Dear Reader,

Welcome to Issue One of StepAway Magazine.

Who was the first writer to bring a city to life for you? I vividly remember my first reading of William Blake’s “London”, and the unique experience of being transported directly to the streets of the nineteenth century capital. Furthermore, the poem reminded me of when, as a child, my father and mother first took me to London. I held my father’s hand tightly and peered curiously at the passersby. Faces stared back at me, only to be torn away forever by the pace of the city. As a young reader, Blake’s “London” forged for me a bridge between the urban present and past. I found the same fear and fascination on the page as I did whilst walking with my parents in the city. Fashions change, as do urban topographies, yet the sensation of being immersed in a crowd is timeless.

I was later introduced to the term ‘flâneur’, which, in my teenage years led me to read Guillaume Apollinaire, Charles Baudelaire, and Walter Benjamin amongst many others. I marvelled at the manner in which these writers guided their reader through the streets of the old world cities. It was my particular admiration of Poe’s “Man of the Crowd,” however, that led me to write a doctoral thesis about the New York flâneur. “Man of the Crowd” was set in London, yet not having visited the British capital, Poe drew upon his experiences in nineteenth century New York. I began to seek out other American writers that employed the flâneur device in their work.

Immediately, I noticed clear differences between the old world and new world literary wanderers. For example, whereas Baudelaire thrived on being within yet apart from the crowd, Walt Whitman’s view proved far more egalitarian. I drew upon work such as Allen Ginsberg’s “Mugging”, Frank O’Hara’s “A Step Away from Them”, along with David Wojnarowicz’s Close to the Knives and Sarah Schulman’s Girls, Visions and Everything. Each of these writers employed walking narratives in their work, yet, after close examination it became clear that in being transposed onto the New World city, the classic nineteenth century Parisian flâneur device had become something else. The wanderers found in these works were not aristocratic dilettantes bound to wander on account of their boredom; they had taken to the streets due to poverty, necessity, or simply to cruise. My studies revealed the manner in which the literary flâneur had evolved into many diverse genera: the social analyst, the urban collector, the drifter, the voyeur, the stalker, and the auto-flâneur, amongst many others.

This is where StepAway Magazine begins. It is our aim to perpetuate the evolution of the walking narrative. We urge our writers to submit work which forges pathways through the cityplace.

We are open to work which embraces the classic forms of flânerie, but we are also fascinated by writers that reject such forms completely. Our first call for submissions was met with an overwhelming response. On behalf of everyone at StepAway Magazine, may I express our gratitude to each of the writers who considered us as a home for their work. The standard of submissions was exceptionally high. Please do not lose heart if your work was not accepted on this occasion. I would also like to take this opportunity to thank our contributors, without whom we would not have been able to publish what we believe to be a remarkable first issue.

Our guest author for issue one is a writer for whom I hold great admiration – the novelist, historian and playwright, Sarah Schulman. Her story “WHY NOT?” is set in Los Angeles and views the city from the position of an outsider; a New Yorker who has ventured out to the west coast for “money, meetings and a girlfriend”. Issue one also contains a wealth of finely crafted poetry and prose by both new and recognized writers. Matthew Hittinger’s “Füße: Umlauts, Eszetts, A Step” offers a contemporary response to Frank O’Hara’s “A Step Away from Them”. Jaydn deWald’s experimental poem “Tour, Anti-” blurs the divide between cityspace and cyberspace. “Cat People #9: Tales of Manhattan” by Kyle Hemmings is a surreal paper chase through the streets and apartments of a salacious New York City. Joan McNerney’s “street corners” is a strikingly minimal study of urban living, suffocation, and a meld of the natural and the synthetic. David Gaffney’s “Effective Calming Measures” set in Poole, England, examines life in the edgelands, those artistically overlooked spaces that fall between the cityscape and the countryside. “Urban Poetics” by Changming Yuan is a witty exploration of a city brought to life by poetic terminology. Tom Sheehan’s “A short look at the Great God Shove,” shows us Boston’s Charlestown in the nineteen thirties through the eyes of a seven-year-old boy. Meanwhile, P.A. Levy’s poem “Home to Roost” offers a seamy stroll through nocturnal London and Gem Andrew’s “The Small Mouth Bass” juxtaposes small town America and the big city, in order to describe two contrasting states of isolation.

We hope that you enjoy reading the work of these talented writers as much as we did, and we look forward to receiving your comments and submissions for our following issue.

