The Rough Edges of Identity: On Kyle Carrero Lopez's "Muscle Memory"

Kyle Carrero Lopez | Muscle Memory | [PANK] Books | 2022 | 52 Pages

Sometimes the interesting stuff happens at the edges, where categories bump and scrape against each other. Muscle Memory is a book that knows this, fascinated with identity and community, the personal and the political, and the tensions that arise between them and at their borders. Its author, Kyle Carrero Lopez, is a committed anti-capitalist, a gay man, and a son of the Afro-Cuban diaspora born and raised in the U.S.—a complex combination of groups to belong to, and one that intertwines in surprising ways throughout this debut collection. A poetics of intersectionality is nothing new, but Muscle Memory gives the notion new teeth, approaching complex subject matter with dark humor and confessional sincerity. Nowhere more so, perhaps, than in “Untitled (Havana, 2000),” the book’s stunning final poem. 

A turbulent exploration of the crossroads of Cuban heritage and queerness, “Untitled (Havana, 2000)” uses vivid, sensuous language to describe the island nation, where “the cool air whiffs molasses wafts” and “your feet crunch mashed bagasse”—debris left over from processing sugarcane—with each step. From there, the poem pivots to the political, offering a full-throated revolutionary prayer: “may cuba live / island her own, free from us / of a, por siempre.” There’s tension in that Cuban-American us, acutely aware of its existence on two sides of a divide. Matters are only troubled by the poem’s epigraph, a few short lines which describe the abuse and imprisonment of LGBT Cubans during Fidel Castro’s revolution. 

The figure of Castro haunts the poem, both an icon of revulsion and fascination. His legacy appears first as “gusanería: worms piling / in the absence of light”—a reference to the way the Cuban government branded perceived deviants as “gusanos,” or worms, and to the darkness of La Cabaña fortress, an infamous military prison where many were kept. (The poem borrows several of its images from an art installation of the same name by Tania Bruguera, which appeared briefly at La Cabaña before being banned.) In the next breath, Castro paradoxically becomes a homoerotic sex symbol, with several lines dwelling wistfully on the leader’s idealized image: “hugging & kissing the masses / he bares his furry chest / sans bulletproof vest / young fidel? you would / & so would we.” Despite all morals and better judgment, there’s something undeniably seductive about a political strongman, and Muscle Memory faces this fact with provocative frankness, all while remaining sensitive to the bitter homophobia that scarred the foundations of modern Cuba. Ultimately, historical memory and mourning win out, but nothing here is clear-cut. Nation, politics, and sexuality pull in divergent directions, and the poem’s real strength is in its ability to dance along their fault lines. 

The politics of gay experience return in a very different form in “RuPaul is Fracking,” a poem with a funny title and serious ideas. It’s a tall order to create a memorable piece of art from the ephemera of celebrity controversy—already, 2020 feels like a lifetime ago—but the revelation that the titular drag star has a fossil-fuel empire on his 60,000 acre Wyoming ranch creates a wonderfully incongruous image, rich with enduring symbolism. Lopez uses it to disturb the notion of the ‘gay community,’ often spoken of as a monolith, and expose the divisions of class that it shares with every other community. Which figures are chosen to embody and speak for a group, and who decides? As “the queen himself” remains “slippered / robed, and seated at home nearby,” while workers toil away at the “cracked earth”—recalling the manor estates of Europe, or the Antebellum South—it becomes clear the answer has a lot to do with wealth. Call the issue ‘rainbow capitalism’ or simply selling out, but with a “once-hero’s death,” a more radical possibility emerges, promising that “all who hoist coin over lives / shall be someday recalled as they lived.” (An inspired choice of word, “hoist,” evoking both flag and petard.)

The concern with class and privilege extends with “Petty,” an ode to the unique pleasures of fare-dodging on the subway. Finding elegance in the mundane and furtive, Lopez elevates small transgressions into works of art, initiating the reader into the dodgers’ panoply of styles, from “a two - / step or stomp to techno throbs.” The arc the body makes, leaping over a gate, becomes “a hill worth dying on”—or, equally, the arc of a quiet smile shared between strangers, letting each other in the emergency door for free. It’s misdemeanor, dance, and rebellion all at once, an experience instantly recognizable to poor and working-class people around the world. Equally, it forms a response to the many crises of the last few years: “If you wouldn’t call rules that make theft make sense / an emergency, then you might be confused / how the door should be used.” The word “solidarity” gets thrown around a lot, but refusing to let each other stay locked out on the platform comes very close to its essence. 

