Category Archives: Poetry

Fante and Bandini

Posted on November 12, 2024 by John Biscello

Inferiority might have been your first memory. Though you were born on American soil, stubbornly planted there, the chinked chains of immigration clanked and rattled, Marley-style, tightening around your throat, as you butted your head against the scabby base of … Continue reading →

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The Sorceress

Posted on November 11, 2024 by John Biscello

To be a mother, and to double as a dark sorceress, a cleaver of dried bones, could not have been easy. Especially in the 1950s. They burned witches then, as well as reds and blacks and faggots, and other things … Continue reading →

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How Tomorrow Moves

Posted on November 11, 2024 by John Biscello

   It was a matter of helium-speak, and tomorrow-talk, and bright ribbons of noise amounting to nothing.    We, hanging out on the street-corner, conducting ping-pong volleys and raps, ferocity and verve, building ourselves up—who we were and were not, … Continue reading →

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Out of Silence

Posted on November 10, 2024 by John Biscello

Beckett spoke about it: the inability to keep quiet. The inability to not say stories, to not make stories, to not find oneself shaped according to stories fitted to shifting forms. Beckett, with gallows irony, talked plenty about silences. He … Continue reading →

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We Pause for Glacial Identification

Posted on November 10, 2024 by John Biscello

It is the winter within, the writer dying, the chaos bible scored in ice, texts of veins, I mean, I think I mean, veins of text, veins and bulging whorls of text embedded in ice, and your body moving through … Continue reading →

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Memory and Fiction

Posted on November 10, 2024 by John Biscello

What is the difference between memory and fiction? What are the intersecting policies of their tenuous and subjective relationship? For example: You have a woman, a mother recalling her dead daughter. She sees her daughter playing on the beach, she … Continue reading →

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John Fante

Posted on November 8, 2024 by John Biscello

John Fante splashed vinegar into the eyes of the world. The vinegar was house-made, from his mama’s trusty cupboard. Mama’s cupboard contained a lot, an old-world apothecary glutted with cloves of garlic, deceit, shame, bones, crucifixes, oregano, thyme, rosary beads, … Continue reading →

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Jean Rhys

Posted on November 8, 2024 by John Biscello

Jean Rhys was a bedraggled feline. She’d slink through cobbled alleys, lap up Parisian rainwater. High sky glance the glittering harem of stars, and long. Cats are the masters of longing. Spiders are patient, but when it comes to longing, … Continue reading →

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Kerouac

Posted on November 8, 2024 by John Biscello

Kerouac whizzed and hummed. He lived with smoldering zest a crumbling highway within. He took to this unlighted highway, equal parts tour guide and lost little lamb, nuzzling a candle, believing that even the littlest light would make him brave, … Continue reading →

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Marguerite Duras

Posted on November 8, 2024 by John Biscello

Marguerite Duras crowed about nothing. And nothingness. Lyrics like so much silky water threaded in the raptures of an eddy. Whirling, heady, intoxicating, a dizzying effect that spoke sheerest volumes about the secret history of love. Love for M.D. was … Continue reading →

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