Yours faithfully,

Darren Richard Carlaw
editor@stepawaymagazine.com

Acknowledgements

Thank you to everyone involved in the creation of issue one, particularly our small team of learned readers, web designers and the artist I. Martin for donating her striking cover image. I would also like to thank James Annesley, John Beck, Jon Balmer, Linnie Blake, Paul Coulthard, Immy Humes, Jim Jones, Elena Kharlamova and Donna Wylie for their support, advice and inspiring conversations.

Tara Bergin, Olivia Chapman at New Writing North, Kirsten Luckins at Apples and Snakes, and Van Troi Tran all helped us to spread the word.

I would also like to express my gratitude to all of those who were eager to show their support for StepAway Magazine in its very early stages: Hannah Boylin, Keith and Heather Carlaw, Heather MacLeod, Ala Reutter and Lucy Sherwood.

Very special thanks to Irene Carlaw for her steadfast support, encouragement and belief.

Finally, thank you to Elena for her patience and tender devotion.

Issue One is dedicated to Dennis Carlaw and the art of drawing boxes.

“Why not?” she asked, and I knew it was a real question. Little Catherine. Actually she is taller than me, but there is something about age that makes them smaller, until we start to shrink.

Starbucks has a repulsive ability to play great music that was banned in its day but has since become banal. It reminds us that few things in life are truly dangerous. Only drunk driving and the adoration of the young. All of their pastries are dry white flour and colored sugar lumps passing for fruit and we eat them without joy. The only pleasure comes from thinking about how they could taste. The young, I mean. It’s amazing how far one will go to sit in a comfortable chair.

We’re in the gay Starbucks on Santa Monica Boulevard. I’ve come to Los Angeles for money, for meetings and to find a girlfriend, but instead I found Catherine and she meets none of my requirements. She’s young. That’s out. She’s not accomplished, in fact she’s lost. She doesn’t have her own friends. She’s not busy and she’s not solvent. She’s also not cute, although strangely attractive in the way that smart lost souls with wounds that will never heal are always compelling to the terminally hopeful.

Don’t do it! I tell myself sipping the burnt coffee, passing for strong.

An hour later we’re on her mattress on the floor, fraying towels, telephone wires buzzing outside the window against the passing traffic. She has three coffee mugs but no coffee, so they’re filled with tap water. Of course she’s a great kisser and looks at me deeply and soulfully, doing what women in the know know how to do. Holding, guiding, placing, maneuvering, lifting, painting my soon to be corpse with skill. She ignores my various symptoms of use, mostly because she doesn’t recognize them for what they are. I’m silent about aches and pains, dislocations, biopsy scars, thinning, bunching, untrimmed, puckering. She individuates me within her panoply of 22-28 year olds, and it all makes sense to her because every human being is real at some point.

This isn’t what I want a voice is whining inside my head, but it’s not my voice. It’s Jamie Robbins, Emmy- nominated but closeted, who ten years before when middle-age was some vague possibility, stood naked and gorgeous in her dank, dreary studio apartment on the Upper East Side of Manhattan and after four hours of the best sex of her life, blew me off because I couldn’t advance her career.

In the way that abused children abuse – I had waited the entire decade to use those wasteful stinging words on some innocent, thereby transferring the poison from my own wound to the next victim. Who would then pass it on to the next. This ensures multi-generations of traumatized lesbians who are great lovers but have no power, realizing that the former simply doesn’t compensate for the latter. Giving each other meaning in private has its limits and it’s our jobs to devastate each other with this news. The gay girl version of black- on-black crime.

Apparently, I’ve learned nothing despite my years, because even while moving from the discarded to the discarder, it all still takes place in tiny hovels with no view. Later, I decided at the last minute to be grateful and not sadistic, and so noncommittally kissed goodbye to sexy but flat-affected Catherine the Younger. Relaxed and yet troubled, I drove my white third-hand Pontiac down that Silverlake Street where Jamie has lived for the past four years with Louise Rockefeller. For the past four years. Each morning that I am in Los Angeles, I drive down their street, past the house where Portia and Francesca used to live. The pool. The Mexican gardeners. The BMW in the driveway. The delivery truck unloading a piano. The caterers and their tents. The limo waiting to take Jamie and her brother to the Emmy awards as Louise stood in the doorway waving good-bye with a drink in hand.

