If you want to feel what feeling small is,
Be so unseeing as to acknowledge how the sun out there
feels against your cheeks—
Like just-dark-enough toast on Sunday morning,
like the just-soft-enough butter you smother on the toast—
And you keep smothering even as it melts and the toast sags,
because it’s getting too heavy, but you can’t stop,
until you check to make sure you’ve gotten every inch—
Like the cinnamon sugar you sprinkle on top to make it just perfect.
Like when dad takes out the grill for the first time that summer;
Like crispy hot dogs and grainy mustard;
Like putting the radio up even though it crackles, because it’s too old,
and you’re drinking mom’s iced tea on the wooden benches
grandpa carved and glued and painted that burnt sepia color himself;
Like how grandpa would feel if he were here,
if he were seeing you and dad and mom and everyone there still taking the grill out
and drinking the iced tea from those frosted glasses, tall with blue and green stripes,
And sitting knee to knee on the benches he made.
As this sun, it takes you somewhere other:
where the fear of subway poles and handshakes and missing a count
as you scrub your hands until they bleed—20 one thousand—
where this isn’t the only thing filling your mouth,
and pouring from your nostrils and clogging the radio and the tv and every inch of all of it,
making everything so heavy, so much to hold for you, and him, and her, and them.
If you want to feel small,
be so unfeeling as to tell him how that sun feels to you
as he churns out your cinnamon dolce latte with almond milk,
yet another under fluorescent lights;
As he says, “I wouldn’t know;”
As you choke out, “Try to take a little break;”
As you ask if he can sprinkle a little cinnamon on top,
And neither of you is sure he’ll get out there
before it’s already too dark to feel it
or see what’s just ahead.