Tabla de contenidos para Winter 2020 en Orion

Hannah Dela Cruz Abrams is a recipient of the Whiting Award, the Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award, and a North Carolina Arts Council Fellowship. She teaches in the department of English at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Lauren K. Alleyne is the author of Difficult Fruit and Honeyfish and coeditor of Furious Flower. She is currently an associate professor of English at James Madison University and the assistant director of the Furious Flower Poetry Center. Rose Thater Braan-Imai (Tuscarora) is director of the Native American Academy, where she leads creative projects and ceremonial dialogues reconciling Indigenous and Western worldviews. Ama Codjoe is the author of Blood of the Air, winner of the Drinking Gourd Chapbook Poetry Prize, and Bluest Nude, forthcoming in fall 2022. Among other honors, she is…

OUR INTENTIONS are modest as we traverse the Brahmaputra on a small boat to visit the wetlands of Majuli Island. The island was formed in the eighteenth century by the Brahmaputra River and its anabranches. Considered the largest river island in the world, Majuli is home to more than thirty Vaishnava Hindu monasteries, where celibates perform bhaona plays wearing character masks, such as Krishna, Sita, or even a bird. But we will not be visiting any monasteries today. We are eager to meet a grassroots environmental activist known as The Forest Man. Since 1979, he has planted seeds to combat yearly floods and erosion on the island. His name is Jadav Payeng, and the thirteen-hundred-acre forest he has created is larger than New York’s Central Park. It takes twenty minutes…

THE REDANG AIR is electric during the monsoon season. Breezes rustle through palm trees and the air swirls into a fog before bursting through the sky with a welcome breath of cool on this tropical island in Malaysia. It’s November, off-peak season and a strange time to visit a resort town. Bad weather has suspended travel, and on my first night here I am the only guest. There is no public transportation on the island, and Malay farming families make up most of the permanent population. On walks I meet more roving monitor lizards than people. I share my meals with nearby chattering monkeys. But I am here to grieve a family tragedy and to work on a manuscript that feels both cathartic and impossible to finish. The solitude suits…

I. Mo‘oleloI THE CHILDREN SAT cross-legged and squirming in the church schoolroom, but as Auntie Paulette began her story, we all, as one, became still. “I grew up in Pearl City, in a place called Peninsula, near the water,” she said. “And in that water, there was a shark named Ka‘ahupāhau. Ka‘ahupāhau was the shark goddess, and she was the protector of Pearl Harbor—we called it Pu‘uloa 2 back then.” At fourteen, I was too old for church school, but today was a special day. Auntie Paulette Moore had come to tell us mo‘olelo from her childhood on the shores of Pearl Harbor. I knew Auntie Paulette as the kupuna 3 who chanted the psalms in Hawaiian during church services. She had a round smiling face and always wore stylish…

The wasps are dying in my son’sbedroom, and each morning I rushto collect them before he wakesand finds them on the floor. On myknees, cheek pressed to the thin woolenrug so I can see them at eyelevel, I pick them up by theirwings, by a crooked leg, pinchingparts between my two fingers likea jeweler. At first the numbersstartle me—I find forty, thenfifty striped bodies, some twistingin hunger’s throes. Soon their bodiesdwindle to a dozen. I’ve learnedthe drones can’t feed themselves, that theyrely on their sisters, the queen’swill for food and care. Once my boyleaves for school, his last year beforehe heads to college, I returnto the room, lay my head againsta wall, listen for their humming.I am learning not to cry.…

WE WERE CHILDREN once, pulled in all directions by the call of the earth’s fruit. We drifted through the street markets of Chennai, mesmerized by the sinuous shapes and names: Neelam, Mulgoba, Rumani, Alphonso, Imam Pasand. We awoke, jet-lagged, to the sounds of peddlers hauling their pyramids on the streets and the footsteps of dogs behind them. We turned our chins to the canopy at the first signs of yellow. We were young and didn’t know better than to trust our appetites. There are several ways to get a mango. You might retrieve one at Koyambedu market, red and yellow in your blue muslin bag. You might find one whittled into a rose at the hotel restaurant. You might, as we often did, haul a ladder up to the roof…

GROWING UP, I never thought about the daily schedule of wild turkeys. They seemed, in my imagination, to be mythical creatures who lived mostly in paintings of rural 1800s England. I did not know they were to become part of my life. Take yesterday at dusk, for example, when the local gang, maybe fifteen or so, came rolling up over our wooden bridge and hopped, one by one, onto the roof of the other house on the property. The same way they do every night. They mill around for a bit and then disappear into the lower branches of trees to go to bed. I should take a moment, here, to describe them. A good size. Think peacock/peahen. The same sort of body. Brown, in a variegated way, and with…

ON SUNDAYS, before he saw patients, my father would take me on walks through the wooded acreage behind our home in southwestern Pennsylvania. The first of these walks I can remember was from the vantage of his hip, a deer crashing through the underbrush ahead of us. The last was three years ago when illness left him too weak to continue. Our woods were never quiet. There was the quartz-clear song of the creek where we would wash our hands before eating the baloney sandwiches my mother packed, and the skittering of black raspberry thorns against our windbreakers. Wood thrushes called from the old growth, secretive as dryads, while black cherry trees cracked against the occasional thud of a falling crab apple. Everywhere the susurrations of cicadas, trill of toads,…

