The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body - Jessica Martinez

Alberto Rios creates insightful meanings through his poetry collections in his book, The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body. He combines childhood memories along with culture and family legends to provide the reader with a sense of awe and wonder once they've completed any selected poem. Alberto is very passionate when it comes to family matters and this is clearly viewed throughout his collection. He describes the situation, or better yet, his memory using vivid language and imagery and lets the reader come to their own conclusions. Rios leaves the ending open so that one may figure it out for ourselves. He never comes out and says, "This is what happened," he shows you. Good poetry always contains a hidden message, a moral that is intertwined within the words waiting to be discovered with thought and effort. All of Alberto's poems succeed in doing this. There were times while I was reading certain poems in this collection that I just couldn't decipher the meaning, then suddenly I would understand. Some poems were so intense I never comprehended them. Others, were so simple yet so complicated that I got hundreds of different possible meanings, each one viable in their own way. The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body, raises questions but also creates answers that based on opinion, can or cannot be helpful when it comes to life situations. Alberto Rios is a great author and his work of writing is even greater.

REFUGIO'S HAIR
By: Alberto Rios
In the old days of our family,
My grandmother was a young woman
Whose hair was as long as the river.
She lived with her sisters on the ranch
La Calera- The Land of the Lime-
And her days were happy.
But her uncle Carlos lived there too,
Carlos whose soul had the edge of a knife.
One day, to teach her to ride a horse,
He made her climb on the fastest one,
Bareback, and sit there
As he held its long face in his arms.
And then he did the unspeakable deed
For which he would always be remembered:
He called for the handsome baby Pirrin
And he placed the baby in his arms.
With that picture of a Madonna on horseback
He slapped the shank of the horse's rear leg.
The horse did what a horse must,
Racing full towards the bright horizon.
But first he ran under the alamo trees
To rid his back of this unfair weight:
This woman full of tears
And this baby full of love.
When they reached the trees and went under,
Her hair, which had trailed her,
Equal in its magnificence to the tail of the horse,
That hair rose up and flew into the branches
As if it were a thousand arms,
All of them trying to save her.
The horse ran off and left her,
The baby still in her arms,
The two of them hanging from her hair.
The baby looked only at her
And did not cry, so steady was her cradle.
Her sisters came running to save them.
But the hair would not let go.
From its fear it held on and had to be cut,
All of it, from her head.
From that day on, my grandmother
Wore her hair short like a scream,
But it was long like a river in her sleep.