L'Esprit Literary Review

Issue Six

Cover photo by  Stephanie Klepacki on Unsplash

Contents

L’Esprit Literary Review || Volume IV Issue I

D. W. White, Editor

Jessica Denzer, Editor

MMXXV

in mediam mentem

  • Deja Vu All Over Again

    Kelly Kelly escaped the sweltering humid heat of 1958 New York City by ducking into the Horn & Hardart Automat on Broadway between 46 and 47th street. She was here to meet her blind date for the second time, Thomas T. Thomas.

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  • When I Write “I”: The Disabled Body and the Myth of Narcissus

    The disease hit without warning. I was healthy, young, safe. Then, I wasn’t anymore. It began in math class: my body shook so hard I fell out of the chair and knocked over the desk. At times, I was too weak to walk. Bright lights gave me searing headaches. The spasms struck as often as ten times an hour.

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  • Bluebird

    They are prone to many things. They are prone to squabbling, which for some is another way of conversing. They are prone to that and a few others. When the two speak, it is like listening to the fountain in front of Saint-Sulpice, and the clouds are there and the café is there and one of the two towers is incomplete. Subjects are many.

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  • Forgive Me, Kurt

    Because she respected the man so much, she wants to like his book. She really wants to. She recognizes his talent but can’t abide his formal choices. 

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  • Generative Grammar

    It was the leg cramps and the thirst that confirmed my pregnancy before my pregnancy was confirmed.

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  • Your Beautiful Life

    When you lie in bed in the opaqueness of the night, bright, luminous forms loom, as if by magic. Light bananas. That’s what you call them, the shimmering objects floating before your eyes in the dark, swinging from the left side of your vision to the right, then leaping upwards before plunging down again.

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  • A Conversation with Nataliya Deleva

    The manuscript also aims to deconstruct the language of visibility and invisibility – both in the literal sense and in the societal context. What happens when people around you (including workplaces, schools, or institutions) refuse to accept you the way you are?

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  • Nothingbergers

    I’m not sure whose bright idea it was to stick the old water tower next to the graveyard–how many boil water notices had there been on account of somebody’s mawmaw leeching her corpse juices into the water supply?–but it sure did make it convenient for Daddy after Mama fell the hundred-fifteen feet from the balcony of the Hyacinth County standpipe onto the gravel road of Cemetery Circle below.

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  • Twilight in the Amphitheatre

    I brought my girlfriend on a date to Art Hoe theatre to see an indie flick directed by and starring a rich girl I went to high school with. She, the rich girl, was known for her straight-A’s, inspiring visual artistry, and lack of tact in mixed company due to the improvised way she used euphemisms, a tendency she publicly claimed was downstream from either feminist rebellion or rebellious feminism.

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  • Parallel Monologues

    I leave class tonight in the rain, class which ends at an hour when all the world turns navy blue and I fall into a sleepy trance, driving through that navy blue, dark and soft as velvet, punctuated with spots of red and green and yellow and everything that has happened is happening again, and tonight was the last class and I can’t help but think about the first one.

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  • Hiraeth

    My eyes are closed. I am in my body. My eyes open. It is morning. Early. I am awake. I know where I am, when I am. I am in the cottage in the Welsh countryside. I am in bed. I am facing the wall, lying on my side.

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  • Helen Mulgrew and the Hollow Tree

    She seems to correspond intimately with the surrounding landscape: the snatches of wool on barbed wire; the hoofprints full of water; the crooked, hillside hawthorns—all seem somehow to acknowledge her presence, to reflect her possible action upon them

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  • Object Permanence

    The eco-terrorist is zipping down the highway in a 1996 Ford Aerostar. He keeps laying on the brake, even though there’s hardly any traffic going East in the mid-afternoon. You’d think that’s out of caution. The man does have a bomb, after all, and even suicide bombers get nervous about popping off before the requisite moment.

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  • The Difference

    It is possible to walk from the south-east tip of Guernsey at Fermain Bay to the lumpy promontories at Vazon and Cobo in the north-west – a distance of seven or eight miles – without coming across a single pub. This is the first major difference I notice between the Crown Dependency of Guernsey and the British Isles at large. 

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  • An Invitation to the Gulls

    First the snapping of the metal bits that hold the screw cap to the collar. Slowed down, deeper by it, amped up, it might be pealing of bells; joy down street and sidewalk. Slowed a bit more, their tolling.

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  • Why Paris

    There is a chocolate shop in Paris. It is on an elegant street, with trees, in a building cut in blocks of cream Lutetian limestone. Three stories high — nearly all the buildings are on that street— with steep, sloping blue-grey roofs, that Paris-grey that isn’t grey. The zinc casts off the light in tinted shades of silver and lilac, spilling down the building silently to pool in front of the shop on the sidewalk.

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  • War Woolf

    Along with T.S. Eliot and James Joyce, Virginia Woolf stands as one of the most important and impactful proponents of what has subsequently been termed Modernism. Her deployment of free indirect discourse and stream of consciousness to subvert traditional narrative styles, her exploration of queer characters, and her unflinching depiction of mental illness, made her a formative author who remains relevant today.

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  • Monstrous Bodies

    It’s incredible how heavy the body can feel. How at times, without moving, the weight of the self can sink so deep into the chair, the bed, the wet dirty ground. Perhaps it’s unfair to begin this idea in an unspoken third person. This implied objectivity, as if the you and I are on the same page, that the reader at large can read these lines and think to themselves, yes, true. At times the…

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in mediam mentem // issue six