Mistake House 2017
Issue 3, May 2017
Aurora Robson
On Aurora’s website, her bio explains her work as “the founding artist of Project Vortex, an international collective of artists, designers and architects who also work with plastic debris. In addition she has been working on the development of a college course called “Sculpture + Intercepting the Waste Stream” designed to foster creative stewardship at …
Aurora Robson
Reviewing Aurora Robson’s work in the May 2015 issue of Sculpture Magazine, critic Barbara Schreiber writes, “[Robson] works with a global nightmare of a material—plastic. Robson was first motivated to work with salvaged material after learning about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch. She has an oddly personal attachment to her plastic flotsam, anthropomorphizing it in …
Kristiana Kahakauwila
Mistake House: You explain in a Writer’s Digest interview with Chuck Sambuchino that you found your voice and your vision when you were finally “fearless in [your] writing.” In your own words: “I let my stories access all my anger, my sadness, my confusion, my hopefulness. My characters, if they are raw, are so because …
Kristiana Kahakauwila
For me, the creative process—the act of writing—begins before I’m ever in front of a computer screen. I was on Big Island once, up in paniolo country, and I noticed how the grass, windswept, grew in arches. I knew as soon as I saw that grass that I was going to have to write it …
Kristiana Kahakauwila
Writer Kristiana Kahakauwila is of kanaka maoli (Native Hawaiian), German and Norwegian descent. She earned her BA in comparative literature from Princeton University and her MFA in Creative Writing (Fiction) from University of Michigan—Ann Arbor. In 2015-16 she was the Lisa Goldberg Fellow at Harvard University’s Radcliffe Institute of Advanced Study. Currently an Associate Professor …
Kristiana Kahakauwila
On the slopes of Haleakala, high above the health food store in Pā`ia and just below the paniolo town of Makawao, once stood the Wai`olu Girls Seminary, named for the stream than ran beneath the girls’ dormer windows, the water so cold they could keep a jar of milk beneath its surface for three days …
Aurora Robson
Aurora Robson is an artist-activist working in wide-ranging media, though she is best known for her work intercepting the waste steam. Robson demonstrates the power of transformation in her work, repurposing plastic debris to create aesthetically powerful sculptures that draw attention to the issue of plastic pollution. Born in Toronto, Robson moved to Maui, …
Aurora Robson
Mistake House: In your 2013 TedxPeachtree talk, Trash + Love, you explore the idea that every aspect of experience is worthy of appreciation, despite any perceived lack of value. First, will you speak broadly about this concept of “attentive appreciation”? What is required, for example, to appreciate what seems valueless? What do you see as the …
Bug Poem
They swarm, head high when I’m standing, mid-air above sapling, golden, they hover like ashes the heat of a fire floats and deck in and out of sun beam and tree-shadow burns through the pines reflecting off the water, and I think this is what love looks like. A thousand floating bugs on the edge …
Peaked Saint
If your walls could talk I would beg them to stay silent like I have tried to be. If they could hear I would have asked for boiling pipes, so desperate to fight the pain alone, all I needed was water a degree hotter than my cheeks, steam to sooth my contracting tomb squatted as …
Innate Value
You are valuable, and I’m able to see your value from any angle. People have become blind with insanity because no one lives in sanity where you see the sanctity of a soul. We don’t see the depravity in our audacity to have a mentality that treats humanity as vanity. We don’t understand the innate …
Go Live It
Who are you when no one’s looking? Are you looking the way you look when you know people are looking? Or are you constantly looking to make sure no one’s really looking to see the true way you look? Because when I look around, I see a lack of intensity directed towards integrity. So, infidelity …
To Belong
Everybody longs to belong, and you’ll be longing too long for belonging if you’re logging bonding hours talking about belongings. When too many conversations are revolving around materials of matter, and not the materials that matter, there’s no evolving of the relationship. The lack of involving someone in your inner thoughts prevents the involvement of …
A Dirge Melody: Don’t Let the Humans Know We Contain Souls
If you want the pearl the oyster growled as a lioness you will have to pry me from this rock wrest my shell jaws open cut my living muscle self apart. Can you do that? They can. They do. They polish, bleach, buff, label the pearl grade C light luster, barely usable. No one asks …
Read More A Dirge Melody: Don’t Let the Humans Know We Contain Souls
Slasher Flicks
A genre of publicly-traded companies is Horror with much higher death counts. They “cut” and “slash” better than Kruger or Jason ever could ‘cause they kill by the thousands in dark-colored tailored suits at a long table in a room with views with views. Macy’s is “cutting” 10,000 jobs the New York Times tells its …
Eat Your Heart Out
