.
How to tie their laces
with a soft voice.
How to read their silences
between snack breaks.
How to hold their joy
like a bowl of warm rice,
never letting it spill.

We folded paper cranes,
we recited poems about stars
as if they lived in our palms.
We danced to songs
in languages none of us owned,
but all of us sang
as if the melody
could unmake loneliness.
They taught me the soft c’s of Korean love.
I gave them the rough edges
of English,
rubbed smooth
in the glow of our afternoons.

And now,
I cannot remember
what year it was—
only that they were mine,
and I was theirs,
and we thought that was forever.

But forever has its faults.
I have amnesia now,
or some version of it—
my mind a curtain
half-pulled.
I know they existed,
but their names
slip from my hands
like soap.
I reach for them in sleep
and wake
with only shadows—
the sound of a child’s giggle
dissolving
before I catch it.

Were they real?
Or is my mind
so desperate for comfort
that it’s carved
children out of fog?

I still set the chairs
in a semicircle.
Still hum the tune
they used to sing
when the bell rang.
Still check
for handprints
on the windowpane
as if memory
could leave fingerprints.

If you find them—
tell them
I remember
how they made me feel,
even if I no longer
remember
their faces.

Tell them
I still love
what they left
in me.

Miriam, May 16

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

She stood
like a lit match
before the press—
hair a dark crown
that refused to bow
to humidity or injustice.
Her voice,
not shaking,
not pleading,
but sharp
as bone exposed.

It was May 16,
and the country had already begun
folding her name
into silence.

They said she had lost.
But loss
is not the same
as surrender.

She knew it—
felt it in the marrow
of her tongue,
in the syntax of lies
stitched into election returns,
in the way
the vote count shifted
like a body dragged
off a bed
before morning light.

She did not weep.
This was not a woman
born for breakdown.
She was all tendon
and fire,
a legal brief
written in blood.

I imagine her that day
swallowing
the betrayal
like crushed glass,
speaking each word
as if it might
break the teeth
of the machine
that dared to unmake her.

She did not concede—
how could she?
You do not hand your country
to a system
that eats your name
and calls it statistics.

They mocked her,
of course.
Hysteria, they said.
Bitterness.
They do that
to women
who see too much
and say it.

But I watched her on that screen—
a single woman
in a sea of suits—
and I understood
what it means
to be righteous
and ridiculed
at the same time.

She didn’t need
to win
to prove
she had already become
something larger
than ballots.

That day,
she lit the sky
with her anger,
and we
are still
burning.

Bud Bagsak, May 15

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

By the end of it,
they say the mountain was quiet—
but not the kind of quiet
you pray for.
The kind that hums
after something
has been broken
in half.

The women
were still there—
skirts stiff with smoke,
the weight of their dead
folded into the backs
of their knees.
Children clung
not to their mothers
but to the heat-stung rock,
to the hem of the mountain
that had cradled them
as if it too
had known it would
lose them.

The Americans came
with guns that did not tremble.
General Pershing,
with his pressed uniform
and eyes like cold dishes—
he called it valor,
later,
what they did to the bodies.
He said they died fighting,
which is not the same
as saying
they were killed.

It is not battle
when the earth itself
cannot swallow
the blood fast enough.
It is not a war
when mothers fall
with knives in their palms
and babies still
wrapped
in slings
against their breasts.

I try to imagine
what it felt like—
to choose the mountain,
to climb it
knowing it will be
your last rising.
To hear the jungle
stop singing.
To smell the gunpowder
before it arrives.
To hold your husband’s breath
in your lungs
because his chest
has already emptied.

They said it ended
on May 15.
But grief
does not end.
It roots
in the hollows.
It passes through wombs
and grows quiet
as it waits
for the next name
to carry.

This is not a poem.
It is a body
buried
too fast.

Dear Ma’am Edith—

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

You once wrote
that we live between—the space
where hibiscus forgets to bloom
and footsteps never quite
make it to the door.

I imagine you then,
sunlight feathering the porch,
your hands deep in soil,
talking to roses
that refuse to open.

Your poem feels like that:
the weight of water
poured into the wrong pot,
the ache of a gate
that hasn’t creaked in weeks.

