—40,000 child miners work in southern
Democratic Republic of the Congo

We juggled boastfulness with our phones
in our hands. K said he used one before I ever knew
what it was called. Then I sliced his insolence
with a photograph of a nine-year old me
holding his point-the-light-to-the-soup phone.
I was ignorant of the genesis of phones,
how the light it opened in my face came to be—
the sweats across the neck of little boys like myself.
F said Africans are ignorant in noisemaking for our wound—
to dissect the world with a shrill.
To pull every eye into the body of our drowning.
This time, it’s not cotton picking, but metal digging,
willing & unwilling. Ripping the canopies of schooling
off the backs of little children with a sack of cobalt.
I posted a change for Congo on my Instagram
& bought a new phone a year later.
Two years later, on YouTube, I watched the cobalt hands
of kids unearth the terrain the way it reiterates
the history of rubber & mutilated hands.
In Katanga, Arthur said he digs the world to live in the world—
to battle a shovel like his parents.
Richard carries a bag big as his body—
filled with red sand. Dorsan mourns his mother
with forgetfulness, a misery so big you forget your grief.
To subsist is to be capable of mourning.
what is that bright thing up there?
He asks of the light in the bulb.
Monica sits, the four-year old child
picking stones instead of brick toys.
Natalie says, my finger hurts.
Mukumba carries a lump on his neck,
as if the woes of his country like piles
unfolded inside it. I call mama on the phone,
asks how my sister, who is 3000 km away
from Katanga, fares in school—she’s doing well,
she says. I exhume my Instagram with a new protest post.
I keep watching. The world keeps watching.
Little children with faces as if the offspring of dust.