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.