I read it again this morning,
beside a cup of over-steeped tea,
the air thick with burnt sugar
and old lavender.

You wrote, we wait,
and suddenly I’m ten again,
watching my mother smooth
wrinkles from a dress
no one is coming to see.

The door never opens,
but she wipes the knob anyway.
Just in case.

I wanted to tell you—
you say the wait is unknown,
but I think we know it
like we know the hum
of moth wings
against a screen door.

We name it
by what it touches:
a basin left out overnight,
still warm with yesterday’s rain;
the kettle we fill
out of habit, not hunger;
the way silence
settles on a chair
meant for someone else.

Maybe we don’t fear
the end, Ma’am Edith.
We fear
the long table
with too many plates.
The heat of fish
blistering in the pan
with no fingers reaching
for first bite.

Still we coax
the gardenias—
we rinse leaves,
cut back stems,
spray for aphids
with a tenderness
bordering on delusion.

We live inside
this careful choreography—
setting the table,
lighting the stove,
washing the same cup
over and over,
because somewhere
between the wash
and the drying,
we remember
what love looked like
before it left.

Your poem, Ma’am—
it didn’t break me.
It planted me.

In the soil
of things unfinished,
where the wait
was not cruel,
but holy.

And sometimes,
when the wind
smells of river
and blistered bread,
I swear I see them again—
those who wandered—
carrying with them
a silence
that tastes
like grace.

Bud Bagsak

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

They say the mountain was shaped like a mother
curling herself over her children,
her ribs the ridges of Bud Bagsak,
and the sky,
wide and brutal, was the final witness.

I imagine the women,
their fingers still red from the morning meal,
pressing their bodies against the mountain rock—
not to hide, but to hold.
Not to run,
but to remember what earth feels like
when it hasn’t yet tasted
the blood of your son.

The children were there, too—
barefoot,
carrying no weapons,
only the smell of their mother’s sweat,
and the rhythm of drums
they would never again hear
as music.

The Americans came
not like monsters,
but like men
with names and photographs
in their breast pockets,
shouting orders in a tongue
that sounded like metal
clanging against flesh.

And General Pershing—
his boots still polished
as he stood
on the bones of a language
he did not care to translate.

They called it a battle.
But a battle implies
an evenness,
a fairness of ruin.

This was a hush
before a throat is cut.
This was a mother
watching her daughter
become a sound she will never
learn to unhear.

The mountain did not speak,
but it remembered.
The smoke rose
as if mourning could rise too,
as if loss could find a way
to escape the belly.

I write this now
from a desk,
my hands clean,
my breath even.
But my chest
has begun to ache
with the weight
of their last names
that never made it
into textbooks,
their bodies folded
into the hill,
as if they belonged to it
even in death.

They say it was over by May 15.
But I know the sound of it—
the sound of someone trying
to carry the last word
of their mother
in their mouth
as the rifle lifts.

That does not end.
That keeps going.

Tongue of the Empire

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

English did not arrive
as a god or ghost,
but as a suitcase—
unlatched in the middle of a dirt road
still damp from monsoon.

Inside:
a cracked Reader’s Digest,
a transistor radio humming
with vowels shaped like fists,
a lesson plan marked Civilizing Mission,
a crucifix whose face had turned
Anglo and unfamiliar.

We stood barefoot
on the schoolyard gravel,
our mouths learning
to twist around
th and v,
as if our own teeth
were too wild to understand
the elegance
of empire.

In the margins of notebooks,
we drew mango trees
but wrote “apple.”
We said “snow”
though the sun
burned the backs of our necks
raw as old tobacco leaves.

Our teachers
sounded like radios,
their grammar a hymnbook
too clean for the mud
on our calves.
They taught us to spell
"development" and "obedience"
in the same sentence.

Later,
we’d write poems—
in English, always—
about grandmothers
whose names we no longer knew
how to pronounce
without apologizing.

We called it power:
to publish in journals
bound for New York,
to speak in a tongue
that once called us
childlike,
illiterate,
incomplete.

But we do not write
about the river
whose name we lost
to a new map.
We do not mourn
the dialect we traded
for eloquence,
the gods we left behind
in favor of citations.

