BIO
Kyle Lopez is an American poet of Afro-Cuban descent living in Ridgewood, Queens. He is a TuCuba Fellow with the CubaOne Foundation and an MFA candidate in poetry at New York University, where he is also a Goldwater Fellow. Kyle serves as Poetry Editor of EFNIKS, a media space for queer and trans people of color. Recent poems appear in The Florida Review, The Boiler, Glass: A Journal of Poetry, Cosmonauts Avenue, Luna Luna Magazine, and elsewhere.
Social media handles: @kylelop3z on both Twitter and Instagram
Black capitalist wet dream
after Juliana Huxtable
Jackson and I awaken in bed drained ached from endless day
of drinking and dancing in sunny brooklyn
rhodiola tincture starts the mornting natural coconut oil wash showers
talk Afropunk as we dress how it used to be free who can’t go
then we go lyft ride to quick thai for lunch crabmeat fried rice
shrimp pad thai with egg bean sprout scallion and crusted peanut
chicken dumplings fresh lychee juice bit heavy on the meat
buuut bestie’s here from nashville we clean each plate
walk to day two bloated in cute clothes yesterday we stormed the pro-
Black fest with the all-Black lineup in our best Black dress denim shortalls
pink triangles patterned on hand-batik cotton lacy white wedges
forty inch Beyoncé braid shades to match both fits
strangers snapped unprompted pics
we sipped frozen piña colada and orange mango and cranberry lime smoothies
ate empanadas de carne y picadillo
everything we bought we bought Black as we shopped
my cousins in cuba with our same skin
checked hungry medicine drawers
dashikied embargo hittin’ the Shoot to our left right by Obama tanks
showin’ off those guns
as we bopped we passed a white man in the crowd
rockin’ a tee that read BLACK EXCELLENCE and we damn near all boogied
right past the rent control table