Robert L. Dean, Jr

In the Morning There Were Lovers
 
She knows this from the way the sheets are rumpled, spots still damp, shower sequined in mist, two sets of footprints in the plush cream of the Pension Zipser bath rug, the smaller in-turned between the larger, a kiss for cleanliness, yes, hungry tongues groping, trail dripping quickly across hardwood—so hungry—the way the drapes are pulled to one side, balcony door ajar, as if, maybe, three stories above the lavender and hydrangea, sun birthing on glistening flesh, they’d done it even there, yes, see the beads, trivial to other eyes, evidence enough for her, dregs at the bottoms of the Viennese Rose cups on the mahogany table, she is a reader of tea leaves and coffee grounds, a diviner of long standing, a connoisseur of beginnings and endings and the ways between—right now, at the sidewalk café on the corner, the lovers are brunching on apfelstrudel and Riesling, she knows this, she could see them if she went down and out the lobby door, looked up the Lange Gasse toward that place with the bright umbrellas, rain or shine.
 
What she does not know is that, as we pay the waiter and board the tram, hand in hand, for the Reisenrad, the big wheel where Harry Lime compared people to dots while etching an arrow-pierced heart in the fog on the glass, we wonder, as we anticipate the fresh-laundered art of the turned-down bed, guess at the color of the tulip in the cut-glass vase on the nightstand when we get back—at least for a heartbeat—if we left enough Euros to take her family to the comedy at Die Josefstadt this evening.
 
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This poem was first published in October Hill Magazine.
 
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Still Life with Roman Noir
 
So, this is how it ends. Which one of us pulled the trigger, which one of us is bleeding, doesn’t matter. What matters is the dark, how it lasts forever, how it’s been there all along, finger twitching on cold metal, how we both rushed to meet it, how it anticipates the second, final, shot.
 
That September day I stepped out of the Parisian rain into the little bistro on Rue des Martyrs and found you sitting in the corner shadows drinking absinthe, how our eyes first met, yours deep as wells, I like a pebble, falling, falling, it was there then, while we talked about nothing in particular, there while we walked under your red umbrella up the Montmartre steps to Sacré Coeur as you told me the story of Saint Denis, who, decapitated by the Romans, carried his head the length of the street before dying, there as you dipped slender red-nailed fingers into the holy water font, signed the cross over your head and breast, whispered God the Son, Redeemer of the World, have mercy on us, there at Cimitière de Montmartre as you pointed out Falconetti’s grave, told me I want to burn like her, something I did not understand until days later, when, at your logement in Avenue Victor Hugo, you played the DVD of Dryer’s La Passion de Jeanne d’Arc, and I saw the burning, the terrible burning, the much too realistic burning, and remembered you had told me on the way down the steps from the basilica There is no God, no redemption in this world or the next, the rain spattering like muted bullets on the arched pongee dome you held us under, and how I’d wondered at the contradiction in your words and actions for a moment only.
 
And that night—this night—after I have entered you for the second time, you take the Beretta from your nightstand, momentarily dazzling in the undraped moonlight, and say, matter-of-factly: One of us will want this someday, don’t you think?
 
How prophetic you can be. How well you know me. How little time it took.
 
You lay the Beretta on the sheet between us, release the safety, say, Tell me about them. And I do. All those loved and lost. Discarded like so many decapitated heads. All the funeral pyres I’ve lit: London, Rome, New York. All the saints I’ve slaughtered. How the darkness never leaves.
 
The moon slips behind a cloud and you look at me and a shadow something like a smile passes over your face and you say, your breath a flame licking my ear: They are here, now. Yours. Mine. They will never show us mercy. Never leave us. This is where it ends. Fire that sheds no light is a cold, dead, thing. And, as always—as you were in London, Rome, New York—you are right.
 
I reach for the gun, find your hand already there. For less time than it takes an angel to fall, fire lights the night.
 
**
 
This first appeared in The Aerialist Will Not Be Performing, by Robert L. Dean (Turning Plow Press).
 
