Christine Hume
Christine Hume was born in 1968 in Fairbanks, Alaska, and has lived in fifteen different states and countries. She holds an MFA from Columbia University and a PhD from the University of Denver. Her poems have appeared in The Best American Poetry 1997 and such journals as AGNI, Boston Review, Conjunctions, Fence, Harper’s, The New Republic, McSweeney’s, and Volt, and her reviews and critical essays have appeared in the anthologies American Women Poets in the 21st Century and Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics, as well as in Augfabe, The Chicago Review, The Constant Critic, Context, Verse, and elsewhere. Hume is the author of Musca Domestica (Beacon, 2000), winner of the Barnard New Women Poets Prize, and of Alaskaphrenia (New Issues, 2004), winner of the Green Rose Award. She lives in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and is an Associate Professor at Eastern Michigan University.
Explanation:
Many of the stories circulating about my escapades are not true. I would like to believe myself, but I’ve never taken to tourist routes—Wild vagaries of common air! Mild wagers of the feint and bent! Forget the serotonin-drenched titillations of blowhards, listen here.
It is NOT TRUE: I have never climbed into the hollower world below, never even attempted it; but I have roared above the summit in a lost world. And I hasten back to that Eden of poisonous snows.
It is NOT TRUE: I am not the only woman to ride sixteen blighted horses, ride a bike eaten out by rust, eat a map riddled with circles and fingerprints, circulate a mean withdraw sickness, and draw kill in a woods with two moons. Absolutely not.
It is TRUE: I am the only trespasser on Mighty Mac’s windchill. I saw huge blocks of ice caribou and hoary moose moving toward the ocean. I hid among those shapely half-ideas that throng dim regions beyond daylight. My eyes, being infected with many nameless blues, could see straight through possessive air.
It is NOT TRUE: I did float for a story while my back was in a cast from an accident caused by shifting traplines. The heaviness of hydrogen only made me feel weightless: exposure emptied me further, but I still had a pulse from underneath. I did locate my prey in a dream, but its hole was already foaming. I did not fly to it.
It is NOT TRUE: I have landed on most of the mountain’s glaciers, but I was not transformed. My blood did not turn to gold or anything like propane. My heart was not bitten in half by avarice or parasites. An acoustic lack may have racked my rectum for heaven, but I had adopted an Alaskan ear long before; with it, it’s not unusual to hear from inside the hammer: stampeded terrain, yea avalanche.
It is TRUE: I did originate the future. I was up to here in memory; I had had it. The future was better protected than the past. Therefore, I left a group of inconnus in the lurch to become a remora to their forged expectations. All points of view turned up dead on sodden hills.
It is NOT TRUE: I embezzled no indescribable sky event. Perhaps now we can agree with the trouble eustasy caused my ex.
It is NOT TRUE: I did not dash my son’s brains against the rocks. The beauty of this place is mad, a drug for driving you blind and diplopic; its amplified contradictions played the music of his messy slip.
It is TRUE: Thereafter, I used my milk to feed a drove of walruses, shattered on the shore like glass. If this sentiment offends, be assured I offer it only half-hearted.
It is NOT TRUE: The hoax was not my idea. I claim many ideas that are not my own, but everyone knows that licking a glacier can change your DNA and reprogram your bones to be bombs. You like to gainsay such things because it pleases your frontier.
Sampler City
The cities came from twelve girls
within one. The sample girls
searched for a bloodeye in the city
weighty with mountain fluenzas.
In the sample city, most expectorants
enchanted them; in the sample city,
feral mistook fevers for cold fear.
An ample girl broke for a fair
to middling. Some girl had not yet
started to fast. No girls reared the cities
or selected randomly. Their secrecy
carries like a red wool coat, and their coughing
transferred to the girl entire.
The know-best girl felt her wholehearted oats
running overloud and melted.
Girls resembled the state hospital,
and a plague slept between them.
