Dear Reader,

Welcome to StepAway Magazine‘s seventeenth issue.

I’d first like to thank you all for voting for us in the Walk 21 Vienna Walking Visionaries Awards. We make it our duty to avoid bombarding our readers with weekly emails, however, on this occasion we bashfully requested that you participate in Walk 21′s online public vote. The response was overwhelming – so many of you took the time to support us. Your efforts are very much appreciated. I am delighted to report that StepAway Magazine won an award for Walking and the Arts. We’ll be thinking of you all when we receive the award in Vienna in October.

Issue seventeen opens with two extracts by Adam Ford. The first is taken from his book Mindfulness & the Art of Urban Living, which explores the activity of walking as an exercise for both body and mind. The second is from The Art of Mindful Walking where Mr. Ford takes the reader on a mindful journey through the city. Leaping Hare Press publish a set of engaging, beautifully bound titles on mindfulness.  However, I felt that these two particular volumes by Mr. Ford would most interest StepAway readers. I was particularly impressed by the author’s positive approach to walking – his enthusiasm is palpable throughout both of these titles. I was also captivated by his attention to the walker’s gaze. In each of these extracts he encourages us to look upwards and outwards, beyond our habitual field of vision when walking. Furthermore, the books are refreshingly jargon free and a pleasure to dip into.

This issue also includes some fantastic work from: Ben Banyard, J.D. Blair, Nancy Charley, Joachim Frank, Sarah Newfeld-Green, Sam Lewis, Luisa Lyons, Myron Michael, Derold Sligh, and Gina Williams.

Our cover art is courtesy of the London based artist John Gledhill. The image, a linocut, is reminiscent of the Elizabethan Street Scene from The Roxburghe Ballads. The pedestrians in Mr. Gledhill’s contemporary work may not be tending to livestock or dodging the contents of chamber pots poured from upper floor windows, yet they are united across the ages as faces of the urban crowd going about their daily business. A number of pieces from the artist’s impressive portfolio, such as “Communication II” pass comment on the interconnection and disconnection of those inhabiting urban space. I admire his intuitive flâneur’s eye view of the city and encourage you to explore his website further.

I hope that you enjoy reading this, our seventeenth issue.

Yours faithfully,

Darren Richard Carlaw

editor@stepawaymagazine.com

A moment spent looking beyond the city can catch one unawares. Hemmed in by the jostle of strangers streaming both ways down the pavement; dodging deliveries staked by a shop door; peering into bookshops; walking past glass
windows, our reflection moving with us – everything is close and busy, when suddenly, while crossing a street, carefully looking both ways, you catch an unexpected glimpse of a distant landscape, fields and trees far out of town.

These views have a valuable part to play in the way we live our urban lives. They may at first appear to be, but are not, moments of escapism. We can appreciate them, not because they remind us of the unpressured life we desire (though they may), the rural dream far from the gaol-fever of urban bustle, but because they inject new life into the urban scene.

A good place to contemplate the out-of-town scene in my local town of Lewes offers a seat on the pavement at a small table, and coffee. I often pause there for half an hour. The High Street is steep at this point. Mothers toil up the pavement with pushchairs; a traffic warden idles down the hill checking number plates, sometimes halting humanely to give a harassed shopper time to dash out from a shop with a purchase and drive away. Snatches of disconnected conversation catch the attention, the speakers lingering long enough to give one an entertaining hint of family goings-on; gales of laughter get lost among the roar of passing traffic. A tired shopper rests a clutch of bags by your legs.

But you hardly have to raise your eyes to look out and over the centre of town to see a high curve of downland, up above some houses and trees. An ancient burial mound, a tumulus dating back to the New Stone Age, is a small hump on the horizon; it carries your mind back in time for an arresting moment. I always rise from the coffee stop exhilarated – and it is not just the caffeine. My love of Lewes is enhanced by being able to gaze out to the countryside beyond; the town is improved by knowing how it sits in its landscape.

An Evening in Ayamonte

Almost all small towns share this ability to reveal the landscape around them – vignettes of far-off countryside caught in a glimpse and cherished. I have a brother who lives in Spain, in the Andalucian town of Ayamonte. Sit of an evening at a small table with a glass of wine in the sociable town square, where the loud chatter of sparrows in the manicured palm trees vies with the shrieks of happy children playing ball or roller-skating around and around in front of their families, and you might catch yourself gazing out of town.

