Elizabeth Pinborough grew up in the shadow of the Wasatch Mountains and in the bluegrass country of western Kentucky. As a Salt Lake City local, Pinborough came to live in the valley through ancestors who trekked across the plains as Mormon pioneers. She studied English at Brigham Young University and religion and literature at Yale Divinity School, where she was a scholarship member of the Yale Institute of Sacred Music. As a Yale student she joined a group of artists, poets, theologians, and activists lovingly named “Inkwings,” after the famous Inklings.
Situated in a Mormon context, she has been published in two anthologies of Latter-day Saint poets, Fire in the Pasture and Dove Song. Her work has appeared in print and online in The Friend magazine, segullah.org, Exponent II magazine, Dialogue: A Journal of Mormon Thought, Psaltery & Lyre, and Wilderness Interface Zone. Her edited collection Habits of Being: Mormon Women’s Material Culture explored women’s reflections on their inherited material culture. Her first book of poetry, The Brain’s Lectionary: Psalms & Other Observations, which will be released by BCCPress in 2020, represents the neurodevotional poetry and linocut prints she created as she rewrote herself during traumatic brain injury recovery.
Pinborough won a Dialogue “New Voices” poetry award for her cycle of poems, “A Shaker Sister’s Hymnal,” based on undergraduate research into Shaker aesthetics through a tour of 6 Shaker communities. Her choral poem “Dorcas Resurrexit” won runner up in the 2016 Exponent magazine midrash contest. Pinborough works as a freelance writer, editor, and artist in Salt Lake City. In her free time she studies the brain and human development, her greatest passion.
Works
A Psalm for - - - - - - -
A Psalm for - - - - - - -
January 21, 2019
January 21, 2019
Hello, God, small and obscure, distant twinkly point of light.
Perhaps, you are the portal and I am the time. I long
thought the other way ‘round.
I whistle through this little dark
corridor of space, an earthly continuum—
waiting.
Waiting for the advance.
Waiting for the Final Anointing.
Waiting to be called up.
Waiting to be chosen.
The giant night pearl blisters black, shrouded by earth-shadow.
I, your little girl with a willing heart, am ashes,
burned to the ground of being, which is to say—
whatever spiritual geometry you find, whatever
compass and square with which you shape my mind,
whatever plumb line you drop into eternity’s pool,
whatever thread with which you spool and unspool my nerves—
come back, O God! Come back to me.
Do not hide yourself in lunar umbra. Reveal the light of your shining.
From behind the sun’s weak glare, release your radiance. Consume
my heart with your lively burning. Infuse my cells with every wavelength
of love you possess.
the God particle
the God particle
In the uppermost corner
of the tallest glass window
in the draftiest laboratory
the marble moon hangs,
a little round note in a vast
conservatory of light.
On a spindly metal stool
she perches, hunches over
her notes, strands of brown
gossamer escaping her hasty
bun. A whiff of sulfur seeps
into her nostrils and flees
away on a gust of wind.
“This formula you have drawn—
it is not quite right,” she muses. “We created
it in the lab before. It did not form
any useful material. Do you remember?”
Do you remember, echoes across the
room, dashing light years through a
grand canyon of stars.
He pauses, pricked, and continues
his wild scramble across regions of
blackboard.
A trail of chalky equations ripples
beneath his hand. Lines and letters
and integers spark as thought coils
into substance and—almost—motion.
In the beginning, they met in this lab.
He can picture it in every twinkling
corner of his mind. Beakers glinting,
glasses filled with infinite mystery.
And, then, to look on her.
Infinitesimal movement of air.
Infinitesimal breath of knowing.
Infinitesimal beat of heart.
Infinitesimal sweet and start.
What once was not, now is.
What once was void is now light.
What once was calm is raging sea.
What once was satisfaction is insatiety.
What once was inhale is now exhale.
What once was loss is now perfection.
It is creation.
I am trying to describe a thing without
form or weight. Delicious and holy,
a substance that will fill all space.
She feels his thoughts. She holds him in her
mind and heart, even when she is with him,
and feels she knows something of his way,
although at times it is beyond her grasp.
She simply feels the power, the sumptuous
greening in her heart when she looks on him,
robed in light, walking amid his many creations.
I have seen him answer the question that
chased him for centuries: When will the
universe be organized? When will we uncover
the pattern infallible with which to charm
chaos?
The are ἄτομος. They are one.
Photo 51
Photo 51
Bibliography
- The Brain’s Lectionary: Psalms & Other Observations, BCC Press (forthcoming in 2020).
- Habits of Being: Mormon Women’s Material Culture (Exponent II, 2011).
