As soon as we set eyes on it, Martin Christmas’s photograph of two buildings in the Central Business District (CBD) in Adelaide, Australia seemed ideal for the cover of our Spring issue. For one, it adopts a flâneur’s eye view – gazing up from the street to the overbearing height of the city’s office blocks. There is the sense of observing and being observed from the many overlooking windows. Then there is the juxtaposition of architectural styles. And of course, the emphasis of boldly contrasting colours. In context of our Spring issue, the cold blue hints at the winter we have left behind us, against the orange warmth of the summer to come. Of course, an antipodean like Martin may prefer to turn this theory on its head given that Australia are currently heading into winter!

Bold, contrasting colours are also prominent in the opening poem of this issue, the timely “As Prominent as Green” by Mary Melvin Geoghegan, which celebrates the yellow and blue of the flag of Ukraine. And at the very heart of this issue are poems about North East England, home of StepAway Magazine, and a region synonymous with the black-and-white and red-and-white of its football teams. The issue also transports the reader across the urban spectrum visiting Lancashire, London, Bristol, New York State and Knoxville, Tennessee.

Thank you to all our contributors: Amy Bacon, Martin Christmas, Mary Melvin Geoghegan, Ceinwen E Cariad Haydon, Daniel Hinds, Julie Hogg, Tom Kelly, Noah Kucij, Paul Marshall, Jennie E. Owen, Martin Potter and Laura Sweeney.

I hope that you enjoy reading this, the thirty-fourth issue of StepAway Magazine.

Yours faithfully,

Darren Richard Carlaw
editor@stepawaymagazine.com

But, the stark destruction of Mariupol
and the burning ruins of Kharkiv carries in the wind
living in the children of the dead
reverberating through the generations.

Our hearts are breaking for Ukraine
out for the first time in three years
watching the parade.

Mary Melvin Geoghegan

I come from a despised place,
a shrinking city selling off
its nurseries for trauma wards.
I am a son of cobweb, rust,
long rot and quiet abandon. Never
worked the turbines steaming beside
the Mohawk River, never endured
the pink slips and the midnight U-Hauls.
Still, when I open my mouth around
the beautiful name of my town, I risk
apologetic nods or cackles.
Still, when a drizzle begins on certain
carbon-strangled boulevards,
my town’s name isn’t beautiful enough.

2.

We didn’t know our streets were ruins.
Early March, with crocuses
and last year’s yellow pages poking
through the snow, we lingered over
smokes on secret porches, sure
the center held. And so it did.
Before the nurses whipped away
the sheets and showed us gangrene, we
aroused the sleeping alleys with
our swagger. Erie, Ferry, Seward,
Morningside, the ripped-upholstered
stools of tired confectioners
were home, were ours — before the choice
to flee the sinking vessel or to sing.

3.

I sang the coffee bottomless
and burnt, the empty parks, the tracks
that cut the Great Flats into teeming
scars of industry. I dogeared
atlases, came home over
and over, distant tongues tucked in
my overcoat, home to the same
homely river. Every now and then
the future merchants docked and hawked
revival, but under my skin I knew
the only sure return was grass
to the faces of graves, was gulls
to the closed Ramada lot in droves,
was the dreaming eye to the drowning freckles of loves.

4.

In a Thai restaurant attached to a bowling
alley, in a thunder of chilis
and pins, I said goodbye to my Cali-
fornia girl and flew to the smoking
empty east, my echoing nest,
and spent my twenty-second autumn
tending to rusty chrysanthemums
in a stiff-steering pickup truck
emblazoned with my city’s name:
SCHENECTADY.
I guess the West was too in bloom
too often, too abundant, too easy –
so back to the ball and chain, its greasy
toast, its dogs and sauce, because that’s
what we do here, because hunger is good for the cook.

5.

