Indice dei contenuti per Winter 2023 in Orion

I WAS EIGHTEEN the year I moved from Kampala, Uganda, to New York City and got my first waitressing job. I had no idea then that I’d be doing it for twelve years. Sometimes, when consoling a guest whose fries weren’t crispy enough, or cleaning a drunk person’s vomit from a wine bucket, I’d reflect that this was not what my father had in mind when he told me that the purpose of life was to serve others. My father’s service had been to direct emergency food aid to people living through disasters—hurricanes, floods, droughts, wars, forced displacement. For this, he’d been paid a middle-class salary in U.S. dollars, plus benefits, including private school tuition for my siblings and me. But he died before I graduated from high school, and…

The sea rises remixes worldsweaves in souls - Oh how I hadburned my arms in flames - the damn mopwas in our way in the closet - Oh how I hadhungeredfor him - His name was Rolf he came from a villagenear Boden Down there he saidI dammed over myown childhood home - We hike in Muddus I smoke a cigarettefeel our child kickinghiccuping - Rolf lies on the blanketdrinking a beer - The paths underme are alive have memories- Inside my bellyskin is drawn - it is shaped in life *Ædnan, which means “land,” “earth,” or “my mother” in northern Sámi, is a multigenerational epic poem about two Sámi families on the Swedish side of Sápmi and their experiences of love and loss across a century of migration, violence,…

Of a sudden, she rises: peering through wave: dive-dapper,pond-silked. In her shy gesture, she makes no apologyfor jewel round her neck: bone-of-God jewel,tangle-of-spirit jewel, shadow-of-shadows, fish in her mouth. ~ I came here to purge my brainstemof its usual store. Amygdala, counter-argumentto will: I want ten degrees of constancy. I shush myself. Hover withinthe prospect of knowledge and its tendency to bruise.And yet, I bear no trace of loss, simply dive underits shadow. Stilled,I come up breathless. Behind me birds of evening ridethe tidal wind, familiar, surely, with its requirements, bend the full and frothing heart,to tenderness and plaint. Eva Hooker is the author of Godwit and two hand-bound chapbooks, The Winter Keeper and Notes for Survival in the Wilderness. Her poetry has been deeply affected by Madeline Island and…

WE CALLED IT the desert island game. Arriving at a train station or airport gate, you’d survey your fellow passengers—those with whom you were throwing in your body to hurl through space—and you’d have to choose by the time you boarded. Who would you want to be stuck with if it all went wrong? We were teenagers. What did we know about other people? I’d have been horrified knowing I was auditioning for a part in someone else’s mental landscape while rummaging for pretzels or filling my water bottle. We were only just growing into an awareness of our mortality. We were role-playing as bodies on a planet we could not control. Trying to figure out when—if—love could stint our fear. WHEN YOU THINK of global warming and birds, you…

We thought ourselves wateron water. Rememberonly now the myth: two oceans meet but don’t mix.Salinity, temperature, tidal direction.The falsehood matters little. Just that we touched there for a timeand felt—How we made ourselvesinto little envelopes to hold each other and— Maybe the word was enclose. I thinksometimes I closedyou. I closed me, too. On the longest day of the year we rode our bikesin new places and I wanted to screamat you each time you left me behind,crossed the road when I couldn’tbeat the traffic. It wasn’t surprising when I changedmy mind about all this,when I called you from the midwestand said [] and it all got caught inside your oaky body,the one you used to warm my feeton the Grayson Highlands,by the New River,under Pigeon Mountain. I don’t want…

A QUIRKY food stand waitress crushes on a lovelorn cop. A plainclothes detective falls for a mysterious woman (who turns out to be a drug smuggler). Set in 1990s Hong Kong, Wong Kar-Wai’s Chungking Express is a charmingly optimistic take on romance in the postmodern city. It follows four lonely protagonists whose utterly disparate lives inevitably overlap; they meet by accident and end up slumped against one another at a bar or dozing off together on the couch. Wong’s Hong Kong is a place of unlikely encounters—where two attractive strangers from opposite ends of the social spectrum are bound to run into each other (literally). “You brush past so many people every day,” says the detective, “and some people you may never know anything about, but others might become your…

ANG LEE’S Brokeback Mountain is often described as a “gay cowboy movie,” yet that’s a simplification almost as limiting as the American West’s stereotyped lone figure on horseback. The film, based on a short story by E. Annie Proulx, follows the twenty-year romance of Ennis Del Mar and Jack Twist. Though both understand the deadly consequences of homosexual love in 1963 Wyoming, the two are brought passionately together by bitter cold and the high craggy landscape of their sheep camp. “You know I ain’t queer,” Ennis tells Jack the next morning. “Me neither,” Jack replies. But they make love again and again. When they finally leave Brokeback Mountain, they try, and fail, to resume the straight lives expected of them. The contrast between what society demands and what the mountain…