Investigating them has been an education. The first thing I learned is that people named Rockefeller are all related. That one easily becomes a heavy hitting producer at the same studio where her Jewish grandfather started it all. Her father (Mr. Rockefeller) married the boss’s daughter because he wanted to avoid the fate of his indulgent cousins and so got his own sports channel from papa-in-law and went to work every morning, happily. In his Ferlinghetti. I mean Berlusconi. Until he traded it in for a Negamaki and started collecting grandfather clocks. That’s how big the house was.

When Louise became a lesbian, it got as far as her father. But when she showed up one morning with a tattooed butch from Milwaukee, it went directly to her grandfather. Summoned onto the studio lot, she sat quietly in a small leather chair as grandfather laid down the law.

“If you can tell me that you are going to be with that woman for the rest of your life, I will accept the tattoos. But if you can’t tell me that, the tattoos have got to go.”

Young and freshly out of a legacy BA at Brandeis, Louise sat simmering between his Emmys for Dr. Kildare, impressed by his authoritative pragmatism, and realized she wanted Emmys too. She realized that she wanted them more than she wanted a boney muscular and somewhat dirty-minded hard-working mechanic from Wisconsin. They made a deal. Louise got a career in Hollywood and began a parade of acceptable girlfriends and lived happily ever after, now with Jamie Robbins.

So for the last four years I have taught five extension classes at USC, two online courses at UCLA and written earnest but overly sophisticated screenplays and pilots in my simple, but quiet West Hollywood apartment which was five times nicer than anything I could have afforded in New York. I bought Russian delicacies, shopped intelligently at Whole Foods, worked out at 24 Hour Fitness on the broken machines, all the while driving my leased Pontiac. I had an occasional drink at the Abbey, while watching celebrity children walk to the 8 pm AA meeting across the street. Once I went to AA myself, and all the stories reminded me of Jamie Robbins. It was like she was sitting there, emaciated, buff, micro-dermobrasioned and suddenly ready to tell the truth about herself. And yet, she never appeared. All along, as I drove and typed as a way of life, I knew that my primary motivation was to prove something to Jamie Robbins. To prove that she was wrong. To make it. And to make her. And to have all my dreams come true. Like in the movies. To win, to win the girl, to win the Emmy, and to be my one and only true self, the self that turns down love because it doesn’t advance your career. The self that no one else can destroy. So far, I have achieved none of these, but at least I have goals. It tells me what to do everyday.

It is easy to get waylaid in Los Angeles. In a typical week I meet for breakfast at Hugo’s with a dyke who has been spending the last five years trying to help the latest platinum Sammy Hagar look-alike find a movie that he wanted to make. Finally she stumbled on the winner. “Murder on an aircraft carrier” was sold on a one-sentence pitch. Five years of a human being’s life, devoted every day to this. She read my adaptation of Madame Bovary, called Mrs. Bovary about a modern housewife who gets her values about the world from watching the soap operas.

“Who do you think should direct it?” she asked.

Uh oh. I knew that meant she wasn’t going to help me.

“Uhm. Jane Campion?”

“I’ll try to get you her email address.” Then she introduced me to Billy Crystal’s manager. That was Monday.

On Tuesday I met with a former underground lesbian cult star who was looking for a writer to work for free on a movie starring all the former lesbian cult stars of the 1980’s and 90’s. It would have an audience of 45,000 or so, which isn’t enough, but it would be fun and could be good.

“Now that the L Word is finally off the air we could get our own people back out there again,” that was her strategy. “Now that the economy is collapsing we can make art again.” “Sure,” I said, paying for her burrito.

Wednesday I went to see a friend from New York in a play at the Geffen Theater. It had good New York actors, a good director, a good designer and it was awful. Something about being in LA affected everyone involved. They seemed traumatized. I had never gone to the theater in LA before. The audience was filled with women who seemed to have burned their hair, dyed it with vegetable root and applied Kabuki make-up before leaving the house. Strangely the audience clapped after every scene. It was like the crowd from New Jersey at The Nutcracker.

“Why do they clap after every scene?” I asked.

“I don’t understand why anybody in LA does anything,” my friend said. And then we didn’t have a drink because New Yorkers don’t have the skills to drive home drunk.

On Thursday a cute gay pop singer Facebook’d me.

Have you ever thought about writing a musical? Sure I wrote back. Lets get together and talk. I’m free after 3. I’m free all day tomorrow, she answered. Okay, what about 8 am at Mani’s on Fairfax? Great.

And then it occurred to me that this girl might be gf material. After all she ran a career that required upkeep of an image that was simultaneously spacey and sharkey and tough but unassuming. She was accomplished. I called my friend in Brooklyn for advice.

