Mistake House 2021
Issue 7, May 2021
Photography
Beginning with Issue 7, Mistake House Magazine started accepting photography submissions. Featured below are images by Sarah Geis that were published in Issue 7.
Current Staff
Editor-in-Chief, Slater Smith Slater Smith is a senior, majoring in English in the creative writing track and minoring in Mass Communications. In 2019, he traveled to Prague, Czech Republic, where he studied Czech literature, studio art, and creative writing. Slater has been writing creatively since the age of 12, but has been focused on writing …
From the Editor’s Desk
The seventh issue of Mistake House Magazine marks a new direction for the publication, both in content and process. As many classrooms across the country and world continue to operate via remote learning, this issue of Mistake House is the first to be produced completely virtually. This past year has also seen the extension of …
Sheila Pepe
Mistake House: Here at Mistake House Magazine, we are interested in the ways in which the creative practice intersects with a sense of place and home. You have cited your experience walking across the Gowanus Canal in Brooklyn as having inspired your piece Redhook at Bedford Terrace. How does your work draw inspiration from the …
Sheila Pepe
For more than 30 years I’ve accumulated a family resemblance ( see Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations) of works in sculpture—installation—drawing and other hybrid forms. Some are drawings that are sculpture—or sculpture that is furniture, fiber works that appear as paintings, and table top objects that look like models for monuments. The cultural sources and the meanings …
Sheila Pepe
Sheila Pepe
Sheila Pepe is best known for her large-scale, ephemeral installations and sculpture made from domestic and industrial materials. Since the mid-1990s, Pepe has used feminist and craft traditions to investigate notions concerning the production of canonical artwork, as well as the artist’s relationship to museum display and the institution of art. Venues for Pepe’s many …
Yesenia Montilla
Mistake House: Here at Mistake House Magazine, we see home as multidimensional, not always confined to one location. A number of the poems in The Pink Box such as “Magnetic” and “Sappho in New York” place the reader in very specific locations within New York City. In “Raise” you write that “home and homeland are not …
Yesenia Montilla
Invasion Prevention The next time I let tongues roam my body whose ancestors never knew Lucumí Yoruba, Taino or another Arawakan spilling out their mouth …
Yesenia Montilla
My process changed a lot once I found community. The art of writing is so solitary; when you find a group of folks that have similar writing stamina to you, that you can share your work with and that give you honest feedback, the world seems less lonely. I’ve been so lucky to be friends …
Yesenia Montilla
Yesenia Montilla is an Afro-Latina poet and a daughter of immigrants. She received her MFA from Drew University in poetry and poetry in translation. She is a CantoMundo graduate fellow and a 2020 New York Foundation for the Arts fellow. Her work has been published in Poem-a-Day from the Academy of American Poets, Prairie Schooner, …
Fallen is the word for snow
Issue 7 Editor’s Prize for Poetry Fallen is the word for snow; soldiers; it denotes a forever grounded thing. Loving is the same. Like falling into step or sleep, you are felled until time—like sunlight— slowly passes over your head.
Pathfinders and Snowflakes in winter
The mountain blues remind me of the vigil, Of the water dragging us back to the shores as if our bones were not meant to be a revolution. The scenic route is the lover, who tied nooses wrapped in potato bags, and as we bird watch, we run back to the water casting ourselves in …
Fear, like water
takes the shape of its container, expanding to fill these abandoned stadiums, empty streets, quiet schools; crowding mailboxes and warehouses with shipments of toilet paper, disinfectant, and hand sanitizing cream; shrinking to the circumference of a backyard, an apartment, a hospital room; fitting just into the space of six feet, or the miles between the …
Rothko
When I saw the immensity of the darkness, I was immediately afraid. I was on a field trip to the Nelson Atkins Museum of Art. I was eight years old. I wore my maroon plaid jumper over my white polo shirt, like all of us did. We were Catholic. Blond ponytail bouncing around. The hair …
[April 3] Myself
when i look inside and wonder why the mainframe’s shutting down, pause and listen for the message the quiet notes the memory plays: charlie’s small voice that says pain is a pearl. you layer and layer coats of gloss to hide the tiny kernel in an alabaster shell. it magnifies the decay, buries the green …
If Eurydice were an Asian Kid Named Tommy
You came late to the party and got stuck holding an empty red solo cup. Everyone there shared your shade of melanin, yet you still felt like a stranger to them. After too many nights like this, you pushed your way out of this skin and into the underworld. By the time we noticed, you …
Not All Men
Six: a Qari in the dining room held a tablespoon poised against my forehead, ready to strike, Replaced by a kiss when I cried; but now I see that it won’t be every man I meet. Nine: one-story house, green carpet in the living room my hand forced on a servant’s crotch by his own; …
Self Defence
She turned off the cartoons, the ones I was glued to, until the colours blipped into nothing. Redness, yellow, a black hue – An imploding pinhole, then, gone. Eyes up, on me Now is the time she decides – Budding breasts are the sign so, now is the moment, pressing, important, imminent: I’ll teach you …
On Becoming a Woman in Youngstown, Ohio
“You’d be a sunflower,” he said. “A red one.” A rust-flake blossom. First, townspeople will use your father’s shovel to scoop sidewalks …
Sunset. An elegy for Junko Furuta, the concrete angel.
Just as hot wax would burn, for forty-four mornings the sun would rise, glistening over scalding rivers of urine and blood, as a dwindling vessel found itself stuck between waves of boiling water and concrete, only to drop anchor on the baby soft skin of the shore, and crash its bow into the white, fragile …
Read More Sunset. An elegy for Junko Furuta, the concrete angel.