A narrow side street, leading away from the square, runs west down to the broad Guadiana river and sailing boats. On the far bank of this slow tidal river is Portugal and the Algarve; a medieval castle rises above the salt marsh, built originally to guard the land against Spanish marauders. The castle becomes a silhouette as the sun sinks in that direction. You might see a skein of pink flamingos flying elegantly upriver, their long necks, extended legs and strange bills making them look cartoonish – like aerial hockey sticks with wings.

Views from the Larger City

It is not just small towns that offer views and vistas from the bustle of the street – many a large city does the same. Anyone who has ridden a streetcar in San Francisco knows the exhilaration of catching a view of the bay – of Alcatraz with all its mysterious history as a prison island, where the ‘bird man’ was incarcerated; or of the iconic Golden Gate Bridge. And in the afternoons the ocean asserts its near presence by the curling wave of sea mist that rolls in over the western suburbs. San Francisco would not be San Francisco without its hair-raisingly plunging streets and glorious views, or its proximity to the Pacific. It draws life from its surroundings, builds its character on things seen in the distance.

Sydney in New South Wales offers similar sea views beyond the ends of its thoroughfares. You step off the pavement to the encouraging ‘get-a-move-on’ sound of the crossing signal (I always think of the urgent laugh of a kookaburra), traffic halted and waiting, when mid-street you suddenly see, beyond the enormous overhanging limbs of a Moreton Bay fig tree, the harbour – blue water, sailing boats, a swiftly moving ferry; and beyond that the north shore at Manly. For a moment you are tempted to stop and enjoy the scene – but the engines of the stationary traffic are running, growling to be off, and so you rush on, the moment glimpsed and caught in memory like a butterfly in a net.

Every city has something to offer, whether it be the Rocky Mountains seen from Vancouver or the snow-covered Alps from Geneva. Every good view is easy to miss in a preoccupied life; even easier to ignore.

Views Over the City

People who have apartments in high-rise buildings can enjoy the opportunity of contemplating the way their city sits in its landscape every day. London lies in the hollow of the Thames Valley and there are many places from which the observer can get an overview of the city, get a feel of how it has been shaped and how it settles naturally into the local geography. From central London, such fortunate people have views of the suburbs rising up to the North Downs, or, in the opposite direction, the heavily treed slopes of Highgate and Hampstead Heath.

This view of London can be reversed. Instead of catching a glimpse of something lying beyond the enclosing buildings, revealed for a moment at the open end of a street, we may find ourselves looking out over the city, contemplating from above how it fits in its place in its entirety. Walk out of the woods on Hampstead Heath over the open grassland and all the major buildings of the metropolis lie beneath you – there is St Paul’s Cathedral, there the Stock Exchange; there the inside-out shape of the Lloyd’s building, and the new skyscraper affectionately known as ‘The Gherkin’; ‘The Shard’ rises above them all on the South Bank, while the London Eye turns slowly like a great bicycle wheel, revealing similar views to tourists in its rising, then falling, pods.

Views of the city from above, or distant views from below but above the snarling traffic and the milling crowds, help the city to breathe and us to breathe with it. They are worth seeking out and cherishing.

Mindfulness & the Art of Urban Living
Adam Ford
ISBN: 978-1-90800-577-9
RRP: £8.99
Published by Leaping Hare Press

If I had to give one piece of advice on city walking, it would be: ‘Look up!’ It is easy to be distracted on the street by the hustle and bustle of pedestrians, the hassle of the traffic, the need to get from here to there; the shop windows and the captivating smells; the coffee shops, the soap shops, the passing perfumes and cigars. We get caught up in a two-metre layer of fascinating, noisy, human activity.

Look at the rooftops and gables, the detailed ornamentation around the windows; the carved brickwork and statues; the tiling and chimney design; the clocks and stained glass high above street level. Someone has designed and created every feature, with care and skill. They deserve to have their work admired from the pavement. No one needs to be an architect to appreciate it all.

Every city has its own unique character and, by looking up, you begin to acquire a taste for the differences. No city I know demands more that the pedestrian look up than New York. I doubt if anyone can walk down Fifth Avenue without raising the eyes and gasping at the astonishing world soaring hundreds of feet above street level. The buildings draw the eye up above the taxis and flashing lights at pedestrian crossings. Art deco challenges mock gothic across the street; ornamental brick vies with glass; pinnacles, towers and gargoyles seem to dream of another era and of another place, a high-up world where the sun sets later than it does down on the pavement.

The Art of Mindful Walking
Adam Ford
ISBN: 978-1-907332-58-6
RRP: £8.99
Published by Leaping Hare Press

Joachim Frank

shimmering in

the glory of God’s breath

trembling Aspen

Myron Michael

If a man stands alone
If he peers out the window
If he peers as the subway crosses the River Han
If the sun bathes him in light
              as the train emerges from a tunnel
        Consider first steps toward touching…

_______________

Was boldness built up
like birds snapping branches into bunches
to build nests in Spring?
Or was it pent up before I arrived
like so much gunpowder in an old sweaty
stick of dynamite?

