Industry Prize Winner: Dress code for an immigration interview by Kristin Chang
We are so honored to share with you all the winning poem of our Industry Prize. Kristin Chang’s “Dress code for an immigration interview” received the highest scores from judges Don Share, Nicole Sealey, and Matthew Zapruder—a well deserved recognition for such a promising emerging poet. With the Prize, Kristin will also receive $3000 for her work.
Dress code for an immigration interview
At his deportation hearing
my uncle wears a suit & a flag
patterned tie. In detention
centers, clothing is the number one
cause of suicide: sleeves knotted
into nooses, shirts wadded down
windpipes. In a month, they’ll uncork
a shoe from my uncle’s throat.
In a month, we’ll frame a copy
of the Constitution in our living room,
pray to it like a portrait & pretend
our fathers founded a way to drink
directly from the sea. My mother folds
our laundry into letters, sends my uncle
his favorite pair of socks. We are sent back
his ashes in an envelope. We list our address
as the sea’s. In detention, three colors
are banned from the body: red, yellow, and blue.
My uncle’s favorite color is the sky. On
birdwatching trips, he took me seaside to watch gulls
abduct the air. My mother says it’s best
to wear a dress you can get out of
one-handed or with a saw. Go skinless:
at birth, we are issued a body each
to be buried in, a country to clothe
like a corpse. In a mirror-walled room
my mother is questioned for marriage
fraud. She memorizes my father’s ring size,
the birthdate of his backache, his aversion to butter
knives. She comes dressed as a housewife, fifties
hair & oven-doored eyes. My country tries me on
for size, tailors me for a funeral. At the factory,
my mother sews skirts to order, spools
thread according to thickness. My throat a sleeve
for silence. When the raids begin, officers
measure mouths according to accent. When asked for
an origin, I answer with a tongue
doubling as the dark, a shadow I wear
white. Salt bleaches the surname
off my birth certificate, my mother’s
a map of holes. I light this city
with scarlight, pray god is powered
by grief. For a week after my uncle dies,
I sew a scarf of my hair & flush it down
the toilet. In his cell, my uncle shaved
over the toilet, kept his razor & underwear
in a mattress hole. I question my blood
for proof of residency. It answers only outside
me. Under cause of death, the coroner writes self
harm, shrink-wraps our shoes as evidence.
In my uncle’s file: mugshots
he accidentally smiled for. Photos of his lungs
hours without air, the dead tissue
a dark blue, the shade of the sky he flew
in two. It was night when he immigrated
with clean clothes in his pockets & the phone
number of my mother written
on his sleeve. It was morning
when the voicemail said
he suffocated on his own spit.
We return him to the sky
as smoke. We plant him
graveside trees as reminders
to breathe. I wear my lungs upside
down, reverse every anthem
into air. Everyone I buried
into a bird.
Kristin Chang
Kristin Chang lives in NY and reads for Winter Tangerine. She is the recipient of a 2019 Pushcart Prize, and her work has been published or is forthcoming in Bettering American Poetry Vol. 3, The Rumpus, The Offing, wildness, and elsewhere. Her debut chapbook “Past Lives, Future Bodies” is forthcoming from Black Lawrence Press (October 2018). She is located at kristinchang.com and on Twitter (@KXinming).
