Contents
- Strip Poker, Rachel Rodman
- Night of Terror, Hormoz Shahdadi
- Fragments of an Intermittent Lover, Eric Daffron
- Seated, Milo P. Ono
- And If The Line Breaks, Shannon Savvas
- The Moral Duty To Be Recondite, D. J. Wexler
- One Time In Hell, Leigh Rastivo
- Talbot and The Fall, Michael Nath
- A Conversation with Michael Nath
- Skating, Karen Walker
- Haunted Walls, Edward Lee
- Before, Amy Marques
- Light and Shadow, Nicole Blair
- Couch, Robert Stone
- Watching Shadows Move, Richard Risemberg
- Ghost in the Machine, D. W. White
L’Esprit Literary Review || Volume II Issue I
D. W. White, Editor
Jessica Denzer, Associate Editor
MMXXIII
in mediam mentem
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Strip Poker
I have lost every hand, until now. All my clothes are gone, because I threw them in. Then my skin. Then my bones.
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Fragments of an Intermittent Lover
Everyone knows that the lover speaks from great solitude. Roland Barthes teaches us as much. Yet the discourse that I speak comes from a solitude more absolute and profound. For, minus a beloved, I have no one to address. Hence a rare subject: the one who loves with no one to love.
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Night of Terror
Ismaili sits on a chair at a table. The benches are full of boys and girls. Noise. Noise of terror. They’ve started. Tapping their feet. What should I do?
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Seated
Rosa refuses to be still. She stretches her arms high above her head, stacks her palms, glues her biceps to her ears, and dives. She is a dolphin and the couch is her ocean.
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And If The Line Breaks
Dark sky, dark room, dark heart. Only the mad noise of the pre-dawn birds in the shadowy trees outside her childhood bedroom window tells her she lives, breathes. That her heart beats on. The house is cold.
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The Moral Duty To Be Recondite
‘Mugwump’, ‘vitiate’, ‘paralogism’ – It would not be a stretch to say 99% of the English-speaking population is unfamiliar with at least two of these words.
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One Time In Hell
I went to kid hell when I was eight years old. I stood on a red velvet runner, and I smelled a familiar sweetness—frankincense, I think.
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Talbot & The Fall
Brown-cracked Barbour, dreaming of … grooved gent bulkhead message (crumbling) relay room: 660V!
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Skating
The dad is ice on the lake in the park. Says to his child and the mother of his child he’ll scout for thin spots, dark open water. He skates away. The hard grace of the hockey star he was.
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Haunted Walls
The nurse asks me to sign a document I cannot see. Or I can see it, but cannot read it, the words nothing more than indecipherable black marks scratched into the whiteness of the paper, a whiteness which, combined with the harsh shine of the overhead fluorescent lights, hurts my eyes.
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Before
The marriage ended before he learned what she looked like when the white started showing at the roots of her hairline.
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Light and Shadow
Virginia Woolf is one of the most widely read authors of British Modernism, her innovations in narrative form revolutionizing fiction in the early 20th century, the effects of which are still felt today.
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Couch
A fly sways drowsily across the sunny room until it hits the window with a bewildered thump. Then the ticking of the man’s watch is the only sound that anyone might hear.
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Watching Shadows Move
The afternoon light coming through the window raked across the bedcovers, throwing shadows that the observer likened to those cast by desert hills just before sunset.
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Ghost in the Machine
The mind, we are told by Cartesian philosophy, is separate from the body. It exists on its own, invisible, inherent, indispensable. It is in the combination of mind and body, a vital if uneven relationship, where human life, in some manner, comes into being. Je pense, donc je suis.
Cover photo credit: D. W. White, private collection
in mediam mentem // issue two
L'Esprit Literary Review 