Lessico Famigliare

Kyle Carrero Lopez

A pale man—Afro-Cuban blood—

my abuela’s abuelo would flood

her head with a joke he liked just two things black:

tuxedos and Cadillacs

The Yale Review · "Lessico Famigliare" by Kyle Carrero Lopez

How did this poem begin for you?

An earlier, wordier version of this poem revolved around this same “punchline.” Eventually, it felt logical to pare it down to an epigram. My mother and grandmother relayed this to me as a child. It feels important to me to situate culturally normalized, casually colorist and anti-Black attitudes among other pieces of mine that celebrate Black Cuban histories and culture in ways that contrast the dominant image of Cuban-Americans: historically, either overwhelmingly white or just Black-proximate via the logic of mestizaje (but not definitively Black).

I named the poem after a wonderful Natalia Ginzburg book from 1963 whose English title is Family Sayings.

Kyle Carrero Lopez is the author of Muscle Memory, the chapbook winner of the 2020 [PANK] Books Contest. He co-founded Legacy, a Brooklyn-based production collective by and for Black queer artists, and his debut full-length collection, Party Line, is forthcoming in 2026.

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