Kyle Carrero Lopez is an American poet of Afro-Cuban descent. Originally from North Jersey, he is a Poetry MFA Candidate at NYU & reads poetry submissions for Homology Lit. His poems are published or forthcoming in Poetry Magazine, The BOILER, office magazine, The Florida Review, The Acentos Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, & elsewhere, as well as in the anthologies Grabbed & The Breakbeat Poets Volume 4: LatiNEXT.



Previously in Glass: A Journal of Poetry: i’m like dropping hints that i’m manic Rorschach

Poets Resist
Edited by Kwame Opoku-Duku
September 19, 2019

Kyle Carrero Lopez

Say Buttigieg Three Times & Nothing Happens

after Zoe Leonard I want a president with multiple day jobs & a JustForFans account, who actually knows what trade means, who didn’t speak English first & doesn’t speak to one or both parents. I want a president who’s never been to Europe, never left the country, never played a game of Uno or Spades without yelling. Not everyone you’d think gets it gets it in this game of representation, so only those who do need apply. I most want a president who defies all precedent, despises cops, defunds the military, decriminalizes corporeality, meaning sickness for the US working class is a dare; a death sentence bid. I want a voting base that demands more, imagines better, won’t eat up the same silly rabbit tricks again & again, & I want to believe kinship with white queers who value more than themselves is possible, that they’ll hear us saying someone has not, will not, have our backs. I want to understand what splits one rich white man from another, why we need progress to tiptoe like it’s sneaking from a cell, who made a husband a tourniquet for a centuries-long bleed out. Buttigieg, Buttigieg, Buttigieg: in South Bend, Indiana, police kill, then sleep well.



Poets Resist is published by Glass Poetry Press.
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