Three After Jason Baldinger, by Robert L. Dean, Jr.

Wiscasset, Maine, by Jason Baldinger (USA) 2024

The Night Window
 
That face. You grope for a name—is that a beard? A hat? A white stick? Could he be blind, staring straight ahead like that? Do you know a blind man? You did once, maybe—Sunday School, Homer, Milton, Beckett, the knife thrower at the carnival when you were ten—but the feet are wrong, all out of whack, they don’t line up with the torso, they don’t face forward, they are coming your direction. You know them, those pointed, shiny black boots. Or should. What are they doing on your street? If this is, indeed, your street. The banister, the ornate iron which the man is passing, it’s not yours, it doesn’t lead to your house—at least, not this house, here, tonight.

You push up on the wood rails. The window doesn’t give. Nothing gives. No egress, no chance of communication. Only disconnection. You will never speak to this man. Never truly see him. And yet, he is always here. Always in passing. You can hear his stick tap. Night after night. Tapping. Cradling that doll.

Your childhood. That’s your childhood in his arms. Now you know where it went. It never left. It’s right outside. You can’t touch it, but it’s there. You’ll never get it back, he’ll never let it go, look at the way he clings to it, that man. He took it the night you abandoned your parents’ roof. The night you first penetrated a lover. The night you realized the dark was real, and you were destined for it. This night you realize he will always be out there, him and the babe in arms, passing by on this street—the street where you are—with pieces of a life dismembered, a life misplaced, a life, sometimes, you hope, well-lived. A life, certainly, well-haunted.
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And, though tomorrow night it will flame out, an echo—his name, their name, your mother’s voice, calling, like the light on the pole you thought you had lost track of—fires your subconscious.

Corning, New York, by Jason Baldinger (USA) 2024

Cloister
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Though I have taken vows, though I walk this path black-robed, hands folded, I am not blind. I see the young woman in shorts, the jaunty-jeaned man I might have been, the tent set for whatever feast day this fellowship celebrates. Whatever profane thing in which I must not, can not, participate. You may say it is my own choice, my cynical hermeticism, which seals me off from the laity, the flock, the world. And on certain days I agree. On those days I walk elsewhere than here, a different corridor, a sanctum sanctorum with only one view, and that not outward. But this corridor—this cloister of guilty pleasure—I have built with my own hands, blessed with my own benediction, sacrilegious as it may be to the Brothers who never promenade here. I am tempted—tempted, I say—to pause, to genuflect, as if the Sacrament were exposed, though what I see beyond the glass is surely sin, error, the fall, even if of my own making, of my own self. The panes rattle, a devil’s tongue of voices—Miles Davis, George Strait, Taylor Swift, calling from the tent. I press my hand to the trembling glass. Covet the exit at the distal end. Later, in my cell, I will remove the scapula, apply the lash. God help me.

Lorain, Ohio, by Jason Baldinger (USA) 2024

Escape

What sort of blueprint gave us this redundant stairway to nowhere? And why do we so blindly worship it? Surely such a sky was foreseen, such celestial conjuring forecast long ago. Not even a crossroads marks us, merely a T-bone. Had we intended to reach for the heavens? In a moment, the heavens will reach for us. The stop sign is facing the wrong way. We cannot help that we have given such a grandiose name to such a narrow lane in a no-stoplight town, it is in our nature. We are dreamers, schemers, stargazers. We reach for the impossible, improbable, unattainable, not expecting the dark to come for us one day, out of the blue, that we will need a way to get down as well as up, that we have cut ourselves off at the knees, drawn up no plans for retreat, no shelter from the storm. Perhaps if we take a right turn, follow that supernumerary Broadway into the reflection of our handiwork, we’ll find a loophole in our intentions, a way out of our built-in obsolescence, an escape from the threat of the idols of us.
 
Robert L. Dean, Jr. 
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Robert L. Dean, Jr.’s poetry collections are 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).  A multiple Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, he has had work appear in many literary journals. He is a member of The Writers Place. He has been a professional musician and worked at The Dallas Morning News. He lives in Augusta, Kansas, midway between the Air Capital of the World and the Flint Hills.
 
Jason Baldinger is a poet and photographer from Pittsburgh, PA. He’s penned fifteen books of poetry the newest of which include: A History of Backroads Misplaced: Selected Poems 2010-2020 (Kung Fu Treachery), and This Still Life (Kung Fu Treachery) with James Benger. His first book of photography, Lazarus, as well as two ekphrastic collaborations (with Rebecca Schumejda and Robert Dean) are forthcoming. His work has appeared across a wide variety of online sites and print journals. You can hear him from various books on Bandcamp and on lps by The Gotobeds and Theremonster. His etsy shop can be found under the tag la belle riviere.