Dear Reader,

Welcome to Issue 33.

It is surprising to discover that our previous numbered issue was published exactly a year ago today. Since then, we have shared a number of special issues including our celebratory tenth anniversary edition and our Flâneuse issue. I must say that it was a rewarding experience to hand over the editorial reigns to the poet Julie Hogg, guest editor of the Flâneuse issue. Julie allowed readers to see StepAway through a new lens. Her vision, judgment and perspective helped shape a powerful and unique issue; compliments flooded in following publication. I would like to take this opportunity to thank Julie for her work and dedication.

Issue 33 may not be themed, but it has a distinctly cosmopolitan heir. The issue opens and closes in Australia and wanders its way through (amongst other locations) Edinburgh and Exeter, Galway and Greece, by way of Denmark and Morocco. At a time when travel is once again restricted, reading this issue of StepAway feels like an act of escapism. Thank you to the talented line up of writers who allow us to break out and explore new territories through their words.

I’d also like to announce that one of those writers, Shaun Hill, published his debut collection, warm blooded things, earlier this month with Nine Arches Press. The book is full of wanders through the nocturnal city and will certainly be of great interest to StepAway readers.

Before stepping aside to allow the work of our writers speak for itself, I would like to wish you all a very merry Christmas and a happy New Year from everyone here at StepAway Magazine. Here’s to the hope of better days ahead.

With the warmest of festive wishes,

Dr Darren Richard Carlaw

editor@stepawaymagazine.com

The city carries very much on its back. The lights, the clocks, the trains and the tracks. The red-brick buildings, the stations, the bus stops, the fast food joints, the bars, restaurants, the bridges. The skyscrapers that cloud in the heights hover over us mortals down below. Some say the city grows on you. The city with its gestures that represent every human emotion. The city with regrettable faces, dead faces, sad faces, mad faces, trying to hold onto things that aren’t there. It is hard to say how or why a city can make you fall in love with it.

The City, Study No. 2

The city

/ is an entire different thing, on the whole the city is alone, very much contained, like a bowl of jelly, or a block of wood, a bar of soap, a slip of tongue, a wild oat;

/sleeps on its side and never snores, always diving deeper into a hole, a seamless transfer of fluids, thoughts, images, like ducks and coca cola ads, like salamis and miami beaches, like palms and hands, like gauguin and cezanne (pronounced the American way);

/wandering from one chair to the next, from one machine to another burning oil drum, from highways to the moroccan, from mildew to scum; the city is infested with sporadic conundrums, idiosyncratic dilemmas, enigmas, stigmas, enema;

/walking on pincers, prongs, prunes, dunes, thongs, rubber dongs, sitcoms, nuns, noons, nonentities, songs, and lines and lines of them; no rocks, no ice cream, no rivers, nude and green, no mountains, tall and lean, no nothingness, but full of nothingness;

/ travels light, speeds past grasses, graves, gravels, masks, police cars, sand, bulrushes, bushes, dog excrement, ferment of big voices broadcasted from one speaker to another, from one heart to another; estimation is cost-effective;

/blue and grey, savage, voiceless, a wreck, the age, construction cranes, helmets, high-visibility vests, arms and legs, concrete slabs, steel racks, curbside oddities, plastic waste, ramps, lights and flowers, trams, the city is late and arrives on time, the city is on strike and the sky is alien to night;

/ cannot relate, walks away, comes back, yawns, grows wings but does not fly, lazy,  heavy, its skyline changes, its face, an ever-shifting blur, a wall of water that separates the foam from the film of earth, a solid hour in a putrid room;

/ is cloud, is doubt, is fear, is anxiety: the city is feet, the city is music, the city is beat, but the wild rhythm, tap tap tap on the root, throat strains, eyes read crazy, defiled, dirt and grime, loneliness inside the busy throng?

/ asks little, thinks a lot, broods, large questions settle on ennui, question marks floating from window to window twenty storeys above, what do we know? how can we answer?

/ answers,
it doesn’t know.

City Dogs, Study No. 3

pipes, fences, grasses, tennis court, weight of the wind, chimneys, mirrors, roofs, and we come riding like a pair of straw-necked seagulls, gulping the earth and the sea, the church and the office, the parliament and the law courts, the rainbow and the sand, and because we are seagulls, we go like a bunch of mad men at the chips scattered from human hands

Janet Jiahui Wu

All those voices clattering
in the enclosed space like
Chinese diners at dim sum
lunch in Hong Kong, Australian
office workers crammed into
a yellow tiled basement food
hall picking at their selections
from plastic containers that
they’ve purchased from
the Chinese/Malysian stall
or Indian or Earthfood, crunchy
feed to energize them for
the afternoon of work ahead,
but I am returning to visit family;
I don’t have to tolerate this cacophony of squawking ducksound so I seek a quieter venue I recall across the street where myna birds peck at leftovers with their orange beaks. I sit outside with them after purchasing my pumpkin in coconut milk and Thai tofu from a stall for A $9.50.
Two blue-plaid uniformed high
school girls ask if they can share
my table, the three of us companionable as if we shared the same branch; there are brown faces with features I don’t recognize and today I am not returning to an office so I can sit here, curious as the scavenging myna birds.

Jan Ball

Maine summer memories wither,
shaping a child’s decades.
Lodged in stasis, we argued
a Chinatown courtship of
opium pipe and ginger prawns,
biography’s careless sense.
I tossed it to the table:
Practice to your limitations.
I don’t want questions.
Give me your answers to
the test of days alarms.

