Author Archives: John Biscello

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About John Biscello

Originally from Brooklyn, NY, writer, poet, performer, and playwright, John Biscello, has lived in the high-desert grunge-wonderland of Taos, New Mexico since 2001. He is the author of four novels, Broken Land, a Brooklyn Tale, Raking the Dust, Nocturne Variations, and No Man’s Brooklyn; a collection of stories, Freeze Tag, two poetry collections, Arclight and Moonglow on Mercy Street; and a fable, The Jackdaw and the Doll, illustrated by Izumi Yokoyama. He also adapted classic fables, which were paired with the vintage illustrations of artist, Paul Bransom, for the collection: Once Upon a Time, Classic Fables Reimagined. His produced, full-length plays include: LOBSTERS ON ICE, ADAGIO FOR STRAYS, THE BEST MEDICINE, ZEITGEIST, U.S.A., and WEREWOLVES DON’T WALTZ.

Melodrama

Let’s start with this photo, the comic melodrama in which you, perfectly staged, are wearing a blue pinafore dress, your dark hair gagged in pigtails, mouth heavily lipsticked, cheeks cherubically rouged, your eyes two flashing ovals of abyss-pooling licorice, sweat … Continue reading

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Blue

I knew this. Even before I met her, I knew this. But she, as an explicit confirmation, as a caretaker and symbiotic mouthpiece to my unsaid secrets, said, and so concisely—Dreams come out of the blue, returning to the blue. … Continue reading

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Play

I have to imagine her death from every conceivable angle. She has assured me she will disappear, said that dying is a trick of the light, and everyone was enamored of the mirage, convinced, in on it, the gag. When … Continue reading

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Stand-Up

This is not a not a novel. This is a rhapsody. I rhapsodize, I bubble, I ferment, I fount. The amassing of word-shaped sounds have become rhapsodies, digressions, solos within spheres and platforms of soul-sounding species and choruses, the every … Continue reading

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Recorded Live

In the cinema, hypnotized. I died a drugged and stupefied death again and again, crucified by the diminished returns of flickering images. I die, tranquilized, a sweetly solemn refugee from reality. This is the escapist way, its creed. Why pretend … Continue reading

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In the Dark

If cinema is a tomb, then let us die watching. The angel over my shoulder is hunched, opaque, morphing. None of us ever leave behind the dark of the theater.  We are here, always. Sanctuary, haven, enclave, respite, sitting tight … Continue reading

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Gilead After Dark

Time dreamed, and I was there. The persistently nagging sense of simultaneously being there and not being there. A fusion and mediation of allegedly separate entities, such as timelines, distances (intimacy, you see, belong to the immeasurable). The mantling of … Continue reading

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Pandora

I won’t call this a book because no one reads books anymore, no one gives two shits and a dime about books. I’ll call this an exalted and long overdue mania, a catalytic inversion, a freebase purge. Whatever, whatever. Voyeurs … Continue reading

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Station

Historyless is where I come from, the sun-crotched navel, the part of me not yet born, the part of me dead to the world on its way to being born into the potholes and foothills of unimagined fictions. That, plus … Continue reading

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Andrea Doria

Itchy navels, persecutions, manias, projections, snot-rimmed abysses, it’s been a mixed bag of plenty and none, and here I sit with the day’s teeth growing long and chomping down with razor-edged intensity … the stringent air of day after days … Continue reading

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