Manifesto Monday—Pigeon Manifesto

Welcome to Jujubes and Aspirins' new tradition of Manifesto Monday! If you wondered why last week there was no manifesto, it is because I haven't had internet and only posted on the days I had time to visit a computer lab.

This week's manifesto is an excerpt from Michelle Tea's poem "Pigeon Manifesto." You can read the entire poem here.


from "Pigeon Manifesto"
Michelle Tea

The revolution will not begin in your backyard because you do
not have a backyard...

The revolution will begin at your curb, in the shallow pool of
shade that is your gutter. The revolution will begin with the
pigeon bobbing hungry in the street—it is now your job to love
her. It is now your job to not avert your eyes from her feet, your
job to seek out and find the one pigeon foot that is blobbed in
a chemical melt, a pink-orange glob, a wad of bubble gum. The
pigeon splashed in a pool of chemicals laid out to kill it because
so many of the people hate the pigeons. This is now why you
must love them. We must love the nature that does not make it
onto the Discovery Channel, onto Animal Planet. We must love
the nature that crawls up to our doorstep like sparechangers
and scares us with the thickness of their feathers, their mutant
feet and orange eyes. Someone could have made dinner with the
rice on the corner but instead they sprinkled it on the curb with
the hope that hungry pigeons ate it, and that the grain would
expand in their stomachs, tearing them open, felling them in
the street, plump and feathered and dead in the gutter. I think
perhaps this does not even work, because I watch the pigeons
peck at the rice and fly off on grey wings. I hardly ever see
them dead in spite of how many people try to kill them.

Pigeons are doves. They are rock doves...
...What you might not know is when you call a pigeon a
rat with wings you have given it a compliment. The only thing
a rat lacks is a pair of wings to lift them, so you have named the
pigeon perfect. When you say to me I hate pigeons I want to
ask you who else you hate.