ORION

Author's note: In my twenties I was diagnosed with Major Depressive Disorder with Psychotic Features, and have experienced episodes in which language shape-shifts, becoming distorted and impossible to read. The following image is a "cipher poem," or code poem, intended to reflect the magical thinking that can accompany periods of mental illness. Inspired by train monikers, the Rosetta Stone, alchemical texts, Viking runes, and historical cryptograms, the visible symbols can be unencrypted to reveal an English language poem beneath the text.

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Kai Carlson-Wee is the author of RAIL (BOA Editions, 2018). He received an MFA from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and was a Wallace Stegner Fellow at Stanford University. He is the winner of a Pushcart Prize, the Lynda Hull Memorial Prize from Crazyhorse, and the Editor's Prize from The Missouri Review. He has received fellowships from the MacDowell Colony, the Bread Loaf Writer's Conference, the Sewanee Writers' Conference, and his work has appeared in journals such as The Kenyon Review, New England Review, Tin House, AGNI, and Ploughshares. He currently lives in San Francisco and is a lecturer at Stanford University.