Every Saturday night, cast in shadow and fog, our Crew – a Melvillian band of shadow laden pranksters – lingered curbside near a moon-shined fire hydrant.

            “How many years we been submerged in America’s academic shackles?” one boy snorted and spit.

            “Damn long,” another barked.

            “Need out,” one said. “Need to get away.”

The Crew were the directionless scraps of the late baby boomers. If you took the time to look at them, really look at them, they were nothing but Northern California boys and young drunks too keen to lean on the liquid. The edge of they-knew-not-where or what was waiting. They could feel it, and they didn’t like it.

            The sputtering of a spit-shined car exhaust pipe collided with our shifting faces as a rouge pair of headlights cut through us.

            “Hush, quiet, cutty, cutty, cutty,” a voice ordered.

            One shadow began to flee.

            A rough hand grabbed their shoulder.

            “Chill,” they said. “Chill.”

            The headlights passed. Someone called someone a soft bitch. A fist hit a soft stomach. A mouth sprang and spoke.

            “That looked like that a mom back late from Whole Foods.”

            “The one who flirts with all the cashiers?” Someone asked.

            “Yeah, her, yeah her,” they said. “She never forgets to leave her wedding ring in the drink coozy whenever she comes in for a shampoo and La Croix. Frisky Mrs. Dixon with the short cherry-red hair and wandering eyes.” They licked their lips and smiled Cheshire. “I fucked her once, you know.”

            A round of bullshits spilled out like a poorly tapped keg.

            “Bull-yes,” they defended. “Some of us got some game.”

            Shoulders bobbed in hushed chuckling. 

After a pause, the existential question of “what next” quietly settled back amongst the ranks. As Larkin wrote, till then I see what’s always there/ Un-resting death, a whole day nearer now/Making all thought impossible but how/And where and when I shall myself die. Our end was not a literal one but merely a transition of identity. Secondly, our individual demise was the disintegration of the tribe, a security that would soon be dispelled by circumstance and time.

The Crew’s bodies shifted like rusted gears in the now silent night. The flushed orange lamp post, coupled with the oily sky, bled on. We were silhouettes in transformation. The 101 curling south droned in the distance. All those cars with all those people with all those bodies were going somewhere for something for someone. The Crew wanted something, somewhere, someone on their terms. Agency was their only weapon against the buzzkill of determinism.

            “San Francisco,” a voice piped up. “She’s out there, far and away yet right within reach. She has all the answers. The city by the Bay is the way. Let’s go.”

            Rowley, the only one with a ride, asked, “Should we take out the old The White Whale?”

            The 10-seater, 10 miles to the gallon, white Ford suburban brooded by. Dr. Dre’s The Next Episode thumped against its metal walls. The White Whale was anxious. It wanted to go somewhere. It needed fulfillment.

            “I’m down,” The Crew muttered as one. “Very in. Very dope. Let’s roll.”

            In celebratory sugar-infused maple and molasses joy, the Captain Morgan got passed around, freewheeling. Each one of us took a hit of the liquor, struck by its smoky, chemical sting as it flowed over our virgin throats, burning our guts. A faint hand appeared in the middle of our pow-wow with a lit cigarette. Another hand plucked it and brought it to their mouth. The drag showered us with the warmth of deadly light.

            Drizzle stabbed at our backs.

            Another hit of the rum.

            The White Whale roared for our attention.

            We piled in, five in the back, three in the middle, two in the front. Time turned off, and the stereo turned the fuck up. Wu Tang’s 36 Chambers slapped the Pacific wind that shot in from the windows. The smell was a concoction of stale liquor, beer, sea salt, and nicotine. Elbows jabbed into torsos as Rowley slurred onto the highway. A faded In N’ Out shuttered by. We climbed up and over the 101 South to San Francisco.

             “Cop,” someone whispered.

            The music cut. A faceless form murmured something. I said nothing. I was not me. I watched as the cop’s blue and red firework lights sped off into the darkness, seemingly unconcerned with our shenanigans. Everyone exhaled in their beer-soaked seats.

            “Who cares about us?” I said aloud, “But us.”

            Like Jean-Paul Sartre said, Existentialism is a humanism.

            Rowley curled his fingers over the steering wheel. His sober eyes squinted into the rearview mirror. “Clear?”

