Tabla de contenidos para Spring 2019 en Orion

THIS living flowing land,” writes the poet Gary Snyder, “is all there is, forever/We are it/it sings through us.” That really is the way it was between people and nature, for hundreds of thousands of years. The distinction between the two was slight, evanescent, even nonexistent. Who we are was irrevocably linked to the natural world. These days, people are more likely to encounter animal life on screens than in person. We are quick to blame lap-tops and Xboxes and iPhones for luring people indoors and away from direct experience of nature, but let’s not kid ourselves — human culture has been distancing itself from the living flowing land for millennia. The reasons for this—or the culprits, as it may be—are many. The hunter-gatherer way of life that humans relied…

JUST YESTERDAY, after picking my way up the short flagstone path from our house to the roadside, bending and weaving through katsura branches and ferns, stumbling on a sequoia root, breasting the chest-high thimbleberries, I discovered a card in our mailbox from someone who offered to buy our house. AS IS! the would-be buyer shouted in all caps. Last month one writer enthusiastically offered us CA$H! The month before that, a hopeful purchaser supplied a tear-jerking tale of a young family making a business of buying and selling fixer-uppers. The riotous streetside growth obscuring our Pacific Northwest house and small city lot also regularly attracts pink, blue, and yellow flyers slotted into our gate, advertising garden services galore. Our unknown correspondents clearly have a vision for what an appealing yard…

AMID THE BIRCH TREES, violet-colored dame’s rockets, and forget-me-nots rests the mother of our local fiddleheads—the ostrich fern. My friend has taken me into the woods of northern Vermont to show me where they grow. She loves fiddleheads, and over the last few years she’s noticed a decline in their abundance. Swaths of flora along the Winooski River in Vermont, for instance, bear large bald spots where the ferns once flourished. The decrease is in part due to rising demand for the fiddlehead fronds the mother ostrich fern produces in early spring. These fiddleheads are considered a delicacy among chefs, foragers, and anyone wanting a taste of its life force energy, as we humans all emerge creaky-boned and mineral deficient from the scarcity of winter. The fiddlehead fern frond is…

the sand in your hair has fallenon the bed after we spent our last days betweenboulders lakes sand dunes & you werea lizard in its element & I was a turtlereturning to the same beach it hatched inravens clouds stars above our tentpitched in the softest ground the warmest skin I’ve ever touchedis yours & what does the sand say to you nowin the morning when I’m waking & you’re waking & we’re no longerkiss to the forehead leg on your leghair on our lips when we look for half a bottle of wineyou must be weighing all scenarios how longwe’ve known each other vs. the countries we’re apart when I look at Librahere in the southern sky your Kindle is the only thing missingnext to my hardcover fear is…

Would you like some sugar in your tea?Can I lift this tea bag out for you, lay itin the sink, little satchel of my heart,sopped? Your hands, can I wash them?Stir the soup along your knuckleslike clean, white clouds? Outside,can you see the sediment seesawing?True or true: all the bees are leaving,wings loosening a lullaby? Will there behoney enough to laugh in? Our faultlines, wrinkled in what wonder?The muscles of flowers, missing whatpetaled tendon? How can we carry eachother in the sweet yearsafter? In a skycradled in sour sun, in smoke sludge?How to carry, how to uncovet thiscalamity in our blood?…

THERE IS A PHOTO of me just at the moment: a faded black newsboy hat shades my face, leaving only a half moon of visible chin, perched on two open hands. Lying on my stomach, I’ve pinned the book open with my elbows: One Hundred Years of Solitude. I wear a blue fleece jacket the color of a Muppet and yoga pants that are a little too bright. The ground around me is scattered with Doug fir cones and yellowing pine needles. Beside me, a stream throws itself over a little cliff, crashing and surging. The light is dusky—a Montana red-orange. Shoulders slumped into a wide U, head leaning in toward the page, I am oblivious to the camera. All I hear is the water falling. I remember the sound…

TO READ Joe Wilkins’s first novel is to spend time in eastern Montana, to feel the sharp wind cutting across the cedar ridges, through the sagebrush and bunchgrass, kicking up dust that gathers into grit at the corner of your eyes. It is to hear the sweet, languid whistles of the meadowlarks in the fields. It is to feel “the gravel and the ruts and the old cracked tires” beneath you and to see, above you, always, the wide sky, its “whole box of colors” and its “extravagant stars,” that pull of the sublime to lift your gaze from the intractable earth. And it is to know how hard-earned the beauty is. While Fall Back Down When I Die examines how education, social class, life experience, and gender inform its…

