Welcome to our twenty-second issue.

Whilst urban space and nature are historically viewed as opposing concepts, the green man is a welcome intruder here. Nature’s presence in the city is apparent in many of the poems found in this issue. In Eamonn Lynskey’s “He Walks His Several Cities” and Michael Schiffman’s “Dwelling on Decay” the direct conflict between city and nature is explicit. This is a full-on land grab. In other poems, nature has other functions, such as the power to shake us from our urban stupor. In “A Crow in the Sun in Two Thousand and Three” by Alzo David-West, the sudden appearance of a bird is so captivating that the chaos of city life recedes dramatically. In Seamus Hogan’s “Paris Nuit 2016,” the blackbird’s call cuts through the urban darkness. And in Laura Glenn’s bicycle flâneuse poem, “Pedaling Backward,” the moving grasses provide a momentary “hypnotic moiré”.

This month’s cover art comes courtesy of the Italian photographer Roberto Raiz. He has always been fascinated by the geometry of the city – its architectural lines. However, when shooting architecture alone he often discovered the results to be “elegant, sometimes ethereal and magical” but also “sterile”. It became his endeavour to “make architecture more involved and meaningful by capturing the presence of the human being that lives within the ‘lines’”. His stunning portfolio can be explored further here and here.

Taken at La Triennale di Milano, Raiz’s cover photograph is part of a series entitled “Humans in Urban Geometries”. He suggests that the “partially undefined human figure” in the photograph appears as though he is in “fast forward mode,” as on a video recorder. Raiz comments: “nowadays our life is not playing on a regular frequency, it’s going too fast, and we’re losing too many important things and values”. Raiz’s words ring true with the manner in which this issue captures city life. “Commuting” by Finola Scott emphasises disconnection — the urbanite losing touch with his surroundings.

Yet, this issue also addresses the antidote to such disconnection. “On My Walk Along Stoke Road,” by Belinda Rimmer, “Moscow” by Elizabeth McSkeane and Looking back: Amsterdam Moment” by E A M Harris, all underline the importance of personal and collective memory ascribed to place. Meanwhile, Iain Rowan’s “Weightless” speaks of an invisibility similar to that enjoyed by the nineteenth century Parisian flâneur. In fact, each of the poems found here encourage a change of pace, a re-connection via observation, whereby, to quote Baudelaire, we relearn that “to take a bath in the multitude: to enjoy the crowd is an art.”

Often the intrusion of nature in the city helps us to press the metaphorical pause button on urban life. Nature does not follow our urban laws. It does not follow our lines. Its appearance can be unexpected, and sufficiently unsettling to stir us from our A to B existences and reconsider ourselves and our place in the world surrounding us.

There is some great poetry in this issue. Enjoy it.

Yours faithfully,

Darren Richard Carlaw

editor@stepawaymagazine.com

You feel strange, weightless
Like you have helium in your boots,
Left the heavy part of yourself behind.
You wonder when the wind picks up
Whether you might drift away
And never come back.

Iain Rowan

I skirt around clumps of houses
where the old football pitch stood.
Once my boys played in the goal mouths;
the open spaces. Beyond the estate,
still, a concealed duck pond.
The quack of ducks gives it away.

I wave to the retired music teacher,
Mr Cook. His house is called:
Nutwood Lodge (though it’s not a lodge).
In his windows, floral curtains,
tall green vases filled with silk poppies.
I often walk behind him to catch chalk dust
or listen to the pluck of his acoustic guitar.

I take time to sniff the roses that ramble
over the remaining thatched cottage.
Behind the door, I see a table laden
with bread and cheese, home-made fruit cake,
a jug of lemonade or warm milk:
simple country style snacks.

These things, to soften the edges of urban living.

Belinda Rimmer

workers slough off
burdened skin.
A boy kicks kicks kicks
the seat in front kick
kick bang bang

kicking kick bang thump.
Hard wired to the universe
he nods to invisible tunes
neon trainers tattoo
upholstery.

He’s coiled, ready
eyes gleam at tightening
jaws suppressed sighs
of curled-haired snug smug
buttoned women
lost in ebook fantasy.

