Denouement

(Summer 2013)

Welcome to Conservative America
ripping and shredding the Constitution.
Stand Your Ground is a law in twenty-two states,
whereas the Constitution of the United States is mute
on Stand Your Ground . . . or is it a rider
originally attached to the Second Amendment?

A man with a car on neighborhood watch
inside a place with gates opening into walls
pursues a black teenager walking home
with iced tea and candy to watch the All-Star game.
The telephone dispatcher orders the man not to follow,
but he does, he gets his gun ready, opens the car door.
His defense states the dead boy bashed defendant’s head
on concrete. The photo of his bloody face bears no date.
The jury finds him Not Guilty. He gets his gun back.

Jump-cut to two cars side by side in fast-food
drive-through lanes, a man and woman waiting
beside boys who rock with the rap on their radio.
The man tells them to turn their music down.
They don’t. The man kills one with his shotgun.
Later the woman confesses they’d been drinking
at some event where you drink only to signal
camraderie. She says she told him off
once they were home. This may be how the law will go:
The last one walked, throw the book at the next. 

If we claim the Bible says that wives
are their husbands’ chattel, we are its clarion,
not the Bible’s race of Ham, 
Jehovah’s wrath, Solomon’s sword . . .
Let’s go get us a . . . Fill it in . . . 
A husband is dead set on raping his wife.
She gets a gun and fires anywhere
away from him. She gets twenty years.
Her husband is black like her. The white man
he idolizes is the atavistic one,
he of the master race. 
A woman has the right to abort what a man
saddles her with. Why must she
pay for his uninvited, unbridled desire?

(22-23, 24 July 2013)

copyright 2013 by Floyce Alexander