Put A Straw In It And Suck The Word Choice Dry by CAConrad

A note on the text: This poem comes from "Resurrect Extinct Vibration," a (Soma)tic poetry ritual in 9 parts.  The main ingredient involves inducing a trance by saturating my body with recordings of recently extinct animals while lying on the ground across the US.  Another ingredient is drawing the animals on index cards with request for correspondence, leaving them across the nation in laundromats, coffee shops, etc., and I reply as ghost animals. "Saint Francis Safe Passages" is an activist ingredient, writing to elected officials to convince them we need thousands of land bridges across the US-highways for animals to cross into safety.  This is one of 108 poems resulting from the ritual.

CAConrad is a 2019 Creative Capital Fellow, and the author of 9 books of poetry and essays.  While Standing in Line for Death (Wave Books), received the 2018 Lambda Award.  A recipient of a Pew Fellowship in the Arts, they also received The Believer Magazine Book Award and The Gil Ott Book Award. Their work has been translated into Spanish, Greek, Polish, Norwegian, Portuguese, Danish and German.  They teach regularly at Columbia University in NYC, and Sandberg Art Institute in Amsterdam, and their poetry can be found online at http://bit.ly/88CAConrad.