Poetry Month Prompt #12

April 12:  

This is a selection of the Wikipedia Revolver page. This is a small part. Print the portion and, using black-out technique, slowly cross off words you think won’t be great in your poem. With the leftover words write a poem, in oeder the words appear, and then blackout again. You have distilled the poem to its essence that may not have anything to do the original article. I stole this from the poet, Torrin Greathouse’s form, The Burning Haibun. You can try it with another example of prose. See https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/articles/160533/writing-from-the-ashes-on-the-burning-haibun 

Automatic revolvers 

The term “automatic revolver” has two different meanings, the first being used in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries when “automatic” referred not to the operational mechanism of firing, but to extraction and ejection of spent casings. An “automatic revolver” in this context is one which extracts empty fired cases “automatically”, such as upon breaking open the action, rather than requiring manual extraction of each case individually with a sliding rod or pin (as in the Colt Single Action Army design). This term was widely used in the advertising of the period as a way to distinguish such revolvers from the far more common rod-extraction types.[70] 

In the second sense, “automatic revolver” refers to the mechanism of firing rather than extraction. Double-action revolvers use a long trigger pull to cock the hammer, thus negating the need to manually cock the hammer between shots. The disadvantage of this is that the long, heavy pull cocking the hammer makes the double-action revolver much harder to shoot accurately than a single-action revolver (although cocking the hammer of a double-action reduces the length and weight of the trigger pull). A rare class of revolvers, called automatic for its firing design, attempts to overcome this restriction, giving the high speed of a double-action with the trigger effort of a single-action. The Webley-Fosbery Automatic Revolver is the most famous commercial example of this. It was recoil-operated, and the cylinder and barrel recoiled backwards to cock the hammer and revolve the cylinder. Cam grooves were milled on the outside of the cylinder to provide a means of advancing to the next chamber—half a turn as the cylinder moved back, and half a turn as it moved forward. .38 caliber versions held eight shots; .455 caliber versions held six. At the time, the few available automatic pistols were larger, less reliable, and more expensive. The automatic revolver was popular when it first came out, but was quickly superseded by the creation of reliable, inexpensive semi-automatic pistols.[71] 

In 1997, the Mateba company developed a type of recoil-operated automatic revolver, commercially named the Mateba Autorevolver, which uses the recoil energy to auto-rotate a normal revolver cylinder holding six or seven cartridges, depending on the model. The company has made several versions of its Autorevolver, including longer-barrelled and carbine variations, chambered in .357 Magnum, .44 Magnum and .454 Casull.[72] 

The Pancor Jackhammer is a combat shotgun based on a similar mechanism to an automatic revolver. It uses a blow-forward action to move the barrel forward (which unlocks it from the cylinder), rotate the cylinder, and cock the hammer.[73] 

From the Muse library: Juan Luna’s Revolver by Luisa Igloria: “The poems in Juan Luna’ s Revolver both address history and attempt to transcend it through their exploration of the complexity of diaspora. Attending to the legacy of colonial and postcolonial encounters, Luisa A. Igloria has crafted poems that create links of sympathetic human understanding, even as they revisit difficult histories and pose necessary questions about place, power, displacement, nostalgia, beauty, and human resilience in conditions of alienation and duress. Igloria traces journeys made by Filipinos in the global diaspora that began since the encounter with European and American colonial power. Her poems allude to historical figures such as the Filipino painter Juan Luna and the novelist and national hero José Rizal, as well as the eleven hundred indigenous Filipinos brought to serve as live exhibits in the 1904 Missouri World’s Fair. The image of the revolver fired by Juan Luna reverberates throughout the collection, raising to high relief how separation and exile have shaped concepts of identity, nationality, and possibility. Suffused with gorgeous imagery and nuanced emotion, Igloria’s poetry achieves an intimacy fostered by gem-like phrases set within a politically-charged context speaking both to the personal and the collective.”