I recently learned that my prose poem, “Flood, Fire, Mountain,” was selected to appear in Writers Resist: The Anthology 2018. It’s coming out this October, and there are plans in the works for a reading at AWP 2019 in Portland, OR, and possibly elsewhere. Stay tuned!

My poem “Photosynthesis” was just released on the Poetry on Buses website. You can read it here: http://poetryonbuses.org/poems2017/liz-kellebrew/

The tale of my encounter with the esteemed zombies of Rene Depestre’s Hadriana in All My Dreams, courtesy of Pif Magazine: http://www.pifmagazine.com/2017/06/hadriana-in-all-my-dreams-is-a-sensuous-zombie-feast/

I am a shining star,

shining over the valley where David slew Goliath.

I see the blood upon the stones,

I see the color of my bones where the birds have picked them dry,

Where the sun has shone like a rainbow from heaven.

I am waiting now on the loincloth of Goliath.

I am a jewel on his belt.

I am a vulture scavenged by crows,

I am the body of the giant felled upon the ocean shore.

 

I will be the salt on my grandfather’s foreskin,

tasting the earth through the lips of the sea.

I will become a gull, feasting on herring,

churning on stormy seas.

I will be a ship on a wave,

Breaking on the shore.

I will not be afraid.

I will be a tender spot on the heart of a calf,

on the tail of a bear rooting through the woods.

 

I have been a book originally.

I have held the body of a Hebrew son in my arms,

and I have embraced him as one of my own.

We did not mean to be fighting.

We were on the same side.

I have been a giant of the first degree and upon my breast a silver star gleamed.

And when the last sons of David have sounded the alarm,

the biplanes of the enemy will drop their loads

and retrieve new eyes from the bottom of the cleansing sea.

 

I have been a book originally.

I want to know how this ends.

 

-Written as an exercise in a class I taught last February. Italicized lines are from the Cad Goddeu.

 

Gold. What is it good for? Absolutely nothing, unless you’re talking about filling bad teeth or encircling ring fingers. There might be some days when you wished for more of it, because for some reason we think of it as money in this country, as well as  in most of this world. It’s strange to think of, isn’t it? Vast vaults under the ground stacked full with yellow metal the shining glory of the sun. Hidden beneath the earth’s crust.

It’s 99% pure. The other 1% is for impure thoughts and sneaky deeds. What would gold get up to if it could? Probably a drive-by shooting, or at least a spoon in a dictator’s mouth. Wouldn’t that be something, to die by a golden bullet? What’ll they think of next? Maybe we’ll really start using gold for money (since as-you-know-gold-backed-currency-must-be-backed-by-actual-ore). We wouldn’t have paper money anymore. We would all carry around heavy bags of doubloons and grandma’s jewelry and melt it down and weigh it in exchange for our food.

Imagine your paycheck. It would come in a cardboard box, shipped by an Amazon armored drone, dropped into your open bedroom window. Gold. You would open it and there would be George Washington’s face stamped on these coins, all these shiny golden coins that would reflect the afternoon light in your face, bright as noon.

Then, if you wanted, you could melt your gold into bullets, or a spoon, or a wedding ring. You could eat or kill or love with your gold. If you were saving up to buy a car you’d need a wheelbarrow and a trusted neighbor with a heavy-duty pickup, since you wouldn’t have a car yet and you’d need a way to haul all that gold to the dealership.

Gold would take up a lot of space in the freezer if you were saving it up there. It would be lumpy under the mattress, and displace too much water in the toilet tank. It would be hard to hide under the floorboards, but I suppose you could try. I would always be worrying about the gold I left at home under the floorboards, worried sick that someone would come and take all my gold because I like to eat, and in this country that I am writing about one must have gold in order to eat. Otherwise you won’t get any food.

