Blue Yodel #69

I’m walking down one of memory’s dirt roads in the Coast Range, with barely enough room for a pick-up truck let alone a fully loaded log truck roaring toward me, bouncing over potholes and ruts, spitting out a vapor trail of diesel exhaust. I’m headed home with bags of groceries from town, arms already aching.

Each morning his e-mail arrives like jumper cables, like an external defibrillator, my heart chugs, sputters, bursts into life again as though it had died on that dirt road over 50 years ago when the log truck got so close there was barely room for wind between us.

Jimmy Rodgers yodels not out of the Alps but the Appalachians, his voice echoing up West Virginia hollers, across Texas prairie, out of log truck radios in the Pacific Northwest. Those warbling calls sending subliminal messages to young lovers and old lechers alike.

Aging lovers hoping to finish together listen for the right chords in the air, for a harmony to which they might both be able to wholly succumb.

M.J.  Arcangelini, born in western Pennsylvania in 1952, raised there and in Cleveland, Ohio, and has resided in northern California since 1979. He has published in little magazines, online journals (including The James White Review, Rusty Truck, The Ekphrastic Review, The Gasconade Review, River Dog, As It Ought To Be Magazine, The Rye Whisky Review, and Live Nude Poems), & over a dozen anthologies.  He is the author of 6 published collections, the most recent of which is PAWNING MY SINS, 2022 (Luchador Press).