Some Questions I Had Later and Still Have

Johnny Cash played
“Folsom Prison Blues”

at our county fair,
and my dad bought me

the program. What
was the horse shit, the cow

shit, the prize-winning
goat shit smearing

our good country air
but each its own chord,

struck by a breeze, pushing
through open-mouthed

barns. What has ever
been a man on a stage

but a truth someone wanted
to tell me, and what

is a crowd to that man
but foam overspilling

its beers and soaping
the earth so he need not

walk in the dirt. What
my dad showed me

that night was Johnny’s
dust-covered bus, parked

and hidden stage left.
It’s full of black shirts,

he said, later.
In Plymouth, Wisconsin,

was everyone a bus
of black shirts. Johnny’s

stage that night was our
town’s stock car track:

on Sundays, the sound
of driving in circles

was so scowling loud
I could hear it six miles

away. We shot a man
in Reno, under filament

stars of fairground
fake-day. We shot him

loudly, stomping,
whooping, but who that night

wasn’t a stage for Johnny
to stand on and sing.

When a crowd and a man
agree to stand and be stood on,

they make one song
together. When a crowd

and a man sing a song
pretending they know something

of prison, they buy
their daughters the program.

Am I, I wonder, that bus
of black button-downs.

And of those shirts, am I
the shirt Johnny swore

he wore for the poor
and oppressed,

or am I more like the shirt
he wore while telling

that story, back when
the band wore only black

because they owned no
other shirts that matched.

ξ

Elizabeth Langemak lives in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.