Dear Reader,

David Hockney once spoke of his childhood love of going to the cinema (or the ‘pictures’ as us northerners refer to it). He admitted that watching a film had a powerful effect on him. Beforehand, he’d be walking though the dingy streets of his hometown, eager for the cinema to transport him to another world: “when you come out you’ve been in the French Revolution or somewhere…you come out with your imagination working.”

I’ve always felt this way about visiting the Tyneside Cinema in my own hometown of Newcastle upon Tyne. Opened in 1937, and designed and built by Dixon Scott (the Great Uncle of Sir Ridley and Tony Scott), this independent cinema remains one of the city’s key cultural landmarks. As a teenager, I fell in love with world cinema here, and, like Hockney, I too felt transported to another world.

It is for this reason that the cover of this issue of StepAway Magazine has great personal significance. Our cover photograph, shot by local photographer David Hall, captures the Tyneside Cinema’s alleyway entrance. The image has great cinematic appeal in its own right, reminiscent of a slick, high contrast still from Sin City. But beyond this, it makes me think of all of the cinemagoers who have walked this alleyway still dreaming of the faraway worlds they have just recently encountered on screen.

The alleyway, for me, has always been a liminal space. It is here that you make that slow transition from the cinematic world in which you have been immersed back to the reality of everyday life. Walking this alleyway allows you to adjust, and to daydream, momentarily, of still being in Paris, New York or Rome, before rejoining the crowds of shoppers at Grey’s Monument.

David Hall’s photograph is fascinating in the sense that it captures this phenomenon, projecting a gritty neo-noir filmscape onto what, for some, is no more than a mundane urban thoroughfare. David is driven by the desire to capture the beauty of Newcastle upon Tyne from as many unique and poetic angles as possible. His portfolio is not to be missed.

As always, this issue holds the power to transport the reader far and wide. Our writers include: Malcolm Friend, Laura Glenn, E. A. M. Harris, Monique Kluczykowski, Ann Matthews, Jane Molinary, Sue Spiers, Brendan Todt, Melissa Tombro and Sally Vogl.

I hope that you enjoy reading this, our sixteenth issue, marking the fourth birthday of StepAway Magazine.

Yours faithfully,

Darren Richard Carlaw
editor@stepawaymagazine.com

Yesterday, while taking a vaporetto
to a museum, I photoed
a woman, at her window
looking quaint―
unshuttered but still
planted, leaning toward sunlight.

It’s morning; I fling open the shutters: see past
terra-cotta rooftops
like neatly whelmed-over plant pots,
and a windowsill planter where thyme flowers.
Laundry sways on a line;
my braid sways, too―long enough
for a ledge mouse to climb.

Beneath my third-story window
people stream across
a tiny bridge
where murmur blends with burble.
An oarsman dips and pulls
against the current―his wooden boat glides
between brick walls,
then disappears under the bridge,
ferrying today’s bread.

Water divides the city the bridges connect:
to my left, a fruit stand
in front of a small bookstore;
part of the city I haven’t explored yet, to my right.

If I walk farther than the eye can see,
I’ll find more
water-stained buildings with pointy arched windows
~ and their watery reflections ~
some housing portraits of women,
framed by windows, their hair bejeweled―
not undone by the wind like mine has become.
I’ll scoff at rabid tourism,
yet everywhere stalls of scarves
will beckon me to choose.

I look down at the stream of people, and fancy
I’m like none of them,
though soon I’m one of them, crossing
another small bridge.

Laura Glenn

Praise the blues
of this gray-sky city,
the sweat-stained t’s
sticking to the chest that labored
to keep your heart inside
after almost getting jumped,
the trembling twigs that replaced
your skinny legs.

Praise the skinny legs
that didn’t let it happen,
learning to hop fences,
plop back down,
and speed
through the South End.

Praise the South End,
the ball courts laced
from Genesee
to Othello,
the shouts of
“Souf End!”
pouring from every street,
from every boy.