Then he’s up
& OFF.
On the pavement he grins
flashes perfect
teeth
waves cheery
farewell.

Finola Scott

Elizabeth McSkeane

Two who’ll walk away,
one who’ll stay.

Anna was cold.
I touched her arm.
Her shivers clutched me through our coats.
She turned to our hotel,
I to a bridge over Prince’s canal
The triangle decomposes into points.

An old waltz follows all -
fingerless gloves and hope for a coin.

I forgot that tricorn confluence:
me, Anna, the street violinist;
after forty years isosceles again:
one wanderer in flashback, two lost
among the bridgeless channels
of a failed keep-in-touch.

I didn’t plan a re-visit
to this street, those thoughts.
I re-hear the waltz.
Now I know I’m a point.

E A M Harris

Moving always between past and present
and then back again, he makes his way
along new-tarmacked roads and new-laid pavements,
seeing cobblestones and alleyways

that once had overlaid the Viking wharfs.
The Liffey’s acrid stench – long-gone – assails him
and the river at low tide reveals
old mooring posts and ghosts of Guinness barges.

In the narrow medieval lanes
that wind through Temple Bar he finds a maze
of little Jewish garment factories
instead of restaurants and pizzerias,

all the weedy derelicts he knew
replaced by shining chrome and glass; the junk shops,
pawn shops, musty book shops vanished;
churches – open all day once – now closed.

And it’s the Pillar, not the Spire, he sees -
remembering the long climb up to stand
between the seagulls and the Admiral
to view the distant Corporation Housing

built to clear the tenements and slums
romanticised in story, song, on stage,
but screened away from view when Queen Victoria
rode her regal cart down Sackville Street

before this pocket city of the Empire
crumbled into insignificance
and remnants of old grandeur and became
a 1950s transit point for emigrants.

Unhappy times, yet he’s nostalgic now
and even for the hardships, comforted
that Smith O’Brien, O’Connell, and Sir John Grey
stand resolute on their pedestals as yet;

Cuchullain still convulsed in epic struggle,
constable Sheahan’s bravery remembered
at Burgh Quay – these stubborn survivors
offer compass through refurbished streets

where he is like a snail with house on back,
where he is like a book now out of print,
where he is like a refugee who cannot
shed the memory of what he’s lost.

The more he walks the bustling streets the more
he feels removed, part of a Malton scene
where well-dressed gentry stroll pet dogs across
a wide, almost deserted, College Green

or trapped in some old sepia print of crowds
that blur through thoroughfares of trams and drays
and he’s the only figure standing hesitant,
uncertain, wondering if it’s safe to cross.

Eamonn Lynskey

Seamus Hogan

Now I’m riding a bicycle for the first time
in twenty-five years.
But something’s wrong—the pedals move
backward. I used to pedal backward for fun,
but this is different—the harder I push, the farther back I go,
traveling a path through someone else’s memories.
Faster, faster . . . the years blur in scores,
then begin to slow.

At a red light
I watch a friend cross the street.
My old friend! I’m traveling through my past after all.
She’s young again, and I am, too.
Except I know things, like what happened
to our friendship.
We used to bicycle to each other’s houses,
sometimes bearing poems. We’d get close,
then wheel apart, in different circles—
I wish I’d realized I liked hers more than mine.

We’d always find each other. Once in the dark,
we danced improv by candlelight in a glass room—night
pressed against the wall of windows—reflections of flames: burning stars.
Without touching, electricity flew between us.
Later, we’d speak of this, but did it bring us closer?
Why did we stop seeing each other?

The grasses move ≈ a hypnotic moiré.
Green light—and suddenly I’m riding forward,
past a swath of Queen Anne’s Lace—weedy and royal.
Cattails sway by the waves of the Sound.
Out of the mist the Cubist City rises.

I’m speeding forward, but my mind’s racing back
to Friday nights: memories conflate—she’d skate
a figure-8 while playing the violin.
Later, wearing peasant blouses we’d draw with our Rapidographs—
my mirror image, her pictures made with her left hand.

Words erupted when we met again later—we confided:
breakups, breakdowns, picking up the shards,
creating new mosaics, we couldn’t fit each other in
the reconfigurations.

Laura Glenn

Alzo David-West