My fist raised high but my palm still grips
an iPhone, its cobalt veins mined
by a six-year-old hand, brittle as chalk
I chant Free Congo between tweets & posts,
Bowing to algorithms that continue to lick blood from Congolese soil
Our hashtags bloom while our children choke
Choke on the dust & the sharp static of effective silence
I protest Free Congo yet my tongue,
My tongue too is a lithium battery, charged, deadly, recyclable, just as the slogan itself
Our apps still siphoning the scream of our soil,
Our convenience a knot around their throats
—Black breath traded for your next click
Our convenience is still a coloniser
I’m curious, do we ever ask what is the cost of our convenience?
Or is our complicity really that habitual?
As we sit at tables we were sent to overturn
Did we forget?
We insist we have no choice in the matter—as if our hands aren’t fists,
As if your voice can’t shatter the glass of this screen & let them breathe
Do you think your hands are clean?
They reek of the Congo,
They reek of Leopold’s legacy, relabeled as “progress”
They reek of decades & centuries grinding Black flesh into wires your silence continues to conducts
So confess it, admit it, once and for all,
We’d rather let a continent burn than live one unglitched day
So, yeah, scream Free Congo again
Scream it between Amazon orders,
Scream it between prompts,
Scream it over Zoom calls
Scream it until your voice cracks open
like the earth sucked dry on our behalf—
Swipe this poem away
Refresh the page
Pretend our retweets absolves the child digging our salvation
out of a pit dug by our convenience