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City of the Fallen
 
There are no footfalls here, but, if one listens closely, one can hear the absence of wings. We move about like shadows, crawling across the landscape in two dimensions, arms and legs akimbo, time pointers with no time to point to. We are unsprung watches, clocks with no sense of chronology, false memories of false events. We do not nod in passing. Eye avoidance is an art. No one looks up because
that’s where we’ve been.
 
I move across the face of a building. I do not slide inside. No one goes inside here. Inside, we disappear. Cloudy days are hell. Nights pandemonium, terror, loss. We think sometimes of ending it, those dark periods, but there is no stone we can grasp, no trigger we can pull, no rooftop we can throw ourselves from and not survive. No bones to smash, no blood to let, no breath to extinguish.
 
Once, I think I see you. I open my mouth but no name comes out. Names, like memories, like actions—like love—require depth. The feathers of you scatter, leaves in sympathy with the coming snow. A blight drips from my eyes. Beneath me, footsteps stumble. Regret echoes.
 
I’ve made a mistake. I’ve looked up.
 
**
 
This first appeared in MacQueen’s Quinterly.
 
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The Boxer
 
He lunges. Misses. Never lays a glove on anybody. Nickname growing up, punching bag. And it stuck. They can knock him to kingdom come but they can’t knock him down. His face and the canvas have never been intimate. Nine rounds and he is pulp, standing. Or fight called, TKO, squeamish ref.
 
In demand, always. Guaranteed notch in the other guy’s belt. Doesn’t take a dive, never. Freddie tells him Hang it up, sport, your brain’s gonna be mush, but Freddie hasn’t, Freddie still manages him, Freddie’s brain is mush, hasta be. Nothin’s the percentage on nothin’.
 
So there’s gotta be somethin’. Something worth hanging in for. Taking lumps. Spitting teeth. Stitching skin. Mopping blood off shoes. Waiting for the world to bobble back in place.
 
Next marquee, his name at the bottom: Dad behind a desk, name tag askew on Robert Hall shirt, actuary fingers rattling risk and percentage, don’t let ‘em knock you down, son, don’t let ‘em knock you
 
**

This first appeared in MacQueen’s Quinterly.
 
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Laughing and Crying and Other Martial Arts
 
Each tear you shed pierces my heart. Because you laughed, you say. And I have no answer. It had seemed trivial, in that moment. What you always do in similar small crises. Don’t you ever cry? you say. Many times, I think, but the drops are kung fued into chuckles, snickers, guffaws. I am from the Emmett Kelly school of tears. I sweep the spotlight around the arena, blow up the balloon till it pops, bury the aftermath in the sawdust. You are from the Annie Oakley Shaolin School, calmly shooting backwards over your shoulder with a hand mirror, bullseye every time.
 
We consult the Wallendas. Use a harness, they say. Look how many of us we lost before we learned. Pride goeth before the fall. Bodhidharma advises wall-gazing to achieve the absence of self and other. Bodhidharma sat in front of a wall for nine years and what did it get him? He cut his eyelids off to keep from falling asleep. We decide we are lovers, not pack animals, and decline to be harnessed.
 
You pull out the blades, I burn the balloons. We found a new school. No walls. No safety nets. If we fall, we fall as one. Ringling offers us a contract. We laugh until we cry.
 
**
​
This first appeared in MacQueen’s Quinterly.

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Crosswalk Jesus: a Moment in Four Facets
 
This is the stretch of the expressway which is depressed and I look up, as I always do, approaching the chicken-wire pedestrian overpass, expecting to see, as I always have, nobody crossing. But there he is, back-lit by the end of the day into which I am driving, a small black X, hanging. And at first I think someone’s got a jump on Halloween, like one of those straw-stuffed dummies dangling from a gutter with the ladder kicked sideways beneath them, because X-Man doesn’t move, he just clings there, looking down upon us, poor, lost voyagers that we are, some of us already turning on headlights as the line of the hour between light and dark begins to blur.
 
*

How Christ-like he looks, or like the shadow of a Christ, dying. A forsaken smudge of God, splayed against the cage of deity, sacrificing himself for the souls of the metallic river of sheep which flows, not knowing that which we do, beneath him, not knowing that which we do not do: look up this one evening when he makes himself known--Here, take me, take me—watching over us even as he fades into the twilight of the autumn of our lives, not knowing what it is that he bestows on us as we cut and swerve and tailgate one another. It’s a miracle we are not all killed, that everyone makes it to the football game, the grocery store, the movie theater, aerobics class, home in time to walk the dog, feed the kids, hug someone. O bless us X-Man, for we have eyes but do not see.
 
