Wednesday, April 24, 2024: Kelley J. White's "Good Night, Ashbury Park"

 

Pediatrician Kelley White has worked in inner-city Philadelphia and rural New Hampshire. Her poems have appeared in Exquisite Corpse, Rattle, and JAMA. Her most recent chapbook is A Field Guide to Northern Tattoos (Main Street Rag Press.) She received a 2008 Pennsylvania Council on the Arts grant and is currently Poet in Residence at Drexel University College of Medicine. Her newest collection, No.Hope Street has just been published by Kelsay Books.

“Good night, Asbury Park,

—Johnny Cash, July 28, 1990

I’ll see you at church tomorrow.”

I don’t quite see how a hotel

can nestle along the Jersey Shore

but this one claims to—

and who am I to doubt

though this story I am recalling

sounds doubtful—Johnny Cash

investing 250,000 in a hotel

in a failing town, Asbury Park?

But there’s proof, a 1990 concert

at the Paramount, with Ring

of Fire, and June’s there too,

and two of her sisters, and I Walk

the Line and The Old Ragged Flag and,

well the door just opened so I got

no privacy but just to say I never made it

to the Stone Pony but of course

I did once see Bruce Springsteen,

front row in Boston, so he seems

like really a new guy, and I did

ride that Carousel, 1963, and my

cousin Jimmy got the brass ring

and again in 1983 and Cash might

have been in town and I would have

bought the Carousel it if I’d had

100,000 in 2009 but I was in

New Hampshire at the time and

I couldn’t raise the money but

if Johnny Cash were still around

I imagine he would have bought it

and the animals would still

all be together.

© 2024 Kelley J. White