Orion Magazine

Donovan Arthen DIRECTOR OF FINANCE AND OPERATIONS Ananda Bagiackas CUSTOMER SERVICE SPECIALIST Amy Brady EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR Tracie Butler-Kurth PHILANTHROPIC STRATEGIST Christopher Cox EDITOR AT LARGE Camille Dungy POETRY EDITOR Amanda Elkin PROOFREA

THIS YEAR MARKS Orion’s fortieth year in print, no small feat for an ad-free non-profit publication. As we reflect on this occasion, our minds turn to the figures who have guided us over the years, and specifically to Barry Lopez and Jane Goodall, wh

SHE SITS ACROSS from us, the middle-aged Black woman in the orange vinyl-upholstered chair, her eyes red and swollen, gripping a tissue that has been disintegrating for the last two hours into bits of dust that dot her pants and the floor beneath her

WHEN FINALLY it was time for our daughter to be born and I headed out on the Green Line from Copley Square to the Brigham, I had only the one book I’d brought with me to work that morning in my backpack, Ishiguro’s An Artist of the Floating World. I’

WINTER RAIN in Taiwan’s mountains seems to hang in the air, getting into every seam of my clothes. The weather was warm when I left the city, but two thousand meters up, in the cloud forests near Alishan, I am shaking with cold. I was told the trail

IT’S PREDAWN in the vast ocean of sage and sand that bristles between the Wind River Range and the Owl Creek Mountains. I am ten miles from the nearest farmhouse, and the last gurgle of my ATV motor has long surrendered to the night. The surrounding

BEFORE THE STORM, my children and I carried the potted plants indoors. We emptied the linen closet onto the floor and hauled the contents to the yard, where we wrapped the citrus trees in sheets and covered the cactus with a thin blanket. My husband

Now the silverfish have eaten your sad dictionary.Once you stood behind the counter, ribbons in your hair, you measured and cut yardagefor the buxom ladies. And now a pile of Kleenex rises by your elbow as you cope with your rhinitis.You have become

Surprise comes slowly to a redwood.So slowly we might think it remorseor grief or the color brown orthe feeling of that which has not been done. Not dropped cones. Not made them.Not stood gathering in the rains. Not sprung in fresh green.Not morninge

We watch what we think is hesitanceas its long legs enter the stream’s edge after a few moments we call forever,and even then, the movement deliberate, slow, what fear might look like.Someone close by guesses crane, someone else jokes albatross,while

The heart won’t make its point.Why not let you go out into the sunwhere blossoms burstand rush like oxycontin? The chickadee’s precision in the pearchastises my earto clearer witness than the cat-pissstink these beauties flush into the air. Whatwould

With cockroaches, disgustdoes not become revenge.It’s terror hammered like an onion.And when a veteran roach, steeped(like a tea bag) in survival’s dexterity,shapeshifts: from under the soleof the footwear of the Godsyou’re holding—and the cockroachr

YOU CAN SMELL IT before you spot it, one of the first fragrant greetings of spring. Even if it looks like the stems have turned black and the leaves are brown and crispy during the dreary winter months, it’s one of the hardiest herbs in the country—i

Omar El Akkad is the author of What Strange Paradise and American War, which the BBC selected as one of 100 Novels That Shaped Our World. He has reported from Afghanistan, Guantánamo Bay, and many other locations for The Guardian, Le Monde, Guernica,