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 PROOFRE

I HAVE PLACED my hand upon a sheep, but that’s about it. By this I mean I have not known a sheep, have not tended to one in any formal capacity. I’ve not, for instance, drawn milk from one or scraped the rot from one’s foot. I’ve not cradled a newbor

RAIN WAS FALLING when I carried my two-year-old daughter and her tricycle home from the park. Her legs, galoshes swinging, straddled my pregnant belly. One small rubber tricycle wheel bumped against my shin with each step; the other spun on its axle.

"THREE… TWO…. ONE!" Tara yelled, and on “Go!” I flung my sixty-year-old body into the air—bare arms raised, palms to the sky, bare legs kicked up behind me, off the Zodiac’s platform. I felt the little ruffles of my bathing suit flutter in the twenty

THERE ONCE WAS a woman from the mountain village of Breznitsa who was kidnapped by an Arabian prince. In the desert, she lay down her black feredjé cape, stepped on it, and recited a spell. This is how she landed back in her Balkan village wrapped in

We have on this earth what makes life worth living: the perfume of a sleeping child, the four rain-colored wings of the dragonfly, the hourglass on the black widow’s belly pouring blood into blood. We have the mineral-green innards of cucumber, rain-

Gather the grooves and tines in gray bouquets, line up the fragments to make a patience. Collective—a den of sticks, an alphabet, memorial. Crows calling from the cypress, a gray afternoon in November, ripe for dry leaves and shaken seedpods, I show

Shh! Rise and be quick about it. Gather your things. Brother, sister: You were olderbut I was the strong one,humming one leg, two, now socks, now shoes—all our games lost to shadow.Just one toy, small. Nothing that rattles. We knew not to whimper. We

I am reminded of the blackbirdin the dead of heat & the cold of nightwho makes her voice known on the land. I am remindedhow you never let the story they tellbecome the story of you. Each quiet thread pulled with fingertipsunraveling the folded cuffs

One of the new vintage hankies is so delicate—linen lawn printed with blowsy ocher flowers, in them many black anthers—anemones—and with lining-of-the-body’s-openings bright pinks, and with lilies of the valley, turquoise inside—and I am taken back t

Tor Books T. KINGFISHER challenges the idea of the “wicked witch” through the gravewitch in her subversive fairy tale Nettle & Bone. The nameless dust-wife—part witch, part gravedigger—is all too willing to help the novel’s heroine on her quest to ki

When you think about the landscape of the contemporary fairy tale, Carter may not exactly fit into the sexless, fluffy role of Mother Goose, so per-haps we can instead think of her as “Mother Gooseflesh.” Her work is sensual, prickly, and full-throat