Angel of the impound lot,
essence of the omelet onion,
give me one more day to see and
smell and taste. On this grey slate
is the brilliance of lichen and ivy furthest
from lost, in this undignified damp
are skunkweed and mulberry most at home.
Schenectady,
I’ll sing your bee-stung body in
the sweetness it deserves. I’ll leave you
one day where I found you: marsh
behind right field where decades of homers
return to mush. Watching them sail
above the busted scoreboard, through the pale
canal of sky between workday and dark.

Noah Kucij

‘Though my face is a burnt book’
- Sidney Keyes, War Poet

Some days I look at you and am unmoved.
Stone speaks to stone.

Men cut down cut from copper.

Today, your legacy is the cut of the epaulettes
On my Ted Baker coat.

I sweep the gathered Gregg’s pastry crumbs
From the wool of my front.

I have come to this place
To be the heir to men too young for sons.

If I brought you forth from the fatherland,
With smooth skins of flesh, with all my Pygmalion skill and skins,

You would still be grey shades.
Metal fists mailed in flesh punching through hard-packed earth.

Inside, bone branches crack and curl
And never bloom bordered in bronze and stone.

Our eyes could never meet.
Roots go unwatered.

I’ve read the war poets and I know
You demand I be blooded.

George’s seahorse steeds stamp beneath red waves,
Soundless tramping under Acheron, on the lookout for lost souls

And more comrades.

I look up at hard faces
And try to read to them from an unburnt book.

Pages pristine white, unmuddied.

Daniel Hinds

Ceinwen E Cariad Haydon

In a moment we are at 48 Stanhope Road where Granny and Granda lived, near the flat-faced-Co-op shop. I had forgotten about Granny reading tea leaves in the cracked cup. She half-smiles, ‘There is something good on the way. You will see’. When there was danger, a cold breeze ran across her face, ‘Be careful is all I can say’. She straightened her pinny before putting the always worn headscarf at an odd angle as if trying to ward off danger. I was left staring at the distorted mirror above the fireplace seeing years fleeing by.

I am back in the centre of Jarrow where cinemas became bingo halls, before they died or were demolished. A few working men’s clubs hang on as I have a pint in ‘The Alberta,’ club  nestling beside the Metro. Shipyards are well and truly dead and two-car families squeeze down the no longer cobbled back lanes.

Tom Kelly

This is my nameless northern home town
scribbled large in slick diesel puddles that reflect
only orange cones, patchwork building sites,
bus shelters and bookies; a row of charities selling
wear and regret, clashing with Cash for Gold!

Our music this morning
is the drill and digger duet, our song,
voices tumbleweeding out of pub doors.

Jennie E. Owen

through the other side of a
Blackwall Tunnel -
of an A200 umbilical cord

Spanish chestnut trees
and the slipform core of your
wharf, Copperas Street,

a fontanelle opening again,
coarse mustard hail
on the rooftop garden,

winter-spring raclette
of a melting cannon salute,
tang of cement works

in this starry morning,
brilliant riverside
apartments clear and warm,

each floor foil blanket
wrapped, water in the creek
like hot, sweet, tea.

Julie Hogg

Your muffled echoes alone
The Heath screened by house-rank
Hour of moon-tint and fox-walk
Approaching Kentish Town

Now prefer a diversion
Revelling in narrower ways
A backstreet bookshop window
Flashed beacon in Tufnell Park

Square-panel glazed display
Propped-about thin volumes
Continental translations
A life in other cities

And pondered printed visions
Novellas of neon light
But time to finish homing
Wrapped in the fragrant darkness

Martin Potter

We tread the pavement,
traffic swarming the street,
engulfed by shrieking brakes
and hot fumes
as buses pull away.
We rush forwards,
not noticing,
until you say -
Birds!

I follow
an imaginary beam
shining from your fingertip
to the front of the Central Police Station -
there, flying below
the fluted frieze and parapet,
a flock of birds
etched
into blackened sandstone.

Amy Bacon