Bluesky

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

We juggled boastfulness with our phonesin our hands. K said he used one before I ever knewwhat it was called. Then I sliced his insolencewith a photograph of a nine-year old meholding 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 schoolingoff 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 handsof kids unearth the terrain the way it reiteratesthe 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 motherwith 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 childpicking 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 pilesunfolded inside it. I call mama on the phone,asks how my sister, who is 3000 km awayfrom 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.