“Okay, I will,” he blithely responded. “Yea, you do that,” she smiled. “Wait, what are you—” “Oh my God,” she whispered. Taking out a scalpel, he looks down at his chest; now looking at her, he slowly runs the scalpel, starting above the collar bone, right in the middle of his chest down to where …
This is Called New Year’s Resolutions
I’m going to kick 2017’s ass so hard- so hard the 7 will become a lightning bolt. And don’t act like you didn’t know, the 7 is the ass of 2017. I’m going to kick 2017’s stomach so hard- so hard the 1 will become a “less than” sign for a math equation. And don’t …
The Greatest
The greatest movie the greatest director the greatest writer the greatest boxer the greatest coach the greatest player the greatest actor the greatest president the greatest general the greatest war the greatest football team the greatest country the greatest this the greatest that the greatest superlative the greatest …
Woke up Choking at Zero Four Hundred [fresh out of elegies]
The unofficial version of the story: He was stumbling home on Valium and unlaced Chucks cutting through the old abandoned factory, tripped, fell into the pond where they used to flush their chemicals and dyes—floated, floated, sunk. Willie’s obituary might as well have been blank (we weren’t even 17) some junk about still searching for …
Read More Woke up Choking at Zero Four Hundred [fresh out of elegies]
Nude Sketch: Tupac
Nose ring rusted Red Wings jersey faded to a sun-wrecked pink bandana, once head-tied (to keep one’s brain from exploding, Foster Wallace said) now unknotted, hangs limp around your neck lacking even the noose’s grim dignity. Twenty years on and the runoff still spills— all those ripoffs and posthumous comps, a desert hologram, a Broadway …
Protest Singer
You could reach into my voicebox and pull out a fistful of ammunition. You could reach into my larynx and pull out a dead canary, X’s for eyes. Come see me spitting spent shells like sunflower seeds at the monument’s feet scrap metal castanets on asphalt clattering broken sambas. You could …
When Mothers Would Bathe You
A careless girl is warm and cool like cornflower blue filling the tub with a sweat-heavy heart Where home sweet home is sweet and sour as a purse full of stolen sauce packets And you’re a tidy list of pleasant tasks, assembled with the discreet love of a wet finger taming a curl. (Count …
Discarded Headstones
Here where broken pile on broken where marble stones and limestone crisscross together in a final, final resting place— a place for remembrance, for collecting together the discarded, As though death were not enough the threat of time further advanced a more fatal blow. Forgotten. Surely loved ones carefully selected the stone, the words, the …
The Slope of Seasons
Taking a draught of Autumn draft I stopping sought on the air the old subtle sting, butcher’s shop smell Or the aura of blackening coffee beans smoky incense, thick through and hanging around A hundred of those old suburban towns Each of one street Each with a thousand tree-closed tunnels and Luminous dead-orange Maroon soaked …
Elegy with Underlying Tones
Imitation of Kelli Russell Agodon I hide from emotions at a funeral by saying a joke: A lonely man went to a burlesque show—His pride was stripped. The only time I cry is from laughter. I skipped a rock across Roubaix Lake. When we sprinkled the ashes, the fire in my eyes was doused. …
Gifted
The morning the angel fell in love with her, he attached his blazing invisible wings to her shoulder blades with transparent duct tape. Her first child would often reach behind her ears and stroke the shivering feathers in the air or he would tilt back his head to see the cirrus canvases tacked above …
We Children Had No Choice But to Give Up the Roses
and the stone lions guarding the front door under the magnolia trees, the curved bronze figures resting and dancing in the den, the matted-down olive carpet running up the stairs, the towering grandfather clock standing watch in the foyer, swinging its golden scepter stiffly, ticking loudly, precisely, right, left, and on and on, every second …
Read More We Children Had No Choice But to Give Up the Roses
What Da Vinci Saw in Her
You said you would only know for sure once you saw her in person, so you flew to the Louvre and you saw her as he once did, sitting upright all day against the wall, smiling so softly at the crowd, not smiling to you, and you thought: she’s smaller than I expected but not …
Artemesia Gentileschi, Self Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (1639)
Dress in green, hair half done A painter’s allegory should always include some color Remember me? I was immortal once In 1610, it’s said foreshadowing A year later, truth from true pain I heard there ought to be some blood on the history otherwise it’s not really history Remember me? I am immortal once more …
Read More Artemesia Gentileschi, Self Portrait as the Allegory of Painting (1639)
scene: filmmaker seeks poet’s advice on composition of sext to future wife
A friend brought her fried clams and Mexican Cola, said this was a metaphor for sex Now help me write this text, faggot, I am trying to seduce the girl who sits by the door in Global Studies and aren’t you good with words? She drank the coke with its cane sugar base imported special …
Read More scene: filmmaker seeks poet’s advice on composition of sext to future wife
Georgia O’Keeffe