Adjusting your weight in perfect pivot
like a martial artist,
you, a vapor, a fog slinking past the people
and blotting out the light.
Ode to that first step,
that simple lift of sole!
I envy your momentum,
the precise motions
that had been molded
in your mind.

Did you fixate on me from shadow
like fox eyes on a hen house?
Like a serpent of biblical beginnings,
you soft-footed my direction,
so no one would see that touch
from those spineless hands,

hands that knew nothing of labor—
you were just a student
when the factories bloomed,
plumes of smog from smokestacks
just after the Korean War.

Covered in that oversized coat,
a taxi hat low over your brow,
your frail, sickly frame,
two wet gray eyes peering
from within the shadow of your brim.
Where did it begin—
how your hands made it
from there to here? What algorithm
did you compute,
what gruesome calculation did you punch
before you reached out to touch me?

Derold Sligh

Around the corner
a man on the sidewalk convulsed in his
sleeping bag. A puckered old woman
in polka dot pants
unlocked her suitcase from the bike rack
in front of the city library. A blond
boy with a begging sign played
his cello so fiercely the strings curled
and snapped in the wind like cables of a collapsing
rope bridge.

The heater was left on
and I sweltered in the night,
tossed in a sticky web of midnight
daydreams, took a pill,
dreamed at last of killer waves and angry relatives.

Now the morning news tells me a bomb went off
at a bus stop someplace in the far east.
Another plane plunged into the sea.
Those children in Syria are dying from the cold
before the bullets can kill them.

The bus was late. I forgot my lunch
on the counter at home. The coffee pot
at the office sparked and smoked.
I cut my finger on the staple remover. My
spine bends a little further to the left each day.
I’m unprepared for fire or weather.
I bought a sandwich,
carried it around, handed it to a man in rags
shivering on the corner,
flames licking at my boots
as I walked away.

Gina Williams

Along Stratford Road
Arab, Jewish, Latino
Children play on the sidewalk
Skip and yell and laugh
Push younger siblings in prams
Draw chalk pictures and lines
Into the cement

People walk their dogs
Run with
Headphones plugged in
Feet pounding
In the runner’s shuffle
Pa! Pa! Pa! Pa!

Cars blare music
Setting the mood for Friday night
A child cries, comforted by its mother because it fell off its scooter
A fire truck races, horn blaring
Lights flashing

At the edge of the park
Three small boys perch in the gazebo
Plotting mischief
Dad is busy at the grill
Mom chats with neighbors

A woman sits reading in dappled sunlight
She sits in close proximity to her parked car
Where she has left her phone, wallet and handbag
She has told her husband she is working late
This is her only half hour in the week
For quiet reading

At the baseball field
The men’s games are in progress

Further down
A family sits eating pizza
The large box obscures the child
As you walk past
You see him munching on a cheese slice

A little girl
Three or four,
Wearing pink floral leggings under a baby blue dress
A purple scarf over her long dark braids
Walks by with her mother
The girl giggles for no apparent reason
The mother gives her a look
They keep walking

In the other direction
A mother and her little boy
Three or four
Walk by
              Don’t touch it honey
              People should really pick up their own dog’s poop
                            It’s not Harry’s poop?
                            HARRY’S POOP!

Two girls on bicycles come tearing by
The smaller girl yells
              LET’S RACE-3-2-1-GO!

I realize
That for a whole half hour
I wasn’t even thinking about cancer.

Luisa Lyons

The cops showed up to investigate.  A detective named Bellows questioned me.

“What do you know about this?”

“I don’t know anything.  I was next in line and I heard the kid on the intercom.”

“What did he say?”

“He said good morning, what the fuck.”

“What the fuck?”

“Yes.”

The cop continued.  “What else?”

“Nothing, I didn’t hear a shot.  But I saw smoke come out of the barrel of the guys gun.”

“What kind of gun?”

“I don’t know guns…just a pistol.”

Bellows voice took on an edge, “Well, was it a large pistol or a small pistol?”

“Like I say, I don’t know guns.”

The cop paused to jot a note.  “What kind of car was it?”

I hesitated, “I don’t know, a sedan of some sort.  They all look the same to me.”

“What about color?”

“I’m color blind,” I confessed, “So I’m really not sure.”

“Your color blind?” Bellows was starting to get pissed.  “Christ kid, did you see anything?  A license number maybe?”

