Project MUSE®: Ecotone - Latest Articles
https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/587
Project MUSE®: Latest articles in Ecotone.daily12026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00text/htmlen-USVol. 1 (2005) through current issueLatest Articles: EcotoneTWOProject MUSE®Ecotone2165-26511553-1775Latest articles in Ecotone. Feed provided by Project MUSE®An Abundance of Os
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968456
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In a hard time or a good time, the moon is a steady solace. It's no exaggeration to say that I've been looking forward to this, Ecotone's Moon Issue, for years—and I'm thankful to be able to share it with you at this moment, when that solace feels ever more needed.Approximately twenty-five lunar cycles ago, I gathered with our MFA editorial team, Ryan Bloom, Becca Hannigan, Maggie Boyd Hare, Emily Krauser, and Summer Wrobel, to write the call for work for this issue. We dreamed together through wide-ranging discussions of the kinds of things a Moon Issue might include. "We're thinking," we wrote,
of how we perceive the moon—as a beloved celestial body, as a guide, as a source of light, as a resource some wish to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/587/image/coversmallAn Abundance of Os2025-09-02text/htmlen-USAn Abundance of Os2025-09-022025TWOProject MUSE®115062026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-09-02Eclipse
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968457
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It was the fall of 1996, a lunar eclipse was looming, and the world was different. Back in Boulder the four of us—my younger brother Scott, my old friend Hones, my wife, Nina, and me—had semi-secured four bikes to the back of a rental Saab, crammed our backpacks and ourselves inside, and pointed the car toward Canyonlands National Park in Southeast Utah.Back then none of us carried phones and the internet was a novelty. We wouldn't get our first phones until five years later, after 9 / 11, and we would have laughed if you'd suggested that one day phones would be glued to our hands and we would spend half our lives on computers sending mail to each other.There was a whole lot else we didn't know back then. For one
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/587/image/coversmallEclipse2025-09-02text/htmlen-USEclipse2025-09-022025TWOProject MUSE®264462026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-09-02Missing Girl
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968458
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hannah and michael were playing missing girl again. A jump rope snaked around Hannah's waist, lacing her to the base of the oak in her front yard. Hannah always acted out the missing girl part—bound to trees, confined behind a wall of deck chairs, cordoned in the tower of her playset—while Michael was the kidnapper and policeman and sometimes the father. The game was Hannah's idea.Hannah had seen photos of the missing girl on the covers of magazines in line with her mother at the grocery store. Her face appeared on television and in the smudged ink of the morning newspaper, on the sweating cartons of milk served at Hannah's school, and sometimes in Hannah's dreams. Everyone was talking about the missing girl. That
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/587/image/coversmallMissing Girl2025-09-02text/htmlen-USMissing Girl2025-09-022025TWOProject MUSE®404822026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-09-02The Return, and: Okchamahli
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968459
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Okchamahli is the Chickasaw word for both blue and for green. It comes from our lives as water people who originally came from beneath the earth.Okchamahli is the Chickasaw word for both blue and for green. It comes from our lives as water people who originally came from beneath the
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/587/image/coversmallThe Return, and: Okchamahli2025-09-02text/htmlen-USThe Return, and: Okchamahli2025-09-022025TWOProject MUSE®53212026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-09-02Non-erotic Space Fantasy
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968460
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it goes like this: We're both researchers at the International Space Station, studying the effects of microgravity on the bioluminescent microbiota of the Hawaiian bobtail squid. We're well funded, with many important investigatory questions. For example: How will outer space alter the beneficial relationships between animal and microbes? I spend lots of time watching you float from squid tank to squid tank, writing down—in a cute little notebook—your observations concerning the glow in each bobtail squid's specialized light organs. There are a thousand radiant baby bobtail squid to tend to, so many that they form a constellation to rival the moons and star stuff outside the space station's windows. When you're
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/587/image/coversmallNon-erotic Space Fantasy2025-09-02text/htmlen-USNon-erotic Space Fantasy2025-09-022025TWOProject MUSE®89262026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-09-02The Witch Dreams of Black Bulls
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968465
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The child is sick. Pale, listless, and not yet one year old. His mother holds him close, feeds him spoonfuls of syrup, vials of bitter drops, and all the milk he'll take. But that's not much. With the strength he has left he turns his head away from her and gasps. Soft, small, weak noises, from a soft, small, weak body. And when his mother lifts his hand up to the light, she sees the outline of bones like the watermarks on paper money.Listless and angular, tight skin across a soft skull, and fainting, "cada nada.""How often?" I will ask nearly twenty years later, from the back of the child's father's taxi as we drive through the hills of Quito, Ecuador."Almost all the time." Almost no time between. Limp limbs, limp
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/587/image/coversmallThe Witch Dreams of Black Bulls2025-09-02text/htmlen-USThe Witch Dreams of Black Bulls2025-09-022025TWOProject MUSE®476902026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-09-02December: Green in Winter: On Henry David Thoreau's Kalendar
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968468
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In the spring of 1860, at the height of his intellectual powers and the peak of his political engagement, Henry David Thoreau created something new. Part blueprint for a grand new work, part scientific chart, part picture of temporal experience, this something—which, following a suggestive Journal entry from October 1859 has come to be called his "Kalendar"—was more a tool than a text. Comprised of six multipage charts of "General Phenomena," the Kalendar was an instrument for recording and perceiving not just annual, weather-related phenomena themselves, but also the hidden relations between them—between the skies of one June and the skies of past and future Junes—relations we often feel but can't quite hold
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/587/image/coversmallDecember: Green in Winter: On Henry David Thoreau's Kalendar2025-09-02text/htmlen-USDecember: Green in Winter: On Henry David Thoreau's Kalendar2025-09-022025TWOProject MUSE®174942026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-09-02Snowy-white, Rosy-red, Will You?
