Tabla de contenidos para Fall 2023 en Orion

"WHAT DOES THE LAND WANT?" We gather in ceremony to hold this central question, trusting the forest will answer in its own time. Around the circle we introduce ourselves to our host, this magnificent nine hundred acres of unceded Kashia and Southern Pomo territory, situated above the Russian River in Sonoma County, California. Once a church camp, the area is now lovingly stewarded by Shelterwood, a collective of queer, Black, and Indigenous organizers committed to restoring the forest and healing this ecosystem. I and three others who fundraise on behalf of Shelterwood are here this crisp May morning, which happens to be my fifty-first birthday, to connect more deeply with land and water. We each bring something of significance for the ceremony. A song, a totem, a blessing. I have…

In the face of death, the California dandelion will raise its stalk to face a breeze head on Come springtime, our picket white fence will encapsulate a cemetery cosplaying as a garden I picked flowers to congratulate my aunt on passing her citizenship test She sobbed into the bouquet & asked if every celebration here begins with death In this country, God is a gardener who thinks of petals and souls as one and the same Does beauty exist in the apathy of being ripped apart limb by limb? I am waiting for a country that gives me flowers before my love dies One which allows me to lay amongst flower beds made of magnolias & poppies Some days I wonder if they get tired of seeing corpses in their…

IT WAS THROUGH the glass screen of my windshield that I first saw the people, residents of the city of Philadelphia, where I also live, who suffer from drug addictions so severe that they live, unhoused, unprotected from the elements, buying, injecting, and experiencing the effects of sedative drugs in plain view and so close to a kind of living death that the internet refers to them as “zombies.” I passed Kensington Avenue, a congested two-lane thoroughfare that runs underneath the raised subway throughout North Philadelphia, and then drove along the edge of a park circumscribed by a low stone wall. Across the grass and through the trees, I could see a noble white-columned building at the park’s center and a sign: the McPherson Square branch of the Free Library…

Truong Tran Kaya Press “TRUONG … this is not what happened to you.” In Book of the Other, gay Vietnamese refugee and immigrant Truong Tran shares his experience of being perpetually viewed as an outsider, as other. Using stark prose, essays, and poems, Tran recounts stories he’s been told not to tell. Of fleeing his home and the war in Vietnam, of his childhood attempts to fit in amid people’s explicit racism. He writes of how his mother failed her U.S. citizenship test, about his initial shame surrounding his gay identity, and eventually details a series of enraging professional slights that speak to racial bias in academia. All the while he implores readers to see him, believe him. Book of the Other is an important read. It asks you to…

WHEN MY FATHER DIED, I began making weekly visits to a public grief house. I mean greenhouse. For seven Mondays, I rode the streetcar across town to warm myself in a glass building full of plants. No one had warned me that hard-hitting losses sometimes take the form of ordinary problems such as temperature-related discomfort. I had not seen this play out in stories, so I was not prepared for the cold current that entered my body and spread like ice through my veins. I did not know ski gloves and wool fleece would be my mourning vestments. For seven Mondays, I sat with leaves the size of airplane wings under a glistening dome. I basked in winter sunshine, buried myself among the dripping fronds of palms and cycads. The…

Tonight, a storm. And I hear weak humming drift down the throat of this rain-voiced house. My son is asleep when I check, but the first notes sounded like the softness of him upstairs learning by singing to soothe his own doubts. I’ve answered that hymnal despair before; I’ve been that odd wonder—no hidden talent, just the boy who, if asked, would let a room of unhomed siblings hear him trying to hush the terror his own mind could not contain but for song. Nightmares taught me young. When the pale lady from my dreaming began to blur with waking life, for days I trembled through the winded dark of our trailer home to know the frightening figure had not returned for my family. I whispered strange psalms from bed…

OUTSIDE the GTB Nagar metro station in North Delhi is a dense bustle typical of mornings in the city. Hundreds of people brush past one another at the crossroads; women stand on tiptoe to scan the snaking lines for the day’s trains; rickshaw drivers shout their prices to people exiting; students wave at one another across the street before bunching up to head to Delhi University campus; and street vendors set up shop, opening their umbrellas over trays of sliced papayas or pots of milk, soon to be boiled for chai. At this intersection, Raj Kumar Yadav sells litti chokha, a dish from Bihar in eastern India, where small litti—balls made of sattu, a multigrain flour—are cooked on coals and served with chokha—roasted spiced eggplant. Yadav runs this business from…

MAYBE IT’D BE A STAND OF TREES encircling a ground soft with pine needles, out of view of neighbors so as not to scare them, but close enough that, should danger come, there might be a witness. That’s the kind of place George McCarthy adds to his mental inventory of where he could sleep as he travels about the city on bus and foot. Even now, a few months into living in an apartment after ten years of homelessness in South Carolina and Oregon, he scans and adds to his catalog of places he could return. In one of my first conversations with George, he referred to a Frank O’Hara poem, and I realized I’d found a friend. While he vacillated between sleeping outside and finding a mat in a…

Victoria Jamieson and Omar Mohamed Dial Books AFTER SPENDING his childhood in a refugee camp in Kenya before emigrating to the United States, Omar Mohamed knew that he wanted to write the story of his experience caring for his younger brother, Hassan, in a supposedly temporary living situation that stretched on for fifteen years. In collaboration with middle-grade author and illustrator Victoria Jamieson, the two created a graphic memoir buoyant with soft purple hues. The book shines as an honest, accessible depiction of a child’s experience of surviving a war only to live in its interstitial wake. Bold lines and simple shapes frame the authentic, childlike perspective that Omar maintains amid a complex situation, while his endearing voice drives the story to open a wide entry point for children and…

