Orion Autumn 2020

IT COULD have been anything, but it was salt. It could have been police violence, which was all too present, or the land tax, which siphoned crops and maintained a centuries-long state of famine. It could have been the very existence of the Raj and its guarantees against self-governance. But when asked where to train the gaze of India’s uprising, Mohandas Gandhi pointed to the Salt Act, an undeniably racist but, by most accounts, bearable law under which Indians were forbidden from harvesting their own salt and instead required to purchase it from British sellers at inflated cost. During a period of political oppression and the legalized murder of dark-skinned people, this bit of policy struck Gandhi as “the most iniquitous of all.” The funny thing is that he hated…

Chen Chen is the author of When I Grow Up I Want to Be a List of Further Possibilities, which was longlisted for the National Book Award and won the Thom Gunn Award. He teaches at Brandeis University. Allen Crawford’s work includes Whitman Illuminated, an illustrated and hand-lettered edition of “Song of Myself.” Todd Davis is the author of six collections of poetry, most recently Native Species. He has won Foreword INDIES Book of the Year awards and more. He teaches at Pennsylvania State University’s Altoona College. David Farrier is the author of Footprints: In Search of Future Fossils and a recipient of the Royal Society of Literature’s Giles St Aubyn Award. He teaches at the University of Edinburgh. Tamta Gabrichidze is a film director from Tbilisi. Her story in…

FROM OUR READERS IN “SINKING INTO THE ARCTIC” (Summer 2020), Barbara Hurd weaves hope, ecology, and climate together. As I first began reading this essay, it felt untimely given the trajectory our society has followed this summer. When cops are killing Black people at a rate 2.8 times higher than white people, when 140,000 Americans have died from a preventable pandemic, the loss of permafrost feels far removed. But then Hurd’s essay swerves: “Maybe all this collapse today is what’s necessary in the face of tomorrow’s crucial realignment.” The Trump administration recently put public lands near my home in southern Utah up for lease. The highest bidder drills for oil. Meanwhile, the pandemic is decimating tribes whose land the United States stole to offer these leases. If there has ever…

EVERY MORNING, my young daughter and I walk from our apartment just above ground zero in Lower Manhattan to her school in the shadow of the Brooklyn Bridge. We cut across Federal Plaza and pass the line forming between policed barricades designated U.S. IMMIGRATION AND NATURALIZATION SERVICE, as the early light illuminates the inscription on the courthouse frieze: the true administration of justice is the firmest pillar of good government. On one of these bright autumn mornings Beatrice discovers the pill bugs that climb out of the shrub beds and make their way across the plaza. She delights in the way they tuck up their tiny legs and curl into armored balls when poked. I am pleased with her affection as I worry that raising children in the city will…

BLAME IT ON OCTOBER. A nor’easter blows rain for three straight days and the gleam of blackened tree trunks lifts every summer thought from my head. Then one night I find myself by an open window after dark and realize the only sound in the woods behind the house is wind rustling the leaves, the clack of bare branches. I’ve missed it. Again. My intention every year is to listen for the last cricket, the explosion of silence after its ridged wings have struck their final chirp. I imagine it as somehow akin to Bashō’s temple bell whose sound, after the bell has stopped ringing, comes pouring out of the flowers. I have no reason for wanting to mark the occasion other than a poetic temperament and a feeling that…

IN THE SUMMER, my family used to gather at my grandparents’ house in a suburb that felt like countryside. From the front of the house, we could run down the driveway and all the way to the end of the cul-de-sac, or across that street to the pond, or stop in the drainage ditch to look for snapping turtles. Behind the house were gardens. My grandmother planted waving and multicolored flowers; she grew vegetables on newspaper mulch inside a fence made of wood and chicken wire. She grew a raspberry patch with dark leaves, tall brambles, and heavy fruit tucked under the branches. The littlest kids harvested; we could see under leaves and reach between thorns. We filled pint containers and Tupperware and mixing bowls, and carried them proudly back…