By Vladimir Ermolenko
10th grade | Gymnasium No. 13 Akademgorodok | Krasnoyarsk, Russia
Finalist in the K–11 contest, Information and AI category
With lines from “Moderators Received 7 Cents per Task To Comb Through Violence, Pornography, and Extreme Content on X” by Tatiana Dias and Sofia Schurig, a Pulitzer Center-supported story
I.
In western Alaska there is a river called Tutakoke.
The Yup’ik gave it its name. The black brant
have been nesting at its mouth for ten thousand summers,
each gosling tagged on the webbing of its foot
so that the count of the world is not lost.
None of this travels down the cable to São Paulo,
to Belém, to the small bedroom in Recife
where, at four in the morning, a woman opens her laptop
and the dashboard greets her with the river’s stolen name.
II.
Welcome, the email says. The work
is challenging content that requires a firm
and determined hand. I am why that hand
stays firm. I am the soft brand
they are protecting from the rest of the world.
I am the quiet feed that loads at the bus stop,
my thumb a small white moon
crossing other people’s nights.
III.
She labels: weapons, terrorism, child harm,
deaths, injuries, military conflicts.
She labels them so I will not have to.
The categories overlap. There is no time limit—
they just recommend taking a break.
For each held breath, seven cents.
For each scream cropped to a square, seven cents.
For each child she does not let me see,
seven cents and a sentence of silence
she carries home in her own throat.
IV.
It is not for the faint of heart;
it requires resilience, discernment,
and a keen eye for detail.
Mine has none of these. I have a thumb
and an opinion. I have a clean feed
and a cleaner conscience. I have learned
to call her labor intelligence
and to call it artificial,
as if her hands were not hands,
as if the river were not a river
but a code name in a 15-page PDF.
V.
The brant return each June without my permission,
unbothered by the rate of exchange,
the children of children of children
of those the Yup’ik counted by hand.
Somewhere a woman closes her laptop.
Her cursor is still warm. The count
of the world is not lost—it is hers,
carried home in her own throat,
while I am scrolling, kept
very, very safe, the river’s name
in someone else’s mouth, my own
mouth open, asking nothing,
swallowing the day she labeled
so that my morning could be soft.
Vladimir Ermolenko is a 17-year-old entrepreneur and poet from Krasnoyarsk, Russia. Ermolenko builds AI startups and was named a top 50 finalist in the All-Russian literary competition "Class!", out of 13,000 entries. His poem grows from a question he couldn't stop asking: Who does the invisible work that keeps our digital world clean—and what do they carry home?
Read more winning entries from the 2026 Fighting Words Poetry Contest.