Lesley Téllez

Volume Dial

There’s never been two things that have gone together so well: 

funk music and the car. The sun and my arm 

next to the rolled-down window, skin emanating heat like asphalt, 

Cutie Pie’s trumpets prancing and stuttering as my dad’s Grand Am

ribbons through the desert. 

In those days, we’d gather in the living room, cold red tile under our bare feet,

bodies sunlit as The Gap Band whistled its bomb, my brother 

cranking the volume for the gritty synthesizer part, nobody dancing, 

all of us singing.

As teenagers our car doors hung open in the driveway, the trill 

of More Bounce to the Ounce announcing our status,

Atomic Dog’s hot 

hot 

hot

breath trembling our speakers, our guts. 

Everyone I knew recognized the opening bars of Parliament’s Flashlight—

it was never not part of us. As part of us as the sun. 

When I left L.A., I didn’t know there’d be a hole in my musical throughline—

the funk soundtrack of my childhood gone, replaced by Selena in Texas, 

David Allan Coe in Dallas, and the Disney songs my children ask me to play. 

I didn’t know there’d be no one to remember.