Other poems experiment playfully with form. In “Ode to the Crop Top,” gaps of white space between words echo the gaps in fabric on the garment, and the gaps in conventional ideas of masculinity through which the impulse to dress and act differently can spring. “Diptych (Headline Heads),” a poem written in memorial for a gay teenager murdered by his father, forms a bold crescent C on the page, its meaning elusive. A sideways rainbow? A knife, or sickle? Meanwhile, “Beauty Examined” operates by reworking a spare handful of words over and over, arranging and recontextualizing them into new meanings with each line: 

you’ll be made prop if you don’t speak up

you’ll be made you if you don’t speak prop

you’ll be propped up if you can’t be made

you’ll be made prop if you can’t speak up

you don’t speak up if you’ll be made prop

you’ll be made        if you                speak 

you’ll be made prop if you don’t speak up 

you’ll                    prop          you         up

To be “made prop” is suggestive: to be rendered a pawn, or an object on someone else’s stage, lacking self-determination. And, alternately, the structural support that holds something up: a system, a family, a country. To “speak up,” perhaps with truth to power, is to be “made”—but does “made” mean “constructed, solidified,” or is it slang for “caught, apprehended?” Each reader will take these fragments and shift them, making a new picture in their personal kaleidoscope. Meanings may multiply still further in the context of the poem’s other sections, as well as its rhythmic, repetitive meter.

Unpacking embedded meanings through wordplay, “Black Erasure” evinces a bone-deep irritation with the euphemisms and neologisms used by well-meaning (and, generally, white) liberals when they want to talk about race. With scathing sarcasm, the poem splices the term “POC” into a range of words and phrases where “Black” would normally appear, inventorying “[POC]-eyed peas,” a “[POC]bird” in the air, “[POC] Lives Matter,” and the way “cops kneel on [POC] necks.” Subtlety is not the point. The subject demands this literal approach; after all, it isn’t just any People of Color that are being attacked in America’s streets, or in its culture, which rings with “outcry over [POC] Rue / in The Hunger Games / [POC] Hermione [POC] James Bond.” Anti-Blackness is specifically what we’re talking about, and erasing the word “Black” from the discourse only serves to soften and blur the edges of the problem. A stylistic sledgehammer suits the circumstances. 

But if Muscle Memory is dissatisfied—to put it mildly—with the way non-Black writers think of race, it’s equally open to self-criticism. “Black capitalist wet dream” comes full circle, returning to the question of what it means to be Afro-Cuban-American, an identity that is hyper-specific where “[POC]” is hyper-vague. Initially idyllic, the poem chronicles a day out in hip, liberal Brooklyn, showing out at “the pro- / Black fest with the all-Black lineup in our best Black dress,” sipping drinks in glamorous clothes. In America, it seems to say, the first and best way to express an identity is by spending money, bragging that “everything we bought we bought Black as we shopped”—before imagining “cousins in cuba with our same skin,” starved of the most basic supplies by American sanctions. There’s a limit, in other words, to how “pro-Black” one can really be while condoning and paying into a global market rooted in empire and domination. It’s a noxious act of narcissism to frame consumption as activism. Maybe the most explicitly socialist poem of the whole collection, “Black capitalist wet dream” reflects on the way ostensibly progressive social movements can be diluted by capitalist tactics, hollowed out until they’re just another brand. This isn’t a new observation, but read in the midst of an ever-more-corporate Pride month and Juneteenth, it resonates.

I have no idea why the 2019 poem “Say Buttigieg Three Times and Nothing Happens” wasn’t included in this collection; three years on, it feels more relevant than ever. But taken for what it contains, rather than what it doesn’t, Muscle Memory is a bold debut from an exciting new poet. In a literary landscape clogged with trite techniques and simplistic takeaways, the book challenges its readers to reexamine their sense of self and the shifting, contradictory communities they belong to, inviting them to see the world through a new and more complex prism. It’s funny, sexy, angry, and mournful. Often all at once, as when Lopez imagines his own funeral in “Black Erasure,” complete with “medleys of essential [POC] tunes / for y’all to throw ass to at the after-party.” That’s not a bad description of Muscle Memory itself.