Some people might love their gold more than food. They might wish that everything they touched turned to gold. They might be the President and hang gold drapes behind their desk in the Oval Office. They might pay gold to marry a Russian princess with gold teeth. Can you imagine everything turning to gold in your mouth? You could eat only fish food, otherwise you’d choke. (Gold flakes are digestible. You can drink them in hot cinnamon liquor.) But how long could someone live off a diet of gold? And what measures would you take to recover the gold brick that would eventually emerge from the canal of your intestines? It would definitely displace far too much water in the toilet bowl.

First recorded in the Historia Brittonum in the 9^th century, awen is a Welsh word for what we might call poetic inspiration. It’s also interpreted as instinctive knowledge, a muse, a breeze, or a flow.

Getting in the Flow

Writers, musicians, and artists talk about getting “in the flow” when they’re doing their work. So do athletes, scientists, artisans, and workers of all stripes. Being in the flow is being so wrapped up in what you’re doing that you lose track of time. Doing what you love immerses your senses until you’re actually in a kind of trance state. (Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi calls it “flow.”) People tend to be at their most creative when they’re in flow state.

Inspiration from Beauty

Besides doing what I love, I’m also inspired by the beauty I sense from outside myself. The sound of wind blowing through tree limbs, certain lines in the poetry of Borges, and the opening strains of the Pastoral Symphony from Handel’s Messiah. Awen strikes when I’m paying attention, all of my senses attuned and alert to the beautiful and true.

Awen also strikes suddenly, sometimes interrupting my absentminded train of thought, when something lovely or unexpected catches my attention and gives me the shivers.

The Good Kind of Shivers

Scientists who study frissons, or “skin orgasms,” say that these shivers are physical responses to environmental stimuli such as nature, music, and art. But in order for the physical response to happen, one’s brain must be cognitively immersed in that sensory experience in the first place, and people who are capable of becoming immersed like this are more open to experience.

Practicing Openness

The good thing about openness to experience is that anyone can learn it. Some of us may take to it more naturally than others thanks to personality differences,  but everyone can practice openness to experience— and thus, openness to awen— in everyday life. We can all slow down, look around, gaze deeply and appreciate the beauty around us, making space for our creativity and gratitude to arise from within.

I’m at a writing conference in Port Townsend, WA this weekend. The Snow Moon is full and so is Venus. There’s even a comet. The high astronomical tide combined with intense wind gusts closed bridges and canceled ferry runs, so crossing the water to get here was a bit of a dance with celestial forces.

***

We laid the foundations of stars before the planets were formed. We assured them of their place in the zenith of the sky.

We had no nadirs, no anchors, no gods. We built because we were. We did not stop to think, did not stop to ask ourselves what we were doing. There was no time, therefore no reason to wonder what would become of our use of no time.

After the foundations were laid, we built a telescope to watch them shift. We built the telescope from the eye of a panther and the heart of a bison. The bison’s heart moved the telescope across the meridian all night long, and all day during the dark star night, and all night during the dark moon day. It was the dark of the galaxy in our hearts.

We spun a sugar of dreams across the cloudy moons of Jupiter that day. In that day we found a lasagna replete with cheese, dripping with spinach. It was satisfying and salty. We licked the salt off our plates and asked for another. We searched among the verdant trees for our lost brother, but did not find him. So we asked for another.

Epiphanies are for lesser writers, so they say. I say I don’t know what an epiphany is but I do know when I know something and a character does not. A character sometimes only thinks they do, because a character is an extension of myself. All of those times I thought I knew something and I didn’t: glaring at my memory, mocking my shame, my private thoughts about my competence. I sat on couches and ate grilled cheese sandwiches when I wanted to be outside playing war with the boys. I accepted grape Kool-Aid and offerings of warm blankets and cartoons and listened to the mothers who said girls should play inside.

But I suppose this was fortunate because otherwise I would not have read the books. I would not have built the stars.

I occasionally feed peanuts to two crows who visit my apartment balcony. There’s quite a large crow colony near the University of Washington in Seattle, and awhile ago I had the opportunity to go see some crow specimens that the researchers there were working with. I thought I’d get to see something like the interaction in this video, so I felt rather foolish when I realized that the specimens I’d come to see were dead (of natural causes) instead of alive.