            The Crew nodded in the shadows.

            Rowley fought off the rain spilling over the White Whale’s body by pressing down the gas. Bodiless heads bounced up and down in their seats. More rum, more beer. An ambulance suddenly whipped past us, their red and white lights whirling. We all opened a round and roared at their selflessness. The frothy suds bubbled over onto our hands. Drunk off our presumed infinite youth, we reveled in our haughty disobedience, steering blind into one synchronized kaleidoscopic future.

In that moment, we did not know ourselves as individuals.

We only knew each other as one.

The Crew was the Crew was the Crew.

            The White Whale breached Robin Williams Tunnel. We saw the Golden Gate stretch out her rusted hands toward us. Soft, blinking amber lights lined the muscular tubes of her veins curving upwards. Across the Bay, a million square fireflies’ whirled, row after row; a swarm of zip codes. A smile appeared on my face.

            Maybe this would be it, I thought. Maybe this is where I should be next.

Rowley caught my eye in the rearview mirror. “There is little time for sentimental revelations. Snap out and snap-in.”

With shot gunned beers and cheerful annihilation over choppy waters, we hurtled onward aiming for infinite escalation.

---

”New Home” is based in my Mexican/Spanish background and the stories I’ve heard my abuelita talk about coming from Tijuana to the Bay Area. The poem is from the viewpoint of one of her sons. My aim was to capture the contrast of the mysticism of her stories with the hardships of not knowing what was going to on the other side of a new life. This poem is for my abuelita Bertha and her husband, Samuel who I never had the chance to meet. He was a World War 2 veteran that fought in D-Day.

---

_{New Home}

My eyes were the shapes
Of avocado pits,
Silver as a new peso,
Blue as the Pacific
On the first day of summer.

That’s what
Madre told me at least.

My arms were fat
Like pork loins;
Plump and squishy.
They were tanned like
Padre’s work boots.
He shined them
Every night
Con un cigarillo in
The right corner of his mouth.

If madre was asleep
And I woke to pee,
He was usually out there
Lit by the cornmeal porch light,
The cow milk moon,
The bullet-riddled sky.

Ey boy, he called out to me in a whisper one night.

I said nothing,
I just went.

He picked me up
Like a small dog
Or a fat cat and
Put me on his knee.

You know we going soon? Padre asked me.

I shook my head no, saying nothing

Beyond those hills, Padre said. Over them.

He blew a thin river of smoke through his lips.
The smoke hovered there, uninterrupted.

The air was still and smelled like warm dust; 

Hopeful coercion.

Then, Padre took his cigarillo from his mouth and
Hung it over my fresh, soft caterpillar lips.

Open your mouth boy. Breathe in.

I did what I was told.

Smoke. Fire. Burning.

I thought,

This is how men breathe.

I started to cough.
Padre’s hand covered my mouth.
He laughed as he patted my back
With the palm
Of his other hand.

The inside of his hand
Tasted like tobacco,
Like dirt,
Like the salt of the sea,

Like work.

You ok, he chuckled. You ok boy.

He wiped a tear from my cheek.
I looked into his meditative eyes.
They were jagged, creased, as if
There was a silent earthquake of fear
Rumbling inside of them.

Where are we going? I asked.

New home. He coughed,
Jammed the cigarillo back into his mouth.
Gray smoke rolled over his face.

He doesn’t blink.

---

_Propensity

Be it this
Horror
I hold around my
Waist

Or that
Pleasure
That I hold around my
Heart

Proves pain
And pleasure
Are nothing but
Reminders

Of life
Of life
And its measures
Of propensity

If pain
Or pleasure sways
Rather
Than guide
To one’s own discovery

We will be but mechanisms
Of mechanisms
Of mechanisms

Who hath no name.

---

When I was a very young child & I heard the moog trills of the In Search Of theme music, I would run into my room & hide under my covers.  The grainy black & white images of the intro. sequence alone frightened me: a grainy row of rapa nui, a ruined Scottish castle, a crystal skull, but I still would listen from that vantage & catch fragments of Leonard Nimoy’s earnest narration & those images, that voice, never left.  
 
