did-you-just-say-thang theory

I grew up on monopoly money and lucky charms
leftover hanukkah gelt from 
the friend who always
had things
in her family fridge
but what about those things
I bought with my own money
(pennies
             from
                      the
                             pavement),
the sour one-cent gummies, 
shaped like warped, warring men
they tasted hard and right
on the way
home from school.

(whispers, loudly: this is an ode to Rihanna)

what about those things?

(title for the thing: maybe “Repairing Rihanna”)
(or maybe: “Rihanna and Redress”)

hard-earned money in the
so-called smart city began to
get us
began to get us less things
the thing itself 
went public,
kicked back and relaxed 
meanwhile i am already so bored
i want to die

whenever I check my balance I hear voices
someone is owed! sing it, honey!
laaaadiiiidii, ladiidaa!  louder, honey!!!!
those automated sing-ah-longs…
make it count
make tech boom

a digital glitch is not the mistake
but rather that exact moment
the institution reproduces itself

and ugh.

Credit

Copyright © 2020 by Tiana Reid. Originally published in Poem-a-Day on June 4, 2020 by the Academy of American Poets.

About this Poem

“The title of this poem is a reference to both the structural fragility of thing theory and the 2004 movie Mean Girls in which Cady Heron (played by Lindsay Lohan) asks the brown boy, Kevin, "did you just say ‘thang’?" Blackness in this movie is a specter, haunting us. What feels fleshiest sometimes, though, is capital, which is also one of the many things I spin around: how childhood is remembered as lack, how the digitization of finance and the electronic surveillance of urban automation is experienced through a history of meanness, girlness, and thangness. And Rihanna, of course, is the one good thing many of us have to share.”
—Tiana Reid