Tabla de contenidos para March / April 2017 en Orion

THERE IS, of late, much talk of walls in America. Sometimes the talk is literally about concrete, while other times it hews closer to metaphor. But whatever form this talk takes, the job of a wall is always the same: to divide people, places, and ideas into two. Those that are welcome and those that are not; those that belong and those that don’t; those that are good and those that are bad The problems with this line of thinking are numerous. Take, for example, the 654 miles of fencing that already exist along the US-Mexico border, a place that is home to some of the most amazing ecosystems in North America, including the sky islands of New Mexico and Arizona and the El Pinacatey Gran Desierto de Altar of…

45° The angle at which the heads of commuters on the 8:16 morning train are locked while swiping their phones to make fragments of text and digital candy disappear, lest the things on their screens grow long and nourishing like daydreams of fresh baguettes and weekend meanders outside the city, up to the mountain headwaters, that central source. 65° The angle at which other heads of commuters on the 8:16 morning train are positioned in their search for other eyes — watery and reddened perhaps from fussy babies or a hard night out, or restless and darting from imagining worst-case scenarios in some future job interview. The eyes tack into the storm of faces, seeking stories and solace in this gorgeous, desperate city, even if only for an instant —…

IN THE 1990s, the internationally acclaimed French classical pianist Hélène Grimaud had an encounter with a captive she-wolf. “The wolf was life itself,” she wrote in her memoir, Wild Harmonies: A Life of Music and Wolves. “[It was] more biting than the frost. Life itself, with an incredible intensity.” In 1996, Grimaud cofounded the Wolf Conservation Center (WCC) in New Salem, New York, which since 2003 has helped to breed Mexican and red wolves and release them into the wild. Some of WCC’s most popular educational events are “Howl for Pups of All Ages” and “Howl for Adults,” during which people can blend their voices with wolves’ calls. “Why do wolves answer our human howls?” I ask Grimaud during a recent phone conversation. She speaks in thoughtful bursts and riffs,…

A CEMETERY seemed an odd place to contemplate the boundaries of being. Sandwiched between the campus and the interstate, this old burial ground is our cherished slice of nearby nature where the long dead are silent companions to college students wandering the hilly paths beneath rewilding oaks. The engraved names on overgrown headstones are upholstered in moss and crows congregate in the bare branches of an old beech, which is also carved with names. Reading the messages of a graveyard you understand the deep human longing for the enduring respect that comes with personhood. Names, names, names: the stones seem to say, “I am. You are. He was.” Grammar, especially our use of pronouns, is the way we chart relationships in language and, as it happens, how we relate to…

In the gravel parking lotbehind the blue LaundromatI find raspberries, though herein the rain arched canes are rare Haven’t been on land in weeks—it seems everything could knockme over: the top steam stack leaksthe smell of fish rot and bleach. I find the exact wood screwsI need in the hardware store.There’s fresh water, hot showers,clothes warm out of the dryer, a bar full of strangers, cell service, an apple, and this berry patchwhere feral plants have blossomedand bear tiny ruby drupelets. I want to eat each one. Iwant to walk back to the boat,cupping the whole harvest, leavenothing for the rest of town. In the sink, the berries glintroe-colored. I see, somehow,salmon thrashing in black nets.Berry-pink pearls spawned on deck Each day someone does somethingworse to another so whatdoes it…

THE INDIAN INSTITUTE OF SCIENCE campus in Bangalore, India, is a rare green lung within an increasingly polluted and paved - over metropolis. In the two decades that I have often sought refuge here, I have seldom had a good excuse to be on campus. I’ve never been enrolled as a student here, though I generally tell questioning security guards otherwise. If I were to give them an honest answer, it would probably be, “I’m here for the trees.” Much of this century - old campus lies within the shade of giant avenue trees, giving the impression that the research institute is in fact a forest. Jacaranda, native to Central and South America, spills violet flowers across roadways filled with bicyclists. Tabebuia, a tree from Central America, comes alive with…

Greystone Books, 2017. $16.95, 240 pages. MARISSA LANDRIGAN’S debut, a memoir in essays, traces her search for her place in the larger food systems of our society. Landrigan feels like an outsider to the people and places around her and discovers activism in college as a way to become part of a greater whole. Although this does not provide the connection she craves, with each failure — whether it is a failure in a romantic relationship or the failure to bond with a particular place, the failure to locate the elk she hunts with a friend in Montana, or the failed attempt at making a chicken pot pie — she comes to pay attention to the context and complexities of not only her relationship to food, but, eventually, the American…