Black hat style, all western and a black dress in the sun, for the bones She made flowers strange, made skulls pastel Did you dream of ghosts, my dear? In high school some girls dropped a book in a barrel of ink stained the flowers black got detention also: a legacy Who else dreams of …
Morning Meds
Tossing the various pills on black marble counter, throwing bones like a sangoma or inyanga Western medical treating symptoms, Eastern divinity, there are no cures Heart condition at age thirty living with it, this cardiac cocktail every morning Blood pressure, rhythm, deteriorating arterial linings—fighting back black buzzard hearse Thoughts—debris that can clog dam blood …
Passage
Hot petite, not even a hundred-pound blonde—lost my virginity with in high school Clear starry darkness on a West Virginia hill My bottle green 1970 Pontiac Le Mans Sport 350, black leather bucket seats up front Four on the floor—she fell & bumped her head years later in a parking garage At our ten-year …
The Geese
Ducks zoom in jet fast, then glide quite slow, wings cool Geese gawk honk hiss—this pond is home—belongs to future big potato eggs Ducks, heron, hawks shooed away with flapping wings, ritual daily blares Pond impounds two geese each year—nesting here like clocks, bring spring Honks of hope their love lasts, guarding against fox, raccoons, coyotes, hands …
Would You Rather
Claudeen and Will don’t know each other very well, but when they got together they got to talking like freshmen philosophers, like if you were immortal but doomed to drift forever, would you pick outer space or the sea? Will said the sea ’cause then he could just kick it with the sea creatures. Claudeen …
The Politics of Eating a Peach
Whether its skin is peeled, or teeth are plunged into its ripe visage without any such preparation, the decision will be hated by someone. Cutting into the peach would be a mistake: the public would think it a violent act; they’d scream monikers like monster. To grind one into jelly for a sandwich is out …
Woman Gives Birth!
“It’s selfish, that’s what it is, Trish!” “How’s it selfish?” “It’s perverted.” “My body, my choice.” “Don’t pull hippie bull-shit on me!” “It’s natural!” “You’re putting yourself in danger and the baby.” Mum’s been against self-birth since the beginning. My friend Day is also having a baby, the normal way. Tells me that I’m brave. …
What Counts
Jacob can’t remember learning math; it’s just something he’s always known how to do. If there were 3 chickens and papa took away 1, there were 2 left. It was simple. His parents, humble, hardworking people, never had heads for figures like he did. They were born to till land and milk cows while Jacob …
Self-Alienated
You persistently try to find meaning in a universe apathetic to your attempts. In case you’re reading my story and persistently puzzled by the frequent, out-of-place burning numbers, however, feel inclined to look up “Kohlberg’s Stages of Moral Reasoning,” as well the criticisms which note that the stages may be circumstantial modes of reasoning—not modes …
The Future, An Ocean
It is unquestionable as to what attracted you to this shore, the light-beige color of crushed bone, where the motions of spume push clumped seaweed and husks of dead fish in and out with the raging tide. Now you face the sea, positioned on the threshold dividing the future, set shrewdly before …
65 Inches Wide and 37 Inches High
Let us observe the Clarks in the television room of their small but not unhappy home, a respectably uninteresting red brick that might wait on a grassy hill in any mid-Western neighborhood. Amelia Clark is sitting on the couch. Her legs are propped on the coffee table, sprouting towards the television. The back of her …
At Once
There is nothing more capable than an Apple font for undermining her self-esteem. She thinks, a nagging woman isn’t flattering, fact of ’Merica, probably world, and these words are not hers but phrases her next door neighbor spoke, a kid with a faux-hawk and cargo pants. This is the sort of nonsense that, floating in …
Six of Spades
They introduced themselves in turn in their south-Wexford accents, starting with the tavern owner sitting to my left. Lawrence Cronin, or “Lar” as he insisted I call him, with his scruffy salt-and-pepper beard, pale skin, and of course his endless stream of questions, such as where was I from? What was I doing this far …
Council of Originals
Silence. It shrouded the meadow in an unnatural stealth that belied the epic gathering that was to begin in but a few moments time. Night had already arrived. He sat with the same finite stillness as the quiet gathered around him. Neither listening nor staring for any hint of the others who would come to …
Current Staff
Patricia (Patty) Gray is from Southern California, and is majoring in English in the literary studies track. Currently, she is a copy-editor for Principia’s on-campus newspaper, The Pilot. Last fall, she traveled with students from Principia to Prague, Czech Republic, to study 20th &21st century Czech literature, studio art, and creative writing. For her …
From the Editor’s Desk
Welcome to Mistake House! This year’s issue is a home for diverse, fearless, and honest writing by graduate and undergraduate students from several countries. Franz Kafka once said, “Don’t bend; don’t water it down; don’t try to make it logical; don’t edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most …