A Triangle Instead

Had I not been a boy
but a triangle instead, a patch of asphalt
shaped thereof, or the steel 
that keeps the swing-set in the ground
at Delaney Park, 

you would’ve seen me, touched me,
remembered me. As a boy
(there are a million boys), all I did
was stutter and laugh, look up
at the obnoxious sun

that was my father’s face
and his before. I never asked for
a name, a body, or their blood. 
I could’ve been a bicycle instead,
or a downtown building 

where the women gathered if it rained.
I never wanted to be at all,
except, perhaps, a baseball card 
or a bowl of fruit. They would’ve liked me
better, then, without communions

and homecoming dates,
all those accouterments
of body and voice. How pitiful they are;
how lonely I was at family reunions,
Halloween bashes, Easter Sundays 

in the snow. In a photograph
I wore a beige sweater; in another
dark pants with patches for knees.
I was a good boy, but I should’ve been
a monster made of steel

or the Y-Street Bridge attaching
Akron to the rest of the world,
to Cleveland and Pittsburgh, Detroit 
and Chicago, to every woman and man
desiring to be another.

Carl Boon is the author of the full-length collection Places & Names: Poems (The Nasiona Press, 2019). His writing has appeared in many journals and magazines, including Prairie Schooner, Posit, and The Maine Review. He received his Ph.D. in Twentieth-Century American Literature from Ohio University in 2007, and currently lives in Izmir, Turkey, where he teaches courses in American culture and literature at Dokuz Eylül University.