“Buy a new shirt,” she said.

By the time I got home from the horror of clothes shopping in a town where parking determines experiences, she had canceled.

Dentist she Facebook’d. Are you free later?

Dinner? I asked. 8 o’clock at Hugo’s or Real Food? I have therapy in Encino at 7:30. Anything else? 11:30 at Mustard Seed in Los Felix? I asked. Nope.

And then she blew me off. This was such a typical LA experience it was funny.

Right out of LA memoirs like Hello, He Lied by Lynda Obst and that sort of thing. I went home and worked on my pilot LOVE MONEY about actresses trying to make it in New York, so I could base a character on Jamie Robbins, but I couldn’t make her gay, it was for the network.

The next morning I met Bill at The Casbah in Silverlake.

“This neighborhood is just like the East Village,” he said – which is what everyone says about Silverlake because it was gentrified by people with tattoos. Bill had just gotten a job on that TV show where the detective is really dead, but he doesn’t know it.

“You should get a job on a TV show,” he said. “I’d love to,” I said. “I have a great agent,” he said. “Good,” I said.

“Your friend, Gina, has her too. You should get Gina to hook you up.”

“Great idea,” I said and ordered my fizzy pink lemonade.

The weekend was coming and with it that special kind of loneliness, the one so well worn it’s a comfort. Sometimes on Friday or Saturday night I lie in bed, have a cocktail and watch one of the greatest movies ever written like Primary Colors, and cry tears of joy that someone (Elaine May) could make every second interesting and count and surprising and human and funny and still throw in the Jewish jokes. And I feel so happy, so safe, and comfortable that beauty does exist. If I wasn’t used to loneliness, I would be miserable in moments like that because I let the right one get away. But that absence is my life now, isn’t it? That absence is why I live where I live, work where I work, write what I write, why I get in the car, why I have these ridiculous conversations with people whose lives make no sense either. Because I have a goal, and that gives my life meaning. My goal is to be someone who can advance Jamie Robbins’ career, and nothing else is worth doing. So that loneliness is special, it’s part of my quest, it’s got its own clarity and I know it. It knows me. I put its name down under In case of emergency please call, please call on my loneliness. She will pick me up from the hospital, bail me out of jail, and take me to the doctor. She’s the one I really trust to be there for me.

The next Monday I drove to a boring café on Cahuenga to meet with a lesbian who works in independent packaging at the new William Morris/Endeavor merged monster. I wanted to talk to her about my movie, The Lady Hamlet, a 1920’s backstage comedy about two great actresses competing to play the role of Hamlet on Broadway. She’s heard of Hamlet but doesn’t think there would be any interest. So we start to gossip. There are lesbians all over Hollywood. There is the costume designer at that HBO show and the assistant to the producer at that same show and the head of talent at that agency and that film agent and her TV producer girlfriend. They are all there, but they don’t work together. They have no Apparatus. So the moment always gets wasted. Sometimes I see them sitting at the corner table with Sandra Bernhard as I drive by the Ivy – three hundred dollar haircuts and eyeglasses that are Belgian design. “Are you single?” she asked benevolently. Trying to help.

“Yeah,” I say, suddenly remembering the beauty of Catherine’s chest tightening and releasing and I realize why I had been avoiding the gay Starbucks. “Do you know someone who would be right?”

“Lets see,” she says assessing me across the table of Diet Cokes and bad salads. “You’re looking for….a butch professor.”

“No and no,” I say. I am a butch professor. Has it come to this? Am I so inconceivable that I now look like the type that I crave?

“I know,” the WM/E girl says, suddenly lighting up with happiness. We all want each other to fall in love. We really do. And we all do everything we can to help. “What about Louise Rockefeller? She’s a really lovely person.”

“But she’s with Jamie Robbins,” I say – robotically, because some kind of information has entered my consciousness that I have no ability to accept.

“Who’s Jamie Robbins,” WM/E asks.

“She had an Emmy nomination for the Charlie Brown Hanukah special. She played Lucy.”

“I never saw it.”

I was offended. How could someone so in the know that she didn’t get fired in the WM/E merger, have never have heard of Jamie Robbins. The great. The great great actress. The one I love.

“Well, they’re together,” I denied.

“No,” the girl answered, looking at her Blackberry to see the time. “Louise has been single for two years. She’s lonely. She said she had a partner but the girl was too selfish.”