If we were honest,
we’d say English
was a pair of polished shoes
two sizes too small,
shiny enough
to impress the world—
but never enough
to let us run
the way our names
once let us
fly.

Still, we write.
Because even now—
with a dictionary in one hand
and grief in the other—
we are trying
to remember
what it was like
to speak
without translation.

Maaf: A Poem, A Protest, A Reckoning

 by Roger B. Rueda, PhD

Khairani Barokka, an Indonesian writer, poet, and disability arts advocate, delivers in her poem “money for your english” a fierce and intimate critique of linguistic imperialism, colonial residue, and the quiet violence of having to survive through the language of one’s historical erasure.

Let me now proceed, in the voice of reason sharpened with indignation: This poem, my dear students of the Republic, is no mere arrangement of enjambed thoughts—it is a laceration of the postcolonial soul, a searing indictment of how language, under the guise of opportunity, becomes an elegant form of subjugation.

Let us begin where it hurts: "If you do not speak English, you may not be able to survive—it is sink or swim."

This is not education. This is not empowerment. This, my friends, is a declaration of cultural warfare issued by neoliberalism at a school assembly under the punishing heat of the sun—a metaphor so precise it might as well be our national condition.

The poet, Khairani Barokka, stands here as a witness and a whistleblower. She does not merely critique the colonial hangover of English—no, she excoriates it. She exposes how English, far from being neutral, functions like a global currency of survival, a ticket to legitimacy dangled before the brown child while erasing the very stories, syllables, and grandmothers that once birthed that child’s voice.

She writes: "This performance of writing in public is not a remittance of culture / it is attempt at asserting mine while erasing mine."

What glorious contradiction! What bittersweet power! The poet acknowledges the paradox of her craft—to speak truth in the tongue of the oppressor, to etch resistance in the very alphabet that once silenced her ancestors. This is linguistic survival masquerading as literary success.

And yet, beneath the rage lies a trembling tenderness: "I ask forgiveness for English every day."

Here is the crux: the speaker does not deny her use of English; she owns it, grieves it, spits it out, and swallows it again. It is not a badge of shame, nor a crown of pride—it is a lifeline she clings to while mourning the drowned languages beneath her.

She ends with a single word: maaf. Sorry. But this is not an apology of defeat—it is a mourner’s whisper, a fighter’s breath, an offering to the ancestors whose tongues were buried under plantations and PowerPoints.

In summary: “money for your english” is not a poem. It is a civil disobedience performed in syllables, a protest wrapped in prosody, and above all, a political act of survival in a world that insists fluency must always come with forfeiture.

Let us remember: In a country like ours, where fluency in English may buy you healthcare, but not dignity, this poem must not only be read—it must be carried. Like a wound. Like a weapon.

Maaf? No, my dear. We do not owe the Empire an apology. It owes us a reckoning.

 

Each Sibilance, Each Murmur

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

You stood before it,
Cirilo—
not like a man admiring craft
but like someone
who had seen too many wars
disguised as gardens.

You didn’t flinch
at the lions’ mouths,
or the virgins’ marble breasts
that refused to rest.
You watched the water
splinter sunlight,
watched it spit its song
from terrace
to terrace
as though trying to outrun
its own sadness.

And I—I wanted
to tell you:
I never meant to own the ocean.

I only wanted
a part of it
to stay.

You called it a dream
bursting in water.
But I—I was a man
who had grown tired
of forgetting.
Who built a prayer
with fountains,
not because I believed
in answers,
but because I needed
movement
to mean something.

Each spout,
each hush of spray,
was a syllable
of what I couldn’t say aloud.
Each fish
traced my failures
in circles.

You said your brain swam
with them.
So did mine.
For years.

I gave it angels
not to guard,
but to grieve.
And breasts,
because I missed touch.
And lions,
because I no longer knew
how to pray
without teeth.

You saw through it all.
Saw me,
standing behind the veil
of my own design.

When you asked
if I believed brilliance
could be frozen—
I didn’t answer.

Because you knew.

Because you, too,
have tried to keep fire
inside language.

Because we are men
who’ve tasted exile,
not from country,
but from the body
we once trusted
to hold memory
without shaking.

So no, Cirilo—
I never owned the ocean.

