DJ Ashtrae

Kicked out of bathhouses, top of the charts dream police condomless quarantine, banned through urban renewal rather than factory law. Back seat 9-5, front-page shouting match. It was all you can do. Smash hit show tunes `back to back commercials, kale juice spend thrift callings, horses and fuel efficient thrall amid deco fabuloso. Hairy, flexing like 3-dollar pliers. Toss glitter. Wrap it like its your birthday, gazettes of perpetual bliss. Smashed in back windows, relaxed on-goings, cryptic volts, walking arm and arm with a taqueria buzz. Drumming out the fire hydrant. Pink shirted agonies, hugs, hip left turns. Mojado marathon over the fuck this lounge graffiti, ruby phone digits, connect the dots body politic. Ride him until I see two colors and my love drags me down. Pay per minute three way kissing, bumping secrets in the gay cabal. Neck with me, pumped lashes. Closeted soldier wants to know if you are okay. Modcit loves up on that emergency mysteriousness, rough kilobites of flirting, mostly illegitimate criminals who use ghetto adjectively. Groady skateboard, groady beer beard, groady rules crew cuts, scrunchies, cranberry lipstick, once in a lifetime dgaf turnstyles, bilingual condomes. The platform is crowded with spent and scented passengers from the 80’s, Dolores Park, $70 Spaghetti, luxury cock ring fighting. The last train is so cheeky. Cranky, ‘portant coyote finally gets a break. Scruff pup ojos. Broke glasses. What am I, marvelous rot? Sliding.

If they pass by my Tacoma, they’ll see banana stems and receipts shuffled with sand and dirty dreams, these pretty corners as naked as the morning.

Left ear bent from the superstore mauling its den, coyote paints by tongue; he uses yellow dye from eyes, trails, billboard glares. He clamps copper rods by mouth; scratches the slickness off of gutters in the late afternoon. Coyote rams into a garage door; props it up on a power box; jumps, jumps, jumps. Its horn is maracas. With three imps, a lick of botany, coyote fashions auto mo’ bee lay.

What more could we want, bottled llamas? Lizards belong to the sun. Pour like this, combed up vacancy. The theory of new fortune gets turned up blasting. I speculate. We do lines on the street, the wind more real than it’s feeling. NOW you’re cornered with the lotto on a cartoon planet. Once in history we burn candles at the corner of a weak fence around sustained effort, selling ourselves and watermelons in the low flat valley. Small creatures and bugs eat each other as yesterday’s +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ water clings to the mountains. ++ ATOMIC GIRLS SACUDE LA PEREZA ++ Carpenter ants crawl on my legs. Crickets +++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++ play with my hair. We open cans of fruit by leaving them on the used up highway, yap murmuring MADE FM, lady downs her fresh threat, the city returns a few favors, I stay outside too long on the way to the East L.A. mansion of the Goddess of American Love, half-finished and half-electronic. Animal statues pose in the foliage of the long, legal driveway. Digital and yummy, tastes like churros, each shows a failure: trading him for him, losing your beds, smiling or dreaming during. I wait in the courtyard so long I eat your birds of paradise, slog through paper rain again. Illness turns the wheel, try biting your own hand. Mewsyc in my apartment plays for a year waking cacti. I am masterfully artfully so LA. What more can we want, clay llamas? Washing my car while flies hop between cold avocados, my face pink like I’m in snow. A diamond-backed snake crosses us, us peeling oranges.

Joshua Escobar (DJ Ashtrae)

Joshua Escobar a.k.a. DJ Ashtrae is the author of Caljforkya Voltage (No, Dear/Small Anchor Press) and XXOX FM (DoubleCross Press, 2019). Bareback Nightfall, his first full-length collection, is forthcoming in 2020 from Noemi Press and Letras Latinas. A CantoMundo fellow, he publishes Orange Mercury and lives in San Bernardino.