american dream

Style: Poetry

Statement: In this poem, I wanted to highlight the frustrations resulting from current politics. Through a prose poem, I wanted to explore how my experiences and emotions often slightly differ from others in regards to politics.

my dad tells me to pack my green card. i know i packed it the first time, but he asks five more times. he tells me, if you lose it, you can’t come back. i roll my eyes & i tell him not to worry. i am not five years old anymore. 

but i really want to say maybe i should just leave it in korea. last month, a korean girl vanished into her green card & nobody said a word until after she was gone, after she missed what i imagine to be her bio 101 lecture or her advanced american history class. if i could, i would let go of the hyphen tethering me back into the american sky, watch the demand to call this place my country float like a balloon into the quilt of clouds. still, i care (too much) about going through the same immigration & customs lane i’ve always gone through each time i land in seoul. that other lane feels too foreign to me, which is ironic to say because i feel too foreign for america. 

this country does not want to claim me, just as it didn’t claim that student or that husband or that daughter. their faces are blurred into a list of too many names, each flattening into a green card stamped as invalid. 

i could be the next one. 

fifteen minutes away, ICE trucks idle, clouding the street with their smoke. the BEWARE OF ICE instagram posts multiply until they’re the norm. until detention becomes another suburb advertised on the sides of caltrain stops. we aren’t welcomed even when we’re welcomed. in my house, this is the norm: it is a fact that i will be an american by the next election. i have never even voted in a korean election. 

and on that election day, i will have chosen to step into a dream that right now, still feels too dreamlike. 

i will not lose my green card, dad. i won’t lose it until the day it’s pried from my hands & when it is, my body will turn a little less green and become tinted red and blue & i will still fear deportation. i will still fear ICE trucks & american sirens because i haven’t yet been claimed by the government that, one day, will tell me i am an american.