Two years. “Sure, I’d go out with her. We both dated the same woman at different times, but I’ll meet anyone.” “Yeah, she said the girl was too selfish.”

“Well,” I realized hopefully. “Maybe Louise would want to talk.” Why not? I thought. Why not just have the conversation. “Sure, I’ll meet her,” I said. It can only illuminate. But I knew it was absurd. Most people don’t do things like that. They don’t just let it happen.

All night I cried. I cried more than when my father died and more than when my mother died. The loss was greater. For two years I had been driving past a mansion where there was no Jamie. I was dreaming, thinking, aspiring to a success that she could not keep a grip on. I wanted the girlfriend that she had failed to be, I wanted the success she had not become. My heart was full with a Jamie that poor Jamie couldn’t have either. I was stark, in my crappy nothing life. And even more, the lesbian grapevine had failed me for two entire years. Now that was devastating. I started thinking about Jamie, not by the pool but on the subway. Borrowing money from her crazy father, and selling off her piano and flat screen TV. She became someone very very near to me. Instead of a frolicking piece of gauze, it was so close I could smell her earwax and I could see her pores. Just like I was once able to do for real. And then I realized that this delayed news of her failure, weirdly, brought Jamie and I closer together than ever. We had both failed at being her. But I’m not her, and she is. So she failed more. It was so LA. It was so stupid. Why can’t people just love their sexy, smart, talented devoted lovers instead of dumping them for the elusive? Why can’t they realize years later that they made a mistake, chosen falsity over substance and pick up the phone and apologize? Why couldn’t we get back together?

I drove down Santa Monica and actually found a parking place in front of Starbucks. Maybe because it was 6:30 in the morning. I knew Catherine would be there because she worked there. She was a barrista.

“Hi,” she smiled, flatly, sexily, intelligently with promise but confusion and that young person’s entrancing directionless lack of hope. She was happy to see me. “What’s new?”

“I’m leaving,” I told her, forgetting everything I ever knew. “I’m going back to New York.”

“Why not?” she said. And then she poured me a grande latte in a vente cup and smiled. She didn’t make me pay. It was her gift.

Sarah Schulman

double exposed and a bubble
floated by in battle with June’s
Solstice warped in soapy glare where
hundreds did downward dog and fresh
from Coney’s Mermaid Day Parade
I fought a station fire watched
a red moon rise over a roof
deck party in Harlem but not

the day Tim Russert died Friday
the 13th and The Hulk take two
debuted with M. Night Shylaman’s
first R film The Happening we
joked in the “what in the world is”
sense; 81 degrees I bought
Madonna tix at MSG
but today day of 8s it is

88 degrees a protest
parade snakes down 42nd
a trail of maroon and gold flags
and Tibetan monks but the voice
on the bullhorn American
leading the anti-China chant
the letters on his T-shirt bleed
“Genocide Olympics” but I

will marvel that night opening
ceremony unlike any
sight we have seen. It is noon, rare
that I venture through the hour
of the Naked Cowboy who half-
strums and half-struts fully poses
on his V-tipped island the chords
lined up like girls his double-lined

white briefs display his name in red
and blue which is to say today
patriot I stepped not away
but across the Neuhaus drone had
a wrap and watched lawyers haul briefs
in pant suits and ties, stilettos
dodge loafers, chin rolls swallow
collars like trees, curbs, and tourists

who need their own lane to crane neck
lenses or better yet Father
Duffy’s stairs where they can twist shoot
while the TCKTS booth lines snake arm-
like around them. It was here cabs
metronomed votes on a big screen,
the honks silenced by O’s win, cheers
carried on grate steam, this pie slice

Disneyfied where hos once roamed where
on the grayest day it feels like
noon from billboard glow. I buy Der
Spiegel. Three cats sit in loaf-of-
bread pose schwarz, grau, orangensaft
unfazed by the falling cranes. I
make for the train, run the gum-dimed
stairs. Step here, high noon in Times Square.

Matthew Hittinger

Please close all windows. To experience the city

One must digitalize one’s home:

                                                   this purple sky

Will make the perfect screensaver. I can see you—

Eating alone at the Taco Bell—

                                               from outer space.

II

It’s earthquake weather. Quit shaking the mouse.

Under the over-

                         pass, in the pixilated dark, I tag.

You’re it. We are constantly working to improve—

You know. On the cement floor, a series of links

And body chalk outlines. To gentrify,

                                                          click here.

III

Our glass elevators afford the best views. Never

Mind this cold, sterile feeling.