But I pressed
my hands
to its mouth.
And it remembered me
long enough
to sing.

What the Web Remembers

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

Merlie,
I have walked the length of exile,
and silence has become a familiar companion—
but never like this.

You speak of the Spiderwoman
as if she were every motherland
forgotten behind the curtains of empire,
every Filipina
who spun herself into obscurity
so the world might pass by
without further wounding her.

I see her,
in your poem,
behind veiled glass,
watching slender boys
and golden-skinned girls
drink in the sunlight
as though freedom were permanent.
She waits—
not in bitterness,
but in a silence
that accumulates like ash
at the foot of burning pyres.

I know this waiting, Merlie.
I know what it means
to shrink daily,
to become “almost invisible,”
to be called traitor by one’s own countrymen
for loving the country too much.
What you name as “fuzz on skin”
and “eyes that multiply”
—I knew it as vigilance.
The kind one learns
in the shadow of a firing squad,
or in the calm terror
of a prison cell in Fort Santiago.

But yours—
yours is a woman’s waiting,
ancient and venomous,
sweet and fatal.
You do not mourn time,
you distill it.
You say: I practice a patience
vaster than ten worlds.
How can I not bow
before such mercy disguised as threat?

And when you speak
of cicadas returning,
of June greening again—
I hear my own hopes
for a country reborn.
Not through war,
but through remembrance.
Through touch.

When your shadow crosses my door,
you write,
come, take my hand.

Ah, Merlie—
that line wounds me.
Because that is what we ask,
isn’t it?
Those of us
who have been misunderstood,
exiled, silenced,
or mythologized into stillness.
We don’t ask to be explained.
We ask to be met.
To be touched.
To be brought back
from the border between idea
and flesh.

You’ve built a room of silk and memory—
a web that frightens
because it remembers too much.
And yet,
you leave the door open.

That, to me,
is the most radical thing of all.

A Conversation with Andrés

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

Andrés,
what did you feel
when they read the verdict—
not in Spanish,
but in the tongue of your mother,
your comrades,
your brothers-in-arms?

Was it the sound of paper tearing
or of a nation
turning its face
from its own reflection?

Did your hands twitch,
remembering the feel
of the bolo’s hilt,
its weight suddenly useless
against signatures
and sealed orders?

Tell me—
did you still believe
in the Republic that day,
when your name was written
in its death roll
by men who once
shouted Kalayaan! beside you?

And Procopio,
standing beside you
like a question
no one wanted to answer—
did he ask
why loyalty folds faster
than a worn-out bandera?

You, who opened
the veins of this country
so freedom might run through it—
was it bitter,
that the revolution
could not save
its own father?

And yet,
you did not cry out.
The hills of Cavite
held your silence
like a rosary tucked in the palm
of a dying man.

Two days later,
they led you into the forest—
not to be buried,
but to become part of the roots.

And still,
I imagine you walking,
head high,
saying nothing—
because the truest patriots
don’t beg for mercy.
They watch history
misunderstand them,
and choose
to bleed anyway.

The Greater Part of the Law

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

In university,
they speak of justice
in Latin—
res ipsa loquitur,
caveat emptor,
as if truth itself
could be summoned
by incantation.

They hand out codals
like sacred texts,
expect you to memorize
every article
as though the world runs
on order alone.
But they do not say
that the greater part of the law
is learning to sit still
while someone mangles logic
with the confidence
of a man who’s never been told no.

There is no elective
on listening to fools
and nodding politely—
when you want to scream
that facts are not feelings,
that a loud voice
is not the same
as being right.

They do not prepare you
for the hearings that drag
longer than the lunch breaks,
or the judge who yawns
as you speak.
They don’t warn you
about clients who ask
for miracles,
or the colleague who jokes
that you’re too idealistic
for this line of work.

The greater part of the law
is not won in debate,
but in the waiting—
in the moments
you swallow pride
like a bitter pill,
and still keep showing up
with your spine unbent
and your shoes polished.

This is what the books
never taught:
that the courtroom is not
a cathedral,
but a market—
loud, flawed, full of barter.
And yet,
you enter anyway,
carrying the hope
that truth,
even limping,
can still
cross the floor.

