A Small Motor

By Alberto Ríos b. 1952 Alberto Rios

The easiest sadness is a boy

Watching another boy

Walk with a barefooted girl, clean

Perfect feet, that kind of nose,

Eyes like those he’s dreamed

In the dream that comes back.

A boy watching another boy lucky

Gets an ache

That is a small motor.

In me there is an animal,

And in that animal

There is a hunger.

I remember the boy

Watching a boy.

It was me.

Watching, I was a little bit

The boy walking.

I was both of us.

That’s how it felt.

What I could not have,

That’s what I was

Inside, an ache

Coming as I stood

Too many places.

Alberto Ríos, “A Small Motor” from The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body. Copyright © 2002 by Alberto Ríos. Used with the permission of Copper Canyon Press, www.coppercanyonpress.org.

Source: The Smallest Muscle in the Human Body (Copper Canyon Press, 1989)

Biography

Alberto Ríos has won acclaim as a writer who uses language in lyrical and unexpected ways in both his poems and short stories, which reflect his Chicano heritage and contain elements of magical realism. "Ríos's poetry is a kind of magical storytelling, and his stories are a kind of magical poetry," commented Jose David Saldivar in the Dictionary of Literary Biography. Ríos grew up in a Spanish-speaking family but was forced to . . .

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