Tabla de contenidos para Winter 2019 en Orion

TWO YEARS AGO a friend and I went on a birding trip to Florida. The trip happened at the same time that Orion staff was working with Drew Lanham on “Forever Gone,” his story about the extinction of the Carolina parakeet that appeared in the Spring 2018 issue of the magazine. Some readers might remember it. Since we weren’t far from the last place the parakeets were seen, we took a short detour. On a remote road a few miles north of Lake Okeechobee, we parked our car and got out. This was the general area where, in April 1904, ornithologist Frank Chapman observed a flock of thirteen parakeets (and shot four of them). Although he didn’t know it at the time, his sighting would become the final verifiable report…

Forces of Migration SUSAN M. MOONEY IN A CEMETERY high above Placentia Bay, I am warmed by sun and chilled by wind, surrounded by the graves of my ancestors. Oddly elated, I rush to read the headstones engraved with the same last name as the grandmother I never met. Perhaps I feel an inkling of the connection that those who have remained in place for generations often harbor? I imagine my grandmother felt this sense of belonging before she migrated to Boston as a young adult. I’ll never know why she left. Most of the little I understand about her life comes from public records; my family did not pass on stories of the “old days” as some families do. But the forces of migration are universal. Humans, like other…

It shouldn’t surprise that an animal’s sizedetermines its voice’s timbre or that too much regard for techniqueloses the image that tricks presence and absence, both honey-dippeddaggers. Speed up a humpback song and a nightingale callsin rounds, in codas, in fermatas and repeats. Speed it up too muchand the rorqual disappears. It took cetologists longto discover that whales croon in patterns, like humans do,in different pace and pitch, learn songs line by line,verse by verse. Like the Vedas or Bible verses I’ve memorizednow lain as sunbaked brick, still, unmoving, unlikedeep music’s liquid. What poetry have I missed, missing the silkfor the worm, filling my cetacean-cello chestwith the mud of naming; damning with the noise of repetitionmy own quickly beating sea.…

HEN, ALONE, strolling away from the eight looming apparatuses of Happy Green Family Farm. Her first steps on dirt, not wire. Most industry hens out of a cage for the first time would never walk off into a chilly day after a life spent in a cage. Most would be crowded up against a wall under an overhang or hiding in a bush, trying to get back inside so as not to be prey to whatever the hell was up there: sky and all its certain evils. Bred to cower, you might say. But here was this enterprising (imprudent?) hen, Bwwaauk, as she was known to herself. How had Bwwaauk gotten herself into this predicament? HERE THEY ARE, barricaded in their concrete barns. They’re dug in, ready — though they…

1 The dappled fawn tangled in a line of barbed wire. Stop pedaling your bicycle. Dismount and quietly guide it to the wet, harried fur splayed out in the nodding grass. Notice how the round, damp eye still reflects a sky full of lazy clouds. Feel the tender dropped weight of the split hoof freed from its impartial snare. Before tucking bright dandelions around her body, count thumbprint spots weaving a milky efflorescence, a blooming blueprint. 2 The dusty pine siskin smashed against your window. Attempt to intercept the body before your toddler understands what has happened. Having failed that, console his hysterical tears. Kneel and page through each soft, stacked feather. Point out the small clutching feet before placing the body in a secluded tree fork. A pot of…

Heather Altfeld’s work has appeared in Best American Essays, Narrative magazine, and elsewhere. Her second book of poetry, Post-Mortem, is forthcoming in April. Ellen Bass’s books include Indigo (forth-coming) and Like a Beggar. A chancellor of the Academy of American Poets, she teaches at Pacific University. Gabrielle Brady is an Australian/British filmmaker. Her film Island of the Hungry Ghosts was awarded Best Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival. Henrik Drescher is a Danish-born illustrator recently featured in The Illustrator: 100 Best from Around the World. Stuart Dybek is the author of five books of fiction and two collections of poetry. He is distinguished writer in residence at Northwestern University. Isa Gelot is a New York–based French designer and illustrator whose work can be seen on her creative platform, Isatopia. Samantha…

FOR THE PAST couple of years, I traveled across my country, falling in love with strangers. I sought them out—farmers, ranchers, fly fishermen, evangelicals—and stepped into their lives, uninvited but nearly always, inexplicably, welcome. I sought some kind of connection, asking them questions few seemed to be asking them, about their lives and what they care about and what they believe in. Who they vote for and why. What they remember from before and what they expect in the future, which to their collective grief are often different things. I spent time with a Georgian peach farmer who faced a failed crop because the winter never got cold enough to set the fruit. I met ranchers in North Dakota who’d been devastated by a sudden and severe drought that had…

