THE OLD 44TH

By Randy Stafford

By day, Randy Stafford practices the dark arts of tax collection for his master and counsels his minions in the same. At night, after the anguished cries have faded from his ears, he cowers in his Minnesota domicile, comforted by his wife and an extensive collection of books and DVDs. He writes many a book review for Amazon. Every few years, he writes some poetry and, besides being an American Academy of Poets award winner in his long-ago-vanished college days, he has published poetry in National Review Online and 2001: A Science Fiction Poetry Anthology, and book reviews in Leading Edge.

There is a geometry of Death.

I have seen its streets and paths

In the records of my father,

From the old 44th.

Krasten’s streets were open

And straight like their minds,

Calling for our wares

And for our human ideas.

So, they baited their minds for the Hounds,

Pack predators from forests outside spacetime.

They came and killed, as did my father,

With comrades, to add another legend to the old 44th.

And as he, the last of the 44th,

Lay dying, his kit listened,

Watched as the last of the Hounds

Loped past the terminus of the city.

Right there, where the mesa ends,

And their blue, frothy Hound blood

Shone under the moons,

Is where they’re kenneled.

The Angles, kinks of rectitude,

Hide them in the Beyond,

And in our world of circles,

There’s always more like the old 44.