Dear Reader,

Welcome to Issue Two of StepAway Magazine.

I often wonder how the layout of a city determines our walking experience. Think of old world cities, Paris, for instance. Here the wanderer has the choice of strolling the grand boulevards, or exploring the meandering ruelles which evaded Hausmanisation. Cities such as London which have expanded almost organically, where narrow, twisting back alleys intersect with wide straight thoroughfares, bear a stark contrast to gridded cityspaces, where straight lines are chalked out long before the first foundation stone is set. It is somewhat simpler for the walker to lose his or her sense of direction in London, to wander unintentionally in circles, to confuse north with south. In midtown Manhattan, as with most New World cities, there is an inescapable rationality within the grid. The street numbers increase with northward movement, whereas the avenue numbers increase with westward movement. With this in mind, it is almost impossible for the walker to become truly lost when a grid reference can be found on almost every street corner. Similarly within the grid, the walker is faced with the same number of choices at the end of most blocks. He or she can either choose to turn directly left or right, continue straight ahead, or turn back on him or herself. In London, the number of choices are never certain. A tangle of capillaries: passages, lanes, arcades and alleyways all offer impromptu escape routes from the city’s main arteries. This too must have a bearing not only on how the walker moves through a city, but how the literary wanderer writes about a city. Do walking narratives set within the grid take on the stop-start rhythm of a crowd held or released by the walk/don’t walk sign at the end of each block? Is it easier to create a sense of being lost in a narrative set in an Old World city? These are questions to consider whilst reading issue two, where our contributors lead us not only through New York, Philadelphia and Chicago, but through Calcutta, Fes and Tirana.

In her review of our inaugural issue, Vanessa Willoughby of newpages.com noted that StepAway Magazine “crackles with city life and the energy of a world-curious adventurer”. That energy is perhaps more potent here in our summer issue, given the far flung destinations explored by our writers. We begin with a story by Richard Thomas, a critically acclaimed writer whose work has been anthologized alongside Stephen King and Peter Straub. Thomas’s story, “Daybreak” is set in Wicker Park, Chicago in the depths of winter. Thomas skilfully disturbs our perceptions of the walk, transforming it into a devastating act of catharsis, a manner of slipping from the emotional trappings of the urban carapace. Morelle Smith’s “Walking as Identity – Tirana” is a sensory stroll through the streets of the Albanian capital, whilst Vaughan Chapman’s charming “Kitsilano Portraits” has all the immediacy of a page of observations torn directly from the pocket notebook of a Vancouver flâneuse. Peter Taylor’s poem “Chicago Picasso” returns us to The Windy City. The poem is taken from a striking new collection by Taylor entitled Cities Within Us. This collection, as Taylor himself states, is a study of the “worlds and wars that we create within ourselves”. Gary Glauber’s poem “Perfect Stranger”, set in the New York subway, reads as a contemporary take on Baudelaire’s “À une passante”, capturing the fleeting nature of encounters in the metropolis. Debotri Dhar’s story “Calcutta, by foot” follows two lovers as they explore the “delicious little nooks and bends” of the West Bengal capital together. In Elizabeth Swados’s poem “Kalid 2” we are escorted through the Moroccan city of Fes and its surroundings by a local tour guide. Swados imagines the hidden city, the private spaces which exist behind stout wooden doors, the ancient ruined city of courts and concubines, and the villages and nomadic camps which lie beyond the margins of the city in open desert. William Doreski’s timely “Deep in Recession” is a poem set in Boston, it too features a tour guide, in this case one that has lost her banking job and is forced to show tourists around the city’s landmarks. Doreski’s Boston glimmers with consumer luxuries all of which are moved further from reach as a result of the economic climate. Meanwhile, Cheryl Chambers’s poem “A Woman: Tres Partes” sashays its way through the nocturnal barrio. Debonair Oates-Primus’s “In Transit: Confessions from the Conscience of a Blackened Street” is set in her home neighbourhood in Philadelphia. Her work is a study of compassion and community in what is perceived by the mass media to be one of the city’s poorest and most dangerous enclaves. Finally, Amy Schreibman Walter’s “On Christopher Street” takes the form of a lament for a lover lost in the New York crowd.

