L'Esprit Literary Review

Issue Seven

Cover photo by  Parker Holliday

Contents

L’Esprit Literary Review || Volume IV Issue II

D. W. White, Editor

Jessica Denzer, Editor

MMXXV

in mediam mentem

  • A Field Guide to Mistresses

    They met at an academic conference in San Antonio. She’d gone for the eco-rebel poet but happened to catch his biodiversity panel.

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  • Achilles Grieves

    I am on a rocky beach looking uphill at the tower, at ocean-gray stones mortared into a powerful cylinder with no exit but the gunports. Behind me, ancient bodies float in a small, churning bay enclosed by jagged stones.

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  • Christ

    Whatever else He is or was, I bet Jesus Christ gives really good hugs. Anno Domini nostri Jesu Christi—the year of our Lord. The year of our misery, followed by a year of still more misery.

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  • Bury The Lede

    Two days after the photographer dumped me, sometime in the middle of January, the bathtub in my apartment began to back up with dark, foaming sludge of rusty sediment and other people’s hair. My own strands were certainly amongst the clumps; for all I knew, they could have made up most of the blockage.

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  • Celebrity

    Under duress/contractually obligated, Emily Dickinson and Emily Brontë appear onstage for a publicity event. Failing to meet the audience’s expectations, they disappoint the crowd, who quickly turn on their idols.

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  • Killing Story

    The man who wants to kill me has blue eyes. Eyes like heaven on a cloudless frosty day. Or like a lake somewhere in the mountains. Mesmerizing, but cold.

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  • Boys of Summer

    Recumbent in the comfort of an easy breeze off the water, Lyle Caldecott squints through his sunglasses at the streaky clouds in the blue sky, all rendered with a grayish hue through the lenses. “In the soup” his boss, Mick, had said about a paycheck after Lyle had submitted an invoice some days prior, an expression Lyle hadn’t heard before and had to puzzle over for a moment—the money would come, the invoice just had…

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  • Carry Me Along

    The mission shimmered in the dust like a refracted image sent from a world where thirst and privation and Hell do not exist or at the very least are not eternal. Where the whitewashed adobe does not need to be repainted every few years because the desert winds cannot scour it because it is not really there in the first place.

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  • Two Stories by Christopher Linforth

    I left the man at Alexanderplatz for a different man who said we should drink some Marillenschnaps and forget who we were. But his mention of the apricot brandy brought to mind a terrible autumn in Wachau some years before, and I had not gotten over that time with V, who I presumed was now dead. V was a Polish academic in Poznan.

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  • A Conversation with Christopher Linforth

    Directory was an unplanned book. It manifested during an unseasonable heatwave in Vermont a few years back. The writer’s residency had no AC and so I sequestered myself in the studio, a powerful desk fan a few inches from my face. I decided to write something short.

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  • Lionheart

    Yes, he’s taken the matter in hand — and the matter now is the wellbeing of his own mind despite the strains and terrors in Richmond: V’s ongoing madness.

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  • Stummfilm

    That summer I had a job documenting the damages of various construction sites around the city. Actually, I wasn’t the one documenting them. Someone, or several someones, whose faces I never got to see, moved around town to do their inspections on a certain type of construction overseen by this specific company.

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  • Chatterly, the Scrivener

    The Writer drags deeply on a cigarette, leans his head back, and exhales amorously into the ceiling fan. It’s summer. The room is hot and the trees outside his apartment window are tropical.

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  • Blue Zones

    The glow of the setting sun caught in my chin hairs gives them an orange smolder, like little candle wicks burning down to the sebaceous sheen of my waxy flesh. They’re shorn unevenly, only by nanometers, but by catching the light they expose the naivete of my grooming.

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  • Seagulls

    I got to Chicago in March. The city was still painted gray with salt, but on a clear day at 3:00 PM, I was told spring was coming soon. I rented a lopsided, studio apartment next to the El.

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  • Promptings from the Unconscious

    If Freud is the father of psychoanalysis, who is the father of Freud?” This is a question I ask students in my early American literature class just before we begin discussing the short stories of Edgar Allan Poe. Very few of my students recognize that this question is a riddle of sorts and that the correct answer is Poe, whose understanding of the human psyche and its defense mechanisms is everywhere apparent in his fiction.

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  • A Time Demonstrably Not Our Own

    From the very first freewrite in Marion’s point-of-view, I realized she was not what I had been led to believe. She was the kind of character who yanks powerfully on the line every time you put pen to paper, no matter how long neglected, the kind of character you don’t find very often.

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  • All That Is The Case

    In considering first person narration in the novel, we often come to see that what is not said offers a more potent accelerant that what is. In moving towards the book’s compositional (narrower) and artistic (broader) goals, the most effective first persons work in something of a silent trust with the reader

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Cover Photo: Parker Holliday is a photographer and poet based in Oregon, United States. Her work often uses nature to explore the ways we break and the ways we keep going.

in mediam mentem // issue seven