“TRUE MAGIC is to help each thing become its best and most free self,” declares the fairy godmother in Cinderella Liberator, Rebecca Solnit’s debut children’s book with accompanying illustrations by Arthur Rackham. In five slim chapters, Solnit turns the familiar story of the unloved child into a message about transformation’s necessary and unending remit in our lives. When writing Cinderella Liberator, Solnit’s questions were “how to preserve something of the charm of transformation and the plight of the child, and how to work out a more palatable exit from her plight than the one we all know.” Solnit uses language children can understand — whether they’re being read to or reading to themselves—and answers her questions by mapping a way to meet each other in our most difficult circumstances. Altering…

Bryce Andrews lives on a farm in western Montana. His first book, Badluck Way, was published in 2014 and received several awards. His second, Down from the Mountain, was published this April. Christopher Bakken is the author of the culinary memoir Honey, Olives, Octopus and three books of poetry. He teaches at Allegheny College. Jenny George is the author of The Dream of Reason. She lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where she works in social justice philanthropy. Jessica Grindstaff is the artistic director and cofounder of Phantom Limb Company. She lives in New York City. Anya Groner’s essays, stories, and poems have appeared in Guernica, the New York Times, The Atlantic, and elsewhere. She lives and teaches in New Orleans. Rebecca Hutchinson received her MFA from the University of…

THE GEESE LAND one day amid the asphalt and anger and radio static and sweat, their feathers bright against the dull shades of our lives. Celebrity comes quickly. Inmates press their foreheads against dayroom windows on every floor of every tower, but the geese don’t mind: they’re ready for the attention. They preen and nip at each other, frolic in puddles formed by the spring rain. Soon there are newborn goslings peeking out from beneath shrubs all over the compound. Guys argue over what to name them, watch them for hours, and check anyone who thinks it’s funny to bother the flock. We envy the geese. They’ve come by choice, as if in solidarity, and soon they’ll spread wings we don’t have and leave this place on a whim. They…

A stillness, some light that marks the shadow.Even in spring when my coat sheds at my fingers on the buttons, my shirt and base layer,too, fallen to ground: a stillness. A light ribbons my shoulder, my collarbone, makesa dappling, a lace. O the winter here, too long, too full of salt and cloud, loosenedenough for the bramble of me, for the honeysuckle and forsythia,the only flowers I knew to name. In the stillness, the ease of your namelike blossom or bloom. Here the brown eye, black, a dilation. Hear the blood, a promise:the bramble is deep—it longs to part for you.…

A week of rain.Then overnight a crop of mushrooms appearsby the woodpile,pale and luminous, the largest one like a handpointing out of the earth.Fog drips from the trees. The air is filledwith cold urges. Everything has a voice,even if low, diffuse—or outsideof human hearing.And what doesn’t speakappears as signal: driven upfrom the giant tracts of the underworld, silver root-silk fine as baby’s hair,creature without eyes or mind— Fruited, rain-fed, variant, seeping Moons, velvets, small grave-pearls, trumpets, milk…

SAY YOU FINISH reading Kate Brown’s Manual for Survival: A Chernobyl Guide to the Future late at night. You fall asleep and dream of living in a nuclear wasteland. The landscape looks normal except for little idiosyncrasies like red forests and full-grown pines stunted like bonsai trees. You know everything you touch, eat, drink, or breathe in is charged with radioactive isotopes. They careen around inside everyone’s body like a “madman in a library,” altering chromosomes and mutating the genetics of unborn children and grandchildren. Everyday activities like drinking milk, eating berries, and nuzzling a child expose you to enough radiation to make your corpse toxic waste. You wake in the morning uneasy because you realize, in fact, your blood, bones, and organs might harbor as much radiation as a…

ATLAS OF POETIC BOTANY is a handdrawn collection of plants from equatorial rainforests that have sometimes strange but often beautiful and surprising characteristics, like trees that grow on top of other trees, or plants that disguise themselves as mushrooms or have leaves as big as awnings. Why drawings and not photos? To stare at a plant is to form a relationship with it; “it opens up a space for reflection,” whereas perhaps photographing a plant feels more like speed-dating or like a way to “content oneself with limited information.” But, as in photography criticism, Hallé examines each plant as one would a piece of art, carefully drawing out the intention of each with the colorful, informative, and enchanting drawings that complement his studied deliberations. Reading this book, you’ll feel as…

