PREAMBLE

by Lucille Gang Shulklapper

We the people of the United States, in order to form a more perfect union, open our floodgates to end political confusion, we are neither props nor emotional blackmailers, we are citizen cops, and justice nailers, we are the ones who know, you can’t easily track bombs that blow, limbs and lives apart, without a heart, that the NRA has erased, by not allowing taggits in gunpowder to be traced,  that one of us found the tarp bloodied, one of us found Congress studied a poll and a vote, not the body in a boat, who represents our collective desire to demand,  in this our democratic hallowed land, our voice to be respected, from the officials we elected.

Lucille Gang Shulklapper writes poetry and fiction.  She has been published in many journals and anthologies, as well as in four poetry chapbooks.

GUN RUNNERS

by Frederick Shiels

We blame the NRA and we are right
We blame the senators who promised and who fled
We blame those deaf to Gabby Giffords' words
We blame the treason to the Newtown dead,

Children who might have grown to shoot a gun
With 10, 20, 30-round clips at firing ranges
Or much more likely so our pollsters say
Joined generations in demanding changes,

We’re told that frontier heritage floods the veins
Of hunters bred from generations shooting game
To feed their families, or to settle scores, or
Amendment Two invoked to silence 'Shame'!

Cried out by families of the dead and maimed
And those who stand With them, asking why
Their Congress fears those background checks and more
The voters who will end their time upon the Hill,

The NRA ‘knows’ it’s people and not guns that kill
And more, that offense is the best defense
And so it falls to Bloomberg, you and me
To jettison sweet reason for sweet cash,

To target at election time not just
Those who caved to those who swore to stand
Against the firearms absolutists, but those
Who never gave a thought to voting Yes,

Yes to sane measures-- these must be made to sweat
Offense best defense indeed and yet,
At last only more educated wrath will win
Souls at the polls to redefine what’s Sin.

Sin is allowing the likes of Wayne Pierre
To frame the debate year after year after year.


Frederick Shiels is an aspiring poet and Prof. Emeritus of Politics and History at Mercy College. A few of his longtime friends are Second Amendment nuts.

OUR SAD NEW WORLD

by Eric Greene

http://www.davegranlund.com/cartoons/

Helicopters circle 'round
the little red brick school.

Policemen guard the schoolhouse door,
enforcing strict new rules.

Teacher keeps a loaded gun
inside her pencil drawer.

Mary doesn't bring her lamb
to visit anymore.

 
Eric Greene is a singer-songwriter and poet, who lives in SE Michigan. His first poem accepted for publication will appear in Troubadour 21: Writers and Artists in the 21st Century.

WAYNE LA PIERRE

by Llyn Clague



The only thing, sings Wayne La Pierre,
“that stops a bad guy with a gun
is a good guy with a gun” –
a song of good and bad that’s certainly fun
at the Cineplex, but less so in open air

EVP of the NRA is WLP,
an intense, insistent man whose voice
promotes utterly unrestricted choice
of weaponry, but leaves us the invoice
for the cost, in lives, love, and therapy.

What you see in Wayne La Pierre
is the balladeer of bullet and bandoleer,
with rhetoric uncompromisingly clear
and a mask-like, macho veneer –
an apostle of assault-gun laissez-faire.

What you don’t see is his terrible fear –
of demons in a streetlight’s glare,                     
of crackling conspiracies everywhere,              
and of himself, open, laid bare  –                     
a terrible, debilitating, soul-destroying fear.


Llyn Clague’s poems have been published widely, including in Atlanta Review, Wisconsin Review, California Quarterly, Main Street Rag, New York Quarterly, Ibbetson Street.  His sixth book, The I in India and US, was published by Main Street Rag in 2012.

PACKING HEAT IN THE PEW

by Earl J. Wilcox

Image source: HotDogma

Arkansas Senate OKs concealed weapons in church --USA TODAY, January 29, 2013

If you don’t like the preacher calling you out---
sinners, fornicators, back sliders, whoremongers,
two timers, lukewarm Christians, dead beat dads---
responding to the Word is an altar call to arms.
Say Amen like the NRA and gun-toting patriots.
Answer the call with a bullet in the barrel,
blow the messenger to kingdom come.


Earl J. Wilcox writes about aging, baseball, literary icons, politics, and southern culture. His work appears in more than two dozen journals; he is a regular contributor to The New Verse News. More of Earl's poetry appears at his blog, Writing by Earl.