The Flesh Has More Than One Clock

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

I write from the body—

not the one the mirror insists upon,

but the one that remembers dreams in the knees

and arguments in the hips.

It isn’t static.

It sheds timelines like skins:

butch at dawn, trans at dusk,

sometimes a lesbian by the crooked light

of a stranger’s attention.

This body,

this slow inheritance of old wars and new whispers,

has multiple calendars.

Hormones tick like mutinous clocks—

somewhere in the spine,

time stretches and knots.

There is no single verb for becoming.

Only a chain of half-lived synonyms:

aching, adjusting, insisting.

Desire makes the image.

It draws the outline not with ink,

but with waiting.

It sketches in the margin

where my breath meets someone else’s listening.

Sexuality is not a map,

but a trembling—

and the body, that cartographer of secrets,

redraws borders each time I close my eyes.

And pleasure—

yes, even that—is a kind of governance,

a ritual,

a reminder that flesh is political,

even in the solitude of its own making.

So I write.

From the fourth rib today,

the wrist tomorrow.

From a scar I haven’t named.

And the page—

God help the page—

must keep up.

Where the Names Were Scraped Off

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

There are barren places in the world,
and barren places in the mind—
regions gone pale with forgetting,
where time has scraped the names off things,
and memory, clumsy and desperate, draws in the rest.

I walk there often.
Not for comfort.
Not for truth.
But because even absence has its own topography,
and I’ve grown familiar with the sound
my feet make on hollow ground.

You don’t choose what fades.
The body sheds what it must
to keep moving.
But sometimes, what is lost
was never truly gone—
only silenced,
only renamed.

A hand becomes a shadow.
A voice becomes a wind through cracked glass.
A shame becomes a shape
you sidestep in the dark.

Still, the self persists—
not whole,
but fierce in the broken places.

I no longer demand clarity.
I no longer grieve
what I cannot place.
I have learned to live
among the blurred.

Let the past go toothless.
Let it gnaw only at the edges.
The center,
the still center,
is mine now.

And from that center,
I build—
not monuments,
but small rooms
where I can sit,
and say:
This too was a life.
Even if I do not recall every corner of it.
Even if some of it never truly belonged to me.

When the Easel Burned

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

When I build a fire, I do it the way I’ve done most things—
quietly,
purposefully,
without asking anyone’s permission.
Not to warm the house—it’s too damn hot for that—
but to cleanse it.
To strip it of what still reeks of him.

I unbolt the joints of the thing he left behind,
his old easel, thick with years of paint and pride,
crafted from narra, maybe tanguile,
the kind of wood you can’t kill quickly.
Colonial, solid, stubborn—
like his silence
when I finally said,
“This is who I am.”

And I stack the pieces just right,
angled for breath and burn.
He taught me that.
Not in words,
but in the way he lit things and left.

Then, by firelight,
I see what I’ve done.
I am burning the last of him.
The easel he used when I posed for him
at twenty-two, all cheekbones and borrowed courage,
the boy he called muse
when he still thought I could be reshaped.
He said my softness was tragic.
I thought his hardness was love.

For months I sat for him,
naked but not free,
learning how to disappear in plain sight.
He painted me into a man
he could stomach in public,
toned down, angled up,
never too much.

What if someone had told me,
back then,
“If you quit now—if you play the part,
the obedient shadow, the half-you—
he might stay.”
What would I have said?

I didn’t even have an art back then.
Not really.
Just this body
that never fit his frame.

But the fire fits everything.
Even narra yields,
given time.

So it burns—his easel—
with the quiet dignity of a thing
that finally understands its purpose
was never to hold the image,
but to be consumed by truth.

He thought he left it behind
as a gesture, a gift.
But like most gifts from men like him,
it came with a condition:
stay smaller than him.

And yet—look at it now.
Listen to it crack.
The molave groans.
The flames dance, not like lovers,
but like survivors.

I don’t miss him.
I miss the boy who waited for him.
The boy who curled into the corners of someone else’s genius
just to be seen.

But tonight—
tonight I watch it burn.
And in the smoke,
I see the outlines of someone else:
not a muse, not a model,
but a man
who chose to rise
outside the painting.

The Wanting

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

Normal is such an impossible word, isn’t it?
Like trying to hold water in a sieve
and then blaming your own hands
for the flood that comes anyway.

When I was younger—
and that youth was not golden, mind you,
but feral, wiry, all angles and longing—
I worshipped at the altar of Normal.
As if it were something to be earned.
A badge. A prize. A sentence.

I made it a game:
the right smile, the timed laugh,
the mathematics of eye contact.
Normal was always
ten steps ahead, and I
ran in its wake like a dog
that doesn’t know it has teeth.

Meanwhile, another version of me—
you know the one—
slipped quietly into the fantasy lands.
The other girl, the secret self,
barefoot in some imagined ruin,
reading books that no one assigned,
kissing no one, but learning how it might feel
if she did.

There, the rules bent toward meaning.
People said what they meant,
or didn’t speak at all.
Even the silence was holy.

The fantasy lands were wildly innocent—
not pure, never that—but untouched
by the filth of pretending.
It was not escape.
It was rehearsal.
Not for what I was—
but for what I could be
if I ever stopped apologizing.

Back in the other world,
I smiled so hard I cracked.
The air smelled of plastic and performance.
And still I returned,
because there is a violence in wanting
what is outside the script.

But my god, I wanted it.
I wanted to unlearn the rituals,
to discard the armor,
to stop splitting myself
into the one who performed
and the one who watched.

Desire bloomed in the chest like fever.
It made the hands shake,
it made the rooms seem too small.
Everything—every hallway, every silence,
every turned back—
became a door.

And I,
a body too full of wanting,
tried them all.

The Gospel According to Pleasure

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

All my work belongs to pleasure.
Not joy. Not bliss. Not that weak helium.
Pleasure,
with its warped theology—
the kind that scalds before it soothes.
I’ve never trusted happiness.
It arrives too quickly and leaves like a lover
who’s taken the salt with him.

But pleasure—
that is a scholar.
It has dogmas. It takes notes.
It comes dressed in shadows,
and teaches you how to flinch beautifully.

Sometimes, it’s the ache after truth.
Sometimes, it’s the lie you let stay
because the body asked you to.
And you listened.

They never warned me that pleasure
could smell like a fight,
or feel like forgiveness with a razor tucked inside.

I mean this:
My sentences crawl out of want.
Not always sexual—
but sometimes, yes.
The kind that lives in the back of the neck,
behind the knees,
in the soft fascism of restraint.

I write for it.
I write around it.
It is the only church I still attend.

And every line I craft,
I hope it moans.
Not loudly—
but like something real
dragged into the light
and made to name its source.

The Sea Is the Lips of the Earth

a poem by Roger B. Rueda

The sea is the lips of the earth.
It parts slightly at dawn, a whisper
barely heard—
something between hunger and memory.

Sometimes it smiles:
not for you,
but for the moon
which has never left.

Other times, it pouts—
folding ships into its mouth
as if to say,
I told you not to come so close.