L'Esprit Literary Review

Issue Eight

Cover photo by Jeremiah A. Gilbert

Contents

L’Esprit Literary Review || Volume V Issue I

D. W. White, Editor

Jessica Denzer, Editor

MMXXVI

in mediam mentem

  • Lucy

    This is how Lucy thinks of herself: Warily the girl sits on her bed; carefully the girl with the pretty blond hair considers the few numbers in her phone—whether she should trust Amy, if maybe she should text Rich—for every error in judgment upsets everyone, and every lapse in reason ruins everything for days. No antidepressants, no painkillers, no pot, no beer, no liquor, no cigarettes – nothing that excites, revives, or rests her.

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  • Lady Macbeth in Universe X

    In the universe that we call ours, Lady Macbeth is best played by Marion Cotillard. Her depiction is lush and then bare.

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  • The Living Room and Death

    I never really liked her, but I was shocked to hear today that my boss’s wife died. I just saw her three days ago. (At the same time the FIRST GIRLFRIEND reaches out to a plate of cookies, takes one, and eats it. No actual cookies need to be there.)

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  • Load Bearing

    tructures—big things—are making me panic lately. Large, beyond-the-size-of-human things that we dwell in, that we swarm inside, that we rely on to stay intact. Made by us.

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  • Modell’s

    If only the team could see Luke now: Jenny naked under him, her clothing a crumpled ball on the dashboard, her body naked and trembling because it’s cold in the back of his Explorer, he feels it too, outside and inside, a numb, creeping dissatisfaction, but mostly he’s thinking about how impressed the team will be that Jenny lost her virginity to a lineman and not Drew the gangly QB or Stefan the halfback who…

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  • Red Sauce and Notes from a Future Life

    In the future, I’ll be naked. I’ll be cooking my own red sauce, peeling garlic, chopping it fine, even though I’m not hungry. I’ll be listening to a death and lamentations song, and it’ll be Leonard Cohen, who does death better than anybody.

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  • Salvo

    They were waiting for the sun to pass the serrated peaks of Kharas Mountain before they would execute me. This is what the priest said. He had come the night before on the National Rail Service.

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  • The Glitz and the Glam

    Margaret and Bram had been on mattresses in Dad’s almost six months when the thing was declared a pandemic but you still had to go to work and everything. Didn’t you? The show must go on, all that. Margaret was of this mind cycling over the bridge into town.

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  • A Conversation with Maggie Armstrong

    Interview Maggie Armstrong, author of the acclaimed debut collection Old Romantics, joins us as the L’Esprit Featured Writer for Issue Eight Read an original story from Maggie in I8 L’Esprit Literary Review: Tell us a little about yourself and your writing background. How did you come into literature? Give the audience a sense of your literary influences, styles, tastes, and philosophy. Maggie Armstrong: The first few times I tried to write fiction it felt very…

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  • Beatnik By the Lee

    Aloud, reading Langston Hughes on Patrick’s Street, needing to be dug – black dog pretty girl afro styled mother’s shrieking yell. I have a street to walk, shelter down back ways I can’t tell if this is living or loving or hell.

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  • Hula Girl

    Lani and Jo. Jo and Lani. Lani the dashboard doll and Jo the driver. Jo who was given the dashboard doll and named her Lani. Lani, who has a straw skirt and tapioca skin and springs between her torso and her hips and Jo, Jo who forgets her turn signals, who sucks cherry pits beneath her tongue, who smokes blunts and clove cigarettes and taps the ash into the console, or out the open window,…

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  • Kojève, Kandinsky, and Existential Beauty

    In his classic history of abstract painting, Belgian painter Michel Seuphor claims, Virginia Woolf-like, that on or around 1912 Western painting changed. Several avant-garde painters broke with the Western representational tradition and founded a new tradition based on an ostensibly subjectless abstraction.

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  • A 25th Reunion of Graduates of the Slade-Barnes Academy

    “So anyway, if we have the thing on a Friday, Nancy Lipkin won’t come because she’s still Orthodox, but Michelle will be able to make it because she’s free on Friday but busy with the fam on Saturday,” Wendy Greenwood was saying.

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  • Socorro

    From Denver south to the New Mexico state line, I drove through one thunderstorm after another. Hailstones drummed the roof and ricocheted off the windshield for a blinding mile or two.

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  • Father With Dog

    I ran into my father near Potsdamer Platz three years after his death. I was on my way to the library in the Kulturforum. The doors opened at nine o’clock sharp and I had an ongoing bet with myself that I would be the first to get to the secluded desk by the window, tucked away behind the security guard’s station.

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  • European Autofiction, a Sequence

    And I take the phone out of my pocket and read a message from Mother, she writes that the funeral home from that small Czech town contacted her, and on Thursday at five, we can come to stand by the body and say our goodbyes, and if I feel like it, I can join, and I reply that I don’t know yet because I have a discussion in the city at six on Thursday, and…

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  • The Road Out of View

    e were driving alone through the desert under the midday sun, when the road we were on flickered in the heat. The road, which had unspooled before us like a long black ribbon, wrinkled and jittered, coming in and out of view.

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Cover Photo: Jeremiah A. Gilbert is an award-winning photographer and travel writer. His travels have taken him to over a hundred countries and all seven continents, while his photography has been published internationally and exhibited worldwide. He is the author of four travel books, including Can’t Get Here from There: Fifty Tales of Travel, From Tibet to Egypt: Early Travels After a Late Start, and On to Plan C: A Return to Travel, which documented his return to travel post-COVID and was the first to include his photography. His most recent, Around the World in Eighty Photos, includes images created over twenty years of traveling. Each photo is accompanied with a brief story of how the image was created along with the camera settings used. He can be found on Instagram @jg_travels.

in mediam mentem // issue eight