I took a step back, “No, it all happened too fast.”

Bellows sighed, “Tell me, do you know what race this guy was?”

“It’s hard to say, from the back…. white…maybe Hispanic…I suppose he could be black.”

Bellows face turned red. “Jesus kid you’ve been a big help.  Get out of here.”

Late for work by about an hour and a half I headed downtown.  I would grab a stale muffin out of the vending machine at the office. I punched in my boss’ number and tried to explain my situation but he wasn’t buying it. As a supervisor Larry Bertrand was wound a little too tight. I finally had taken enough.

“Bertrand you son-of-a-bitch, I’ll be there when I get there and if that isn’t good enough you can take the fucking job and stick it.” I threw the receiver in the passenger seat.  It buzzed back to life immediately and I let it go.

I stopped at the light at Birmingham and Lincoln and a clump of the city’s homeless were milling around on the corner.  They had a kid surrounded, hounding him for a paper bag he was carrying.  The eerie sidewalk waltz quickly exploded into a messy drama when the kid pulled a knife from under his sports jacket and sliced at the hand of one old guy who was grabbing at the bag. Stunned, the old man sat down in the middle of the circling winos holding his mutilated hand watching blood pump from his fingers.  Another old guy slipped in the bloody mess on the sidewalk and fell hard on his ass.  The kid, still holding, skewered the fleshy underarm of a third guy who grabbed the bag and ripped it open.  A dozen empty glass bottles hit the pavement and shattered, becoming just one more part of the mix of old men, body parts and blood.

Cars at the intersection sat through a green light watching the gory dance unfold a few feet from their windshields.  Finally a taxi driver bolted from his cab and headed for the mess on the corner.  The kid kicked at the torn bag at his feet, took off and disappeared into a maze of stacked pallets and debris.

I took the next green light wondering how much you could get for an empty.  Two cents?  A nickel?  They’re knifing each other over empties?  My thoughts deflected back to when I collected empties as a kid just to get the fifty cents for the movies on Saturday afternoon, the challenge of collecting the bottles, the art of collecting only the most valuable. I recalled fist fights over discarded milk bottles, soft drink bottles, and irate name calling…the fury of those who had and those who didn’t. The only difference I decided is that we didn’t carry weapons. Today empties are a precious barter item on the screwy black market of the streets.  Would I give up a body part for an empty?

I continued downtown and for several blocks a red pickup followed me with a black girl at the wheel and a white guy in the passenger seat.  She was attractive, primitive looking, beads laced closely around her neck, rings on her fingers caught the sun as she gestured toward her passenger.  He was average looking except for the earring in his left lobe.  He had a goatee and wore dark classes.  They were in the middle of an argument and the action heated up when he started waving a pistol in the girl’s face.

Traffic stopped at the light at Lincoln and Stoll Avenue. My eyes were locked on the rear view mirror. The girl shoved the guy’s shoulder trying to push him to the other side of the truck cab.  He was waving the gun around laughing and she finally slugged him on the cheek, hitting him so hard his glasses flew into the windshield.  He shook it off and retaliated by whipping her with the pistol spinning her head into the side window.  A gash opened up under her right eye, along the cheekbone, like a boxers cut.  She slumped over the steering wheel and the guy opened her door and shoved her into the street.  She tumbled onto the road like a sack of potatoes and rolled onto the median with her colorful caftan bunched up around her waist.  The guy slid behind the wheel and was still shouting at her when the light changed.  The girl was on all fours floundering like a struck animal, her face bled as she struggled to get up.  Nobody stopped to help her, the traffic stream got anxious and hurried on through the intersection. When I turned my attention back to the truck it was gone.

By this time I was ready to call Bertrand to tell him I wouldn’t be in at all but I wasn’t up to listening to any more of his philosophy on being punctual and maintaining a professional profile.  Screw professional, people are killing each other, fighting over empty glass and a woman is bleeding in the street after being pistol-whipped.  I’d go to work just to get off the streets.

I cruised through the busy downtown as delivery trucks clogged the avenue and shops began to open.  I tried to hit the lights not wanting to stop, become a target.  I breathed a sigh of relief as my building came into view. Before I could make the turn into the garage a paramedic’s ambulance careened past me on the left, swerved in front of me and sped into the garage.  I followed it in and we spiraled down three levels into the bowels of the Altman Building, home to Brookings Finance.  I was searching for a parking space when out of the dark corners of the garage a SWAT team materialized, and surrounded my car aiming automatic weapons…at me.