                                            I’m streaming live

Entertainment: a crowded street falls to its knees—

Except for one man, stunned,

                                           staring at everyone.

Jaydn DeWald

She’d make a great catch in the rain. Because in the rain nothing moves. No cat girl of deep shade eyeliner. No saint of dark corners. Trouble was whenever it rained we couldn’t find ourselves. We became parodies of the Keystone Cops. She must have laughed with the flashing black eyes of a Daruma doll.

Since she was a part of me, mine, mu, that assumption of sticky fingers, I had to bring her in. We had gone to school together, PS 12 on 63rd across from Central Park. As kids, we flew paper planes there during recess. Our teacher was too busy collecting varieties of leaf and butterfly. In the shade of elm, she moved like a cat, had that sad glint in her eyes of a girl not afraid to be anything. “You’re going to be a bird someday,” I said, watching the paper plane float above us. “But with no wings,” she added, dancing in circles like some mad Nijinsky. She stole my virginity without ever touching me. By the time I graduated the Police Academy, no victim could move me.

Years later she became the infamous Cat Girl, connoisseur of what diamond-shaped love belonged to others: Marquise, Emerald, Radiant, Pear, Asscher, 24 Carat and beyond. She ripped off the Tiffany Porcelain ladies who resembled their manicured poodles. In her apartment paid for by another ill-fated lover, I imagined her dancing to Stravinsky’s Capriccio for piano, or collapsing to the floor practicing her graceful cat death. Across town, in a precinct of weak walls, I was promoted to junior detective.

I chased her through open windows, across floors with glass walls, up and down Soho’s side streets, a no go in Noho. In Chinatown, she vanished through crowds of serious-looking women, shoulder to shoulder. In skyscrapers, she disappeared through elevator cars perfectly timed and my timing was always too hard-boiled egg logical. At night, I fingered my torn pillow and imagined holding the fur of some jaguarondi jumping building to smoking building, and in my dreams a witch changed me into a white cat. In others, I drank Cat Girl’s blood, the only thing that could cure my St. Anthony’s fire.

She had become the rage of fashion society, of young girls tired of A.M. radio’s divas. It became chic to dress in black leather, gold hoop earrings, a vampish hand of black eyeliner, to pose with one hand on hip, the other against a graffiti-raped wall, that incredibly over-dramatic smirk that said Am I fuckable or what?

On TV, in the courtrooms, her close-ups mocked me. There was never enough to put her away. At trials, she would turn around and wink at me, as if to say Fuck you, I’m a cat. One case was dismissed on the grounds of race alone. A DNA sample proved that she was part Russian Blue. We suspected she had seduced the judge with the sweep of her eyes, the keenness of her answers.

As I drove in patrol cars, everywhere written in bold reds and oranges of spray paint, from Spanish Harlem to Delancy Street: You’ll never catch me. In her palm, she had oil sheiks badly in need of new tricks in bed, and Wall Street brokers badly in need of blue sky. She always had me.

We met at a diner. She sat alone, dressed like a punk rocker in some Indie band that grooves in its own distortion, the short skirt, the green leg warmers, the tattoo on her shoulder of a raging cat, paws outstretched. I approached her table, smiled and sat down. I said that sooner or later everyone’s luck runs out.

She buttered her English muffin and said without looking up, “Do you find me fuckable?”

In my place back on Bleecker, we fucked like R.E.M. zombies in a rage of awakening, of having been dead for so long. We smeared ourselves with new voodoo and obscene ritual. We must have made a thousand babies with perfect blues eyes. After she left, I noticed my one hand was handcuffed to the bedrail. With the other, I found a two dollar bill under my pillow. I knew I’d never catch her.

A rainy night. We received a call about a robbery in progress on the upper East side. We fired the siren and drove through red lights.

The woman was in tears. Her best jewelry gone. It belonged to her grandmother from the old country, who in her youth kept a collection of jewel damselflies.

I caught a flash of her through the window. Like a fool, I chased her across rooftops, telling myself not to look below. We were light years up. The streets were lizards. The streets were snakes. She performed a magnificent jump, ledge to ledge. In the rain, through the mist, the hunched shadow yelled out, “Am I still fuckable?”

I squatted, tensed, and flew like a lousy invention. I realized that I was her paper plane from childhood that had turned into flesh and bone. My hands caught on the opposite ledge. My body grew heavy. I fell. I fell forever.