FROM OUR READERS I ALWAYS APPRECIATE a blaring Kings-north wake up. It is like the car alarm in the parking lot that won’t shut off because the owner is too far away to hear it. The message in “Life versus the Machine” (Winter 2018) is an oft-repeated one by writers at this time (and in this magazine): “The collapse of the industrial economy is, in all likelihood, the only remaining way to prevent the mass destruction of life on Earth.” It is a simple and soul-crushing statement supported over and over with hope-crushing facts. Yet rather than sinking me down, I found this article refreshing. Kingsnorth is able to call everyone, including himself, on their bullshit. The alarm is blaring and everyone is ignoring it. The only real solution is…

ARASPY, emphatic proclamation — “phoebe!”—bursts from the hemlocks Sunday morning, announcing the return of our birds. No need for an alarm clock now. At first light, the male declares his workday has begun; we rise and begin ours. When I return in the afternoon, he is circling our house, winking through my peripheral vision as he streaks past windows. He alights atop a wobbly rod of rebar, flicks his tail, states his name. Foraging flights will soon dominate the action. Stationed on the feeder pole, our phoebes conjure moths, then sally and snatch them from the air. Garden-fresh caterpillars, proffered on the perch, are also accepted. Each year we relish this homecoming, a tradition that John James Audubon sleuthed by winding bits of thread around the legs of individual birds…

I ARRIVED AT Schock’s field with a storm of bugs in front of me and dust behind. As I slowed to make the turn from Red Horn onto Hillside Road, a grasshopper soared in through the window, came to rest on my arm, and remained. Glancing down, I was struck by the creature’s yellow, tiger-striped carapace, slate eyes, and barbed, wrong-way-round shins. Though small, the grasshopper was substantial. I could feel its weight and the sharp pricking of legs as it turned on my arm. Coming to the start of the cornfield fence, I slowed the truck and steered for the road’s margin. Giving my skin a final needling, the hopper leapt away, sailed out the window, and spun through the air. As an engine gutters, chokes, and catches, its…

Dear Selection Committee members, I am writing to formally apply for the Exceptional Research Grant sponsored by your esteemed organization. I’d like to begin by expressing my sincere gratitude for offering such generous support for “writers and scholars completing exceptional research projects in the Humanities,” and I can confirm that, if my project is selected, the $500 will most certainly assist me in achieving my “professional goals.” Thank you, as well, for holding the recent informational meeting on our campus, at which your representative was both friendly and helpful in answering our questions. I admit to some lingering hesitation, however, related to a question someone asked about what sorts of research projects your organization has funded in the past. Your representative explained (again, in a very friendly manner) that although…

YUKO TSUSHIMA’s quiet, contemplative novel Territory of Light is less a novel than a collection of petrified lightning glass, each piece a self-contained time capsule of emotions, interactions, and breath. Originally published serially in Japanese literary monthly Gunz0¯ between 1978 and 1979, each of the twelve vignettes represents one month in the life of an unnamed young mother who recently separated from her husband and is learning how to navigate her new reality while caring for their two-year-old daughter. The story starts and ends with place, but most of the narrative exists within the woman’s increasingly unstable mind. There is a voyeuristic quality to the story, which largely chronicles the banality of the woman’s day-to-day living, from getting herself and her daughter ready for work and daycare each…

C. D. WRIGHT once wrote it was her “confirmed bias that poets remain the most ‘stunned by existence,’ the most determined to redeem the world in words.” In The Book of Delights, a yearlong experiment in cultivating delight through daily essays, poet and writer Ross Gay beckons readers to linger with the beauty of the world and his belief in the human desire to conspire in that beauty by reorienting the quotidian to joy’s robust configurations. It’s hard not to reach for religious language when describing Gay’s work. It’s filled to the brim with spirit and the temporal allegiance with dailiness that abides at the root of mortality and spiritual practice alike. One of the shorter essays, “Lily on the Pants,” is prayer, hymn, sermon, and benediction, all in one…

The beauty of things was born before eyes and sufficient to itself; the/heart-breaking beauty/Will remain when there is no heart to break for it.—Robinson Jeffers, “Credo” 1 In the ruined harbor, the moan of the rusting whistle buoy, its hydraulic cylinders transforming the lift of a wave into a cry in the fog. 2 Rain filling the fossil footprint in mudstone of a boy running on the beach. Hard rain, fortissimo. 3 Shards of colored glass tinkling down the marble steps, having fallen from a soaring arch, past the startled face of a stone saint holding a bird in his hand. 4 Wind whistling under a slab of bark in a forest of sycamores grown strong on the desiccating backs of cedars. It’s a sound that might once have been…