Praise the boys
on Rainier and Wabash,
whose shouts mutated
from Black vernacular
to black African
languages over the years.

Praise Rainier,
winding
concrete river
from the CD
to the South End,
all the way down
to Henderson,
where men barked catcalls
to every woman whose hips
protruded,
swayed just the way
they liked;
where South End war stories
were exchanged,
accusations of
punk ass
and bitch ass
and you ain’t real
tainting reputations
across the street
from Rainier Beach High.

Praise Rainier Beach High,
the school clinging
onto life
like the ivy clinging
to its blue-lettered walls,
school you took
the 7
and the 106 to avoid,
a simple act
seen as treason by any
who happened to board
with you,
steps pounding concrete
as they stared you down.

Praise the concrete,
street names Vampire
and Leech,
for all the blood
it consumed—
from the lip you split
on Cloverdale
to the skin
of a teenager split
by bullets
on Fisher—
every blood-soaked corner
of Rainier.

Praise the corner
of Rainier and Wabash,
the drug dealers who crept down
to avoid the cops,
the sharp snap
of footsteps
snapping you from sleep—
how you don’t sleep sometimes
because you can still hear
the echo.

On those nights
when the echoes are loudest,
when the hum of streetlights
is drowned out
by footsteps
pounding the pavement
of your mind,
praise Rainier Beach.

Malcolm Friend

‘I didn’t hear you,’ she said. ‘Tell me again,’ she commanded. Her voice held a snigger.

The old man’s pale eyes rolled in her direction. ‘All are doomed! Even you!’

Sylvie stuck out her tongue at him then spun round and sauntered away. She could get sarcasm even into her walk.

As she flounced round the corner, the voice followed her, ‘You are doomed. Doomed! Your end is certain.’

Doom may have been after Sylvie but he took his time – she lived another ninety years, all that time in the house she was born in, round the corner from the sweet shop. She knew the neighbourhood like her own skin. She walked, ran, skate-boarded, cycled and drove over it until she was its oldest inhabitant.

But she never went into Monument Street again.

E. A. M. Harris

I’ve heard strangers in the bistro say into their telephone
“Meet me at the statue at nine.
From there we will share a cab to the playhouse.”
“Meet me at the statue under the cover of night.
Wear a backwards cap and bring cash.”
Homeless found dead under the statue at dawn.
Their bodies zipped like the hooker’s
purse at the end of her shift.
Men meeting with men, tangled like iron.

Nearby, a woman, found beaten, insists
she will never press charges.
Birds flip rudely in their water.
A man, like me, slows as he runs.
He nearly trips on a park bench but does not.
A sad bush brings forth another sad puff of leaves.

Brendan Todt

Melissa Tombro

Jenny follows the buzz of power lines
and the gurgle of the storm drain
to the all-way stop, one block from school.

Today she’ll prove to her mobility teacher—
whose footsteps are close behind—that she
can ace the lesson. Her cane slides

off the first curb, but a mower blasts her ears;
Go away, she says. I can’t hear if cars
are coming. When it’s quiet, she steps down,

feels the crown of the street rise and fall
before reaching the other side. On the fourth
crossing, she completes the circuit,

marching over asphalt, but misses
the next sidewalk, her cane snagging
on a thicket of grass. Jenny reaches left,

more grass, right, still the cane gets tangled.
She stalls and turns away from her teacher.
Thumping, then panting, announce

a big dog approaching; it brushes her legs.
Jenny bends down, sweeping her fingers
through curls of fur, the inside layers

still moist from the rain that fell earlier.
Breathing in the damp smell, she strokes
the dog again and again, welcoming

the distraction. The animal trots off,
its nails clicking on the sidewalk.
Is it the walk leading back to school?

Jenny trails behind the nice dog, hoping
to reach her school building—praying to hear
echoes reflected by her tapping cane.