$35 FOR ORION 'S 35TH This year Orion celebrates its thirty-fifth year of publication, and every single issue we’ve published since 1982 has been entirely ad free. In 2017 we’re asking readers who have never donated to Orion before to help ensure that the next thirty-five years can be ad free too by making a first-time donation of $35. Visit www.orionmagazine.org/give35. Thank you. GIFTS FOR THE GRADUATE Do you have a niece, nephew, child, or grandchild graduating from high school this spring? A gift subscription to Orion will honor your graduate’s sense of hope, and equip him or her with ideas and inspiration for a bright future. Go to www.orionmagazine.org/graduation. ORION IN BOOKS From social justice to sense of wonder, and from nature literacy to animal hijinks, the Orion anthologies…

Jesse Chehak is an American photographer, artist, and educator. His photographs are inquisitive encounters with places, communities, and circumstances. Laura Didyk is Orion’s production manager. She has been a writing fellow at Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony, and is a newly established illustrator. Patrick Dougherty is an artist who uses tree saplings as construction material. He has received numerous awards, including the 2011 Factor Prize for Southern Art. Sierra Golden has her MFA in poetry from NCSU. Winner of the 2015 Rane Arroyo Chapbook Prize, Golden calls Washington State home and has also worked as a commercial fisherman in Alaska. Kimiko Hahn’s most recent poetry collections are Brain Fever and Toxic Flora. She teaches in the MFA in Creative Writing and Literary Translation Program, Queens College/CUNY. Simen Johan is a…

ON A BRIGHT EVENING in Crested Butte, Colorado, its namesake landform towering three thousand feet overhead, two dudes — and dudes is without a doubt the correct appellation — parked their trucks between the local baseball field and a flat green meadow, which they referred to as “the LZ,” or landing zone. Bo Thompson, a plumber in flip-flops and board shorts, ate a hotdog, then smoked a cigarette. Ben Eaton, a blacksmith with a greasy foam cap and gray-flecked sideburns, turned lazy circles, inspecting distant cumulus clouds. The duo possessed a combined thirty-eight years of paragliding experience. Over the last couple of months they had flown fifty times together, most recently that very morning. “Twice in a day is good,” Bo said. “Keeps me from drinking at night.” “It only…

We wake so rarely together, and when we dothe leaves have already left horses for trees.We didn’t realize whenmoving to the canyon, we’dgiven up sunsets for good. Gold andred for cottonwoods and clay. Here, woodpeckers grouse in the piñon boughsand your sun-brown hands gather the brownest shells.We root about like curve-billed thrashers,silent beneath our chosen trees, try not to speakof the current news. Pitch-ladenneedles pressed to sore knees and palms A flicker lands on a branch above,and we look up but beyond, tothe other side of canyon whereleaf-bare horses sleek and resplendentgallop through ochred grass. And when your cupped hand pourspiñons into mine, the edge of your palmangled to my own, there is relief in knowing.I take it all down — documented.…

Roost Books, 2016. $26.95, 320 pages SINCE BECOMING an adult, I’ve tried to live a “wild” life, whatever that term even means. I’ve lived in a tent for months on end, worked in the woods, and traveled as far o= the path as possible. But now I am days from what might be my most authentic wild experience yet — parenthood. As Michael Branch writes in Raising Wild: Dispatches from a Home in the Wilderness, “Pregnancy and childbirth are among the most natural events humans experience, and in them we recognize the naturalness of our own bodies.” But as Sarah and I prepare to bring a child, hopefully children, into this world, I wonder if we’re choosing the right place to raise them. We live in northern Vermont, far past…

Sarabande Books, 2017. $14.95, 72 pages. Jenny Johnson’s first collection of poetry begins with an echo, both in form and in content, that reshapes the fervent praise of Gerard Manley Hopkins’s “Pied Beauty.” Yet unlike Hopkins, Johnson’s poem, “Dappled Things,” exposes creation’s freckled loveliness to be sensual, even sexual: Or Lovewe could pretend to be utter strangers!I, a house sparrow, and you, a cowbirdhopping over to chatteruntil you touch your lower bill, headbowed to my breast feathers. Sex is the singular, primal force of nature, the urge that yields to life, subservient to creation and ecstasy, and Johnson utilizes this universal element to great effect in her poems. Her poems challenge cultural norms, celebrating a range of sexualities in their characterizations of the human and nonhuman animals that inhabit their…