Lantern lines twist in a rising wind.
Ballroom parties assemble
along the River Walk.
Like a wraith, collapse
wends through all conversation.
I take the dining change,
stuff it in my pocket,
follow you to the pier.
Wrung from confusion’s choice,
arrangement ironies,
the alphabet of secrets leaves us
lying in our final letters:
You fell in love.
I moved in another’s direction.

R.T. Castleberry

And here, by Crow Bridge,
Her red shoes and frame of purple stone
Guarding the twilight,
Here, I like to walk.

It is peaceful, after all,
Here among the dead.
And those who come to mourn,
Show their rent hearts
At their openmost in sight.

And here,
I once saw the face of God,
Split into sherds,
Who left a portion of himself
To watch over his mother,
She, who died of grief.

Oisín Breen

Imagine how it looked
hundreds of years before,
a medieval town of noise,
creaking carts laden with food,
fish fresh from beached boats
and words you might not understand,
though some of them endure.
The rain then was no worse than now,
and in this town, it’s a constant theme
that enchants a rambling mind.
You wish the sky would spare you,
let you savour a simple walk,
but you know it’s rarely so kind.

So easy to ignore the cars
as you cross to Quay Street,
but not those thoughts
of eyeing shelves in Charlie Byrne’s,
where a minute’s search is hours lost.
You overhear the talk of books
from pinted folk on Neachtains chairs,
hearing the whispery prayers of the river
asking forgiveness
for all the stray hearts it ensnared.

Not far from the Spanish Arch,
you face the current, button your coat,
passing the garden of Jurys.
A small herd of apartments gathers
around what seems like a private pool,
though you know the public stop,
thinking how it would be to live there,
sitting on a window sill,
watching the still water stooping
till it’s sucked into the river.
On along the leafy path,
you cross the road to wooden planks
that make a fool of those who rush
when a shower has slickened its slant.

The footpath flings you away from the river,
toward the Salmon Weir Bridge.
A van waits before the bend,
where the turn of the bus is melodramatic.
When will they widen this bridge?, you wonder,
stepping briefly onto the road,
your hair brushed by the bus’s mirror,
faced with Galway Cathedral,
stout and grey, like an ageing queen
in a turquoise crown beaten plain
by decades of penance to wintry rain.

Along the canal,
students stream en masse.
And do you recall with affection
those years of essays, a girl in your class?
By Presentation Road,
something in the chilly water shines;
you lean closer to see it better
- like a red stain across the stone -
a broken bottle of Buckfast wine.
The chunky, weathered wood of the sluice
restrains a charge of plastic and slime.
Frothy water seeps through,
dropping to a lower depth
a little at a time.

Cars squeeze through Mill Street
as water spills through holes, tumbles over stones
near a mischievous bend
wrapped around a small, white house
whose kitchen, you think, has overflown.
On Dominick Street, you glimpse a sculpture
behind a smudged window,
but you might forget it by Raven Terrace,
crossing to the Claddagh
before it surrenders the Corrib to the sea,
where a man engulfed in a blizzard of wings
throws bread discriminately.

Be careful as you step
round iron rings where dirty ropes
are tied to lilting boats.
A crow watches from a crossbar
two spaniels running between the posts.
A train in the distance bound for Dublin
leaves gingerly, almost reluctant,
and you feel a stinging breeze
as winter descends on this town.
It’s then that a tap on your head
confirms the fear you had all along.
There’s nowhere near to offer shelter
as rain comes lashing down.

Trevor Conway

(dull halo of a megabus down a dual carriageway)

             tried to let go of the railings. lips
             grazing a lorry. you should. I couldn’t.

(cold wind clicking on a crane’s metal cage)

             thought I’d slip into the river. rip this
             letter I up. but my tongue became a torch.

(blue discus of an ambulance hurtling through the dark)

             push your ear to the breath of it.
             resuscitate a reason.

Shaun Hill

DS Maolalai

I pass the Ark Church daily,
their giant mock-up syringe
‘Injecting HOPE into society‘
parked up permanently, it seems

& daily I think of Carnegie,
his library built exactly
where the road turns:
gold sandstone, pediments, purpose

union buster, wiped as I smile
at McPeake’s Professional Pest Control sign:
eternally a mouse in Hawaiian shirt & shades
carries a stickered suitcase,

departing. ‘Cant breathe‘ last May
sprayed on the old GAA club
in yellow, ‘George Floyd RIP‘
first thought’s always apostrophe,

lack thereof. Dodging gutter bones or glass,
these are the days when
a low horn sounds, the shadow
of a bus looming over me so

I make my cogs move faster,
road gleaming dark as a river
& I hit the sweet point, these days,
marvelling

to have reached here -

Nancy Graham

All goods on offer, dried fruits and spices,
coloured garments, bright and glittering,
silver slippers, keffiyehs, kanduras,
and scarves of silk, gleaming brassware,
tightly patterned carpets, leatherwork,
long-tailed monkeys and singing birds.
A man walks by with twenty loaves
of new-baked bread on a wooden
raft carefully balanced on his head;
he moves easily through the maze,
from node to vein, and back again.

The song of the Muezzin grows fainter
as I am drawn further in. My group
has disappeared; there is everything to see
and feel and smell, but no winding thread,
no exit from this new bewildering world.

Michael G. Casey