The wind plays with the moon; the moon with the wind.The moon sets. Who can the wind play with? —Vietnamese folk song, translation by John Balaban Meet me on the unlit stretch of lake least fooledby autumn. Under the youngest willow. Its thin branches hang over me, its leavesveil my face from the milk flower playingmatchmaker. You say you love her sweet scent.Even the plum blossom isn’t so lavish. One day I will take a wife myself.If I reach forward, I can touch the waterpast the edge of the moon. I wait for you beyond the temple lightsat the center of the lake, my ankles deepin a pillar of moon on the water. Come whisper our secrets to the lake,make it shiver in unison with the willow.Shall we become nowworthy…

LATELY I’ve been using a small, faded red sticky note as a bookmark, moved so far between perhaps seven or eight different volumes, the lightly adhesive edge gradually becoming less and less effective at holding on to anything and instead collecting more and more an alternate residue of microscopic dust, lint, and other things that seem to be enjoying their determined accumulation. At some point I wrote on the note in black pen “French, ressentir, to feel again,” but I do not remember which book this word came out of, or indeed if I just crossed paths with it and the sticky note happened to be the closest paper to hand. We are talented and unfortunate creatures when it comes to resurfacing and reliving many of our largest feelings.…

WHERE DOES your mind go when you hear the term climate change? Do you think about love? I didn’t used to. My mind would go straight to how we mitigate, adapt, and protect those most vulnerable. To carbon standards, clean energy incentives, and environmental justice. What does love have to do with it? Quite a bit, I’ve begun to realize. In fact, I’ve started to see love everywhere now in our ever-expanding relationship with climate change. I see love smoldering under the climate anxiety and grief so many people feel for our beleaguered world. For the acidifying oceans, burning forests, and desperate orcas. And for the intricate construct of civilization itself, painstakingly assembled over four hundred generations, and now facing ruin. I infer love when I listen to young people…

You cross in front of me speakingto the sun. Then you turn away south,saying rain snow. Miles until we see north,blue and less blue, changingwhere silver evolves: mountain, clouds. I slip in the silt and land on my handswhere a glacier had been, no morethan a valley in Denali now. Two ptarmigans bobsled the tundra,stopping to nod at the wind.You keep moving, the same song playing in the grass, in your long strides.You point out animal tracks.I push myself away from the place that has you distant and educating the skywith your walking stick.Now it’s raining. I need time, I say, standing up to your silence,ready to fail another somebody.You get farther ahead. Above us, the mountains are a bowland glacier waters blue the spilling eye.The rain stops. The story…

The McKenzie River’s half in shade, half molten silverand today, in the shallow water,a single salmon, has made it back to whereshe began, her scintillant body that moves like a riverwithin the river, undulant, greenish and roseate.Then she flips on her side and tail-whips the gravel.The tumble and clack of rocks, the pearlysmoke of silt blossoming. Then quiet, only the murmur of the river,as she floats, her serious jaw opening and closing,fins swaying. And again, she strikesthe stones with the flat of her tail. Again, the clatter,the cloud. Her tail’s scraped white from this quarrying,building up a ridge, her redd.The buck swims near, waiting to floodthe eggs with his milt, his beak sharp.They’ve both stopped eating. Soon their flesh will shred,rip off in strips, all the ornatescales in their formal…

SOMETIMES THEY LOOK AT EARTH and could be tempted to roll back all they know to be true, and to believe instead that it sits, this planet, at the center of everything. It seems so spectacular, so dignified and regal. They could still be led to believe that God himself had dropped it there, at the very center of the waltzing universe, and they could forget all those truths men and women had uncovered (via a jerking and stuttering path of discovery followed by denial followed by discovery followed by coverup) that Earth is a piddling speck at the center of nothing. They could think: no negligible thing could shine so bright, no farhurled nothingy satellite could bother itself with these shows of beauty, no paltry rock could arrange such…

I WAS IN HIGH SCHOOL when Richard Linklater’s quiet, convincing romantic masterpiece Before Sunrise first came out. Two young strangers, Jesse and Celine, meet on a train and decide to spend the night roaming Vienna’s cobblestone streets, parks, and carnivals. They pass street poets, castles, and cafés, engage in lingering looks and easy, epic conversation. Together, they create an alchemy of possibility. The camera’s soft gaze and the ephemeral nature of the lovers’ time together, spent in motion exploring a beautiful place, left me in pure, swoon-worthy bliss. In the subsequent Before Sunset and Before Midnight, we have the uncommon luxury of checking in with the pair, in new phases of their lives and in new landscapes. Here they are, a decade later, reuniting in Paris, the city itself a…

