Category Archives: Prose

Winter

Posted on November 17, 2025 by John Biscello

   I say my mother’s grief was white on white … I say this, but this is not true all the time. The colors change. My mother’s grief has been pink, blue, red. Yet, more and more, when I am … Continue reading →

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Vigil

Posted on November 17, 2025 by John Biscello

When I watched my mother brush her hair, it made a scraping electric sound: vibrating plastic teeth sinking repeatedly into a fuzzy animal. I loved watching my mother brush her hair. I’d make sure to always stand behind her, so … Continue reading →

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Mayday

Posted on November 17, 2025 by John Biscello

My mother’s grief attends nightly to her bones. It is a funeral in reverse, or a funeral in slow-motion, longing for a mourning long delayed. We stall ourselves in grief—idling, passive—and the freest parts become small dark birds tearing away … Continue reading →

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Knives

Posted on November 17, 2025 by John Biscello

   My sister says she doesn’t have many memories from childhood. When she looks back, there’s nothing there: a blank screen. I never asked her if she saw black or white in her absence of memories.    One of her … Continue reading →

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Dinner, No Voices

Posted on November 17, 2025 by John Biscello

   I waited. We waited. A storm was coming. It had to be. He had returned from rehab several days earlier, after having been gone for two months. My father had always born pouchy bags under his eyes, but there, … Continue reading →

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Teatro Paraguas

Posted on November 17, 2025 by John Biscello

Thank you to Teatro Paraguas for being such a gracious host, and to the people who attended and supported the reading and book-signing in Santa Fe. It was a sweet, humanly connected, word-warmed evening.

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Mortuary

Posted on November 14, 2025 by John Biscello

Miko was a singer with her voice in the clouds. They called Miko blue. Occasionally, there would be flashes of red. In the fall, Miko would softly mimic the elegy of leaves and become yellow. She would, in voice and … Continue reading →

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Operating Theater

Posted on November 13, 2025 by John Biscello

   I have become moonless in my grief, a paled comparison. But to what? To who I used to be? What I expected to become? I feel as if I’ve been laid out on an operating table, and Time, as … Continue reading →

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Empire Strikes Back

Posted on November 13, 2025 by John Biscello

   Her hips began the snake-dance, the spasmodic wiggle. She told me to listen closely, and her hips began hissing a slow cadence, the world losing its air, the world a depleted lunar asthmatic in need of oxygen blasts. My … Continue reading →

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Pirate Radio

Posted on November 13, 2025 by John Biscello

   Hips don’t lie. They are the truth-telling giants and the whistle-blowers transmitting through pirate radio. They are also the catacombs and weather satellites of one’s cumulative genealogy. When an old person falls and breaks their hip, it is not … Continue reading →

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