Our cover shot was kindly donated by the distinguished American photographer, Roger Minick. Minick’s photography has featured in Life magazine and is held in collections at The Metropolitan Museum, and MoMA. Having embarked on his first major photography project in 1966, a study of the landscape and communities of the Sacramento San Joaquin River Delta in California, his body of work offers a fascinating and detailed study of America and its people. Our cover shot is taken from his new book “Subway Dreaming”. In this project Minick shot his work candidly using an iPhone whilst travelling on the New York subway. I would like to personally thank Roger for allowing us to use his photograph.

I would also like to thank all of you who sent messages of support to StepAway Magazine following the release of issue one. We are truly grateful for your kind words, and for supporting us via our Facebook page. We wish to express our gratitude to each of you personally in our acknowledgements section.

Now, it is time to let the work of our talented writers speak for itself. Enjoy reading.

Yours faithfully,

Darren Richard Carlaw

editor@stepawaymagazine.com

Maybe it was the snow. It started out as a fluttering, pulling my black knit hat down tight on my head, cinching my coat around me, boots laced up tight. But soon the ground was blanketed. Standing in front of my apartment, Julia gone for three weeks now, I rubbed the stubble on my chin, and looked up into the graying sky, opening my mouth for communion, accepting the numbing donation. Leather gloves pulled on tight, briefcase in hand, I moved forward, while drifting backwards to her pale skin under layers of blankets, to her hot breath at my neck. If I had something in my hand I would have inhaled it.

Maybe it was the song that I couldn’t get out of my head. Brick buildings huddled close together, the city around me waking up with the gush and squeal of bus brakes, hot air as doors slid apart. And in my head, I was lost in a forest—all alone. Running towards nothing. Again and again and again and again. A blur of bodies, huddled together, a flash of red, yelling stop.

Maybe it was the phone call. I stumbled down the steps into the el stop station, going underground, shoulders and skirts hidden in the shadows, hibernating. It was her last night, I don’t doubt it. When the walls of my barren burrow couldn’t hold me any longer, I ventured out into the night. The siren song of giggling girls, the clacking of pool balls, the clinking of glasses, the hot spark of a match being lit, they wormed into my ears and I followed. She was not there, not anymore. But her ghost was. The order at the bar trimmed down to just one, her weakness for gin on my lips, and halted. No, I was alone. I wanted to hate her, for sharing our bed, for turning to stone, for draining me of all that she has poured into me, without batting her raccoon eyes. Her musky sweet perfume, red currant and bourbon, sweat and salt, smoke and cinder, still rested in her pillow, the sheets, the drawers. It was only a few shaky breaths, a tiny gasp, but it was her. She felt something. Still. And that set me free.

When the train ended, I walked. When the sidewalk ended, I stumbled. When the grass turned to dirt my boot prints kept stamping time, my hands relaxing, losing my grip, gloves fluttering to the sky, leather briefcase falling to the ground, cracking open on the icy tundra, spilling out pictures of her meant for the pyre. I could see the lake ahead, so I started to undress. I left the knit hat by a bodega, plantains for sale. My sunglasses fell under foot, the café door opening, fresh bread, my stomach gurgling, coffee dripping, my eyes watering.

If there was anything left, it would have poured out, leaked out, but there was nothing. Between everything and nothing, I chose nothing. The layers peeled off, laces ripped, until my alabaster skin turned to marble, and I slipped between the cracks of the fractured ice, going under, leaving the structures behind, the bricks and iron melting into a flash of sunlight, and I made my daybreak whole.

Richard Thomas

All day it seems, I’ve been walking through the streets. When I leave Rruga Adzeni, cross the pedestrian bridge over the river and head up to the market area, it’s morning, it’s bright, the night has washed the air clean of grime and dust and the city sparkles. Up a straight incline, into a warren of small streets, Rruga Tefta Tashko, Rruga Beqir Luga, Rruga Musa Karapici, all dusty brown threads that wind and meander, like summer thoughts, half-reclining, evasive, following the lie of the land, and the lisp of the tongue, following the sun’s path, and the way the shade moves, when the wind alters its contours, just like leaves move, and dust shifts, like the rat circling round the garbage bins.

