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.
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.
All contents © the author.