IN THE Tiber Valley, about an hour’s drive north of Rome, there is a little medieval village called Orvieto. It was first platted by the Etruscans in the ninth century bce, on the flat top of a tufa butte. This “volcanic plug,” as I’ve heard it described, is bound on all sides by sheer vertical cliffs — forming, in effect, a kind of sky island. In the white heat of summer, standing at the edge of the cliffs in a puny human body among steadymoving clouds, one gets the sensation of standing not on a plug or an island, but on the bow of a great ship. A few weeks after I arrived here, I saw an aerial photograph of the village, taken by a U.S. Air Force reconnaissance squadron…

First a spoutbursting through all that blue with the sun clanging on it,then a slope, wheeling, almost slowly,through the blue air, and four times— or maybe five—I see her dive,the dark fluke flaring, silhouetted, raised heavy for a moment into all that light.If I paddled a canoe or could swim that far, we might meet, her great eye opening to my small one, each corneabending the light, setting off the translation into vision, gazinginto the dark pupil of the other.…

Tide laps up the tracks of shore birds,swallows the holes of ghost crabs,please wade towards me once more from the snarled shade of mangroves,a silhouette polished by the flareof water. We’re without purpose at this hour when the world goeson like we were never hereother than to float on the last light, drifting dazed as if we’ve plungedfrom the height of squalling birdsthat plummet around us diving for the day’s last fish, while fathomsup the sky turns deeper blue.…

They’re like little brown handkerchiefs waving goodbyein the sky. Goodbye oaks, dogwoods, ashes and elms.Goodbye, caves. Goodbye, mines and the coalthat lit up the night. Goodbye, night that the bats fly by. The bats fly by twilight, or bat-light, and their bat-flight is fullof waltz and veer and feeding in midair. Goodbye,arcane glide over the woodlot. Goodbye, tiny pink tonguethat drinks on the wing from the pond with the apricot glow. The apricot glow fills the carriage window of the overnight trainrushing two fields away and then (Goodbye!) it’s too lateto ask who’s inside or what they’re saying. The batshear sumac, nettle, and wild grape when a woman hears nothing. A woman hears that elves wear bat-fur coats, or witchescook with wool of bat, and goodbye, Dunsinane. Goodbye,the old wives…

FROM OUR READERS THANKS TO Leah Tyus for sharing her experience and illuminating the complex intersections of race, gender, access to nature, pseudonative privileges, microaggressions, and displacement (“One but Not the Same,” Autumn 2019). As a cooking and gardening teacher in a diverse public middle school in Berkeley, I grapple with these issues every day. Tyus’s anecdote brought to mind the time I accompanied 120 (mostly black and brown) eighth graders to Yosemite, and the cruel and ignorant ways in which many other park visitors (including other kids) reacted to a large group of urban adolescents of color in a predominantly white space. — Jesse Alm JOHN FREEMAN’s “The Animal Inside” (Autumn 2019) conjures memories of visiting zoos as a child; looking into dreary, too-small enclosures through smudged glass. It…

WE WERE in the forest outside a tiny village called Tixcacalcupul when Ceno sliced through a snag of vines and pointed into the trees. Allí está, he whispered. There it is. The rest of us saw it right away: a streak of gleaming white stone receding into the shadows of the forest. While Ceno — a short, roundbellied Maya man in his midforties — cleared the undergrowth with a few whacks of his machete, Benjamin — also Maya, broad shouldered with gold-capped teeth — crouched and ran his hands over the weathered stone. It was a sacbe, a road built more than a thousand years before by ancient inhabitants of this jungle, the ancestors of Ceno and Benjamin. The sacbe (the name means “white road” in Yucatec Maya) was by…

No One Is Too Small to Make a Difference GRETA THUNBERG Penguin, 2019. $10, 112 pages. EARLIER THIS YEAR, I attended the Cambridge, UK, branch of the second Global Climate Strike for Future, in which activists in nearly eighteen hundred cities spread across 130 countries marched to demand radical action on the climate crisis. In Cambridge, about two thousand students walked through the city center, chanting and displaying a wide variety of colorful signs: CLIMATE CHANGE IS WORSE THAN VOLDEMORT; MISSING HISTORY TO MAKE HISTORY (SORRY MRS. THOMPSON); SAVE THE POLAR BEARS AND PENGUINS. The international scale of the strike was impressive. Even more so is that it — and countless similar demonstrations — can largely be traced back to one sixteen-year-old Swedish student, Greta Thunberg. In August 2018, Thunberg…