Wendy Pearlman Custom House IN THE GUTTING tradition of Belarusian journalist Svetlana Alexievich, Wendy Pearlman deftly collects intimate observations, poetic fragments, and devastating testimonies garnered from hundreds of interviews with displaced Syrians. The entirety of the main text is told directly from the mouths of her subjects, with chapters that span the country’s authoritarianism, hopeful 2011 revolution, devastating crackdown, militarization, war, exodus, ongoing displacement, and, for some, resettlement. We meet Muslims and Christians, people of all ages, all social backgrounds. Jamal the doctor. Hadi the shop owner. Rima the writer. They share with us the joys of public protesting and the terrors of retribution. They recall bombed-out buildings, missing friends, and midnight border crossings, and also the bright butterfly in a refugee camp, the luxury of a big library…

SOMETIMES, the power of color lies in contrasts. You can be swimming in a sea of predictable blues and greens when suddenly—whoa!—a great orange blob jets by. As you follow, a tap on your shoulder turns you back, just in time to see a lilac tentacle retract among others of canary and lime—unexpected shades from the surface world. Before you know it, you are awash in rainbows. They encircle every limb and digit, activate every sense. Though these colors are potent through their contrasts, neither they nor their potency can be disembodied from their dynamic forms, as shape truly brings each hue to life. Squiggles and swirls, bubbles and globs, forms reinforced by clean contours in black and royal blue. The ocean teems with them. And yet: Are they animal…

—UPROOTED TREES I FOUND WITHIN a poem by Bavuudorj Tsogdorj the pleasing Mongolian phrase —young trees in autumn—and I wondered how trees count or mark time, whether they even need to at all. I imagined them counting seasons at the smallest scale, though more likely their passing of time would be even slower—decades, possibly centuries. In the traditional Mongolian script, which has existed in various different iterations since 1204, each letter takes one of several different shapes depending on the position within a word and the letter following it. It is written in vertical top-to-bottom columns running left to right and is traditionally taught as syllables, rather than as individual letters. The following forms variously mark the beginning of a book, a chapter, a passage: And this four-fold dot…

FOR YEARS, my mother hauled me to St. Mary’s Parish. Sunday mass was a habit for most Boston Catholics, but one she, and I, would eventually shed. On the church’s brick steps, I dreaded the misery that awaited me on the pew, granite-hard under my scrawny child’s body. I knew the purpose of my presence was to feel small, earthly, and sinful. “Let us proclaim the mystery of faith,” the pastor commanded. Today, I enter another temple at 9:00 a.m. Other days, 9:30. Like mass on Sundays, adult lap swim at the Northwestern Connecticut YMCA is rigidly scheduled. Unlike at church, my attendance at the pool requires a reservation. At the edge of the pool, I shiver, adjust the leg bands of my swimsuit. I regard the water with a…

My mother built our house from spit and sticks, then shoved me out. She shoved me out. Herself, too. Mud, straw soft as knit. Grass against the east wall. Sunrise. She cared, then flung us both to the ice wind. (Spring isn’t always warm, I learned. Spring, the hardest dirt.) Did I not make bad choices? Did I not make bad choices? Was I not her bad choice? Reader, she was free. She rose against the evening hour, her down gold shimmered and spanned. Gone, gone, she did not see me of no wings. Stone breast, wisp legs, me: a weight. But my sound, my sound flew as I fell. As I fell, I sang. Rebecca Gayle Howell teaches for the University of Arkansas MFA program. She has received best…

A CONVOY of heavy vehicles whose flanks had been stenciled HOMELESS OUTREACH began to pull up on either side of the front gate. Out came the officers in their black tactical vests with guns and walkie-talkies and maybe tasers in their Sam Browne belts. So where should I hide my notebook? said Matthew. But Sunny ran away to watch. Laying down his fully loaded backpack beside her tent, he followed her moodily, with his notebook in his hand. Then he saw a woman glaring at him as if he were a snitch, so he returned to his own tent and hid the notebook under the nylon floor. By now it was so greasy and stinky that no one would steal it. As the black uniforms swept in, a woman screamed:…

Jessica Bruder W. W. Norton & Company BEFORE THE FILM was the book, and before the book was the rising practice of what might be called capitalist orientation programs: so-called support resources from corporations to aid their employees in coping with the abject quality of life into which their job forced them in the first place. As increasing numbers of workers are forced out of their homes, employers respond by offering tips on RV living. Hearing about what one character calls “wheel estate,” journalist Jessica Bruder follows a nomadic group around the American West, specifically Linda May, an employee for Amazon’s van life–promoting CamperForce program whose favorite topic is neither money nor cars, but dirt. She observes Linda wondering “if the dirt was sandy and granular or fine and powdery,”…

Mohsin Hamid Riverhead Books WHAT IF MIGRATION didn’t involve a life-or-death journey across national boundaries but instead anyone could walk through a door and end up in another country? Mohsin Hamid poses this question in Exit West, a magic realist novel about migration, displacement, and love. Saeed and Nadia contemplate leaving their city when militants overthrow the government and daily life becomes deadly. The couple investigate rumors of the sudden appearance of magical portals to other places. Their first door leads them to Greece, where they find safety, but they grow restless when they learn of a global network of doors—heavily guarded doors to richer countries, mostly ignored doors to poorer places. Migration from danger to security, from want to plenty, is what our species does, but to residents…