Synkroniciti is excited to welcome back poet Robert L. Dean, Jr of Kansas in collaboration with Pittsburgh-based photographer Jason Baldinger. We’ve been lucky enough to have this wonderful duo in three consequent issues: “Curiosity,” “Broken,” and now “Space,” and Jason’s “Point Pleasant, WV” was our delightfully eerie cover for “Broken.” This time, “Memory Space” contains three poems and three photos. “Look Up” explores the interior of a ruined building in a ghost town near “Black Lick, PA.” “No one lives here, has ever lived here. Those rough-shod/ bricks, double-arched doors, cement butterfly pillars,/ there was industry here once,/ something built, mined, refined.” The tone is post-apocalyptic, observant and whimsical. “Dead Man’s Conservation Area” focuses on an old stump surrounded by a discarded tire and capped with trash, notably a SPAM tin. The resulting impression is of a crude altar, a monument to decay. Dean extends the metaphor, alluding to Jesus, who asked that his followers feed the hungry and clothe the sick. “Instead, I carted around/ all this rubbish,/ day by day,/ street by street,/ continent to continent,/ mistaking it for intimacy,/ benevolence, compassion.” “And so, I leave you this,/ in remembrance of me.” It is a haunting eulogy for capitalism and colonialism. Finally, “Old Style” contemplates a bar near the grain silos in “Blue Mound, IL.” This is a place that looms large in community history, but Dean wonders “if you walk through the door right now, with your chip-embedded plastic license and wi-fi ear buds, if you can still get an Old Style in a frosted mug, if Slim still remembers, if the air is still drunk with glory.” Time slips into the future and reality becomes legend.
Enjoy “Memory Space” in Synkroniciti’s November 30th issue, “Space,” Vol. 5, No. 4, available for purchase here: https://synkroniciti.com/the-magazine/purchase-individual-issues/.
Robert L. Dean, Jr. is the author of Pulp (Finishing Line Press); The Aerialist Will not be Performing: ekphrastic poems and short fictions to the art of Steven Schroeder (Turning Plow Press); and At the Lake with Heisenberg (Spartan Press). A Pushcart and Best of the Net nominee, his work has appeared in Mocking Heart Review; October Hill Magazine; Flint Hills Review; I-70 Review; Chiron Review; The Ekphrastic Review; Sheila-Na-Gig online; Shot Glass; Illya’s Honey; Red River Review; KYSO Flash; MacQueen’s Quinterly; Thorny Locust; River City Poetry; Suisun Valley Review; and Waco WordFest Anthology 2022.
Studying music composition with Dr. Walter Mays at Wichita State University before going on the road as a bass player, conductor, and arranger, Dean was a professional musician for 30 years. He played with Jesse Lopez, Bo Didley, Frank Sinatra Jr., Vic Damone, Jim Stafford, Kenny Rankin, B. W. Stevenson, and the Dallas Jazz Orchestra, also putting in a stint with the house band at the Fairmont Hotel Venetian Room in Dallas. He worked 20 years for The Dallas Morning News. A member of The Writers Place, Dean lives in Augusta, Kansas, along with a universe of books, CDs, LPs, and a couple dozen hats.