I wrote this shortly afterwards, from the point of view of the deceased specimen.

***

I have always wondered what my liver would look like, if I could see beneath my feathers and skin, cut through the bone with my beak and peel away all of the fleshy layers to see the glistening umber crimson of my organs. But I didn’t have to do that; somebody else has done it for me, and I observe the dissection of my body with the detachment of an empirical scientist.

They left my head intact, but they sheared off my wings immediately, spreading each phalange out as though I was still in full flight high over the skyscrapers. My wings were even larger than I thought. The scientists’ capable hands look small by comparison. I have always wanted to be famous, to be remembered after death, but this was not exactly what I had in mind. Maybe they’ll reassemble me after they’ve taken a good look at my innards; that’s what I’m most curious to see, after all.

They cut through my skin along my back; clipped right through my spine and pulled out the breastbone, setting it aside with reverence. Fitting for a bird of my stature.

And there, nestled in the confines of my feathers and skin, are multicolored sacs of organs that I can’t identify but the scientists do: crop, gizzard, kidney, liver, lung, heart, intestines, brain. The liver looks like a rich slab of meat, sleek and dark, like something I would fight with a seagull for after it had killed a pigeon, and I felt a twinge of fascinated guilt as I realized we birds were more alike on the inside than I had ever dared admit to myself.

The scientists put my organs in glass vials, labeled them, and left my carcass out to dry. My two detached wings lay one atop the other nearby. And I? I just wanted to fly, but I couldn’t seem to do anymore than float, so with great reluctance I tore myself away from my body and drifted into the trees outside.

It was a basement smelling of musty books and sandalwood incense. I walked down carpeted stairs. Someone played an accordion in the corner. Eleven people sat cross-legged in a circle. There was an open spot for me.

There were four hundred people on the hill wearing black. The rain fell steady. The police told them to disperse. They ate vegan cookies in the park.

The moon rose, as big and orange as a prize-winning pumpkin, trembling in the icy sky. It held up the bridge for a moment, then pulled itself over the railing, silhouetting cars and trucks against its cratered face.

I sat down and folded my legs beneath me on the plush red carpet. The others in the circle closed their eyes and hummed. I watched, breathing calm, feeling the breath enter and exit my lungs, my throat, my mouth and nose. The man at the head of the circle stood. He wore sunglasses and had a long, dark ponytail.

After the park, the four hundred walked down Broadway to the bars and coffee shops, warming the chill from their hands. White vans filled with neo-Nazis began to chug up the hill. The police tried to stop them at Melrose. The Antifa and the Nazis could not meet with the police between them.

The moon slid up the sky sleek and quick, shimmering golden orange like the belly of a koi. A photographer circled the mound, snapping pictures. We heard a seagull cry.

The man with long hair approached and motioned for me to stand. He whispered in my ear a mystery that shivered me with hope, with promise.

“How do you know this?” I asked.

“Because,” he said, “I’m the High Priest.”

The white vans vomited their cargo, then swallowed it back up again. The police went home. The Antifa squeezed the rain from their sweaters and scarves and rolled up their banners by the oil drum fires in the Pine Street alleys.

Someone broke a window. Someone else sprayed graffiti on the college walls. And everyone went home.

The moon exhaled, and in its sacred contractions it journeyed ever upward in the sky, pulled along on invisible strings. It shrank, its orange light no longer visible on the rippled surface of the lake, competing as it was with the city lights.

We stood on the edge of the mound, facing east. The photographer left. We descended the shadowed slopes, clasping our cold hands, bursting our warm hearts.

~

This post is the result of a collage writing exercise created by Karen Brennan. The pieces of the collage are 3 different storylines: (1) a personal memory or dream, (2) a current news story or cultural event, and (3) a detailed description of the natural world. This exercise and more like it can be found in the book Now Write! Fiction Writing Exercises from Today’s Best Writers & Teachers.