When I was a young child & finally could bring myself to watch the show, I would have nightmares of being chased by UFOs & lifted into the sky, until I grew up & then I would have dreams of being followed by UFOs & lifted up into the sky: home at last.  What I once feared became a trusted friend, Nimoy’s voice a source of comfort & wonder. It’s funny because most people know that voice as the pathologically logical Mr. Spock, but I knew it most intimately as Leonard himself, or rather the self he farmed out to Rodenberry’s seminal paranormal documentary show.  My Leonard Nimoy had a mustache & a lilac ascot. 
 
Andy Warhol, another alien, another hero or mine, said that images are worth repeating, or at least that’s what Lou Reed & John Cale said he said, & when Leonard died in 2015 I began the project of watching every single episode of In Search Of & mining them for phrases, images & impressions, much like I did in my childhood bedroom.  The show is far greater than the sum of its parts: —the sublime soundtrack—Nimoy’s exquisite outfits—actual academics who, in the 1970s, believed we might actually be able to talk to plants.  The poems are Pop Art, drawing from the well of our popular obsessions.  
 
Over the course of the turbulent years following the 2016 election, the birth of my daughter in 2017 & beyond, the In Search Of project once again became my way of hiding under the covers & now that it’s done I still miss the practice & the man himself.  The character of Leonard began to emerge from the static of the poems, a messianic everyman, a font of arcane knowledge, gaunt & handsome & otherworldly in his burgundy turtleneck & houndstooth blazer, gazing out at the vastness of the Himalayas in search of the Yeti, combing the Sahara desert for King Solomon’s mines, or trying to teach an erstwhile circle of toddlers ESP.  

^{In Search of Life After Death}

Code blue miniskirts.

Leonard, what is it like

on the other side? 

Challenging the definitions,

watching a man die

on the television.  What is 

a useful life?  Leonard 

abandons the turtleneck, 

unfurls a collar testing the line

between life & death. 

Floating over the red bug, 

the blue pool, the green field:

peace, tranquility & low-end

warbling.  Tell the nurse 

you’re not there.  Start your heart

again, without speaking. 

Put on your mask.  

Leave your body.  Do not return

to the hospital.  Become involved

with the canopy of leaves.

Cut open wide awake, make a board

of mind thought.  

You cannot see the wound.

---

^{In Search of Reincarnation}

A girl living now. 

The father of the assembly line

in another body.  

One who suffers

is very, very heavy. 

More or less picking 

Scandinavia. 

Normative, safe 

& reliable,

an elaborate questionnaire.

Bob hears the syllables. 

Leonard’s huge red tie

spilling over into the present

in the graveyard.

Going a million miles an hour

as a girl named Maria. 

So many working-class lives

cannot be imaginary.

A number of histories 

in Connecticut.  

What is your favorite 

teacher’s name?  You are

minus twenty.  A crisis

in a distant land, a cinematic 

revolution.  The harpsichords

of 1613 are listening, moving 

on a ribbon toward

rippling mustaches, 

a comforting feeling. 

Someone must be minding 

the store.

---

^{In Search of Past Lives}

Leonard has an unexplainable

tingling in a military habit

up until the Middle Ages. 

A person keeps coming back 

& coming back & coming back 

to emotional traumas. 

All you’ve got to do is blame your parents. 

A series of relationships with sadness.

The presence of a stranger outside

of this lifetime.  The key moment 

of early afternoon, walking down a 

pathway, hands around my throat. 

I had no belief at all.  One heartbeat,

two dolls.  There is the school 

that lies below.  Sometimes I feel 

like an unshakeable theory, fragmented

images.  

A gold phoenix listens very hard 

to the market square. 

She searches her mind for grey 

stone.  The first impression

used only by royalty.  I could be 

laying down in the very same 

oratory.  

Even in the basket, you’ve got 

a romantic notion of the ground.

A sitar continues on beyond question.

---

^{In Search of Life after Life}

One particular morning,

I was dead.  

A gigantic brightness;

I knew I was missing. 

Leonard folds his suede 

hands.  The definition 

is obvious, a lack. 

Cooling the rat 

in attempt

to find the point. 

A body will suffer

& simply be written off.

The first question is

totally paralyzed. 

She began drifting

toward a computer 

printout.  What is 

to come is an exquisite

fear. 

---

^{In Search of Life Before Birth}

The unborn has travelled 

Drinking & smoking are a normal part of life 

The principle of sound waves

What part of the house are you in? 

