Mistake House 2019
Issue 5, May 2019
Murder in Apartment 30
Never let the acoustics of a bathroom fool you into thinking you can keep time and tune. I tell you, I can kill it on the shampoo bottle and I call it murder in Apartment 30 because I decimate the soap-scum stage. Whims and wishes walk on the promenades of our minds, reinforced and …
Orion’s Lament
We have both fallen to death for goddesses, but only one of us reigns over the void with drawn wrath, though in the east one may only spy that which hefts his trousers; he meanders across the black bowl with a hollow heart in search for she whom he will not attain, he is fractured …
Farm Hand
Start slow because it’s hard to wake before the dawn, but even in the dark someone depends on you. First, take the dog for a walk across the lawn; stride along the fence line and enjoy your view. Stop before you meet the yellow jacket nest sleeping in the ground, hidden by the way. …
51 North
Because I can’t differentiate between Sedona and Camp Verde our destination is never clear, we’re only closer by the three-minute-fast car clock. If you smell a skunk or hit a deer, you’re getting there. Javelina could be anywhere. Because I cannot understand traffic, I feel the world crushing us in a vise, half-Camry, half …
In a Sentimental Mood
I. What else can be done than listen to bloated nature? Its fluid consistency: some sort of masculine fleece or livid crocus, blending in with the blips in the night. The crickets still chirp; they’ve been up all night again, the bastards, roaming the homelit streets and short-cut lawns. Somenight, their cries might stop: A …
Carnation, Lily, Lily, Rose
A family of glassblowers, a river road unturned to loam. Sing the molt to second skin, layer, the wings found on our lawn like petals before fruit. In spring, in bloom, in lantern given by a child, in light flimsy as wax paper, come violent as storms in youth, come melancholia yellow lilies thrown at …
An Egg (1910)
Rose is Regina when she is born in Budapest and before one war and another she is two or three years old she looks out the second-floor window her wealthy downstairs neighbor’s breakfast alfresco the wealthy girl her opulent soft- boiled egg spills its solid gold yolk it’s sunlight the porcelain cup puts it back …
Rags (c.1925)
The stubborn fabric is seizing around the needle its obstinate refusal sends laughter through Rose the school didn’t want a Jew anymore but the Torah unravels itself for her the ark opens in a flash of light her father holds the magnifying glass here Esther defeats Haman here Miriam her watchful eye Rose won’t sit …
Pretending (c.1940)
The little that Joseph recounts of Czechoslovakia includes the black magic of his blond hair blue eyes as admission to a Nazi Party meeting their agenda he imagines any exemption we have so much respect here we are safe here silently Jews Emrick and Walter will be fake Lutherans go to fake Lutheran school learn …
i refuse to sonnet, but love
1. you fill the canvas i paint love softly blushing i am your pigments. 2. my mind is beside you there is no distance the atlantic ocean evaporates there are two countries two cities then only us i like imagining you with me looking eyes into the eyes caressing the other lost in the …
That Dance Move’s Gone Forever
Is what you told me with my ear in your teeth, you had stopped spinning but Prince didn’t get the memo and he continued even as we stood clinging; I tried then to remember how you spun, how your forearm felt, the weight of your foot on mine—it’s all going away too fast. Which fingers …
Taste and See
Whenever she eats a naan bread, she is inside the out of herself. She chews—and chews—and lives alone and beneath, as an essence under your eyes. No, your nostrils. No. Your mouth. So which of you would believe her if she told you each day she throws those limbs of hers into a blender, power …
Current Staff
Editor in Chief, Samantha Frank Samantha Frank, a senior from Massachusetts, Texas, and Illinois, is majoring in English in the creative writing track and minoring in studio art and gender studies. Her current scholarship and creative practice have led her to explore nonsexual intimacy and relationships in her writing and art. Her multi-media exhibition, Attachments, curated by Otis …
Stephen Vitiello
1. World Trade Center Recordings, 1999 Visual: Audio: 2. Yanomami Recordings, 2003 Visual: Audio: 3. Winds of Peters Mountain, 2018 4. Bell of Hope, A Bell for Every Minute, 2010 Visual: Audio: 5. Something Like Firework, Davis Museum, photos by Richard Howard, 2010 Visual: Audio: 6. Fear of High Places, Sculpture Center, NY, 2004 Visual: …
Ode to Odes to Love
Ode to Love Ode to Fucking Up Ode to the Sound of Music of chandeliers crashing like cars of the midnight bell Ode to the breakups and the …
rose bushes
dearest [ ], I found your pin underneath the rose bushes where we laid together. (cold, hard dirt on my back, thorns digging into my spine) The petals crinkled under my hands. (dust kept coating my tongue) All the garden is losing it’s green now. I try to think of you when I watch the …
She is Void
Noetic in essence, exhaustingly dependent; a dissociative abyss, navigated solely by sentiment. You will tell her to seek treatment. She will tell you she is, and she has, and she always will. There is no ignorance in what is chronic. There is only the bleak realization of the discursive dialectics of the horrid mind.
