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[1667/10977] Broad-billed fairywren - Chenorhamphus grayi

Order: Passeriformes
Suborder: Passeri
Superfamily: Meliphagoidea
Family: Maluridae (australasian wrens)

Image credit: John Gould & William Matthew Hart

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monday again
~3hrs

✦Flower Sword✦

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Baltimore Oriole in Fort Worth Tx. From a photo my kid took!

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so cute and angry looking all fluffed up!

i am given birth to by my mother. i am brought home to a falling-apart trailer. i am fed and i am not fed enough. i am aged into a small being with opinions and some semblance of autonomy; my childhood is a video game and i am given three objectives: sit down, stay quiet, and cease to exist. i am made good at the last part; it is a god-like sort of art, and so i do. silence is suited for me as well as i am suited for silence. 

i am told, gently, by my third-grade teacher to stop writing in passive voice. the noun of the sentence should be the actor, the doer, the taker. i am not a taker. never the actor of my own consciousness, of my own unconsciousness, remember, now, i am ceasing to exist. 

i am uprooted like a wilting plant, no sunlight, chipped terracotta pot, placed, never planted. grow, says the sunlight seeping between the drawn shutters, and i deny its case. i am made a masochist at all of eight-years-old, i am made for withering away. i am made mother, made martyr, made clever, made more, made machine. 

i am placed in a foster home and told the new rules. i will sleep at 2130 and wake at 0600. i will eat blueberries and coconut yogurt and i will make good grades. i will behave. i will sit down, i will stay quiet, and i will cease to exist. 

i am told, gently, by my ninth-grade teacher to stop writing in passive voice. like this, you are the subject of the sentence. i am brought home; i am subjected to my sentence. i am taught, i am created, i am embittered, i am disillusioned, i am ceasing. it is all i know how to do.

blurring letters litter the pages before me. maya angelou, oh pray my wings are gonna fit me well. oh, tell the hell-child to return to her cell. mangled beast, worthless mongrel, ceasing. perfect child, perfect victim, passive. the sentences are diagrammed by my expert hand and i am diagrammed as well, pages in a folder, problem child, trouble-maker, mentally unstable. infinitive, preposition, page-break. 

my eleventh-grade teacher is asked why was it okay for maya angelou to write in passive voice? she responds, because to write in active voice would take the focus from the corpse to the crew. i like that. i understand it. the pages aren’t so blurry anymore. i trace them with my fingertips, letter-by-letter. her bones were found//round thirty years later//when they razed//her building to//put up a parking lot. 

i am no longer still, silent, ceasing. i am no longer wilting, and no longer made, i am maker. 

grow, says the sunlight seeping between the drawn shutters. i am neither the corpse nor the crew. i reach forward with trembling hands,

and i pull the cord, and the light floods through.

[1613/10977] Bornean wren-babbler - Ptilocichla leucogrammica

Order: Passeriformes
Suborder: Passeri
Superfamily: Sylvioidea
Family: Pellorneidae (jungle babblers)

Photo credit: Daniel López-Velasco via Macaulay Library

Yesterday morning many martins and swallows were gathered near this pond on wires and trees. They would chatter then scatter in groups and feed on insects swooping over the pond like this and over fields nearby. The numbers were huge and it was wonderful to see.

heres to the other dandelions out there

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version w text (and alt text)