Dear Reader,

Welcome to our eighteenth issue.

The art of observation is central to the work published in StepAway Magazine. The submissions that we receive approach this art from a myriad of refreshing new directions. Jared A. Carnie’s poem, ‘Street Eyes’, published in this issue, made me consider the mutuality of walking in the city. Whether we realise it or not, at street level our presence as a pedestrian presents a kind of performance.  By being in public, we offer ourselves to the view of the crowd by putting ourselves on ‘display’. In recompense for this display, we are in turn given the opportunity to witness others ‘displaying’ themselves. ‘Street Eyes’ highlights a discomfort with this mutuality. Here, the urban observer or watcher becomes the watched. This breeds a self-consciousness, which leads to a change in gait – the confident, instinctive, performance of walking in the street suddenly goes to hell.  The ‘street eyes’ described here are not those of the casual observer, they are predatory, heavily judgemental, threatening even, to the point that the act of looking becomes a visual violation. After reading this poem for the first time, I went walking in the city and felt myself involuntarily judging the weight of each shared glance, the level of comfort and discomfort which came with the proximity of each passerby.

These minute emotional and sensory changes are, of course, part and parcel of the thrill of walking in the city. Within moments we can jump from feeling safe to feeling exposed, and back again, all depending on the signals received from our surroundings. Part of the art of observation is a sensitivity to those signals. And, I must say that the writers published here in our eighteenth issue are excellent practitioners of this art. We have some thoroughly thought provoking work from: Stephen Bone, Caroline Boobis, Carl Boon, Miki Byrne, Jared A. Carnie, Philip Dacey, Gram Joel Davies, Julie Hogg, Gerard Sarnat, & Morelle Smith.

Our cover photography is courtesy of a great friend of StepAway Magazine, Rikardo Reis. Rikardo is a South American photographer and filmmaker, who is currently living in Portugal. Our cover shot, Rikardo tells me, was taken after hours on a wet night in Lisbon. His stunning portfolio can be found here.

I would also like to congratulate StepAway contributor, Antony Owen on the publication of his new book, Margaret Thatcher’s Museum by Hesterglock Press.

Now it is only fair that I let the work of our talented writers speak for itself. Enjoy reading.

Yours faithfully,

Darren Richard Carlaw

editor@stepawaymagazine.com

Freshboy eye candy larva, after Latin class in the Harvard Yard, this puerile grub
put out 2/3′s the hard yards required to acquire Life Magazine’s worn mustachioed
thrift-shop-Brooks Brothers-tweed-jacket-torn-leather-elbow-patches + pipe persona.

As an apostate from one of those sunny big square states, I got taught
nodding Yessir to Pops and Grandpa about pumping gas, slopping the hogs
and then squeegeeing their crap off the pickup, in the end is what really counts.

A self-conscious introvert, I bathed alone in the shadows of Waldorf Cafeteria
cigar circles whose prodigies fueled my piggybacking doom, Disregard pale fools
you come from, kiddo; that’s what this damaged rube from the other side of the Rockies

did while the splintered men’s room mirror futilely attempted to dispense PEZ.
Five decades later, Nordstrom said, Color the hairs left. Whiten dentures. Switch
out glasses for contacts — which prepped for an inevitably less than gala college reunion.

Gerard Sarnat

It’s only by walking, or at least seeing where you are going, above ground, that you begin to piece together parts of the city. When you walk along a street in a city you know, you don’t have to visualize the next streets, this knowledge is in you, and informs all that you see. That’s what we mean when we say I know where I’m going, I know the way. When I first arrived I did not know that the wide boulevard of Kaiserdamm led straight through to the city’s heart. Or that if you followed Königen Elizabeth Strasse and turned right, you would reach the gardens surrounding the Schloss Charlottenburg.

I know that now, because a few days later J and I walked from Zoologische Garten, along Kantstrasse, then Leibnitz, Wilmersdorfer, and on to Schlosstrasse, rustling with trees on either side of the pavement, on the green walkway in the middle, in the gardens of the houses, set back from the street. This leafy avenue leads up to the Schloss itself, set in its patterned gardens, a gridwork of flowers, colours and scents, floral needlework, a miniature Versailles.

*

Once you can say – I know another way, a better way, then you feel you’ve begun to know a city, just a little. Exploring Berlin for the first time, and trying to follow the guide book’s instructions, the neat diagrams on the page did not match the vast scale of wide streets and towering buildings, both old and modern. So I put it away, decided to follow my feet instead.

I got off the S Bahn at Hackeshe Markt and, purely by chance, discovered the Hackeshe Höfe. These are a series of courtyards, enclosed by beautiful tiled buildings, and small shops. In the heart of the city, they are a place of peace, quiet and beauty, away from the noise and traffic on the busy main streets.

I found the plaque on Bebelplatz which said that it was here that the burning of books took place, in 1933. From France, Klaus Mann noted grimly that his books, as well as his father’s, Thomas Mann’s, were included in the destruction. (They had left Germany shortly before, just in time).

We can go this way I said to J, a few days later, as we waited at the crossing at Hardenbergstrasse, outside the Zoologisher Garten Bahnhof. The pavement was crowded with milling pedestrians, the street thick with traffic. But across the road, a pedestrian alley slid beside the red-brick embankment where the trains approached the station, sometimes with a rattle, or a squeal. Cafés, small shops, areas of greenery, flowers and plants, lined the buildings on the other side, so a quiet, shaded alleyway offered immediate refuge from the clamour of Hardenbergstrasse and its entrances and exits to U Bahn, S Bahn and the mainline trains. From here, we came out onto Kantstrasse, another busy thoroughfare, turned off into Leibnitz, then abandoned the map, knowing the direction we were heading in.

