Issue III


Cover art by Amy Guidry

Cover art by Amy Guidry


ecesis

noun   |   ece·sis   | \ i-ˈsē-səs , -ˈkē- \

the establishment of a plant or animal in a new habitat

The Lost Boys of Neverland, upon learning that it is their potential mother (Wendy) whom they have shot from the sky, and upon panicking that they have lost her forever and realizing they cannot safely carry her to their underground house, resolve to build a mossy house around her as she heals, complete with roses and a chimney. The survival of our home planet, complete with its roses, storms, disputed boundaries, marches, slowing currents, chimneys—all of its familiar and all of its sea change—demand such uncanny, subversive, and sometimes desperate turns of thought regarding how we understand house, home, and habitat—and how we make and tend them. As editors it has been a joy to array a collection of such experiments in this, our third issue.

Ecesis has an etymology you can really burrow into. Oikos, Greek for “house,” gives us ecology: the study of the home; economy: the management of it; eccumenical: the worldwideness of it; and, of course, ecesis: the making of it.

It is such fun to offer artists a tight kernel of a word, one often relegated to specific contexts of scientific literature, and to watch them soak, distend, and ply it into queries of the moving body, speculations on inhabiting another’s body, questions for the long dead, liminal slips or headlong charges into other habitats, studies of creatures adjusting to disturbance, inks and oils and lights exploring architectures of loss, newness, and memory. A musing on extraterrestrial agriculture echoes a song attending a newborn earth. Many dwell on the fertile overlap of wordsmithing and worldsmithing in how language fashions habitat. Always speculative in some sense or another, sometimes retro-speculative with a revisionary hunger or a warm wistfulness, these works unfold homecomings and home-leavings of all sorts.

Here are urgent celebrations of phenologies, and of the season of a single arc of dawn or afternoon; incantations for the freedom of migration and movement of humans, animals, and rivers alike; inquiries into violence and the arbitration of lines; challenges to speciesism. In their arrangement: an insistence that these all are forged in the same seedhead.

Could there be more crucial, fruitful work?


Poetry | Open House | David Lloyd
Art | Sara Massidda

Poetry | Triolet | Emily Alta Hockaday
Nonfiction | What White Tree is Blooming Now | Joanna Brichetto
Art | Alexis Doshas

Poetry | Laura Ingalls Wilder, Age 5, Considers the Causes of Exile and Migration | Mark Luebbers
Nonfiction | Traffic | Mike Freeman
Art | Irene Hardwicke Olivieri

Art | Butterfly Meeting | Alexis Doshas
Poetry | Wreck of the Michigan: An Inquiry | Kateri Kosek
Art | Giraffe, Bronx Zoo | Lauren Grabelle
Art | Galápagos Giant Tortoise, Museum of Natural History | Lauren Grabelle
Art | Penguins, Central Park Zoo | Lauren Grabelle
Art | Elephant, W. 33rd Street | Lauren Grabelle
Poetry | Scale | Carol Steinhagen
Poetry | Succession and Succession | Jess Williard
Art | Abandoned Trailer & Cemetery | Alexis Doshas
Fiction | Northward | Leath Tonino

Poetry | Galen Clark Recalls Sunrise Over the High Sierras | Sebastian Bitticks
Poetry | Ballast Water | Colette Lawlor
Art | Bathsheba Veghte

Poetry | La Sélune | Jane Lovell
Nonfiction | Waterside | Anne Bergeron
Poetry | The Fisherchild | Raquel Vasquez Gilliland
Art | Archipelago | Sandy Coomer
Art | Hemisphere | Sandy Coomer
Art | Lake Superior | Sandy Coomer
Art | Pebble Beach | Sandy Coomer
Nonfiction | Whose Words These Are | Nancy Lord
Art | Offering #2 | Linda Laino
Art | Nest | Linda Laino
Poetry | Gem | Heather Swan
Art | Brit Barnhouse
Nonfiction | An Untestable Question | Natalie Tomlin

Art | Patrick Zephyr
Poetry | And what if I’m not more than any of this? | Joe Jiménez

Poetry | Genesis According to Stone | Brigit Truex
Art | Fire Behavior | Judith Skillman
Fiction | The Serpent | Amy Weldon
Art | Yakima River, October | Judith Skillman
Poetry | 2035 | Maya White-Lurie