Everything seems dark

The economy of the mind 

We know the dimension of feeling 

Leonard is extremely sensitive & volatile 

A sensing, feeling & aware human being 

A fetal flute

---

My mother carries

an entire biography

in the palms of 

two small hands,

each wrinkle deep 

and rich with story.

I listen as I 

hold them in mine.

Sometimes, 

when I bring them

close to my ear,

songs of moments

long forgotten ring out 

into the space between us.

From the sound of her

bike wheels hitting 

the dirt road,

to that of my 

father’s calling voice

the day she

caught his eye.

---

Nam Hoang Tran is a writer living in Orlando, FL. His work appears or is forthcoming in The Daily Drunk, Star 82 Review, Bending Genres, (mac)ro(mic), and elsewhere. Find him online at www.namhtran.com.

Washed Away. 

Arthur Schopenhauer said: “After your death you will be what you were before your birth“. When we think of birth, we often forget to remember death. The joy of seeing new life or the prospect of new beginnings and opportunities are seldom marred by the inevitability of the end; death. Yet, the possibility of death [the end] is ever-looming in all instances; for that which is born, must die. However, that which has died (or ended), will in some form or another be born once more. For energy cannot be created or destroyed, it can simply be transferred or transformed.

---

The intent of these photographs is to depict the continuous cycle that Birth and Death (and Resurrection) share. It is also symbolic of the passage of time that has lapsed between the two photographs; this passage could be regarded as life (the short, healing space between Birth and Death). On a more personal note, the photographs depict the physical and metaphysical struggle that the photographer experiences with Obsessive Compulsive Disorder. Every day, it is as though her personality is being eroded [washed away] by her disorder; she must heal [rebuild/regrow] from the wounds or gaps that it [the disorder] leaves in her life.

---

Shiksha uses poetry (mostly) to express her internal and external struggles and journeys, inclusive of her OCD and depression roller-coaster ventures. Mostly, however, she writes in the hopes that someday, someone will see her as she is; an incomplete poem. 
Shiksha has been featured as the Poet of the Month for January 2012 for Forward Poetry and has also had poetry featured on the Aerodrome online literary journal, Poetry Potion and Visual Verse. 

_{I listened (Nirvana)}

To rest on the shores of Nirvana

You must freeze your flow

Cut connections to the current

And sift through your skin

Because buried in you

Is the desire to drown, 

It’s better if you stab your eyes

To prepare for never-ending night

And if you opt for vision

Don’t confuse sheets of ice

For a sky you once romanticized

This was your plan for me

And because I loved you,

I listened

---

_Blizzard

Most of my life

I have been told

Specters can’t be spotted

In snowstorms

Nor can rivers contribute

To the world’s wellspring

With solidified streams

But despite popular belief

Even an orb

Contributes to a blizzard

---

Carson Sandell is a twenty-one-old gay and demisexual poet from San Jose, CA. Currently, he’s a student at Mission College Santa Clara with dreams of becoming a Creative Writing professor. Beyond school and poetry, he is an article writer for The Walled City Journal. 

Cento from “Ideology”, “I WAKE UP CURLED UP IN A C.D. WRIGHT POEM”, “Mother of All Balms”, and “Reading Rilke at Lake Mendota, Wisconsin” by Aria Aber & Where Reasons End by Yiyun Li

---

Aura Martin is a writer from Missouri. She is the author of the chapbook Those Embroidered Suns (Lazy Adventurer Publishing) and the micro-chapbook Thumbprint Lizards (Maverick Duck Press). Her poems have appeared in EX/POST MAGAZINE, Kissing Dynamite, perhappened mag, and elsewhere. In Aura’s free time, she likes to run and take road trips. Find her on Twitter @instamartin17.

The counselor urged us to talk. 

“It’s a chance for you to tell your story.”

This wasn’t a story to me. It was my life and I was still living. 

I sat in the circle with other damaged people. We listened to talk about what was wrong with us and how we could save ourselves. If we heeded the words being spoken, we might be able to heal. A long shot because we were diseased, nearly monstrous, but without the terrible will and determination to be real monsters. We couldn’t even get mutancy right. 

One speaker said the truth was being shined right in front of us. Were we too stubborn and blind to see? We hadn’t been born blind. We’d chosen to live in darkness. Another speaker said our lives were genetically mapped for us. We had to redraw the lines. We were our own cartographers. Next, we were fallen sinners, our lives moved by judgment. 

