Location: The main junction in Stretford (where the tram station/canal is)

across Stretford
quarter moon
hilltop
the sign says
no poems please
in the cycle lane
danger of over emotional cyclists

don’t look for meaning
in the canal basin
don’t fall in love
with tattered old buildings
be careful where you ride
don’t get dreamy eyed or tragic
just concentrate on the traffic

Andrew Beswick is a Manchester-based writer who blogs at Moon Printed Shadows. http://www.andrewbeswick.blogspot.com/

Location: Portland Street

People talk to you here
but not in English
and the rain is cold
on the grim streets
that run for their lives
past empty Victoriana,
lost empires.

At night, the city
sheds its humanity, lies
unwashed in the glow
of fag ends, crushed
and dying among
the grey detritus of
northern mouths.

Martin Zarrop is an (almost) retired applied mathematician who started writing poetry in 2006. He is currently midway through an MA in Creative Writing at Manchester University. He attended Rainy City Stories’ recent Writing About Place workshop in Hale, with Nicholas Royle.

Location: Upper Lloyd Street

When I saw you last week in your tired flat
With the heating full on and Tom the cat
Bent over in pain at your kitchen sink:
It made me think

How much time had passed and I’d forgot to
Pick up the phone and say ”Hello Auntie”
When I saw you last week in your tired flat.

I bet you never thought I’d be like this
Trying to be brave, I gave you a kiss
We stood together at your kitchen sink
It made me think

Of how you used to be – fiery, trouble
Double the size in weight, you’d lost two stone
When I saw you last week in your tired flat

The stories you told and the books you read
I’ll have to lie down, will you help me to bed
We walked through your kitchen, what next?
Think, think.

Look Auntie, please… let me make you some tea
We watched the Somali boys playing football
From your kitchen sink, seeing you last week
Well, it made me think.

Belinda Johnston has been writing for two years, mostly poetry, and performs her poems in and around Manchester. She travelled to Japan in 2008 and returned to Manchester last November.

Location: M62, J22 (Lancashire/Manchester border)

You could cut the air with a paper knife
And re-open the wounding word.
Restrained in a windowed envelope
still dying to be heard.

Deja vu on the M62,
as we passed we didn’t know.
That Britain’s highest motorway
could make us feel so low.

With only hard shoulders to cry on
in this day of contraflow tears.
As the two of us crossed over Yorkshire
both red and white roses appeared.

Fog lights reflected our faltering start
and the road noise was unrelenting.
Permanently more than two chevrons apart…
You were never the one for repenting.

Winston says: ‘After living for over 10 years in Manchester I am now a resident on the Rochdale Canal in Hebden Bridge. Among other things, my work is inspired by the Calder Valley, my interaction with the local landscape and by my 10-year-old daughter. I appear regularly as a compére and performer at open mic events in the North West and also work in cabaret and run workshops in schools.’

Location: Redmires Court, Salford

Will you swap me your wild flowers for my graffiti and tags?
Or your lowing pastured cattle for the bark of my stray dogs
Trade me your peace & quiet for the drone of my traffic
Your organic and natural, my synthetic and plastic

Give me your fresh air in return for my fumes
And I’ll swap you Morris Dancers for my bangin’ tunes
Trade your District & General for my A&E
Prefer Agricultural College or Polytechnic University?

Give up your green lanes for my gum-scarred streets
Or the sound of your birdsong for my siren’s wail
Have my sink estates not your landed gentry
My Iron Duke not your Plough & Flail

I’ll swap you my skate park for a memorial to the dead
Your Post Office or my Aleef News
My bagel for your brown-bread
Your one-stop-shop for J.S. Sainsbury
Little England in return for racial diversity

I’ll take your depression if you’ll have my stress
My Time Out & What’s On, your Order of Service
W.I. or Band-on-the-Wall
My E.N.O. for your Village Hall

24/7 or quiet isolation
Horse & Hound vs. Sleaze Nation
Urban Chic / Rustic Charm
E.U. subsidies or a car alarm

A 20-mile drive or my black cab ride
Will it be tower block or barn for our teenage suicide?
Is it Gucci & Prada or Barbour and wax?
Want your tenement farmers or my poll-tax

Would you give up your life for one that looks like mine?
Drink a pint of local bitter or sip New World fine wine
Want to trade?
Want to swap?
Want to give it a try?
No?
No,
You’re right,
Neither do I.