The streets follow corners the way roof tiles follow slopes. Old wooden awnings over windows lie at an angle, slatted, dark brown, with gaps where the thin wooden slats have rotted or fallen out. The sunlight catches the angles of awnings, and the shadows point on the walls, like spears. The walls are blotched, peeled, discoloured.

Old men in dark brown suits and white fezes, follow the corners of the narrow pathways, blending in with the brown of the earth and the pale brown of the walls. Some alleys are so narrow, the sunlight cannot reach them. The old men turn into the alleys and vanish. A whiff of jasmine blossom slips out of the darkness. Up by the market, there are smells of roasting meat and frying oil. A man with no legs pushes himself along the dusty pavement, with his hands.

The litter bins are set on elegant metalwork, but already some of the upright poles have been bent at an angle of 45 degrees, pulled away from the vertical, dragged towards the ground. Some of the bins are rusty – some are missing. The winter carried them off, or the river perhaps. The sunlight is tawny, not fierce, its claws sheathed, but flexing and shiny.

Near the clock-tower I walk across a flat expense of earth, with here and there a tuft of grass growing, emerald green against the brown. The area of earth is scattered with shiny puddles and most of what is not underwater is slicked with a film of mud. I negotiate the lakes and swampy areas and I feel briefly like a child, playing at explorers. The sunlight sparkles on the puddles. My sandal squelches between a puddle and a handful of grass. I look at my pale blue sandals, elegant suede, of delicate blue, and I want to laugh, for they are dust and grime-stained now and outlined with a piping of wet mud. I jump up onto a wall, to avoid a brown expanse of water, walk along the wall and jump down again.

I do not know who I am, as I step over fragments of patterned paving stones, the sunlight chopping all that it touches, slicing it up into brightness and shade. I am swept up with the rubble, and smoothed down with the dust. I am nothing, other than this. I am laughing and frightened. I am possibly only the words that I write. So I have to keep writing, as I have to keep moving, in sunlight, or out of it.

The clouds ring Dajti mountain like necklaces, blurring its slopes, revealing its peaks. In the evening, the sun swoops for the ocean and Dajti stands on its tiptoes, the scarves of the clouds like a lullaby, soothing and whispering. The sun’s gone now, but its fingers tap messages on my shoulders and neck.

I don’t know who I am, as I walk through these streets. I feel like a chink in a wall, stuffed with extravagant flowers. In the evening, the flowers droop and drop, one by one, from the gap that they filled.

A loosened soil. I could be that, as I walk through these streets. Something crumbling. Maybe a stone. Maybe, once part of a red-brick archway, like the one I saw on a muddy track between Bajram Curri and Myslym Shyri, with greenery dangling from the curve of its roof. Or the darkness the archway is covering. Tell me, I whisper to the sauntering streets, tell me who I am. My walking is waiting and listening, not walking at all.

Morelle Smith

Not yet fifty but chunky as women are at that age, in short black boots, pressed jeans, black turtleneck, and Irish knit pullover. The stitches stretch. Big hands, one swollen and curled and cradled in her lap. She has a round face, with a large pale mole to the side of one eye, and bleached hair, cut short around the ears with enough left for a skiff of curls across the crown. She dips orange cake now into decaffeinated latte, her lips moving before she tastes.

II

He sits, in a well-pressed gray suit, deep inside the softly lit restaurant, long fingers tapping as he talks to a platinum-haired woman somewhat older than himself. She wears a rough wool coat, off-white and wrapped as if she were cold or wanting to go home. Perhaps she is his wife, perhaps his secretary, perhaps a woman with whom he meets to solicit her dying husband’s collection of fine antiques or rare coins or precious paintings. Below the table, his sex stands strong.

III

Red–in her hair, her glasses, her coat draped over the chair, her knee-length striped socks, and behind her on the wall of the sushi restaurant and beneath the book she reads, on the table itself. She wears a black pullover, under that a white shirt polka-dotted with pink, a brown herringbone skirt snug across her hips as she sits, brown shoes. Paying, she pulls out a leopard-skin purse. Out of that, a lime and pink billfold. All of this–and when she rises to leave, a limp.

