The Triangle

Today is the day we dedicate the triangle to Antonio. We wear our Sunday best like armor, like the field-day attire of all those athletes we ever worshipped. We are clean and true and agile. We carry the triangle on our backs to Antonio. Antonio is always 100 yards away, moving as we move, watching as we watch, feeling as we feel. There are a thousand men farther than us. The triangle is the weight of beaten tin. It’s the rush of grocery aisles, the chalk of hopscotched ground. We watch the stain of ocean approaching and retreating from our feet as we walk, stooped over, on the beach. The triangle on our backs hurts like penmanship. Antonio calls the call of being far away, but all we hear is the touch of water. When Antonio was young he would run through the fields of the city. This is when we were empty thoughts, each of us nothing but later lineage, points of data in the sand. We wield facility but don’t know the code. There is only one code. The triangle is not the code. Antonio sees himself as every wide-grin faraway father figure. What this means to us is flimsy alarm, but still we drag the triangle behind us. We see our brothers in Antonio. No one helps the afternoon cadence into evening, and no one suggests our pictures move under night. Today is the day. We don’t feel closer to Antonio, but every move we make is a direction in the right direction. Where we go from here is there in the steps he has taken.

Chase Burke is an MFA candidate at the University of Alabama, but he calls Florida home. His work can be found in Electric Literature, The Offing, Yemassee, Sycamore Review, New South, The Journal, and SmokeLong Quarterly, among others. Find him on Twitter @cpburkejr.