“Out of the car…slowly,” shouted a cop standing at the left rear fender.  I could see him in the mirror, pointing a rifle at my head.  I got out of the car to face the rifle muzzle.

“Both hands on top of the car…slowly.”

I assumed the position and a flurry of blue surrounded me. I was searched and cuffed.  A voice came from the darkness.  “What’s your name?”

“Jeremy Ray,” my voice quivered.

“Jeremy Ray what,” asked the voice?

“Just Jeremy Ray…that’s my name. What’s going on?”

“I’ll ask the questions.”  The man behind the voice appeared out of the group of cops. Pickens was the name on his badge plate. “What do you do here?”

“I’m a mortgage officer at Brookings Finance.  I work for Mr. Bertrand, Larry Bertrand.”

“Really.  Have you worked for Mr. Bertrand long?”

“About two years. Call him, he’ll tell you.”

Pickens stepped close unlocked the cuffs and turned me around to face him. “Well Jeremy Ray we’ve got a small problem, I’d love to talk to Mr. Bertrand but it seems he went a little crazy in the office this morning.  He shot a secretary and two security guards then stuck the gun barrel in his mouth and blew his brains out.”

“What?”  I couldn’t decipher what Pickens was telling me.  The words couldn’t find a spot alongside the other messy episodes that had already taken place.

Pickens continued. “Do you know any reason why Bertrand would go off like that?”

There was a long pause in the deathly quiet of the garage.  I stared in disbelief at the detective.

“Well,” asked Pickens?

“I was late to work,” I whispered?

“What?”

“I was late for work?”

J.D. Blair

I walk down the streets of New York,
the massive moon hanging picking classical guitar, or maybe strumming porcine Floyd and I want nothing but loving grass, its supple comfort on my face, and my beard to live like Walt’s -
a man’s beard is his manhood, the pubic hair of the face, facial Samsonism;
mine grows like a teenage gymnast.
I look to the moon and ask for rain and beers and I get breasts, great and swinging down from endless Consumerism and advertisements
and I’m dreaming of American bards walking in supermarkets, a stark juxtaposition: romanticism and capitalism, dreaming of you through tear-soaked dollars.

II

This poem is really about you Walt, you whose poetic loins burned with agony and love and gave birth
to the words that begat me, living breathing firmament over once-empty lovely endless plains and mountains that stretched up to find answers and I am captured, caged in the expanse of language, here with all the other writers.
There’s Ginsberg and Kerouac pouring out poetry and prose in their massive geysers of unabashed and naked love of something or nothing but surely everything, genitals out for all to see,
and there’s Shelley lying with Byron on a cloud of opium and dreaming of lovers and of each other, while Keats is somewhere being beautiful and Coleridge is bathing in sacred rivers of laudanum and floating off
and Hemingway’s gone probably boxing with swordfish and somewhere Faulkner’s mustache is challenging his mouth to a drinking competition and Vonnegut’s swallowing Pall Malls by the pack
Yeats is still longing for his Helen and Eliot’s got his nose turned up in discontent, or at least I think that’s what he means, and everyone’s here and this is all one massive turning cyclone of language.
In the midst of all this genius,
I’m stuck in standstill, nose-first in my notebook, struggling to catch individual words and nail them to my page like Walt nailed himself to green leaves to absolve me of my sins, so that I may see the words turning before me
and there is Ginsberg again, telling me to let go of myself and my fantasies
and I’m back on the dead concrete, surrounded by skyscrapers.

III

I swear this poem is for you Walt and I swear this isn’t entirely bullshit;
this is my pitiful yawp and I give it to you and place it in your beard and hope it grows infused into your hairs and grows long with them, until it touches the ground and then blends into the grass like you once did.
I think this is just beard envy, Walt –
But you never gave me your beard, instead you gave me your blood
and I remember when I watched you falling from my face and spilling over my hands absorbing into the dirt.
That day in the woods behind my father’s house while big brother ripped poems from my notebook and tore them up you were looking up at me, blood-red Walt, iconic American bard messiah of the once-beautiful country,
and dad was passed out with a bottle of Jack while big brother played soccer with my liver but I was lost in you, in visions of your beard reaching out in one sad, endless grasp.

IV

Ginsberg this aberration was once yours and you wandered these streets in benny-bright stupors with massive, enumerable angels singing of Moloch and you knew that this was holy, everything is holy,
but I want so badly to hide my face behind quintessential stereotypical manliness and coarse brown hairs, to wear my bliss on my face like thick, curly lovers,
such superficial comfort, as if a beard could teach me how to handle my whisky,
how to chug life and embrace the burning holes in my throat.

Sam Lewis