Sally Vogl

At the end of your mobility lesson—
Crossing at Traffic Lights—dusk ignites
ribbons of orange flames, fingering

the winter sky. For three years
I’ve preached the gospel of safe travel.
You know all the math: how many inches

you must arc your cane across your body
to avoid running into poles, how to measure
the depth from street gutters to curb tops

with your cane, and what moment to press
the pedestrian button so you can position
yourself between yellow lines, ready

to cross Kings Canyon Road with the surge
of parallel cars. At each lesson, you plant
your four-foot-eleven frame on a corner,

a silhouette in the afternoon sun, black hair
riffled by a breeze. Sometimes you giggle
when pop music thumps from a car radio,

then you recover your focus, stepping
from curb to street, your timing
as accurate as a metronome.

Today you hesitated. It was the big trucks,
you say. Startled by the boom, you stood
frozen, as if clamor alone could flatten.

Sally Vogl

A runnel of flesh-sacs bring dead torches;
swarm, fingering the vertigo rigging;
engrave their blood in the sea-vat brickwork;
leave scrape-skin on malingering tarmac;
scorch the rats out of the flood-up tunnels.

Sparks glint in the pent-up deck then vanish.
Cod-acetylene leaks stink up the wharf;
can’t prevent the bold-explode cap-gashing,
swarf-shrapnel threshing welders in the hold.
No gifts for them sod-worth the working stint.

Sue Spiers

I am given the tour the next day—
sleek glass towers (circa 2008), stone towers (circa 800).
The subway tunnel gleams clean

as a surgical suite. It is a wormhole
in time, transporting us to the Old Town,
where crooked candy-coloured townhouses

overlook a square filled with white umbrellas.
Here a palace, there a palace; my uncle from Krakow,
resplendent in a cravat, meets us, embracing me

in another square before another palace,
handing me a red rose. He looks like my father.
He takes my hand as we walk to the park

where students play Chopin as girls in white lace
dance with boys in blue velvet, gold epaulets flashing
as they spin and curtsy and bow. Chopin lived and ate everywhere,

even near the house Madame Curie owned.
I break the rules, lift the rope, let my fingertips glide
over the satin wood of her small desk.

On the way home, I step on bricks set into the sidewalk,
a thin red road running under buildings, outlining what once was
the Jewish Ghetto (death toll 300,000).

My cousin drives us to Strzelno, my father’s birthplace,
where my other uncle still lives in a subsidized tenement flat,
just a block from the graveyard. But we must stop

at Chopin’s country house first, unfurnished except for the piano,
white-washed walls leading to bright green gardens where notes
from hidden speakers float down like willow leaves.

We buy live flowers for the dead, my grandparents tucked amongst
their children. Soon my father will be scattered over them,
ashes, ashes, we all fall down (August 16, 2009).

We stop for rest at Popiel’s castle, the ruthless Prince
whose angry subjects locked him and his wife in a tower
where they were devoured, alive as legend has it,

by thousands of mice. He is now the Mouse-King,
elevated by history, as tourist children skip by,
wearing souvenir mouse-hats.

Another midnight supper and my uncle makes a toast,
my cousin translating as we drink wine until three
though we must be awake at seven

to go to the Muzeum Powstania Warswaskiego. I want to say
I am tired; I need to pack, but an appointment has been made,
there are tickets, it would be rude to refuse.

“The Warsaw Uprising Museum, located in the Wola district,
commemorates the doomed uprising against the Germans
in the fall of 1944. It is one of Poland’s finest museums.”

There are planes and even tanks,
all courteously labeled in Polish, German (surprisingly)
and English. I struggle with the German, give up,

read in my adopted tongue. The exhibits gut me,
I had not expected a lone pair of spectacles,
blood-spattered when the Germans gunned down

the doctors and nurses treating the rebels.
A white linen shirt, rust-stained, a photo of a boy
on a bicycle, a courier. He was 11 when he was shot.

Collages of smiling young faces, college students—
their names are on lists (63 days; 250,000 dead).
Himmler then had Warsaw obliterated.

At midnight, they, my family, leave me at the station
to take a sleeper car to Dusseldorf,
the notes of C minor echoing within me.

Monique Kluczykowski