Contents
- Come On, Come On, Come On, Taylor Thornburg
- Halves, Christopher Linforth
- The Reader, Linette Marie Allen
- Modernism and Mimetic Representation, Violeta Sotirova
- Her Life in the Town with the Train, Hannah Wyatt
- Still, Sarah Haufrect
- Bob Sanders is a Fictional Character, B.H. James
- Reckoning, Ella Baxter
- A Conversation with Ella Baxter
- Tongue-Twisted, Beatriz Seelaender
- The ‘Still’ Life of Clarissa Dalloway, R. Russell Magee
- Open Relationship, Emily J. Weisenberger
- Certainty, KK Fiorrucci
- Brawny, Lindsey Moore
- Island, Zary Fekete
- There is No God in the Garden, D. W. White
L’Esprit Literary Review || Volume II Issue II
D. W. White, Editor
Jessica Denzer, Editor
MMXXIII
in mediam mentem
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Come On, Come On, Come On
Jonah unfastened and fastened and refastened his belt. Groaning. He groaned long and low. He groaned like an ox. An untreated ulcer. He doubled over, fussed with his belt, and groaned again. Come on, come on, come on, he thought. Come on.
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Halves
I discovered a letter from my ex-lover in the shredder. My new lover said he’d tried to run it through, but the thick paper stock had caught on the teeth. The letter now sat stuck, half-shredded, the poor handwriting of my ex-lover revealing a dirty weekend away in Western Massachusetts. But that was years ago and I barely remembered the details.
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The Reader
Was orange that summer, wet and very orange. When October finally rolled around, I was ready, Woman; here for it; had frolicked around Charing Cross and Leicester Square multiple times, all within walking distance of Newman House, where I lived. But that tiger orange, that sticky-star orange, stuck around all autumn, to be honest.
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Modernism and Mimetic Representation
‘Coming closer to life’ and representing ‘life itself’ rather than ‘a likeness of life’, not allowing any ‘perception [to] come amiss’ were some of Woolf’s programmatic statements on the nature of Modern writing.
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Her Life in the Town with the Train
She had always lived where a train passed through. She never knew what the train carried. She hoped she would leave. She stayed.
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Still
I started checking Leona’s posts about ten years after I’d slept with her husband. She didn’t post very often, maybe once or twice every few months. But with a decade’s worth of accrual before I finally looked, it felt like discovering a pile of shiny rounded pebbles I could skip across the murky waters of my mind, each one a cause for wondering.
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Bob Sanders is a Fictional Character
Bob Sanders, of course, is a fictional character. As such, he does not actually exist. Never has, never will. Bob Sanders is the fictional creation of the author B.H. James, who, in real life, isn’t an author at all, just a guy named Bill who teaches high school English at the local high school.
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Tongue-Twisted
I am at the English school, summoning the goddesses of patience, explaining Chomsky’s Generativist Grammar to a child’s parents. They don’t understand why I only speak to their child in English, without translating.
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The “Still” Life of Clarissa Dalloway
The word “still” appears approximately ninety times in Virginia Woolf’s 1925 novel Mrs. Dalloway. The word begins sentences; it ends sentences; but most often the word arrives amid detail, nestled neatly within description or interior monologue, sometimes even in parenthetical interjections of narration or thought, a subtle yet frequently occurring grace note accentuating Woolf’s symphonic prose.
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Open Relationship
Sticky wetness of the summer night and a stranger’s sweat cling to Desiree’s skin. This crowded party is supposed to have cleaned and shined away her uncertainty, but it has only made the mask she hides behind more obvious.
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Certainty
A certain man, in a certain town, in a certain land, having been fashioned, on a certain day of a certain month of a certain year, a certain number of years earlier, by a certain man, which is to say, a similar but different man, and, it cannot be denied, a certain woman,
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Brawny
The man who greets her at the Auto Lube Express emerges from his dim grotto of garage bays with a gaunt look about him. He arrives slowly beside her car, languid in the manner of sediment rising from a mossy lake bottom.
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Island
I pull the car into the driveway. It’s my wife’s mother’s house. We’re here for the summer, my wife and two boys. Her mother is having a party for the people who work for her.
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There is No God in the Garden
Time, we learn from birth, is unconcerned with death. Or perhaps they are one, two cloaks worn by the same end. It all depends, really, on one’s point-of-view.
Cover photo credit: Sean Foster carries mail in Hamilton, Ohio when it is light and at times, when it is dark. In 2022, he wrote something every day. In 2023, he began publishing on a small substack called typaphobe. Sean lives outside Cincinnati with his wife, daughter, and their boxer.
in mediam mentem // issue three
L'Esprit Literary Review 