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968472
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i had two baby girls at once and named them for the rose trees on either side of my front door. Snow-white, Rose-red. Their father had already left us, and I hoped the trees at least would stay firmly rooted. His departure hadn't surprised me much—he was a charmer and I'd been mistrustful, if unable to resist, all along—but I wanted to write it out of our lore as quickly as I could and give us other lore we could count on. Snow-white's rose tree had smooth, creamy petals, while the blooms on Rose-red's looked stuffed full of juice. Ta look at them was to want to eat them, which was what I wanted to do to my delicious baby daughters too: nibbling at their toes and kissing their cheeks, edging right up to
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/587/image/coversmallSnowy-white, Rosy-red, Will You?2025-09-02text/htmlen-USSnowy-white, Rosy-red, Will You?2025-09-022025TWOProject MUSE®312962026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-09-02The Dreams of a Descendant of Sirenuse: Works in Glass
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968475
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My work is based on the rejuvenation of recycled, found, and donated American pressed glass. The majority of the material I use is cullet, the scrap glass left behind after a production run in a glass factory. I travel to cullet yards throughout the country, where I find barrels and piles of dead stock from now-defunct pressed glass factories. I remelt the old glass shard by shard through the processes of flameworking and glassblowing to make the multitudes of forms that create my sculptures. My individual forms reference nature and, through their abundance, create a lush environment that speaks of resilience and fragility.Nowadays, pressed glass is generally out of fashion and relegated to the dustbin of American
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/587/image/coversmallThe Dreams of a Descendant of Sirenuse: Works in Glass2025-09-02text/htmlen-USThe Dreams of a Descendant of Sirenuse: Works in Glass2025-09-022025TWOProject MUSE®67382026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-09-02The Moon Moves
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968480
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Box step. Feather step. Whisking. Winging. Weaving steps in the shape of a grapevine. Swiveling hips and pulling arms: flossing, flossing. Feeling the electric slide. Twisting. Twerking. Fountaining arms and shimmying middles, like a sprinkler. Hey, Macarena!I have never been much of a dancer myself, but I love watching others move and learning the names for their steps, something I picked up, perhaps, from eighth-grade cotillions.Maybe the best viewing of all? Michael Jackson moonwalking: gliding backwards as if on bladed skates and smooth ice. Pulling up to tips of toes. But before it was moonwalking, it was backsliding. The buzz is what jazz singer and bandleader Cab Calloway called it when he dazzled audiences
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/587/image/coversmallThe Moon Moves2025-09-02text/htmlen-USThe Moon Moves2025-09-022025TWOProject MUSE®258432026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-09-02Revelation of the Porpoise
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968481
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It was literally raining fish of all descriptions—sharks, tuna—and
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/587/image/coversmallRevelation of the Porpoise2025-09-02text/htmlen-USRevelation of the Porpoise2025-09-022025TWOProject MUSE®31172026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-09-02Ma Barker Floats Across Lake Weir
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968486
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[Ma Barker was] the most vicious, dangerous, and resourceful criminal brain of the last decade.The most ridiculous story in the annals of crime is that Ma Barker was the mastermind behind the Karpis-Barker gang. … She knew we were criminals, but her participation in our careers was limited to one function: when we traveled together, we moved as a mother and her sons.ma looks out at the calm, foggy lake. Two sandhill cranes take flight, rattling out their haunted, undulating call, their heads bloodred. Morning again. Another morning. Ma waits at the upstairs window. Ma has always been at the upstairs window in the house her son rented. She never thought she'd have such a thing: two stories on a lake, white clapboard
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/587/image/coversmallMa Barker Floats Across Lake Weir2025-09-02text/htmlen-USMa Barker Floats Across Lake Weir2025-09-022025TWOProject MUSE®289492026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-09-02Notes on Contributors
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/968487
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clare beams is the author of the novels The Garden and The Illness Lesson, both New York Times Editors' Choices, and the story collection We Show What We Have Learned, which won the Bard Fiction Prize. Her short fiction has appeared in One Story, Conjunctions, McSweeney's, and elsewhere. She teaches in the MFA programs at the University of Pittsburgh and Randolph College.julia bouwsma, Maine's sixth poet laureate, lives off the grid in the mountains of western Maine and works as a poet, homesteader, editor, teacher, and small-town librarian. A 2024 Academy of American Poets Poet Laureate Fellow, Bouwsma is the author of three collections: Death Fluorescence, released by Sundress Publications in 2025; Midden, from
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Project MUSE®https://muse.jhu.edu/2026-05-12T00:00:00-05:00https://muse.jhu.edu/journal/587/image/coversmallNotes on Contributors2025-09-02text/htmlen-USNotes on Contributors2025-09-022025TWOProject MUSE®172902026-05-12T00:00:00-05:002025-09-02