Sometimes, it is a dream:the robin’s slick songparing back the morning—it is not morning,or, it is not like how morning comes,as if water from a glasstipped over, but it is howI loved you, graduallyand then all at once.Cherry plum treessettling into their blush;hills of sodden wheat;this golden fieldI can’t stop returning to:you, naked, inching towards me,an adaptation of tendernessand force—brief lightsthat fall gentlyfrom your hands.If only the landscape were that simple:pollen in the air, each breathleaving the mouth like a manpushed from a building—no, no. He leapt.To what do I owe your beautyto which I never fully required,and yet, while beneath you, is what bloomed.This is how I began: as dirtand desire, or simply a small river,aimless,but moving—to where? — Luther Hughes…

You begin with the bones, their honeycombedcrevasses airy and bloodless,the marrow gone to dust. You finger the hollow cranium, imaginehooking each vertebrae into place—threadingtogether the chain link spine, hanging the ribs. The teeth,you think, would be easiest; how they love ordereven now, stone-white soldiers refusing surrender. The unliving beastwould slowly emerge, terrorless and mute,a mannequin of its former furred and bleating self. But this is not what drove youto pause on the path, to cradle femur, tibia, and shardin your sack of not-skin, to carry death’s leftovers on your back like a too-tired infant.When you bring the bones down the mountain,unbury them one by one, you do not want to build the beast back, or undowhat brought this horned thing to your table.Rather, you want to understand surrender, to see…

1 Lower your binoculars. See bird and person in the full context of their being, feathers or skin. We all share the same air, same water, same earth, and same fate in the end. Don’t just list and be done. 2 Leave your assumptions behind. Don’t make snap ID decisions on birds or humans. A murmuration wheeling across a purpling sky may appear to be a single being but is in fact a collection of countless individuals in one movement. Admire the whole. Respect the one. 3 List your privileges. Know your range. Can you wander like a warbler without wondering who’s watching you with suspicion? 4 Be bold. Speak up. Identify racism as you would call out a crow among snow buntings. Silence lets the oppression grow unchecked. 5…

NEWS HEADING INTO a season of continued isolation and uncertainty, we continue to look to our friends and our books for inspiration and courage. As Orion’s poetry editor, Camille Dungy, reminds us, “we cannot fully understand our everyday experiences without the valuable insights that literature and the arts provide.” Her valuable insights were part of the Democratic National Convention’s Council on the Environment and Climate Crisis event in August, where she also read her poem “Characteristics of Life,” in which she offers compassion to the invertebrate among us: “To say it is mindless is missing the point.” Through months of turbulence, we’ve kept in mind the voices of our advisors. The autumn issue of Orion marked our first collaboration with On Being—a meditative exchange between Krista Tippett and Jane Goodall.…

When a 2018 fire destroyed the National Museum in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil lost both a cultural icon and a favorite destination for one of its most influential contemporary artists, Vik Muniz. Muniz is known for mixed-media work incorporating material elements such as chocolate syrup and ketchup. But seeing the disappearance of collections two hundred years in the making, including an entomology department with over 5 million specimens and the earliest humanoid skull found in the American continent, he found a historical canvas for his aesthetic. “Seeing history go up in flames made me feel groundless,” Muniz reflected. “When the mind wanders entirely ignorant of time, illusion becomes a means of confinement.” Working in collaboration with museum staff, Muniz re-created a selection of the destroyed objects with material sifted from…

I AM STANDING on Yolanda Beach. The edge of the world. One edge, anyway. East of the Philippines, where the island of Samar meets the Pacific. Samar, a sound like the local word for “wound,” an island named after pain. Pacifico, Magellan had said of the great ocean, and in describing it gave it a name. El Niño, South American fishermen had said as the ocean warmed, the infant Jesus blessing Magellan’s fleet with fine weather before the doldrums that suspended them between east and west, nearly killing them. His heart bursting with the thrill of arrival, Magellan didn’t know he would never return home. The beach is as perfect as a postcard: blazing whites, soothing blues, the scene fringed with green. It is midday, and I have come to…

Helen Plane, a Civil War widow and chartermember of the United Daughters of theConfederacy, spearheaded the first attemptto carve the Stone Mountain memorial. She,too, was a Klan sympathizer. After GutzonBorglum was chosen as the monument’ssculptor in 1915, Plane wrote him with adesign suggestion. “Why not represent asmall group of them in their nightly uniformapproaching in the distance?” she asked. — Southern Poverty Law Center Why not represent a small group of themin their nightly uniformapproaching in the distance? Why not represent a small group of usin our nightly uniformapproaching in the distance? Why not a small group of usin our uniformapproaching? Why not usapproachingwearing what we bear. Carve us there.Let the silence of threatembolden our approach. Let any who stand to fearthe white tideof our rising— let them hideas we…

A DISTINGUISHED writer and editor, Joseph Lee Wood, was also a former Eagle Scout and passionate birder, who, the day after his arrival to the Unity ’99 journalism conference in Seattle, Washington, rented a car and drove to the Nisqually entrance of Mount Rainier, nearly ninety miles southeast, with binoculars in hand. He shared breakfast at the Westin Hotel with then Democratic presidential candidate Bill Bradley, along with seven other journalists and scholars, including Harvard professor Cornel West. He scheduled to meet a colleague the following day and then left for a short hike in the park. He was not seen for the remainder of the conference and didn’t respond to phone calls and e-mails. Upon learning that Joe had not checked out of his hotel, his friend and former…

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