House Sparrows At The New York Historical Society Show Poem by Jonathan Andrew Perez

Voter Literacy Tests: (n.)historical moment that bought wisdom for a price.

The past is coming buried but not fully overthrown.
The clatter is heard. We do not need your services in the warmth of brotherly wilderness.

The five voters who failed devised a cribs note
to overthrowing the government

There is little record of it, this season.
Except an exhibition at the New York Historical Society Library

Stucco entrance, fur-lined patrons of the Upper East Side
on long brass artifice displays. Aluminosilicate glass artifice displays.

Test: Draw a circle around the last word in this line,
"Paris in the Spring is ______."

by the backs of men who made minimum wage.
1964 Louisiana: voting rights test, with nothing left to eat or drink

A cartography for those programs that begged door to door.
The IRS, the Housing Programs, Federal Small Business Loans.

Buffalos roamed the prairie in terrible American dreams
Runaways rejoiced in tents of feigned prosperity.

a cockroach, or beetle, scarab-backed crawled within the stained glass
depiction of those who wander in moral terror & legal dismay.

Voting Rights: a divination made to an illiterate government
A masquerade administration

Of ignorant men who made Americans laws, but left in large polluting Fords
Gave the dirty work to those who attest to more racist tests.

Fifteen House Sparrowsbraced against the bitter cold,
Foraging among hot dogs, in distressed flocks

They hopped stone terraces -
to avoid the patterns in the displaced wilderness of the city-

The past is coming buried but not fully overthrown.
The clatter is heard. We do not need your services in the warmth of brotherly wilderness.