I woke up to a nurse taking my temperature. How bad, I asked. She said in a sweet melodic voice, that besides the concussion, I had some bad cuts, that one of them became infected, a gram negative.

I studied her. She had a tattoo of a cat on her forearm. There was a trace of eyeliner and that smirk.

“Is it contagious?” I yelled out.

She already left the room.

Kyle Hemmings

exhaust fumes

slate-like formations

wait for light

to change

her carbon dress

his face of ashes

crushed within

this granite body

we eat grey food

pulling empty

air thru narrow

passageway to

ink stain train

smudged

along blurred

landscape of city

inside myself

searching a

designer

1 clear line

of perspective

which distinguishes

buildings from

streets & points

to where

the synthetic

sky ends

Joan McNerney

The mini-roundabout at the bus station end of Seldown Bridge holds three cars and has eight lanes of traffic channelled onto it. I looked at it for a long time. I saw the giant tin-opener on the quay.  I thought about the asbestos under the beach and how much I miss the Hants and Dorset bus garage. The bare-chested man in purple velour tracksuit bottoms staggered by playing New York, New York on a mouth-organ. He told me to stop whistling. I wasn’t whistling. He told me a Beverly sister used to live in Poole and did I want to hear one of their songs.

I said nothing.

I could sleep the sleep of a thousand animals.

Purple velour asked if I was going to say no to the Yacht Haven.

Poole was better when Boone’s hardware still sold machetes.

I asked him if he ever dressed up as a butterfly catcher, but he said that wasn’t him.

It was now necessary to make a few adjustments to my life.

I went home and crashed my car through the fence and left it there, half on the pavement, half on the lawn. I dragged my furniture outside, including the new suite from Bright House with that mental rip-off insurance policy and sat on the sofa with my stereo blasting twenty punk anthems.

Everyone walked past and looked.

I set fire to the neighbours shed, laughing as it burned and warming my hands on the flames. They watched from the window, pressing numbers into that little phone they have.

All I am waiting for is some intelligence to come out of the mouths of council staff.

David Gaffney

with masks of synecdoche and metonymy

so many metaphors are dancing wildly

that no oxymoron can elbow his way

through crowds of symbols and hyperboles

to his long lost friend paradox

trying to converse with a shy-looking allusion


after standing too long on tiptoes

between consonance and assonance

i become an internally-rhymed road plate

pointing towards the shiny euphony

with no onomatopoeia painted on my face

hardly visible beside the fast lane


Changming Yuan

I hit the bottom landing and burst out into the Saturday sunshine trying to warm the cobblestones of Boston’s Charlestown. There’d be the bully Shove again this day. It had been that way since the beginning.

A late October breeze whistled in from the Mystic River and the Charlestown Navy Yard where my father’s Marine Barracks loomed over the wall. Pennies and nickels for a 25 pound bag of coal jingled in my pocket. Soon the stovetop would be a mickey-brick red. I could smell the toast set on the stovetop for seconds. Burnt was the way I liked it. Well-done, filling the air with burnt aroma. Aromas, in Charlestown, in 1935, were important.

Charlestown was a yardstick for measuring things. For me, at 7, a little wiser than I should have been, it presented a geometry not taken lightly. Perception began with four-decker tenements walling around me, sheer as drab cliffs. A pale green façade might come along and pass quickly. Daydreams were an opiate in the air.

A drunk shivered and smelled in the doorway of No.2 Bunker Hill Ave. For him there was no place to go. Locked into Charlestown gave you grace for survival or a slow death, but did not give promise of escape. Escape came in books I read or over the Navy Yard’s fence, iron wrist-thick, pointed at its top, with the harbor beyond.

Before turning the corner I looked up Bunker Hill Ave., past four-decker cubic blocks, the red-mickey-made Bond Bread factory square as a prison face, and St. Catherine’s Church. Hobie’s garage-like beanery was stuck in between two tenements, an afterthought, a pony stall in a Clydesdales’ barn. Over the horizon, where The Elevated ran two ways out of Sullivan Square, one way went deep in-town. The other headed off to Everett and places beyond, where trees grew in great clusters and fields leaped and the wind sang a different tune. Here it shrieked around clapboard corners and up slim alleys where neighbors touched each other.

I knew Shove’d be in front of Halsey’s Market. I’d have to run the gauntlet again. Taunts and small pains were due. Shove, the bully, 17 years-old, and me, his favorite target. He didn’t have a sloped forehead, a bulging jaw or a strange look in his eyes. I never heard he was dropped on his head as a baby. Nothing said anything about him except he bullied.