A sample girl contracted a young tarnish there;
she lay outside her own drunkenness.
She doesn’t want to be known as “hospital girl.”
The legality of one large ague
concocted another four or agony.
Girls who had never had additional names
characterized the sample. The modern girls’
mercy was phlegmy or pneumatic, stitched
in lavish symptoms. Through their methods,
a drowsy of watching. Find a few
autonomous girls, the scarcity girls, the type girls
who sneeze at nothing. Contamination hailed
in the cities, and no girls called club today.
Girls are cities of no containment. Their games
congest the sample’s chaste purpose;
one girl’s flare-ups come-and-get the others.
Every girl was once a catchall but commitless.
Hume’s Suicide of the External World
the hanging man wandered out of a moonshine dream
smuggled dope in pelts and gold in a Risk game
that cheated his confidences by the dozen
time being, Moot’s pond compressed the blue
a brand-new pond began to self-destruct
morning jackhammers fed underground ponds
their kinetic fury melted down the public, exposing another
there he found a pass in alien rain and dragged ass
kicked himself out of himself said the note
weighed one miracle against a fifth
soft spiders criss-crossed the night interference
liquored the branches
asleep, he fell out of hours on fire
its wings stabbed at him angry
he walked out on the roof reshod in tin cans
electromagnetic blue lure
outlandish blue of his tongue and palm
threw an ambsace and a score of dreams rolled
if he had an eye for every eye on deck
I want to shoot a gun
I want to come down
his speech had left him overly alert
renaming the domain and its potent pheromones
he saved some sounds that had wanted to die in his mouth
and listened at the other end of deserve
headless, out of the state blue
out of its panic grass shook out his hologram
signed Asphyxia, signed Arctic Cat
his walking stick made stars along the scavenger’s path
touching off oil fires in the dice’s outcry
their music confused him into affection
for a dynamite belt and Zero pond
time tranced and put him on ship
a black-voiced bird recognizing his torture
signed his full name on the slanting shore
he weathered genital waves to quit having a curse
then a blue man crawled out from under a horse
whose rusted bit hushed his greedy depictions
his haunches were meat, signed Nitid Piss
and no dragoman staggered out of Candyland looking for him
he had never mouthed something so dead sweet
signed Sugar Melted on a Sidewalk
the chalk outline of him thieved the looks off a bottle
another coast unhung the spectral blue
to drink sea water, coat your mouth with bird fat
to look down from the sky, use ataxia
wrote his note on the wrapping of the rope
vendetta-tethered, his telepathy crested
he left a note in a mailbox abducted by mudflats
the consequence continually shifts
once the map locked, he tripped out of a torn place
his head full of broken asphalt
during a mistake he walked out of my forehead
making my own mind very hard for me
dragging its chain of islands insane islands insane
Comprehension Questions
What kind of phantom is the ship?
Where does the girl hide her great distances?
Accordingly, what is the rate to multiply by to find the intense sensitivity
of minor characters?
How do the men abandon ship?
Why do they trouble the forest with their strange butterflies and huge suns
full of complete daylight?
What role does the dog play in developing catastrophe?
If the setting permitted biological time, would red shift through the
captain’s mirage?
What dark authority lurks among the unpruned spruce?
Whose foreshadowing crawls out and what sets it off?
Do you believe the wave is not a girl in furs?
Is this a comedy or a tragedy of secret motions?
Why should a zephyr so rarely intervene?
Does the stormy girl’s beauty suggest something about the captain?
Why do his arrows ricochet wildly just before the target?
Meanwhile, what does the girl’s fear become when she turns around?
Which constellation best fits the story?
Though the captain arrests the ice horse, what fantasy freezes the dark
around him?
When does it matter? When can you deceive?
Why do the men take the tusk and shank inside?
Does the narrator gain sight by his frustration, humiliation, torture, and debt?
Which prophesies help the girl court the ship?
Is anything more grotesque than the face of human ecstasy?