Contents
- Scarlet, Emma Giglioli
- Passion and Propriety, Katie Goto-Švić
- Little White Lies, Brigid Swanick
- Conservation, Ea Anderson
- Craft, Diane Josefowicz
- Miles, Rebecca Fishow
- Metal Meets Flesh, Becky McLaughlin
- Pauline, Jaclyn Gilbert
- A Conversation with Jaclyn Gilbert
- The Contemporary Parnassus, Paul Verlaine
- Linda’s Viewing, Olivia Sawatzki
- The Siren on the Lake, J. M. Eno
- Not a Tragedy, Just a Life, Kat Meads
- Spreading Petals, Nicole Gantz
- Red, Amber, R. M. Cahillaine
- In the Garden Where the Bones are Buried, Jessica Denzer
L’Esprit Literary Review || Volume III Issue I
D. W. White, Editor
Jessica Denzer, Editor
MMXXIV
in mediam mentem
-
Scarlet
When I met her it was a Saturday night and she was wearing next to nothing. Just a skirt that was too short and one of those sparkly tops made of sequins. Which was odd, because there were men dressed like penguins everywhere, some carrying trays of smoked salmon and foie gras, some carrying their wives by their elbows.
-
Passion and Propriety
The Lucases came to Longbourn today. Conversation was largely fixed on Mr. Bingley’s attachment to my dear sister, Jane; the splendid social climb it would be for her and the somewhat scandal for him in marrying below his rank.
-
Little White Lies
When Brian left me I started spending all of my time at the diner. I was lonely and friendless and my apartment made me sad. I would sit in the corner eating toast and drinking coffee and imagine that Brian had died instead of just broken up with me for being boring.
-
Conservation
Lindsay’s office lies on the 7th floor of a tall building. The large windows face a side street with low, newly planted trees and small bins next to a few benches. Across the street are other tall office buildings with large windows.
-
Craft
Show don’t tell, he said, and I believe he meant it kindly, this advice, offered like a tumbled stone or a coin with half its thickness rubbed away from use, exchange, commerce, or just the thinning that’s the inevitable result of exposure to the world, abrasive as it is
-
Miles
When I came home from work she was sitting at the dining room table studying the journal I’d written during my first pregnancy and kept hidden in a dresser drawer. I managed my feet out of my work flats, paid the babysitter, and sat beside my girl. I’d always planned to wait until she was older to tell her.
-
The Metal Meets The Flesh
Each spring when I teach my “Studies in Film” course, I hand out a syllabus that includes what might be called a global trigger warning entitled “Note Concerning the Filmic Content of this Class.” In this note, I state the following:
-
Pauline
The summer I spent resting apart from you—the summer I met Pauline—I dreamed the ocean below Oak Bluffs was an estuary trickling silver, eddying under a little bridge where streams became rivers that flowed into the sea. I dreamed of who I had been before you were born, of the things I had once painted before I met your father.
-
A Conversation with Jaclyn Gilbert
And maybe this is true of my work in general….I am always trying to excavate the unsaid, to unravel our surface reality into a kind of interior labyrinth that is its own truth, its own self-contained subjectivity….to better understand the ironies inherent to our human condition. To allow the chaotic and disordered to have a place to reside in, despite what institutionalized reality tries to deny or forget.
-
The Contemporary Parnassus
In the distant past, in 1865, for my memory is good, there was at number 45 in the Passage Choiseul a young blond man, the successor to Percepied, the religious bookseller and well-known merchant of objects of piety.
-
Linda’s Viewing
Every morning I wished Linda was dead and today she finally was. I found the address in the paper, under her headshot, the same one she used for years – blurry, outdated, it made her look younger but did nothing for her eyes–I knew she was bullied as a child for how they bulged, that they called her “frog eyes,” and this was of course, a private treasure.
-
The Siren on the Lake
Kelsey had been thinking of leaving him before he invited her back to the lake house. One more trip, she had thought. It would be their tenth time there, a marker that slightly more than ten years had passed since they had started dating. She had trouble remembering the time before they had been a couple.
-
Not a Tragedy, Just a Life
Consider the resiliency of feet, supporting skeleton, organs, muscles, blood, upholding a tremendous load, absorbing the stress and impact of both stillness and speed, fulfilling an evolutionary task in an unnoticed, unheralded way. Taken-for-granted feet endorse the notion, contribute to the presumption—reason and science, aside—that we, the footed, will continue to rise, stand, walk, run.
-
Red, Amber
They book separate rooms at the same hotel. This is an expensive and unnecessary fiction; they travel from London to Brighton knowing what will happen. She drives there in a hire car. He takes the train, then walks down to the seafront hotel.
-
Spreading Petals
As a prototypical piece of modernist work, Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons often synthesizes complex and unique connections in the reader’s mind while simultaneously exposing the boundaries of their own literacy. The average reader will give up quickly, while there is a 50/50 chance a scholar would rather fling it into the sun than analyze it
-
In the Garden Where the Bones are Buried
April is the cruelest month. I think it is cruel because it is gray and rainy. My husband reminds me that April showers bring May flowers, as if this was an unknown but important piece of wisdom.
Cover photo by Daniel Eledut on Unsplash
in mediam mentem // issue three
L'Esprit Literary Review 