Vaughan Chapman

One hundred and eight floors up
in the Sears Tower
you can see it all:
vertebrae of a city
hugging the lake front
like an exhausted animal,
steel wheat
rising from the plains of Illinois.

I think of Lincoln and fires.

After two hours in the Loop,
the mind still wanders
with the despair of a commuter,
until
coming down Dearborn there it is —

50 feet high, unreal at first,
icon, grotesque butterfly,
the bird in the horse in the woman,
162 ton offspring
of Picasso and US Steel,
weathering graffiti
with the patience of a saint
in the Richard J. Daley Plaza.

Across the street
a 39 foot Miró looks on,
its sensuous ceramic
nestled between
the First United Methodist Temple
and the Chicago-Tokyo Bank.

Peter Taylor

Gary Glauber

He was from the northern part of the city, with its hum of harassed vendors squatting by the roadside, its narrow roads crammed with buildings whose paint had long peeled, and breathless bursts of pedestrians trampling over each other to reach the few stray rickshaws that circled edgily around. And she was from the south-est of South Calcutta, where bungalows nestled in wide, tree-lined boulevards and chauffeurs drove you to glitzy clubs and wines flowed and laughter tinkled. If they’d had any sense, they’d have walked away from each other the first time they’d met at a bar during her yearly summer holiday in India and he’d insisted that they walk down to her house which was almost a mile away – taxis were expensive, of course, and he didn’t have a car or even a job for that matter – and she’d struggled into his walksy, wayward life, high heels and all. A quarter of a mile later, he’d proceeded to kiss her very thoroughly and indignant passers-by be damned, until she was drunk on the taste, the touch, the smell of him. After they made love that night, he’d rubbed her swollen feet to the strains of a forgotten Bengali folk song.

‘I’ve always been a street person,’ he confessed the next morning. And so in the weeks that followed, he’d walked her through a Calcutta she hadn’t known growing up, a Calcutta of lazy lanes dotted with tea-stalls and tiny sweet shops and the hot, exciting smells of telebhaja, fried snacks. They went to Mrityunjaya, his favourite Bengali dhaba, and sat on a rickety wooden bench guzzling kachoris as light and buttery as an October sun. They watched a Satyajit Ray play at Madhusudhan Mancha, and held hands and laughed when Potol Babu the protagonist sniffled delicately at an unjust world and flailed his pointy arms about.

Sometimes they walked from under the winding swerve of the Dhakuria Bridge all the way to Tollygunge until, as a concession to her aching feet, he let her chauffeur drive them to Dum Dum, Salt Lake and onwards, where the stars huddled together and the wind whistled mournfully by. And twice they walked to crowded Barasat, to his rented one-room apartment with second-hand furniture, a dog-eared rug and the stench of fish from the nearby fish-market. He showed her his paintings and she could tell he was good with oils. (He was good with a lot of things, but he just couldn’t keep at them long enough.)

The second time they walked to his apartment, she brought roast meats and fancy salads for his near-empty refrigerator, pretty floral curtains for the windows and a sparkly new rug for the floor. ‘You shouldn’t spend your money like this,’ he said quietly. When she smiled and said nothing, he drew her close and ran his fingers through her long hair just the way she liked. But he never brought her home again.

Not that it mattered. The city was full of delicious little nooks and bends, and they never ran out of places to walk to. Over the next few summers, he also showed her the idyllic outskirts of the city. When she saw the green, endless stretches of paddy fields dotted with egret-poised swamps, and just beyond, a river swishing and swirling up in waves to meet a crinkled, crimson-stained sky, she rested her head on his shoulder. Those days, walking hand in hand past sloping ridge and raining hill, through forests falling in thick folds of peepal and jackfruit, she wanted never to return to her nine-to-five corporate job in America. But return she did, at the end of every summer, with just the lingering, unspoken promise of an afterwards.

