The City Admits No Wrongdoing

Somebody put a golden girlchild on a southern railway in the 1920s, with a satchel of chicken. Picnic for one. Northward toward a better life. Billie Holiday loved somebody who put her on a railway with a satchel of chicken. When the food ran out, they called them honkeys. The white men who drove up to harlem in fancy lawn vehicles and honked outside of the houses of the goldenchild, praying for sex and no wrongdoing. O’hara loved you. Orson Wells loved you. Miles loved you. You are loved. I love you, too, What is a heroin addiction, really? What does it indicate? What is the difference between a honkey and rapist? Can she live. Can the stage be riddens enough, the begged for bruises, the softly-spoken desire for a frozen pit bull and a club of her own, northern promise enough to make trouble up. Poised suffering. All she had to do was sing, one man wrote. And cook her dope into the chicken. God Bless the Child. The white actress Judy Garland was sent back to the country to wean off of heroin around the same time Billie Holiday was hospitalized, handcuffed to the bed, with no friends allowed to visit and her last five dollars strapped to her garter, and no candies. She loved candies. We need sugar. We run on sugar. Melanin is carbon. Carbon is sugar. Billie is shook, hurry, you love her. You worship the one you’ve broken. You still cook the fur off, chicken. Sugar, I call my baby my sugar, I never maybe my sugar, that sugar baby of mine. Funny, he never asks for my money… Put on these amber glasses and all the light ain’t blue.

From Prac Crit. Reproduced with kind permission of Prac Crit