Sometimes, like this time, I start reading Orion from the back of the magazine forward. Brian Doyle’s Coda piece “Their Irrepressible Innocence” (November/December 2016) reminded me immediately why I cannot do without Orion magazine, especially now. Thank you. KATHLEEN WEBB Chardon, Ohio As an educator and birder, I deeply appreciate the message in Christopher Norment’s article “A Case for Wonder” (November/December 2016). I agree with Norment that mother birds will not likely abandon their young if touched by a human. However, there are other potential dangers to drawing too much attention to a nest. While attending a workshop one spring, a wren’s nest that was found on the side of a shed drew the attention of many attendees. Nearby a crow became curious about the human focus on the shed.…

AFTER WE FINISH building the stone wall, Ray says, after rain washes off dust and dirt, he’ll pour buttermilk over the rocks. I look up from the toaster-oven-size rock I’m about to lift (or that I think I’m about to lift). Ray explains that buttermilk will encourage the growth of moss. I blink sweat from my eyes. The wall, flanking his gravel driveway, will eventually stretch forty-two feet, rise three, and bulk out four. That’s a supertanker of buttermilk. But I say nothing I’m a summertime resident lending a hand to my New Hampshire neighbor. All I know about stone walls is that they are as much a part of New England’s expressiveness as maple syrup and small-town Fourth of July parades. I learn that if you linked all the…

DAVYD BETCHKAL was soaking wet. It wasn’t quite raining, but the Alaskan air was heavy with mist so thick that it dripped from Betchkal’s fingers as he fussed with the tent stakes and nylon rope that were holding a pair of small solar panels in place. The panels were there to recharge a hefty battery that supported the pile of electrical equipment in the device on the rocks beside him: a tripod-mounted and alien-looking contraption featuring a sound-pressure-level meter, a digital sound recorder, and an omnidirectional microphone. We were crouched on the side of Fang Mountain, a jagged and inhospitable peak in the backcountry wilderness of Denali National Park, and we had spent the last few days hiking out to this machine. Betchkal is the lead — and, at present,…

The boat rocks back and forth over the watersas they rise and the land recedes from sight. The land where women bleed all the time.The land of moss and stubble. If anythinglives at all, pests thrive on the land throngedwith men who are mean to their mothers. It becomes a land of no mothers,a land where girls never sleep. A landwhere we need no land. The land from whichthe leaves grow large and we do not know why. The leaves grow large and do not grow back.The grown leave and do not go back,the gone grow and do not go back. Utiǵ uliqpin? Are you homesick?Utiǵ uliqtuna. I am homesick.Utiqłiutunga. I am going to go back…

Trinity University Press, 2016. $18.95, 248 pages. IN THE OPENING essay of Coming of Age at the End of Nature: A Generation Faces Living on a Changed Planet, Blair Braverman writes, “I was never not aware that nature was in collapse.” Braverman goes on to explore what it meant to grow up loving a natural world that she knew was already “fragmented and polluted,” already in crisis and danger. It wasn’t until I read those lines that I realized the same wasn’t true for me. Like Braverman, I grew up playing outside, exploring pine forests and climbing maple trees, but I don’t remember having an awareness that the world was already damaged. I remember being taught to recycle in elementary school and planting trees for Arbor Day, but I was…

Graywolf Press, 2017. $16, 120 pages. USING the language of the colonizer — the tongue, the tone, the formalities of treaties and government apologies — Layli Long Soldier divides, allocates, terminates, removes, and reorganizes the threads of dehumanization that create the warp and weft of just about every legal document created by the federal government concerning its relationship with sovereign tribal nations. Although a new voice in the poetry world, Long Soldier expertly takes those threads and claims them for herself. Is there a clearer way to declare one’s sovereignty? To self? To tribal nation? Whereas the word whereas…is a qualifying or introductory statement, a conjunction, a connector… Whereas, I have learned to exist and exist without your formality, saltshakers, plates, cloth. Without the slightest conjunctions to connect me. Following…

AFTER FOUR YEARS of farming vegetables in the foothills of Northern California, my partner, our nine-month-old daughter, and I left our farm for a salaried job and a rented house in Austin, Texas. My first morning in the city I surveyed our backyard — a garage-sized rectangle thick with chickweed, an unruly patch of cactus, three leafless trees — then headed to the store to stock our empty kitchen. In the produce section, I floundered in choice. Accustomed to constructing meals with vegetables from our farm, I circled pyramids of tomatoes, stacks of cauliflower. I lifted a bundle of kale, but the leaves were floppy and yellowed. I reached instead for broccoli, the stalk a shade closer to white than green, the flowers dry. At the checkout line stood a…