The review called it an Art House 
Film but here you are in your car 
with a metal speaker hanging off the lip 

of your half-rolled-down window and wondering 
if you should turn on the heat to blunt the cold wind 
leaking in, a flake or two mixed with it, how long 

the battery would last in this old clunker 
your dad bought you in high school, 
whether you’ll have to turn on the wipers 

if the snow gets heavier, why anyone would 
operate a drive-in in January, maybe it’s part 
of the Art House Effect, a Plein Air sort of thing, 

but that doesn’t explain why the film has started 
at the end, with the casket lowering into the grave 
in front of the stone with your name on it. 

Why the next scene is your mother giving birth, 
nothing between and all out of order. But wait, 
there’s Judy, in this very car, someone’s hand 

up her skirt, and your Senior year flashes by, 
that’s you marching on the field with your shako, 
the saxophone frozen in your hands, music fluttering 

on a card in the clip in front of your face, you make 
a swan or a figure eight or something, you and Judy 
negotiating the bucket seats and stick shift, 

where was that? Here? This theater? No wonder the name 
rang a bell when you saw the ad in the paper. And Sheryl. 
Yeah, Sheryl. Not this car, not this city. She tells you 

she’s getting married, dominoes scattered across a table 
behind her, the trail of you to this point, and what about 
love, someone says and it sounds like you, and someone says 

security, and it’s not you and I’m sorry and it’s both of you, 
tears streaming and you wonder how you lost touch with 
Judy and moved half a continent because Sheryl asked, 

and wonder, is this life, is this how it is, how it’s 
gonna be, quick dissolve to Kim in bed next to 
you, how numb your arm feels under her head, 

you’ve talked most of the night, it felt good, and 
not only the talk, and how she wants to 
leave Arkansas and move here, because of 

you. The phone rings. You reach for 
the speaker, put cold metal to your ear, the voice 
comes to you out of the blind numb winter 

swirling like a tornado, says, 
Dad’s dead, and it’s your brother 
and you’re back at the cemetery, 

a casket lowering, the shared stone 
already in place from when your mom died, 
all you have to do is 

add another end date to it, 
and you wonder, as you see yourself 
on screen, looking at the empty space 

next to them that now bears your name 
on the deed, if that’s it, that’s the end, 
all she wrote, your brother walking away 

from your grave with someone’s grandkids 
and you seem to remember 
there was love in there, somewhere, off-screen. 

Robert L. Dean, Jr.

is the author of The Night Window, with photographs by Jason Baldinger (Kung Fu Treachery Press, 2025); Pulp (Finishing Line Press, 2022); The Aerialist Will Not Be Performing, ekphrastic poems and short fictions in response to the art of Steven Schroeder (Turning Plow Press, 2020); and At the Lake with Heisenberg (Spartan Press, 2018).

Dean’s work has been nominated multiple times for the Pushcart Prize and Best of the Net, and has appeared or is forthcoming in: Chiron Review; The Ekphrastic Review; Flint Hills Review; Heartland! Poetry of Love, Resistance & Solidarity; I-70 Review; Illya’s Honey; KYSO Flash; MacQueen’s Quinterly; Midwest Quarterly; MockingHeart Review; October Hill Magazine; Red River Review; River City Poetry; Sheila-Na-Gig online; Shot Glass; Suisun Valley Review; Synkroniciti; Thorny Locust; Waco WordFest Anthology 2022; and the Wichita Broadside Project.

A native Kansan, Dean studied music composition with Dr. Walter Mays at Wichita State University before going on the road as a bass player, conductor, and arranger; he was a professional musician for 30 years, playing with acts such as Jesse Lopez, Bo Didley, Frank Sinatra Jr., Vic Damone, Jim Stafford, Kenny Rankin, B. W. Stevenson, and the Dallas Jazz Orchestra. And he put in a stint with the house band at the Fairmont Hotel Venetian Room in Dallas. While living in Dallas, he also worked 20 years for The Dallas Morning News and made the transition from music to writing before moving back to Kansas in 2007.

Dean is a member of The Writers Place and the Kansas Authors Club. He lives in Augusta, Kansas, midway between the Air Capital of the World and the Flint Hills.

More on the Web: By, About, and Beyond

⚡ Crosswalk Jesus: A Moment in Four Facets, prose poem by Robert L. Dean, Jr. published in MacQueen’s Quinterly (Issue 25, September 2024) and nominated for Best Small Fictions 2025

⚡ At the Lake with Schrödinger’s Cat, poem by Dean published in MacQ (Issue 21, January 2024) and nominated for the Pushcart Prize

⚡ Breath of the Lord, ekphrastic poem by Dean after a photograph by Jason Baldinger, published in MacQ (Issue 19, August 2023) and nominated for Best Spiritual Literature 2024

⚡ Finding the Door: One Writer’s Approach to Ekphrasis, an essay on craft by Robert L. Dean, Jr. in MacQ (Issue 13, May 2022)

⚡ Windmill, ekphrastic poem inspired by Dean’s maternal grandfather, published in KYSO Flash (Issue 11, Spring 2019) and nominated for the Pushcart Prize.

⚡ Metal Man, ekphrastic poem inspired by a 1955 photograph of Dean’s paternal grandfather in the Boeing machine shop, published in The Ekphrastic Review (28 July 2018) and nominated for Best of the Net

⚡ Llama, 1957, ekphrastic haibun by Robert L. Dean, Jr. inspired by Inge Morath’s photograph A Llama in Times Square, published in The Ekphrastic Review (13 January 2018)

⚡ Hopper and Dean: Interview and poems in River City Poetry (Fall 2017)