Königen Elizabeth Strasse is a wide boulevard of a street, but it’s not crammed with restless vehicles, snorting and exhaling loudly at traffic lights. The lanes are wide, the pavements are too and there’s a small green area in the middle. At its southern end, it joins up with Kaiserdamm, the main thoroughfare that leads to the Siegessäule, the massive victory monument planted like a golden goddess, overlooking the Tiergarten.

Kaiserdamm has its own purpose, carrying the traffic like a river demi-god, flushed with its speed and intention, salamanders glinting in the early evening sunlight. Even with U Bahn entrances on both sides, the pavements easily absorb the emerging passengers.

Königen Elizabeth Strasse has none of that sleek river-purpose, no metallic stridency. Its direction is towards the peaceful Schloss Garten, and not towards statements of architectural magnificence and power, no militaristic gold supremacy here, no imperial pronouncements of authority, no pillars of victory, glittering like sculpted ribbons of the sun itself.

Regal as its name, the buildings are stately, but not oppressive. Four or five storeys high, sometimes with small boxes sprouting flowers and greenery. This was the street where the Swiss writer Annemarie Schwarzenbach lived, from the autumn of 1931 till the spring of 1933. It was where she explored the culture and night life of Berlin, and where she wrote prolifically. She completed one novella and wrote two more. She also wrote articles on films by French, German and Russian directors, and travel articles on Scandinavia and Switzerland.

It was also where she viewed, with increasing horror, the rise of the Fascist party – the burning of the Reichstag, boycott of Jewish businesses, banning of writers, burning of books. In March 1933, Annemarie wrote to her friend Claude Bourdet, ..we are suffering, all of humanity will suffer from this…I don’t have any choice, I will have to leave.

We don’t know the number of the building she lived in. But we pick out our favourites, as possibilities. There’s one with book-shaped painted window-frames. Another is at the north end of the street. It’s large and beautiful, has six storeys, including the attic, with art nouveau sculpted friezework high up on the façade, which is a pale bluish violet colour. There are also two sculpted eagles guarding the arched entrance on the street level. Even if she didn’t live there we felt there could be no doubt that Annemarie would have often walked past this building, and could not have failed to admire it.

Morelle Smith

His brick laden eyes
stamp landmarks
to shorten the stretch:
some reddened railings;
a pillar box; The Rose.

His steps are long-
distance
haulage.

            Then it comes, the day
he peels back the road,
turns over miles
on an updraft, riding
the cement like a bike lesson

for the first time
without adult hand,
without stabilisers,
without noticing.

Gram Joel Davies

is this where you end,
black mohair jumper?

delicate natural fibre,
perfectly silky once,
uncontrived, arched

back on a bridge, ever
so slightly supported
by stark nothing of
course, thwarted in
language too sparse
to describe

ultimate autonomy,

is a note
of intention fast asleep
in quick silt on a last
straw sticking out of
the Tyne? will a single
affectionate white

feather gently prise
your fingers apart?

and I hope you have

wings.

Julie Hogg

Walking along the path later that day, the cows are no longer on the march. Now they’re scattered across the Moor, each one so intent on consuming as much grass as possible that they barely notice the walkers and cyclists. Some will look up whilst chewing languidly, and one or two might decide to cross the path just in front of you to get to the other side, where the grass is most definitely greener. A few of them have even made it to very the top of the hill. A raincoated old man once flashed Janey there when she was training for her Duke of Edinburgh award. She and her friend were jogging up there with rucksacks full of tinned tomatoes and he just turned around and opened his coat.

The path ends where the town begins and I close the gate carefully. You sometimes read stories of the occasional cow getting out and wreaking havoc but we just have to be a bit careful that’s all. They’re only doing what cows do.  One got through someone’s gate once. Pushed it open, walked in and ate most of the garden apparently.  There was a bit of an outcry in the local paper but mostly people just shrugged their shoulders. It’s not the cows’ fault we built roads and houses and shops right next to where they live.

By the time I head back from town it’s already getting dark. I shut the gate behind me and the traffic noise recedes, so all I can hear is chomping and tearing from the shadowy shapes that surround me. Halfway along the path I sit down on a cold bench to listen. Some of them grunt or blow a bit, others seem to be rustling very near to me. Those closest to the path are illuminated by the light from the lamp-posts, but most are melted into the darkness. I want to stay with them all night, to lie down on my bench and look up at the stars, fall asleep to the munching lullaby of these creatures.

But of course I can’t.

Caroline Boobis

and in his open hand
(the other rests on the head
of a doe) a few folded
pieces of paper as if he were
offering them to passersby.

Curious to see either
a Franciscan prayer
I must have known in my fervent
Catholic boyhood or some other
piety attributed to him,

I take one as I go by and find
it’s a wallet-sized pamphlet,
“Condom Use Instructions,”
complete with line-drawings
and detailed commentary taking

the reader through every step
from tumescence to clean-up.
Pity the birds who land
looking for seed
in the outstretched hand.

Philip Dacey

Miki Byrne

Carl Boon

You take each glance
like a dart.

Tensing your stomach
won’t save your posture.

Tom Waits records
won’t make you cool.

There’s nothing to be done with you.

You don’t look calm with a cigarette.
You shoulders are curved
and your teeth are wonky.

The wind’s doing something with your hair.

Somewhere you know you’re a genius
but you can’t remember where that is.

Your walk becomes wrong
and when the street eyes
turn your way
you can’t manage anything
except maybe
hopefully
avoiding the puddles
gathering at your feet.

Jared A. Carnie