This summer was different, though. For one, she’d turned thirty. ‘Enough’s enough and you must get married right away,’ her mother had fumed. ‘Not an arranged marriage, Ma,’ she’d protested. ‘Do you love someone then? Someone appropriate?’ her mother had countered reasonably. So when she travelled to Calcutta this year, she got engaged to the son of an old family friend. Like her, her fiancé was also an investment banker in Manhattan, and everyone said she was lucky, for wasn’t her fiancé one of the most eligible bachelors in the Indian-American community? Why, only thirty-two and he already owned a three-bedroom apartment and a couple of cars, and he took care of his parents.

Of course, the engagement meant that she put off meeting, till her very last day in Calcutta, the one person she wanted to see the most. And then, since old habits die hard, they walked while they talked. There wasn’t much to say though, except that Alice was on her way back from Wonderland, and so they spoke of this and that till he eventually suggested he catch the evening train back. When they reached the Metro station close to her house, he ran his fingers tenderly through her hair. ‘Keep smiling,’ he said, before starting to walk away.

From the corner of her eye, she could see her fiancé’s flashy red car turning into the street. Next morning, they were to fly back to Manhattan together, and for a breathless moment, she wanted to shout down the insistent, blasphemous honking and run to another man who lived in a dingy one-room apartment and walked the streets of Calcutta. But that man had already cut briskly across the road and the distance between them was growing by the minute and her feet ached so much that she stood very still, not moving, not moving.

Debotri Dhar

Of white ovens
The first wife.
The four second wives
The concubines
I am thrilled by the facts and
Tense from their revelations.
In this Kasbah was a court—Kalid
Showed me where
The King judged who was a criminal
Who should go free
The criminal beheaded on the spot.
Tomorrow I will met Berber Nomads
The women have tattoos above their noses
Between their eyes
Some never leave their tents and
Only trade with passersby.
The poverty of the poverty red sharks
Along our route is breathtaking.
The mountains and fields are from the Bible.
There is a mosque in every village- even one
With four houses and another village only a half
mile away which must have its own mosque.
One last fact. I dreamt about the book
Of Deuteronomy from this
Book the Old Testament comes the
phrase

               Do not forget!

Never forget
you are a Jew Mordechai says to
Esther when she enters the palace of the Persian king.
Tomorrow we meet the Berber Nomads
Kalid has told me were—in ancient time
Part Jews.
I’m interested in the drums and metal castanets.
And the dreams of Kalid
Who was born as one of them.

Elizabeth Swados

William Doreski

Beat black streets she walks.
In clogs–a hint of a heel– she clops.

Skinny shiny double silver hoops
catch the sun and click with a glint

against a backdrop of heavy hoodies
and too tight white tees–a chica, she thinks

now, she fires off a blitz with a gum
snap and a trill, and says “Kick it.”

2.

Smooth, sweet chica takes a seat, looks around
and swizzles sticks while he swings
a pole up to his hips and looks around.
Tightens his grip.

She orders up, flicks ashes
—he looks around—
she takes a sip,
then sets her drink down.

Winning his hustle he leans back
—takes a break—
next shot he makes he’ll pick up the slack.

The music’s up, a second whiskey sour, stuck
in a beat she taps her feet. Their eyes meet.
Time for slower, lower the neon lights of the bar
and fights won’t blur the passing signal and a hectic
man will walk through, tell them to go, together.
Slams the door.

3.

Mujer washes makeup, midnight stains, and cries
away strange green stares. He’s left for the night and though
she told him to go she screams bloody midnights in cotton
clothes and legs too tight. No earrings on, no new delights
like the rhythm of her feet in her chanclas and tights. It’s all
been too fast and what she wants to say is the music that’s kept
her out all day just slowed to a stop and the darkness dropped
her body out of his sights and she stays alone through this fateful night.

One more look in the mirror and she sees the black streaks cross
over her cheeks and she’s not very neat. A few hours’ time
and she senses bloodlines mixed too many ways over too many days
and this is all that’s left. Grown in twelve hours, she’ll see what the street
lacks. She’ll stick to her room.

It’s got her back.

Cheryl Chambers