Tara Betts
Because teenagers will never know rent parties, because Cabrini Green is now
a ghost that looms over one-bedroom condos that cost more than two-thousand
dollars a month, because they will not know James Brown reinvented the one,
because shooting has become common as bubblegum, because basketball shoes
cost about $200 and Chuck Taylors have been claimed by hipsters, because even
the light-skinned girls are tired of boys trying to clown them, because some of these
shorties will never skip school to go to Lincoln Park Zoo and have a primate throw
shit at their friend who will be the joke they will never forget, because none of them
should know what it means when your friend gets killed under the el, and his tall
polished youth will not save him, and neither will the college scholarship acceptance
letter thrown in the toilet, because no one ever says his name was Cochise, chief
of a tribe led to extermination, because we find joy, even if it’s hard to say goodbye.