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.