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

THERE WILL BE those in your life who swear by the ticking clock. Thirteen minutes. Eleven and a half minutes. However many minutes it takes for the furtive center to transform itself into your soft golden prize. Others will begin cold and let things

THE MOSS in my yard is spreading, climbing up the hill from the maple-shaded glen, sprawling over small boulders, softening them. In an electric green revival after a long winter, it reaches as if it wants to touch everything that can be touched. It’

One way of being hidden is to be in plain sight, looking like a black rock among other rocks in a streambed. Another way is to be small and latch on to the fins and gills of fish and travel up rapids, up rivers, across lakes, then let go, away from t

Apocalypse, for example, actually means to uncover or reveal…. Reaching a conclusion carries the illusion of death. —Dr. Louise Reiss FALLOUT describes a physical process that begins in violence and often ends in death. It is also a rhetorical orient

In a field a little acupuncture of light pushes toward the rosebuds of your eyes, undoing the burrs of your stubborn lips, your stubborn face. The grass eclipses the wreck of your heart & the names of things crawl away on long feet, blind & slow. Ste

My mother takes a pound of shrimp caught four days ago five hundred miles away with an old pearl-handled paring knife draws the odor of the deep from their damp gray backs the ocean’s endless violence sweats with onion in our mouths that join, devour

So all my time was spent measuring time. — Miranda July What was happening was the trees, which we learned were doing what we had suspected all along. Talking to each other with some help from the mycelium. A reality woven from a fantasy grown out of

Then by the lagoon outside Vallejo heat shimmying off live oaks & horses we paused almost speeding on except: Dragonflies, humming & quicksilver. Above low water living sky swarm raw cello buzzing doubled helicopters kamikaze diving lazuli blaze of P

I’d better bring her back right. /The whole house smells of cinnamon and dust. —from the poem “Making Apple Sauce with My Dead Grandmother,” by Bianca Stone THE HOLIDAYS and this colder time of year find my kitchen in mostly happy chaos: with sporty