2025 Joy Taylor Rieves Poetry Prize

RESUME
THE ARCHITECT
Jackson, MS | XXX-XXX-XXXX

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CAREER SUMMARY
I was born in the Americas with a dream in my cradle; My father placed it there.

EXPERIENCES

• “You only have to be sixteen to work here,” my cousin said.
• Can you remember the first time you held a thousand dollars?
• The first time having to knock on fogged car windows?
• Whistled at.
• Honked at.
• Cat called.
• Just to pay for extra classes in high school.
• “4.25 plus tips,” she said.

• “2.15.” I told my mother.
• “But they cook us breakfast and dinner.”
• Food like home from Chicanos.
• When I chauffeured the dish washer
• to urgent care, I posed as his niece.
• I learned Indonesian from my coworkers.
• One is a licensed architect from Jakarta.
• He gels his hair and smells
• like he’s wearing my father’s cologne.

• “But I am not an interior designer,” I said to my roommate
• on the subway one morning on our way to the Garment District.
• “I am an architect.”
• My heels were scraped raw from walking
• in my mother’s black shoes.
• “I don’t think I can do New York.”
• She didn’t even look up. “You can’t or you won’t?”

• I dreamt that if my father had taken his scholarship to UNAM,
• I would have been born a poet.