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Current Issue

Issue 28

Love

Jennifer Tseng & Amanda Tseng envision their father, Sarah Seldomridge & Eduardo Espada draw the beginnings of a family, Silas House sings of a boy's first love, and Jennifer Elise Foerster reads Jane Johnston Schoolcraft. Plus sonnets, rondels prime, sonzals, and brefs double, from Chad Abushanab, Ashley M. Jones, Amit Majmudar, and A. E. Stallings.

Recent Issues

Issue 27

Spring/Summer 2019

Front cover of Ecotone, featuring a painting of doughnuts and a flamingo figurine against a bright wallpaper background
Issue 26

Body

Three people in flamenco costumes look dejected on a beach.
Issue 25

Spring/Summer 2018

Issue 24

Craft

Featured

An image of Bashir's work as an installation in Rome: a long hall of arches with large white flags hung on string, with lines from her work printed on them in black.
Various Instructions

•HOW NOT TO STAY UNSHOT IN THE U.S.A.

Samiya Bashir

EAT GARLIC. GO TO ELEMENTARY SCHOOL. ATTEND A COUNTRY MUSIC FESTIVAL. SEE A POP STAR SING. GO TO THE MOVIES. TEACH CREATIVE WRITING. PLAY LOUD MUSIC ON CAR SPEAKERS BUT BE BLACK. ATTEND MIDDLE SCHOOL.

Close-up of a small cactus covered in bright purple flowers, on a rocky desert floor.
Various Instructions

•Ongoing Revision: Building a Cactus Garden

Lauren Camp

Planting in the high desert is about compromise. What can stand firm through careening wind? What can handle summer’s bubble-wrap heat? Aside from a brief delirium with utterly wrong choices, for years I have put in flats of appropriate perennials. Of those that make it, some spread voraciously, draining moisture from each neighboring plant.

Various Instructions

•Build Back a Body

Destiny O. Birdsong

Just a few days before beginning to shelter in place during the coronavirus pandemic this spring, I learned about the Korean concept of son mat, which means “the taste of one’s hands.” It’s the complex network of preferences, training, familial traditions, and tendencies (I’m heavy on the salt) that make one’s food taste unlike anyone else’s.

An image of a one-sentence love letter by Eduardo Espada: "When I miss you, I use your favorite mug, and sit on your side of the couch."
Feature  – 

•One-sentence Love Letters

Issue 28 contributors

Two things we love: love, and the United States Postal Service. We asked contributors to the Love Issue to write a one-sentence love letter to a thing or being—a place, small or large; a work of art; a plant; a creature; an object; a built space; or, yes, a human.

From the Editor  – 

•The Work of Love

Anna Lena Phillips Bell
Out of Place  – 

•Love Letter for a Magazine

David Gessner
Poetry  – 

•Romanze

Anna Maria Hong
Fiction  – 

•Jericho

Silas House
Poem in a Landscape  – 

•Bamewawagezhikaquay: Jane Johnston Schoolcraft’s Postpastoral Poetics

Jennifer Elise Foerster
Teach Ecotone  – 

•Love Begets Love

Lesley Wheeler, Jenna Le, Anna Maria Hong, Simone Muench, & Maryann Corbett

News

For summer, some Various Instructions

Our new series debuts online this week