I thought of my mother, heard her words from when I was fourteen in the emergency room getting my stomach pumped. She’d leaned in, hissed, “I hope you know how much this little stunt is costing.”

I looked at my shoes. The polish had worn off. Salt stains showed like chalk dust.  

“Do you have a problem right now?” the counselor said. 

Yes, I did. I was in the circle in that room under duress. I was there because it had beaten out death by a narrow margin. Now the consciousness I hadn’t ended was being bombarded. 

I was annoyed but tried to look placid and placate the staff. If I played along, I would stand at my graduation––the only graduation I’d ever had––and be applauded and given a certificate, a slice of store-bought sheet cake, and a plush toy bear wearing a collar adorned with a valentine heart locket engraved So-Bear. 

The truth was what I loved about myself were the things I’d been told were bad. The need to fix life and be happy was militant and all militancy was born of fear. 

Of course, I was afraid, too. I was afraid of what came after this place. 

Tomorrow would bring more speakers who quoted great thinkers and not great thinkers and told anecdotes, parables, and riddles. The anecdotes would have points. The parables would illustrate the points. The riddles would be solved. Mysteries vanquished, we would eat bland foods and shuffle to our rooms where we were not allowed to close the doors. We would read the literature and fall asleep to wake in the night and think of words we had heard until we became ventriloquist dummies. My mind would repeat the words it had every night since I’d arrived: Never explain yourself to others, it only leads to confusion.

---

Nate Lippens lives in Wisconsin. His writing has appeared in Catapult, Entropy, Fugue, Hobart, New World Writing, Vol. 1 Brooklyn, and the anthology Queen Mob’s Tea House (Dostoyevsky Wannabe, 2019).

 _Wheels 

I remember feeling, 

long ago, 

some of that 

derisory 

teenage anguish— 

as if I fell to my feet, 

warlike music all around. 

Now I’m in the car, 

my arm 

outstretched, in the blustery weather, 

remarkably euphoric 

and roaring into downtown, 

torn apart and put back together 

then torn apart again and hollowed out— 

shifting, collapsing 

and making myself 

a fireside inside the frame. 

There is something about this ride, 

the way the air floods and encircles, 

breezes through 

the vents and sockets. 

Passengers unaware 

as they set up house around me, 

snuggling into coats 

and abandoning old customs. 

We all hear the music now, 

so I strum my fist a piece 

because all that exists, 

whether reminiscences 

or the earth itself, 

will eventually not be, 

and because I cannot rest 

under these stars above the hood. 

Not even in remembrance. 

---

_{What Bird are You?} 

A Brown Thrasher is trying to build a nest 

on what remains 

of the broken light fixture on our back porch. 

She ignores an angry family of Blue Jays 

picking a fight in a bush nearby. 

It’s just after Easter, 

so she gathers shreds of sparkly green tinsel 

from the neighbor’s trash bin 

and tries to carefully drape each strand 

over the inch of iron 

jutting out from the brick. 

Hours into her quest, 

and she doesn’t seem to mind 

when nothing sticks 

or when moss and leaves 

gather in a mound beneath her. 

If I were a bird, 

I would hang out in a line 

on one of those signs stretching over the highway, 

chatting in my ancient bird language, 

honking with the cars racing below me. 

To stay dry, 

I would sit in the corner during a rainstorm, 

where signpost meets steel bar, 

and build my beautiful nest on the streetlight 

near the overpass 

so everyone would see 

I’d stare back 

into a cat’s yellow eyes 

as it digs its nails 

crossly into the ground 

because within me 

are hopeful monsters— 

Tetanurae 

Coelurosauria 

Paraves 

Tommy’s Thrush 

would have nothing on my song. 

Percy’s Skylark 

would pale before my soar. 

---

Christi Gravett (38) is a queer, non-binary professor from Little Rock, Arkansas. They’ve taught both Rhetoric and Creative Writing at the college level for 12 years. Christi has had non-fiction, poetry and photography published in various independent and small-press publications, and currently has a chapbook of 20 poems, titled “We Monsters”, available on Amazon. Their work provides glimpses into larger stories, focusing on single striking moments of happiness or discovery, unsaturated by heavy meaning.

---