For your short answer response portion of the test, be sure to contain your answer
within the box provided. You have twenty minutes to develop a correct response.

Check me as I copy Dr. Dre’s verse from ‘Today was a Good Day’
I’ll sketch cartoons of adults outside laughing and free
I’m fixin on a pie chart to chart π in a racecar

I will compose my essay Beautiful Mind style across the edges
of a double helix spiraling into a black hole

I am writing the biography of my grandmother, the woman of no
schooling, the gardener of no pesticides, the curandera of no antibiotic

Me I’m gonna decoupage the school in test booklets
I will redraft the Treaty of Bosque Redondo and sign my name X
Can’t stop me from punching braille if they feed me blind lines

I got enough time to graffiti this test this runaway train
this subway caboose shining silver with my graphite truth

I will dare poetry into existence breathing bonfires of this paper
sending the ash on a wind to those family trees still standing