When Knowing Becomes Knowing

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

That is what learning is.
Not a flash of brilliance
but the slow unfolding of something
you’ve held all your life
like an heirloom tucked in the lining
of an old baro’t saya—
worn,
but stitched with care.

It’s not the first time
your lola says, over tinola and rice,
“ang buhay, parang palay—
kailangan yumuko para di mabali.”
You’re six, drawing hearts
on the condensation of the window,
the radio hums Freddie Aguilar in the background,
and you nod,
not because you understand,
but because you love her voice
more than the meaning.

But then, years later,
you’re twenty-three,
sitting at the back of a rusting jeep
as it crawls through traffic in Molo,
your interview was a disaster,
your umbrella broke,
your heart did, too.
Mud has kissed your heels,
your blouse smells like sweat and wet dust,
and in that exact moment
her voice comes back—
not like memory
but like revelation.

That’s what knowing feels like.
Like biting into ampalaya
in your tita’s dinengdeng,
preparing to grimace—
only to find it
oddly,
quietly
comforting.

Like saying something careless
to your Nanay,
and watching her eyes drop,
her silence drawing a circle around your words.
And suddenly,
the old proverbs sharpen.
They are no longer classroom phrases
but companions to your living.

Learning isn’t new,
Anna.
It’s the tabing na nilalaba tuwing Sabado,
the one that’s fraying at the edges,
but smells like sunshine and wear.
It’s the truth we wear
like tsinelas—
familiar, unnoticed—
until one day,
we step on gravel
and finally feel
how much we’ve walked.

Reading is Not for the Weak of Will

by Roger B. Rueda, PhD

Let us be clear: Reading is not a joke. It is not an elective activity for those who finish their TikTok videos early. Reading is a moral obligation, a civic duty, and quite frankly, a litmus test for intellectual survival. And yet, here we are—inside institutions that have turned libraries into air-conditioned decoration and textbooks into coasters for milk tea.

The culture we must impose is one of reverence. Yes, I said reverence—the same way monks bowed before scripture, students must bow their heads before paperbacks and hardbounds. Every school must transform itself into a republic of readers: no phone before 50 pages, no screen before Steinbeck, no scrolling unless you can name all characters in El Filibusterismo and cite Rizal’s political allegory in context.

The behavior must be militant. Silence in the library must be enforced like martial law—but with more decency and less torture. Students caught faking reading during DEAR time (Drop Everything And Read) shall not be scolded—they shall be publicly quizzed. If you claim to be reading To Kill a Mockingbird, then explain Atticus Finch’s moral compass in your own words. No comprehension? Off you go. Your penalty: recite the plot of three NVM Gonzalez stories before you can log back in to your LMS.

Practices should be sacred. Reading journals—not summaries, but reflections. Socratic circles—not mindless recitation. Book clubs—not to discuss who likes whom, but to wage ideological war over the author’s worldview. Annotated texts should be bloodied with ink. Highlighters should dry up from usage. And reading logs should be policed like airport customs—no contraband summaries allowed.

What tests shall be given? Close reading exams. One sentence, one hour. Find every nuance, every layer, every comma that cries. Students must defend their interpretation in writing and in public. Reading is not passive consumption—it is mental sparring. If you cannot explain Animal Farm without citing actual political regimes, you fail. If your idea of literary analysis is saying “I like the story because it is nice,” then please: just enroll in Kindergarten.

And what of the jesters? The students who treat reading as optional, who laugh during silent reading periods, who use novels as phone stands—let them be warned. Ignorance is not funny. It is pitiful. If you do not read, you do not think. If you do not think, you are a pawn of the loudest voice in the room. And one day, when the nation is again on the verge of collapse because citizens cannot read between the lies—do not blame fake news. Blame the 17-year-old who said, “Why should I read if there’s a movie version?”

Compassion, yes—but only for the struggling, never for the smug. We shall tutor the slow, applaud the persistent, and uplift the hesitant. But for the arrogant, the careless, the willfully illiterate—may your diploma be printed on unread pages, for it is useless.

Reading is a discipline. Reading is defiance. Reading is a requirement—not just for school, but for citizenship.

So, to those who scoff at books, here is my message, with love and loathing: Read. Or rot.