T Bird (she/they/ma’am)

This all looks so goooooood!

Hit me with your favorite poets, poems, and collections, please. I need more. Longing, love, grief, revolution. I love: Natalie Diaz, Ada Limón, Louise Glück, Mary Oliver about love but not as much about nature, Li-Young Lee, Rilke, June Jordan, David Whyte, Jane Hirshfield, etc.

👋 please share

The push for austerity in government- even and especially by local-level Democrats, is fascist. Our community deserves robust public services. We pay for them, and they are best delivered at scale without profit considerations. Local DOGE-like efforts should be met with a fight.

I am begging anyone with the ability to commission articles in my industry: let trans people write about what is happening to us right now.

A linoplate cut to show a stylised crow cracking into a human skull. out of the skull emerge curling plant tendrils

current WIP linocut, going to have a big printing day tomorrow. This one is either called "birth" or "I smash your skull", not sure yet #art #printmaking

My feed here is mostly horrible news. Algorithm, oh algorithm, please send me more poetry and revolutionary writers 🙏🏽🙏🏽🙏🏽

Fasted from 8pm Wednesday to 10am today to prep for a surgery. Truly wild. Good news? Doesn’t seem to be pre-cancer (again) or cancer! Bad news? It’s other things that suck. But now I know! Waiting on pathology to confirm 🙏🏽🙏🏽

Woke up tearful after nightmares. Realized today is the day I can’t eat all day (it already has me sick 🫠), and tomorrow is the surgery where I am considered high risk for being put under anesthesia due to heart complications/ dysautonomia. Been a decade in a morning.

What in the ever loving fuck is going on with the lesbian sciences (astrology)???? This week is so wild!

CDC is pulling back $11B in Covid funding sent to health departments across the U.S. “Now that the pandemic is over, the grants and cooperative agreements are no longer necessary," federal health authorities wrote to funding recipients this week.

“The COVID-19 pandemic is over, and HHS will no longer waste billions of taxpayer dollars responding to a non-existent pandemic that Americans moved on from years ago.” COVID put me in a wheelchair, motherfucker. It definitely exists.

bit.ly/4iJo46y

It bears repeating: please consider that liberalism & fascism are codependent- not opposing- forces.

Every time I listen to julien baker for any length of time, I come away feeling like I have something inside of me I need to scream into a microphone

legends walk among us

For real for real tho

Pay No Rent Turnpike Troubadours · A Long Way from Your Heart · Song · 2017

Just gonna sit for a bit and sing a little

open.spotify.com/track/4FIIaV...

Screenshot of song lyrics that say, “But I don’t want to see the stars If they’re just one more piece of land for us to colonize”

My 10yo sent me a screenshot of these lyrics w/ a link to this song and said, “America partly crushed my dreams of being an astronaut. This song helped and now it went from three quarters to half crushed.”

open.spotify.com/track/4blPH3...

Seeing one of the specialists at the Long COVID Center & none of the doors to the building are accessible to folks like me in a wheelchair. I finally make it in, only one member of the staff is masking, & they ask me to remove my mask for a temp check. AYFKM, COVID put me in this chair. Do better!

Well. Did you?

My 10yo reading aloud to me about the protagonist from his book getting bitten by a pig, and my kid- misunderstanding my confusion at someone being bitten by a pig- says, “You know, like, the animal, not a cop!” lol

Photo of cut stained glass depicting a crescent moon with a lotus and star inside of it to form a complete circle

Moving along in my #stainedglass journey. It’s such a privilege to be able to learn new skills (esp as a person with #MECFS), and I will never, ever take it for granted! Floral design is up next 🌸🌺🌹

Disability isn’t what i would choose if I had been given the choice. It has given me indescribable physical and existential pain and made my body foreign to me. But my body is still where I want to love all the things it has taken me so long to love.

onbeing.org/poetry/the-h...

I connect through safety, intimacy, warmth, and reciprocity- things I used to experience solely in my own body and, later, with a partner and eventually, with my community. Now, constant pain is an entity I must listen to and navigate, appease, create a home within.

I regularly test for EBV, COVID, and other viruses to ensure my body isn’t under invisible attack. I suffer from recurring UTIs, cellulitis, hives, and other painful maladies. Constant pain creates distance between me and my body bc I don’t connect through pain.

Things I can easily do one day are completely out of reach the following days/weeks/months so that I can never quite settle in to my own body’s rhythms. I have to pay constant attention to biometric units like HR, HRV, & lactate levels.

I feel disability dysphoria keenly- the sensation of foreignness in one’s own body experienced while becoming or being disabled. My body doesn’t feel foreign to me solely bc I am a different shape. It feels foreign to me bc what I can do with my body changes everyday.

It helps me a little to reframe the thoughts I instinctively have about my ever-changing body as some sort of pleasantry or new experience I’ve been offered instead of as a tangible driver of disability dysphoria. It doesn’t change anything, but it helps a little.

I’ve put on 25lbs (from 135 to 160lbs) since becoming disabled and unable to exercise. I was quite fit before, so I feel every pound in myriad ways. But sometimes I think about my ancestors and how luxurious it may have been for them to be my shape from lack of hard labor? 🧵

Reading this made me tear up for all the babies who are about to be treated even worse by this g’dforsaken state apparatus.