Neil J. Donald is Manchester born and bred – Chorlton and Salford – now exiled to Heywood. He says: ‘What defines Manchester is what gives its children strength.’

Location: Market Street

Gum on the pavements
Film on her teeth
Tight jeans don’t fit
On this stretch of street

Pretension prevention
Saliva is decadence
But if I want to use language
There’s plenty of precedence

Mouth-washed and side-saddled
Youth killed the coronets
With jovial vitriol
Horns don’t fit the dialect

Twee-bees, glass-smashers
Mods, moshers, drones
A sport-socked strip-mine
A place to call home

Joseph Alford is an unemployed polymath-lite. Resident of Levenshulme since 1981. http://rustavenue.blogspot.com/

Location: Sharp Street (off Rochdale Road), Ancoats

She was hiding from Derek’s wife,
Monday night’s Cora, balcony in Salford Quays,
breeze blowing her scarlet negligee.
In her background viewers could see
Manchester’s tallest tower penetrating blue.
Out of my window I could see it too.

Now me and Liz meet in its Cloud 23.
I buy her expensive white wine
and necklaces bearing LM.
She slips them over her plunging neckline.
She wears dark glasses. We keep our backs turned.
She points out the Rovers Return.

Back at my flat we look up at the Tower
with its winking red night-lights.
We guess which footballers might be home.
I put a match to her Benson & Hedges.
We look down at magpies
nesting in the derelict pub’s chimney.

When the builders have gone,
she joins me at the Juliet balcony.
Figures in the flats opposite
look like mute actors behind screens
until some point, some stare,
some signal, some wave.

David Keyworth is part of the Poetica group, which meets fortnightly at Central Library. He has been published in Manchester-based Rain Dog and other magazines. He has always watched Coronation Street but has only gotten to know Manchester in the last few years

Location: Hawthorn Lane, between Chorlton and Stretford

The branches shake themselves,
Like a freshly dipped dog.
A hundred thousand glistening baubles
Shower down and crack open on the ground,
Spilling out a shiny confusion.
Ponds now stand
Where paths once ran;
The river and road course forwards as one.
Puddles hold dark secrets,
Their depths difficult to navigate
In the tunnel of trees.
At the end: bright light.
We emerge, blinking, roused from a dream.
The rain has gone, here comes the sun.

Clare Conlon lives in Chorlton and spends her time writing, editing and drying off in pubs after exploring the rainy city on her trusty Shopper, Celia. http://wordsandfixtures.blogspot.com/

Location: Strangeways

Smoke plumes from the pepperpot
I never noticed that before
I thought they hanged men there
A beacon to warn us of the enemy within

They could not keep the fires burning
As the deadman walked the sooty steps
The hangman would choke
But the smell reminds us
That the Devil waits beneath the trap

And the ascent to the drop
From the highest point here
Conspires with cathedral spire
To scrape the sky
And glimpse the face of a God so near

If only we’d mend our strangeways

Steve Hunt is North Mancunian born and bred. Sometimes he writes, sometimes he reads, sometimes he makes pictures.

Location: 31 Landcross Road, Fallowfield

Midsummer, 9am,
bristled bees argue
with window glass,
seeking escape,
the first heat of day.

The radio talks on,
too loud, exhaling
the feel-good,
vapid words feathering
across a continuum of
dyed hair, cigarette ends,
dog barks, tabloid screeds,

grass-cool alleyways.
Buried in the back streets,
history matures in
rubber-mouthed jars, dusted,
derelict, boiling with ants,
mouldering flowers,

and down this path you disappear,
seeking to feel without
the complication of thought.

David Stedman studied English language and literature at the University of Manchester and enjoys every return visit to the city