WHILE REPORTING from the polkaloving hamlet of Punxsutawney, Pennsylvania, with his co-worker, Rita Hanson, Phil Connors (a smug, big-city weatherman “who thinks he makes the weather”) becomes trapped in a maddening time loop of Groundhog Day. Each morning, he awakens to gray slush and the radio announcing February 2. A blizzard always sets in by evening, adding to his claustrophobic imprisonment. In this philosophical comedy, Phil relives Groundhog Day until he learns to selflessly love—not only Rita—but also the warm community of Punxsutawney. Only then is he released, and wakes to February 3 with Rita still beside him. Looking out the frosty windows, he sees the world blanketed in a new day of sparkling snow and possibilities. “It’s so beautiful!” Phil exclaims “Let’s live here…. We’ll rent to start.”…

UNTIL I VISITED California Carnivores, the largest carnivorous plant nursery in the United States, I didn’t know there was a world of these plants beyond the Venus flytrap. I’d grown up seeing flytraps—with a warning not to touch—in museum gift shops or nurseries. When the plants sense a meal on their serrated mouths, they close their jaws and form a stomach. Their leaves secrete enzymes, and they digest their prey. When the leaves open, only a husk of chitin—the insect exoskeleton—is left. The plants shouldn’t spend their energy closing around nothing. That’s why you’re not supposed to wantonly touch them. The greenhouse is a humid, tropical riot of reds, oranges, yellows, greens. I’ve stepped into another world. It smells sweet and wet, musty like a bedroom after sex. The plants…

When I walk by the big treeswith their big shade, their big quiet,something alive in the nose, the eyes, theleaf and sway, something makes meregardful. And now that I am old so many facesseem beautiful too, even homely ones might have thatsomething, and I’m so glad of a smile lately it’s embarrassing,and couples of any kind—honestly, that tendersomething. What is that I’ve lived through, now skeiningout behind me, and still this woven now? What must I be, what can it meanthat I keep trying to say? If I play that sonata or prelude, what is itthat I am playing? If I say my love, what are wordsbeside whatever our love actually is? Yet if I keep silence, it is mostly pretentioussince I am always noisy inside. Those old trees hear…

The clatter of hooves on asphalt jolts me out of myselfas I walk through the dark and though I am near the stables,it is not the heavy plod of a horse. The doe dashes forwardinto lamplight and stops me in my tracks.She is a yearling—in the first season of herself, and alone. She makes to run by me, but someone else walks out of the shadow,so she darts to the lawn, bends her head to graze, but then,another group of humans, and headlights, because it is summerand tourists and writers roam and wanderand where is a cornered deer to go? And I want you to know I have felt this trapped. And I want her to know that panic is more likely to inducethe final crash, the fear that takes…

WHAT FOLLOWS is a partial and annotated list of some of the birds I have come to know and something of the story of meeting them. Each of these species can be found in Goldenʼs Birds of North America, which is to say that they figure in my relationship with Jon. As of this writing, none of them are of high concern regarding numbers, though there exists no such category as “no concern.” What this list lacks in rarity and in breadth, it compensates for with personal narrative as example of how to develop a more intimate acquaintance with individuals. It is suggested one reads this as a love story. AMERICAN GOLDFINCH. Common at Northeast feeders year-round. The yellow of the male is like the bright sunshine of a child’s…

AFTER MONTHS of dodging marriage appointments arranged by his Pakistani parents, Kumail Nanjiani agrees to an “arranged marriage” in a hospital: a doctor’s request that he stand in as husband and consent to put his secret, white girlfriend, Emily Gordon, into a medically induced coma. And that’s just the middle of The Big Sick. Though the two meet in a comedy club and begin fall in love to the soft glow of B-horror films, it’s in the transitory space of the hospital after Emily falls suddenly ill that Kumail shifts from kind-of boyfriend to full-blown devotee. While she sleeps, he moves between his own life as a struggling comedian (and let-down son of immigrant parents) and Emily’s bedside, making a collection of visitor’s badges, carrying bouquets of balloons, bonding with…

Sometimes, when I lie in bed at the ranch, the Milky Way bright outside the bedroom window, my head on Mike’s chest, listening to his heartbeat, I think, okay, let it end now … now … now … I am where I belong and I am ready. But not one of us is going to get out of here that easy; none of us is going to get out without bearing witness to suffering on a scale that this decade’s fires and floods are only beginning to reveal. Who will be the last humans on Earth? How many will survive the climate-driven wars, the drought, storms, fires and floods, death of the bees, and the end of agriculture? What will those people have learned about love? What will they have…