Long Eared Owl: Refuse Container Outside the Metropolitan Museum

By Jonathan Andrew Pérez

Long Eared Owl: Refuse Container Outside the Metropolitan Museum

Irving Underhill, Metropolitan Museum of Art (1914), from Wikimedia Commons. Owl photograph from Bigstock. Photo manipulation by William Shunn.

Raking cracked leaves by the Met Museum.

A paper like an Order for unsealing in a canister

Came in: they found your father’s father on the roadside

Here lieth First Man. Let the new ones in.

The street sweeper post-felon cleaner found you

a Cleric of cracked oak trees, Long Eared Owl there

only slightly varied, by ripped finger ears

the Order came with an administered penalty.

We are born, men like me, on the outside looking in,

with no more 2^nd chances, the unsanitary removal

splashes cupped cracked leaves—C.S. Bishop, 1849

invented the first street sweeping machine.

This quest from outside, Rembrandt, Renaissance,

The American Tank Company was built on sweat and leaves.

Papers picked from beneath benches

to those who requested leave without pay.

Newer machines collected smaller particles of debris

Like an Order for Unsealing outside the Met,

Your history is that of a choreography, convicted

like a brush-stroke of deep verdant oil on a Catalan landscape.

The Long Eared Owl stared out our pined-up years.

Copyright © 2019 by Jonathan Andrew Pérez.

shortlink: dogb.us/owl

Jonathan Andrew Pérez

Jonathan Andrew Pérez, Esq., is a Piltdown Review Featured Poet for April 2019. He has published poetry online and in print in Prelude, The Write Launch, Meniscus Literary Journal, Rigorous Literary Journal, The Florida Review’s Latino/Latinx publication, Panoply Magazine, The Raw Art Review, Junto Magazine, Watermelanin, Cold Mountain Review’s Justice Issue, Yes, Mud Season Review, Meat for Tea: The Valley Review, The Westchester Review, Metafore Magazine, and Silver Needle Press. He has poems forthcoming in The River Heron Review, The Tulane Review, Abstract: Contemporary Expressions, The Esthetic Apostle, The Tiny Journal, Pamplemousse, and Swimming with Elephants. He was a finalist for the Still Journal Poetry prize. Jonathan was selected by The Virginia Quarterly Review 2018 for a workshop with Jericho Brown and Cave Canem, respectively. He is a 2019 Pushcart Prize in Poetry Nominee. He has a day job as an Assistant District Attorney as a prosecutor. His popular Instagram-poet handle is hillicon_justice, and he tweets @hilliconjustice.

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