It’s a pleasure to welcome you to our thirtieth issue. When we’re putting StepAway together the poetry we publish often seems to select itself. Common themes emerge rapidly, and the poems begin to fit together, forming, almost magically, an issue that is unique in character. With urban observation at its core, this issue has a preoccupation with strangers, trains, the nocturnal city, Paris, and urban wildlife. The issue also wanders delightfully – “On the first day (of the rest of our lives)” by Julie Hogg, evokes a train journey through Durham, alighting at Newcastle (the home of StepAway Magazine) but it is not long before we are whisked elsewhere, walking the streets of Gettysburg at night in Breanna DeSimone’s poem “Ghost Town”.

I’d like to take this opportunity to thank all our contributors: Francis Bede, Dmitry Blizniuk, James Cole, Ryan J. Davidson, Breanna DeSimone, Aine Dilleen, Julie Hogg, Andrea Mbarushimana, Eva Michely, Michael T. Smith and Gerard Smyth

I would also like to mention how pleasing it is to publish the thirtieth issue of StepAway. In March 2011, I had very little idea how our first issue would be received. I certainly did not expect that over the course of thirty issues, StepAway would win a Walking Visionaries Award in Vienna, and collaborate with Durham University, The University of Westminster and Newcastle Centre for the Literary Arts amongst others. The launch of Voicewalks at Durham Book Festival which included a reading of a commissioned piece by renowned writer and pioneer of British psychogeography, Iain Sinclair proved to be one of many of my career highlights.

I am eager to develop StepAway further, particularly in terms of using the message of the magazine to encourage others to look up from their mobile phones to observe and draw creative inspiration from the world around them. And, of course, the publication of a further thirty issues (or more!) is certainly not out of the question.

I would like to dedicate this issue to my mother-in-law, Galina, who passed away unexpectedly earlier this year.

Yours faithfully,

Darren Richard Carlaw

editor@stepawaymagazine.com

A street sign sighs,
prosily,
a serinette to our feet,
which follow the beaten paths
of the many meek.

A window blinks
but nobody pays it any attention
because -
why would you assume there’s a good explanation?
And the muzzling dew keeps our faces down.

And here we all hold the outside
close to our livers –
ecumene
in a discount suitcase, so that
the buildings that hold us seem like friends.

Michael T. Smith

Rustles have me peering
through deep shadow expecting rat
sour chemical residues rise
from scuffled soil but instead,
the gently padded predator
of discarded snacks -
a fox
crosses my path

We regard each other,
she sniffs
my breath is held
held in – like my limping desire
while she prowls free
rufous furred, a wild thing
looking at me as I imagine
a visitor to a zoo might pityingly
observe
a caged ape

She leaves me
with my unnatural restraint
and struts away

Andrea Mbarushimana

Francis Bede

An older woman was across from me,
and then an older man got on and sat across from her.
They immediately started talking. Not small talk,

like they knew each other,
but the kind of grander ideas
that mean they either just met
or have been dancing
just this number for decades. But then
there were notebooks,
two (three if you count mine),
and a flurried pen and a scratching pencil—

all this in the first minute. And curse me
for my headphones, or just curse headphones.
I didn’t catch a word. In my head,
though, they were both great writers,
both married, both in love with one another,

but this train journey was their only time together,
so they wrote down every word,
scent, sound, and fleet-footed impression.
So, if I’m in their notes now, they’re in mine too.

Ryan J. Davidson

Buildings barricade one side, the other
Flanked by the oppressive
Presence of a thousand eyes,
Perched high on telephone poles;
Metal wires strung post to post,
Like electric fence on a farmer’s field.

I fancy myself a tabby cat,
Prowling power-lines for a free meal.
Leaping as a trapeze artist,
Feathers between bloodied teeth.

From above I see the city’s peaks
Dwarfed by the mountains
And the flat farmyard fields.
From here I feel the wind-chill
Of my supposed freedom.
My hairs grow rigid and spiked.

James Cole

a curfew flew over blacker bracken, how
we forgot that old blue devil tinsel shott
and we are cold enough, after the longer

Winter, snowdrops grow in her red attic
window, tincture so simple, land, sky, we
know the words can’t touch us while

a platform sucked over foliage, viaduct,
over fresher graffiti on melting water over
where we are cold, enough, after this long

poem, our previous evening, denizens of
a city, warmer, through stellar doric order,
we know the words can’t touch us, how

the Nicholson hung alongside the Peploe,

glowing, exquisite, so golder and pristine
and we are cold enough, after this longer
verse, know the words can’t touch us now.

Julie Hogg

The starlings of Paris perform their ballet
in light above The Pantheon.
In a Paris courtyard on Rue des Irlandais
horn-blowers are blowing
for the twilight fandango,
there’s a crooner in harmony with the brass,
dancing shoes kick up sparks.
It’s like a crowd scene in a movie,
revellers going wild
because they’re on the victory side.

A rising moon hides, appears and hides again
in night-clouds crowning Notre Dame.
In fashions from the vintage market
all are dressed for a time in the past -
the first days of peace in 1945
when flag-wavers waved the Stars and Stripes
at boys from Nebraska
with Normandy sand in their eyes.
These light-footed partners
look like couples in a parody of the nights
when war was over for the lucky soldier,
the sailor too who saw land again.

2

In her Paris shawl she walks with me,
back to where we came that summer we turned and missed
Baudelaire’s christening church but saw his early grave.
In the famous museum young Rembrandt’s eyes are glistening.
The Honey Locust comes into bloom like a third-day miracle.

On Rue Descartes the evening is beginning
with a soup du jour that burns my tongue.
Our waiter is a man with information.
He tells us we are sitting at Hemingway’s table,
that Verlaine died in a room upstairs.

Gone are the barricades and gone the man who played
with sweet finesse his twangling instrument -
six sombre strings sounding wistful -
                                                      one breaking like a wishbone.

Gerard Smyth

Dmitry Blizniuk

Breanna DeSimone