He leaned against a wall, like a firecracker ready to pop. Why he picked on me only he and I knew; Shove would get as much of me until revenge came.

Shove thought it’d never come. But I knew different. It was in the air.

He idled against the wall the way he imposed himself on others. But was a strange mixture to say the least. Shove was the neighborhood hero. A lean super first baseman and long-ball hitter, a driving tailback who cracked daylight more often than not, a vicious tackler, speed and power in each fist, he could arc a horseshoe into the air to ring at flight’s end. Out of town he’d be a ringer in any game.

Shove hated me for a special reason, the catalyst being my father, striking in his dress blues, three stripes up and down. But, in Charlestown in 1935, survival was a matter of self. I complained to my father only once. “He’s always pushing me, trips me, knocks me over barrels, breaks my bottles outside the store. He grabbed my back pockets and split my pants down the seam, then laughed crazily.”

For righteous indignation I waited, for explosion, for crimson anger to fill his face. Waited on him to pound Shove into unconsciousness. My father had the fists Harry Greb had.

That explosion simmered. He looked at me, nose unbent and clean, thugs never getting inside his left jab. The collar of his dress blues blouse was opened as it was only at home

“Sonny, I’ll never chase him or disgrace the uniform, but if I turn a corner and he’s there, he’ll never belly up to you again.” Aware of my understanding, he kept talking. “What you have is a problem.” He said you with firmness. It was not the first time I’d been challenged by my father. “You’re 7. He’s 17. That’s a big difference, isn’t it?”

I nodded a yes.

“You have every right in the world to protect yourself. You can use a bat or a hunk of iron pipe, but don’t get hurt by him. You’ve as many smarts as most kids your age. Use them.”

There it was! In 7 years that was my greatest challenge. My toes tingled, ears buzzed. An unknown charge surged through me. A chill went up my back.

He patted my head. Revenge’s delicious air came on stronger than the coming meal, even as he stirred fried onions into the mix.

Later I had a glass of root beer. He ladled up beer from an open crock, told stories about Paris Island, Quantico, Nicaragua, and his younger days in Charlestown. We sat in the kitchen of the second floor flat, the stovetop a dull red, oblivious of the prison we were in, nested and happy for the moment, smiling at old stories told anew. Strains of the dominant male were working their way across the face of my soul.

I dreamed of punishing Shove. I had the license. Didn’t my father commission me to get Shove by any means? Wasn’t I the oldest of the brood, the biggest dreamer?

I’d get Shove. He’d bow before me. It was only right. Evil thoughts passed through me. He was dismembered at wrist and ankle. A Machiavellian enterprise crushed his eyes bloodless, made him a laughing stock of that triangle running from City Square to Sullivan Square to the Mystic Bridge and back to City Square along the huge black iron fence of the Navy Yard. Inside that triangle, long on one side, I would fix The Great God Shove forever.

Tom Sheehan

                                cl-amber out the tube hole

smelling of dust cove-red         electricity

                                            clinging st-atic

                          stub-born like a shadow

stumble into the words of sp-ray can

                                                            poets

that trickle down walls

                        in sob mas-cara let-ters

            and the tags of the disaffected 

                                      that lay a cl-aim to

   grime parts of graph-ite coloured do-main

wall-f-lower posters flutter but can’t       fly

word on the street all torn and tattered

                          as if words ever mattered

jumble of sounds           no-ise

                                            poor reception

caught in tv aerial tan-gle 

                                              dream cat-chers

for the thread-bare set-tee acade-mics

un-sybaritic con-crete echoes with calls in

                                        ob-scene anglo-saxon

                                    under  

amber spot-lights an-other beer bottle

be-comes a thou-sand different diamondesque

                                    t-wink-les 

                                      against the d-ole grey

that gives the land-scape its stark cut out-line

            right     angles

                                    straight lines

con-trasted on street corners

      by b-leached blonde im-migrant whores

who parade curves in colour

shivering in short skirts                 e-yes freeze

                                    self-pity

into self-preservation cry-ogenics

dissolving the pretty girl looks

                                    into hero-in reflections

                                                tart lem-on ac-id

and the sulphurous plum-es of burnt match-es

                  hold a f-lame to cctv superstars in 

                                              branded train-ers

boom b-ass boys            fuel injected cruise by

                                looking for the star shine

that seeps from cracked pip-es

                                    searching to find

                        Nirvana E15


P.A. Levy