Welcome to Issue 32.

One of the writers published in this issue told me recently that they felt that StepAway Magazine is needed now more than ever. They explained that our publication offers a vital stimulus to all those who dream of walking in cities.  I was deeply touched and at the same time saddened by this comment – touched because I am glad that our humble journal can offer some respite at this difficult time and saddened because for some the dream of freely exploring the streets of a city currently seems impossible.

There are those who continue to commute to work observing the restrictions. For them, the feeling of walking in the city is not so unusual (apart from the fact that they now wear a facemask).  Others may not have left their homes in almost a year, due to health restrictions or personal choice. I fall into the latter of these two categories and I dearly miss urban walking. The last time I walked in a city was on a visit to Florence February last – an unacceptable hiatus for the editor of a walking journal! We do, however, live in hope that the vaccine will prove effective and we will return in time to the life to which we were once accustomed.

As I write this editorial, the avid walker William Helmreich is in my thoughts. A professor of sociology at CUNY, Bill was known for writing The Manhattan Nobody Knows (2018) the research for which involved him walking every block in Manhattan – a total of 6,163 miles. I corresponded with Bill for a number of years and he read my PhD thesis with interest. One of the great excavators of city life, Bill passed away in March. This issue is dedicated to William Helmreich and all those we have lost to this cruel disease.

On a lighter note, I’d like to draw attention to new books published by writers whose work has featured previously in StepAway Magazine. Caroline Hardaker, a great supporter and friend of the magazine who featured in our #Lockdown issue has recently published her first collection of poetry, entitled Little Quakes Every Day (Valley Press, 2020). Here readers will find “tales of human evolution and natural laws, of technology, of the world’s problems and the twisted inventions we create”. Caroline also has a debut novel in the pipeline, Composite Creatures (Angry Robot, 2021), which is “a speculative literary take on a world where self-preservation is as much an art as a science”. This book will be published in April 2021, but pre-orders are now open.

Murzban F Shroff, whose short story we featured way back in Issue 7, is also about to publish his fourth book, Third Eye Rising, a collection of ten full-length stories that “makes visible the lives of the invisible and showcases the spiritual strengths of India”.

It is always wonderful to share the successes of StepAway writers. Turning attention to our current issue, fourteen writers feature: Jan Ball, Penny Blackburn, Alan Cohen, Philip Davison, Thomas Elson, Laura Glenn, Amlanjyoti Goswami, David Linklater, Abi Loughnane, Sinéad McClure, Martin Potter, Annette Skade, Marc Swan and Andrea Ward.

Some poems address our struggle with the epidemic, whereas others hark back to freer times. Regardless, there is some great writing here that reminds us of the city life many of us are missing. Wherever you are, and whatever your situation, I hope you can find the opportunity to sit back, pour yourself a glass of something comforting and enjoy our Christmas issue. Here’s to better times ahead.

With the warmest of festive wishes,

Dr Darren Richard Carlaw

editor@stepawaymagazine.com

Despite worldwide evidence,
no guidelines surfaced for continuing care.
She was killed by Covid.
I couldn’t be there.
Later, I couldn’t collect her personal effects—
clothes and paintings left hanging.

I hope the aide—
who called my mom her fave
and held her hand on one
of her last days—
was able to claim the still life
by my mother that she coveted.

I decline invites
from sympathetic friends
for safe-distance walks,
not trusting them any more
than I trust myself,
knowing it’s easy to blunder.

Take those talks on walks
with my husband—
when we stroll outside;
as we speak, I revert
to a childhood tendency,
and keep swerving into him.

Laura Glenn

I sit alone with my decaf grande
carmel macchiata, and write on
the quarto folded description of
the 45,000 mile service my Audi
Quatro will get today on extended
warranty, cell phone on, expecting
a call from the service department
guy just two blocks away.

A man bums a cigarette for a dollar
like a Melville harpooner in a distant
port and I wonder if this is a signal
for a drug deal until I see that the man
who has the cigarettes is joined by a friend
with two cups of steaming Starbucks
which makes me reflect on
what one of our doormen said:
I always carry a cup of coffee to work
at night because a Black man holding
a cup of coffee in a white neighborhood
is not threatening.