Υπέροχα πουλιά / Wonderful Bird
In the early mornings, they tiptoe across bird baths of sunlight and cement as they wait for you to rise, and watch as you step into their dwellings with a palm full of grapes and apple bits; the sweetest slices jumping to the ground beside your big blue rubber boots. They rest gently on your …
Gaia,
I’ll miss your seedless fruit and aquariums and viscous nights lined with jazz and frostbite and funeral pyres that sent off children I don’t remember being me. I envy the sky’s role—not for light, for inspiration. Paint me with Jupiter’s colors and Mercury’s stoicism and my father’s ability to endlessly resurface when you drag him …
Accumulation
Under smoke signals murmuring to heaven or something, Atlas grows weary of bearing Winter and her lonesome gore, a hibernation of survivor’s guilt for three months or six depending. Her eyes are dilated, tethered to the dirt, making provisions for immolation so creative it is swathed as an act of providence. “Hold close her heart,” …
Born by less forgiving gods,
an ebb from planets undiscovered, hope can be seen in even the smallest symbols— thin, magenta torches raised by fists living under burnt-dirt-graves of Earth’s more passive creatures. I took down my crucifix and planted a stalk of fireweed. “Hold fast,” it whispers to the mother in mourning for anything to replace what once was.
Some Things Never Change
The moon threatens tonight: sickle, crimson—northeast gazes at the poplar trees. An edge magenta says it’s often little things that keep my mind from making poetry. Shadow so reluctant lies upon the thin alphabet of outer space that separates myself and my oblivion. Smoking at the window, claustrophobic light has pinned me to the hardwood boards. My crime? …
Interior
Chromosomes migrate within the body atop a sunken mauve recliner. Cells vibrate and divide. Behind black curtains, atoms of nitrogen and oxygen convey electrons, spinning around nuclei. In the interstices of speech, propriety grows. One fascinated by ether portrays its charms, while another’s postulations contrive the present, thoughts of rain, harbinger for the coming year …
Triptych
Triptych I. Falling river, blue speedwell conjured from earth, curtaining nothing— rotted ivory, bone, blood of sport and war. Poisoned moon, pockmarked stars, shadows harnessed to blossoming quasars, and in the foyer, stacks of bullets, white-flecked boots, ruby mirrors. II. Monstrous visages await cocoons of ultraviolet fire. In the early dark dark, long-toothed rats wither …
Season
Each second is an aggregation filled with dead flowers: black juniper, orange hibiscus, the hour dislocated, shattered bone hung on a paisley-papered wall, the station at midnight, trailing a calico cat, trains, and automatic hands.
Be it so
Be it so: The piano. The keys. The catalyst hands carved from oak stenciled in stone: Principesa. Be it so: Without a cover, uninsulated air dust diluting one-by-one— fields of fallen follicles. Be it so: Metallic veins rusted from dehydrated vibrations swing at a fingertip strokes that stem serenading sounds of phantasmagoria; line-dancing. Be it so: The voices. …
Let me sing you
The nursery is duckling soft, imagined lullabies, a nightlight’s glow, a paddle of ducks on the wing. My little hatchling, cracked too soon, a hairline fracture, the membrane ripped from the shell. I am yoked to losing you, too early my beautiful. The milky film of sleep breaks into remembrance. My broken husk, …
The Royal Dollhouse
Issue 7 Editor’s Prize for Fiction GC sir first told us about the Putli Mahal project on a particularly busy day at the firm, pulling us out of our tasks at around two. “I’ve been waiting for a heritage project like this my whole career,” said GC sir, scrolling through slides of his sketches next to pictures …
New Dwellings
Since he’d returned from the First World War, mostly intact aside from a missing right arm, Reggie Umstead had suspected he was inhabiting a space between life and death. That he was occupying a life with traces of death seeping into it. He lost his arm diving out of the trench’s relative safety to pull …
Peas
A husband and wife sit at the dinner table. They’re picking at their chicken à la king with far too many peas. Their plates swarm with them. She tries to get a bite of the rice underneath but still gets a mouthful of them. He was distracted while pouring the frozen peas into the sauce, …
The October Display
The other neighbors didn’t fill me in on this until later, but apparently, October officially arrived on Hadley Street when your doorbell rang between six or seven in the morning. Standing in front of you would be the Underwoods, looking marginally more awake than you but far more chipper. They’d greet you with the same question every …
Sounds Like
HEARTBEAT: I turn on my side, form an electro space blooper drooping to the next beat, an unseen needle — imagine an auto tune bzzzz …
The Palest Settlement
Away above my head I see the strangest sight My grandfather played Tevye at least six times At least two of my great grandpas were milkmen Chagall painted sets Sholem Aleichem Evening Reportedly hated the musical he inspired Tradition? Tradition! Settlement pale …
America’s Cleanest City
In this coldly traded place, visitors often see Art Deco glass, women braiding rope belts, concrete schools boarded with bulletproof windows, and birds of paradise with tire tracks on them. Identical bodies heave on their operating tables. Sand spills from their hourglass figures and empties into plastic rum bottles. I call the number written on …
A HIGHER POWER BITES THE BULLET -after Yeats’s “The Second Coming”
the sun died this morning and for eight fateful minutes we were completely unaware— until the men in coats with telescopes pointed them upward into the ether, optimistic for an uncalculated eclipse or something they’d missed, those faithful instruments performed their final task as they glimpsed the sputtering flares of a terminal star sending off …
Read More A HIGHER POWER BITES THE BULLET -after Yeats’s “The Second Coming”