We are what we take into ourselves: penis, peach, and light, the music from living notes, hear and gone. The notes were here before us, the way calcium and phosphorus were here before us. We are bones ...

A WOODCHUCK IS WOOLLY. Who knows what he thinks? He hibernates in his underground lair, a groundhog by any other name, his ...

A CATFISH WITH THREE EYES lived in the Gowanus Canal. I can say this with confidence because I have seen the evidence. The catfish was shiny and pitch-dark. After a fisherman hooked it and reeled it ...

AFTER ABOUT A YEAR AND A HALF of dating, Sam and I decided he should move into my house. We had each lived with partners before, but those moves had been swayed by financial stress and global ...

THE CHICKEN WAS UNWELL. She no longer ran to the summons of the leftovers pail to scratch at the compost heap with the other hens. Morning found her in a corner of the henhouse facing the wall, with ...

adrienne maree brown has been on my radar for a while. As a thinker, activist, and teacher, she provides essential insights into how we relate to both human and natural ecosystems. Our conversation ...

I first encountered Robin Wall Kimmerer’s book, Braiding Sweetgrass, in the ecology section of my local bookstore. For Orion's Winter 2025/26 issue, we're chasing elusive cryptids and grappling with ...

I’M NO ARTIST, but, if you had asked me when I was a child to draw the shape of a life, I might have drawn a horizontal line. A few years after that, I would have drawn life as a mountain. The upward ...

THE CHINESE CHARACTER for silkworm (蚕) is composed of the symbol for sky (天) and the symbol for worm (虫). They are heavenly worms. China’s Sichuan Province, a damp, landlocked corner east of the ...

IN OUR FREE TIME, WE DESTROY TREES. Hundreds of them by now. Five years ago, soon after I bought the place, I gave my partner a Husqvarna 450 Rancher for Christmas. Since then, he’s had to replace the ...

THE HISTORY OF the plastic carrier bag—the kind so often found caught on a tree branch and flagging in the wind—is a story of persuasion. But in the United States, the paper grocery bag proved far ...

AS PART OF HER tenure as the 24th U.S. Poet Laureate and in association with the Library of Congress, Ada Limón commissioned fifty-two contemporary American poets to reflect on their place in the ...