Later, when Audi Repair hasn’t called,
I struggle to walk home like a listing ship
with my bad knee scheduled
for replacement in February.
A woman my age asks, Are you all right?
Behind her, a young man briskly maneuvers
from the footpath to the curb
either to be kind or to avoid me.

Jan Ball

Spent on the road
Dodging rain
Soaked in leaves and plastic sheets
Away from a cop’s prying eye
Wearing a ready smile

Baked in the sixties.
On his face a beard
More Pound, less Eliot
He says he reads no poetry
But together we recite the lovesong of Prufrock from memory.

He does one line, I the next
A jugalbandhi across the oceans, just as
The sun goes down in mad mad Manhattan
Men meeting each other for the first
And perhaps the last time.

Evening
He reminds me (the long shadow of Eliot peering over his shoulder),
is etherised on a table.
While I joke, yes, people like us come and go
Like Michelangelo.

He waits for no peaches
Wears no trousers rolled
A pair of khaki shorts is all he’s got.
No ambition on his sleeve
Or hard work or rancour.

He offers the world, if we can take it.
There is ancient Egypt, today’s war of mass destruction
They jostle for attention.
A raindrop seeps between the leaves of
Robinson Jeffers

Before the trunks close for good. Close of day.
Lies in the service of truth. He cries prophet-like
At the glittering office buildings the next door.
His place is on the street.
They are so glib he says

Sometimes I believe their talk
More than I.
Why?
Everett of the New York street
Goes home. Finally Buddhist now, about the circle of life.

And yet and yet.
He carries a flame still to be born, of tomorrow.
A magi
Gift laden,
For a dollar and twenty.

Amlanjyoti Goswami

Through a crisis of crosses,
the churches boarded up
and all the black-eyed shopfronts
we went, minding the boy in Shetland
closer to the land than he’s felt in years.

Happy to be anything at all
we walked the cobbled vennels,
brew of meat and bin
lingering long in the nostrils
of our conversation.

I looked over at the wind,
that famous glass blower of the romantics
at work in her blonde run of hair
and felt the buoy roll in the heart.

We were quiet in talking,
in looking up at all prettiness
never seen with faces at the ground,
knowing something the other
may never know, and in stopping
beneath the Beech, having walked
long hours in each other’s feet,
were satisfied to simply stand there
deciding which face in the bark
was the tree’s soul.

David Linklater

You are where it began – at a time before polio shots, seat belts, and television. A time when visitors entered houses through unlocked kitchen doors.

And, after all these years, is it as you remember?

It’s early November, just past dusk. You stop at the corner two blocks east of a grand neighborhood concealed by trees. Look. On your left is the old basement house with dirt walls and next to it the two-story house of your grade school friend. But it’s the house two doors down at 507 West Blaine you came to see – beige and weathered, one of the many shotgun houses thrown up at the end of World War II.

You park, and, in an instant you are inside – small and almost silent. A harsh light from the pole lamp casts a shadow across the living room with a divan, a chair, a clock, and you – a four-year-old child, still eager and open to the world – sitting on the floor next to record player your mother bought, and encourages you to use.

The two of you have just finished playing outside, and now she kneels on the living room floor and inserts a new sapphire needle into the tip of the cumbersome, curved metal arm to replace the needle that skipped and scratched. She smiles, and her face opens as she refocuses your question; then she answers and strokes your upper back. This evening she also brought home a few spoken-word records -  the big 78 rpm kind. You choose the one about Columbus that tells of his ships and his voyage.

Then, as if on cue, your mother’s eyes shoot toward the clock. She checks her watch, twists her wrist, then shakes it as if hoping for some misreading. Her eyes grow flat. You watch. She presses her right hand against her stomach. Her shoulders curl, once again her eyes lock onto the clock. She sways slightly and shrinks. She rises from the floor, says nothing, trudges toward the bedroom, and closes the door.

Evenings weren’t like this when you were a family of two.

Alone in the living room, you hear the kitchen door slam. Your father, recently discharged from the Army, traipses past without looking down, glares at the closed bedroom door, walks forward, and opens it. You feel the shudder of door against frame.

Voices.

Silence.

Louder voices.

You flinch.

Silence.

One or two loud shouts, then nothing.

You listen, but hear only the wind, some creaks, and the record player. After a moment, the bedroom door opens. You tilt your head toward the hallway. Your left hand hovers over the arm of the record player as the narrative of Columbus’ travels continues.