Sylva Fischerová
Let me begin with a quote by Stephen Spender, the American poet, which I found while writing an essay about inspiration in modern poetry (the essay is entitled “Raven in the Lead Mines of the World”; this statement is based heavily upon material I collected when writing the essay): “My own experience of inspiration is certainly that …
The Proposal
The sun isn’t hiding in Bedford Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Half-dressed kids dance in front of the fire hydrant, soothing sweaty skin in the cool water blasting from its pumper nozzle. Zola, Kilimanjaro’s godsister, sits outside in their godmother’s fenced garden, plucking feathers from a limp chicken. Nandi stands in the shadow of the doorway catching a …
Sylva Fischerová
MISTAKE HOUSE: Although home, like our art forms, can be something we care for deeply and invest in, it can also be a location for pain and conflict, as you have witnessed and as you have examined in your poetry. In a 2010 interview with Czech Radio, you revealed you weren’t attempting to escape the questions, …
Other Side of the Mountain
That which is sublime is not humanity, but nature. Nature does not boast of its superiority, nor does it seek revenge on humankind. One day when I was walking through a forest, I came to a brink of a door opening to “the cosmos” and I realized that I saw the “sublime unity” from that door. This state …
Sylva Fischerová
FAMILY HISTORIES ARE FULL OF HOLES Father is on the Gestapo list, they’re going to look for him in Řečkovice, Viola will be plagued with dreams about this for years to come. He leaves the country then and ends up in Holland, first with Bolenka, the wife of a sea captain, later with a rich …
Sound Proof
I shed my clothes and the pain of the week. Forty-eight hours. Forty-eight hours ago we were on the couch in your living room. You comforted me as I cried myself to sleep, nightmares of my childhood on repeat. Forty-one hours ago you and Georgie pranced around the kitchen while I cooked us breakfast. You …
Anya
Sasha sat and watched the leaves fall from the trees in Central Park. It made him feel young again. Of course, he was not young. He was very old. Layers of tan skin cascaded upon one another to create his face. His bright blue eyes, now his only staple, shone through the layers. Women used to fall for those eyes. Women still …
Sylva Fischerová
Sylva Fischerová is a Prague-based Czech poet. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1963 during the Communist regime, Fischerová spent her childhood in the Moravian town of Olomouc. As a writer and scholar, she possesses a valuable ethical lens. She lived through historical periods in which literature (including the work of her father, philosopher Josef Ludvík Fischer) …
Mueller’s Bowling Alley
When I was in the fourth grade, Matt Fischer got stabbed outside Mueller’s Bowling Alley. He didn’t die or anything, but it was the talk of the town for months after it happened. That’s how small towns are. If you live in a big city, you’re used to people getting stabbed all the time, but …
From the Editor’s Desk
Welcome to Mistake House! Like its architectural namesake, the magazine brings together an assemblage of interesting components and offers their conjunction as a microcosm of hard work and play. The voices highlighted by the stories and poems in Issue 5 appear like individual rooms under a shared roof of human mess. In her introduction to …
Ten Things that May or May Not Have Happened
1. When I was three, I threw a snowball at my mother’s back—we were somewhere in the mountains of southern California. 2. My mother walked out on my father and me when I was in the third grade. I have this vivid memory I see sometimes. It consists of the front …
Stephen Vitiello
Sound artist and electronic musician Stephen Vitiello creates both an aural and a visual experience for viewers/listenters. Vitiello creates sound with analog and digital electronics, traditional and homemade instruments, and incorporates a variety of sounds from field recordings from urban and rural environments. As an installation artist and composer—as well as a prolific collaborator—his works …
Stephen Vitiello
MISTAKE HOUSE: Many people remain oblivious to the seemingly insignificant vibrations around them, yet you’ve developed a creative practice from these daily sounds. When did you first realize that the act of intentionally perceiving and interacting with vibrations was conducive to the act of creating? STEPHEN VITIELLO: I wish I could point to some childhood memory and there probably is one buried, …
Stephen Vitiello
As an artist whose primary focus is listening, field recording has been a central part of my own practice since the late 1990s. As a sound artist, I am interested in what is and what is not heard. This can include making sounds audible that we would never hear without specialized technologies. These are sounds that vibrate at frequencies …