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FURTHER READING
Essays by Christine Hume
Some Capacities and Fallacies of Literary Hybridity: A Card Game
Related Poems
Court Gestures [excerpt]
by Kristi Maxwell
Poems About Outer Space
A Clear Midnight
by Walt Whitman
Back Yard
by Carl Sandburg
Bright Star
by John Keats
Comet Hyakutake
by Arthur Sze
I'm Over the Moon
by Brenda Shaughnessy
Let Evening Come
by Jane Kenyon
Mars Poetica
by Wyn Cooper
Moon Gathering
by Eleanor Wilner
Not from the stars do I my judgment pluck (Sonnet 14)
by William Shakespeare
Now that no one looking
by Adam Kirsch
Orion
by Susan Gevirtz
She Walks in Beauty
by George Gordon Byron
Sky
by Anzhelina Polonskaya
Skylab
by Rolf Jacobsen
Star Quilt
by Roberta J. Hill
Starlight
by William Meredith
The Falling Star
by Sara Teasdale
The Star
by Jane Taylor
To the Moon [fragment]
by Percy Bysshe Shelley
Yellow Stars and Ice
by Susan Stewart
Related Prose
Poems about the Heavenly Bodies
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The Truth About Northern Lights

 
by Christine Hume

I'm not right. I'm interfered with
and bent as light. I tried to use the spots,
for months I tried with rings. 
Only now I'm thinking in cracks
that keep a modern light
lunged. I keep the porch light on
to burn you off in ghosted purls,
the licks of which filament me.
My Day-Glo tongue's cutthroat.
Though I'm not clear,
I'm a sight whose star stares back:
it's a new kind of dead;
it hides its death in my cinched
testicle. That bright burr makes me
unreal and itch. By the time
I'm something else, you're making weather
with so-and-so. Drama tenants you;
it wades in queasy waves,
mottled to the marrow.
My mean streak beams neon
so I won't be refracted
or led to reflections. My eyes
trick god's and kick the careless reversals
of radio cure-alls. Rays suffer
until they clench the damaged night in me:
where I go out, gone as done
in a mood of black moving through.
Darkness sits there, pleased.
An iridescent ire could not go unaired,
my limbs wicking at the window.
Look out the window.
I've outened the world
to show you real barrenness:
a void a light
warps into want and then wants
until it warps all it glances.






From Alaskaphrenia by Christine Hume. Copyright © 2004 by Christine Hume. Reprinted by permission of New Issues Poetry & Prose. All rights reserved.
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