You look to your right. You see your father, partially hidden behind the bedroom doorway, with only his right hand and half his face visible.

“Turn it off. It bothers your mother. She has a sick headache.”

Thomas Elson

Sidewalk ends here
Proceed at your own risk

Fourteenth floor apartment recast as used bookstore
Five overflowing case filled rooms
Overlooking water tanks and bridges
Men below asleep among rustbrown and green bottle shards
On benches and sidewalks in sunlight
80 premieres in just one week
In storefronts, old carriage houses, brownstones, parks, promenades
Ramshackle Filipino, French, Bolivian, Nigerian, & Malaysian restaurants all on the same block
Pinball cum videogame display case playgrounds
Commercial and container and passenger ships in their slips
Dwarfing a few last tramp steamers
A tug trundling past, a barge piled high with cabbages in tow
Museum, department store, train station and open air chamber concerts
Placid pigeons stationed on lintels, gutters
Or, wings wide, circling in the air
Winebars and chocolate truffle boutiques
Around a hasty corner from dark redlight, drugden alleys
Jade and art nouveau necklaces and bracelets in reinforced antique store windows
Hot dog stands and pushcart roasted chestnuts
Cranes and beams and hardhats and blank sky, airplane passing
Boarded up windows, graffitoed walls, discolored brick
Ferries and streetcars and subways and buses
And lightrails into the suburbs
Custom shops for dresses and suits and shoes
Gas stations with cars up on lifts
Rooftop gardens with Gaudi and Degas and Brancusi sculptures
Makeshift bus depots and train stations
Cantilevered under, above or between commercial behemoths
Pretty much all, except perhaps the drunks and pigeons, going now or gone

Alan Cohen

Each return visit to the place where I ran errands
builds phantom structures: the coal yard [now houses],
red brick mill chimney [more houses], the gas works
[apartments], canal, lime green with algae, [an amenity].

A young mother wakes at night to the crunch-thud
of coal sacks, flatmates dream of curved metal walls
like a spaceship, the moon sets off the howl
of the engine house, the low groan of barges.

Our minds move across the present like a coin on
a scratch card. Let me tell you, this city has layers,
breaking through wherever one person remembers.
There are millions of us spinning bricks and mortar.

My favourite ghost story. Winter’s evening, he’s off for
a pint, heads along a street bustling with bygone crowds
about their daily business. Witness to a haunting− or
does he stumble on a world of someone else’s making?

Look into the smoked-glass window of an office block,
a row of two-bed terraced stares back at you, trapped
by the passing thought of a passer-by. The multi-storey
carpark rattles in the wind. This entire city is possessed.

Annette Skade

Most nights we walked the rural turn
on a road the river fell below
before a row of tall houses,
wild gardens each side.
You often picked flowers here
it wasn’t stealing,
it was, you said, our land too.
No need to keep watch.

Poppies, daisies and buttercups,
no scent but strength in chains
and under-chin reflections,
petals to press into books.
I didn’t get the showy roses of Killiney.
I got doc leaves and nettles
and the sting of walking
the Commons Road without you after dark,
being chased by those who tried to claim me.
I got the sour stems of sorrel—we called Charlie—
to suck instead of sweets.

It made me harder than granny’s lavender borders
and more endemic than the hogweed that grew on Kilbogget,
softened only by the smell of stolen roses
and the memory of your laughter in the lane.

Sinéad McClure

yells and points our way.
A well-dressed woman
takes his arm, calms him down,
looks at us. In perfect English—
This is not the way Finns are,
apologizing for actions
of a man on a cobbled street

in downtown Helsinki.
We follow the Esplanade
to South Harbor, a summer market
with vendors in colorful attire,
including Roma, long skirts
billowing in a warm breeze,
flip phones in hand, selling
flowers, cheese, hand knitted socks,

leather goods, fish, vegetables.
I stop at a flower vendor, order
a bouquet for our wedding
the next day. On a Friday the 13th,
a magistrate conducts a ceremony
in Finnish, a witness snaps photos,

then into our own bright light
down the Esplanade
hand in hand to Kosmos,
a Russian restaurant
on Kalevankatu/Kalevagatan 3,
with a table for two, champagne,
fresh bouquet of white roses.

Marc Swan