*

Dustin Hoffman arrives too late, crucifies himself upon the church window. A blatant symbolist image on the part of the filmmaker. But not so for Hoffman’s character, who suddenly cries out Elaine! the glass pattering like cold autumn rain beneath his fists Elaine! expecting her, in all her bridal finery, to turn and look up as she’s always done before, to rip his name from the very bottom of her lungs, the very pit of her soul, Bennnnnnnnn!!!! But this time she doesn’t. This time she’s determined to escape the director’s awkward ending. This time the organ plays her out on the arm of what she’s married herself to, and there is no bus in this rewrite, only the limo, waiting. She gets in, laughing, knows now that all she has to do is never look up. And we cut/
 
/out of the depths of her pillow, Katherine Ross stares into the darkness of the cruise ship stateroom, the Christ of her character’s choosing snoring soundly beside her. Cold rain patters the porthole. Camera rolling, the director captures that awkward look anyway.
  
*
 
The chicken-wire cage is warm between your fingers, a parting gift from a dying sun. You don’t know why you have chosen this particular evening, this particular spot to stop. What was it you had set out to do?  Had you intended to cross on over? One side is very much like the other, after all. Darkness begets darkness. Below you, the cars. What are they afraid of? That you’ll throw something? A rock? A bottle? Your hands grip the wire more tightly. That you’ll jump? If you did—if you could—would they stop? Could they save you? That car, there. A dim, featureless face glancing up. He would--
 
but no, he passes right on beneath you, flowing with the rest of the sheep. You hang until all the car lights are on, until all the wire Xes slice deep into your flesh. Cigarettes. What you had gone out for. You turn up your collar against a sudden autumn chill. As you cross on over you listen for that tiniest of little pattering sounds, your life’s blood dripping, fingertips to pavement. It’s all that keeps you from fading into
 
**
 
This was first published in MacQueen’s Quinterly, and was nominated for Best Small Fictions.
 
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Walking Ms. Dog
 
Ms. Dog stands on the shore
and the sea keeps rocking in
and she wants to talk to God.
—Anne Sexton, Hurry Up Please It’s Time
 
 
dark and stormy night but Ms. Dog must go out my living room cypresses sway Ms. Dog keeps me on a short leash her bleached bones clatter in the cold wind I ask her why the carbon-monoxide-locked-garage-door thing ah Bobby she says using my puppyhood name that’s the easy part the tough part Mommy’s fur coat I’d never be caught dead wearing pause sofa I hike a leg in the end I say you just couldn’t let go life still meant something Ms. Dog jerks the leash I was a failed abortion Bobby in the night in the kitchen above the butcher block counter top Vinnie One Ear making swirling motions always knew Ms. Dog says that candle-hat thing was baloney don’t you piss on the canvases Bobby I nearly choke she yanks so hard only the dishwasher I whimper she studies Vinnie’s bloodless face you’ve almost got it she says pulls a gun a little shot of this’ll do it stars burst from Vinnie’s belly light years back to my office God I say I want to die like that Ms. Dog flips her femur onto my desk well then Bobby she aims the gun cocks the hammer up on your hind paws slit your wrists let the ink flow I pluck a galaxy from the sky flesh implodes the universe big-bangs I crack the bone how sweet the marrow
 
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This first appeared in Red River Review.
 
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Robert L. Dean, Jr. is the author of Pulp (Finishing Line Press, 2022); The Aerialist Will not be Performing: ekphrastic poems and short fictions to the art of Steven Schroeder (Turning Plow Press, 2020); and At the Lake with Heisenberg(Spartan Press, 2018), and the forthcoming ekphrastic book of poems and flash fictions The Night Window written to photos by Jason Baldinger. A multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, Dean’s work has appeared in many literary journals. He lives in Augusta, Kansas, midway between the Air Capitol of the World and the Flint Hills.