The Truth About Northern Lights
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.