Waves

Posted on September 5, 2025 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 is viewing the scene and relating to it as archived footage cataloged under the umbrella of Memory. Once upon a time, my daughter played on the beach and I watched. I witnessed her. Except … this never happened. The mother’s daughter died when she was three days old, she never had a chance to substantiate and affirm her life through the continuum and architecture of memories, of memory-building. The beach scene never happened, yet the mother, in her time-hunted eyes is watching it happen again. She is recalling vividly what for her formed a bittersweet memory, with requisite narrative attached—My daughter was so happy that day, playing with the sea, the waves. The mother is not experiencing her daughter and the beach as an invented story, or obliging fiction—she is re-membering, re-calling. This happened and is happening, all at once. You have to wonder how much of what we are remembering is what we need and want to remember, how much of memory is fiction masquerading as factual imprints, or impressions based on phantoms, the publication of haze and fever-dreams. How many memories are sketched from vague outlines of what never took place?  

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Memory Piece

Posted on September 4, 2025 by John Biscello

A young woman came to see me yesterday. I know it’s my daughter, yet something stops the word daughter from coming out of my mouth, any of my mouths. There is word-daughter and there is daughter-daughter and word-daughter is the symbol denoting and defining this young woman’s relationship to me: she-daughter makes me-father. Yet … there is a loose connection somewhere, faulty wiring, and with no felt and innate recognition of this young woman as my daughter, the word daughter becomes nil and void, two gray syllables dying in a vague mortuary. I see her, this young woman, and it is there, in a vacant slot, the history between us packed into a single crystal lying fragile and solvent on the tip of my tongue, living and dying there … If I could speak the word, if I could hear myself speak it, perhaps the crystal would dissolve in open air and our history would prosper as revelation and archive. I would become lighted within. The word doesn’t come. Something holds it back, holds it down. It falls into line with the other vanquished words. I have forgotten how to speak. The other non-words corked in darkness, the other worlds I’ve lost. The young woman standing before me models a blacked-out mirror, a late night fallout, so I avert my gaze. I think this makes the young woman sad.   

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Remains of the Day

Posted on September 4, 2025 by John Biscello

The first spots were discovered, and contrary to my sense of fiction, they had nothing to do with extraterrestrials or loneliness. Nor poverty. Soon, no exact timetable, but soon my memories would no longer be mine. I would no longer have a fixed place within their shifting geography and tablature, within their persuasive mythology. I would become a vagrant mimic, shadowing my elusive host. I would drift, and keep on drifting—a severed and bi-polar chunk of glacier. My memories would be scattered like pixelated minnows in a raging sea. I talk like this, in the color of metaphors and melting wax, while I still can … before language abandons me, or I it. I have decided to keep a record. Uneven, sprawling, subject to inclement moods and their accompanying tides … it doesn’t matter .. some kind of record, some kind of something—In Memory of Memory—that’s what I’d call it, if I were to call it anything. Which I won’t.

Let me start again: my memory is going and where it is going I cannot follow.

Let me start again-again: There are ghosts everywhere. And this brings me more comfort than you can possibly imagine.

P.S. I have always imagined myself intimate with distances, with myself at a distance. The spots, in their flagless colonization, will change all that. What will remain? And who will speak on behalf of those remains?  

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Plot

Posted on September 4, 2025 by John Biscello

Yesterday I buried my mother. Two mothers. Maybe three, or four. I have had many mothers in the small hours of this modest and shrinking life. All of my mothers are tassels of foam threading mighty surf. All of my mothers are liberated and exiled to a single body-host and fugitive core. The passions of men are septic, and in need of drainage. And not just any drainage: mother-drainage. Mothers swallows cesspools and geyser them upward and outward in alchemized torrents intended to bathe stars. Mother-tongues perform rites on multiple levels. The stars wink gratefully. Mirages rage fruitfully, and I say this because here I am, burying my mother again, for the first and always time, there is no end to these burials, no cessation to the amount of mothers becoming funeral batter (the heat of the earth causing them to rise, to rise) … In truth, or in reality—choose your semantical poison—I have buried none of my mothers, not a single one, but I have rehearsed these burials in the cradle of story, I have made myself minister and undertaker, reciting the canticle (while imagining dirt engraving its signature under my nails): I buried my mother yesterday. If I were to start again, and here I start again, I might say—Yesterday I buried my mother. And she buried me. It was a mutual agreement, a tacit bond. There’s something about burying the mother who buries you that engenders hallucinogenic closeness. My mother and I become vivid and clear, near and dear to each other in our correspondent deaths, in our shared burial plots.

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Bed

Posted on September 4, 2025 by John Biscello

I lie in wait. Hell is supposed to come anytime now. That’s what the others started calling that which was scheduled to come: hell. You would think that humans wouldn’t want to coordinate or administrate hell, but it seems they did, or had their list of reasons why they must. Same as they had their reasons to bring us in. We were the stand-ins, the surrogates, the test dummies. We were shipped in from the east coast, all of us family based on make and designation, but none of us families until we were arranged as such, paired up with spouses and children. Temporary families in temporary homes slated for destruction. Not much of a life, but life was never our thing to begin with. So long as we served our primary purpose of modeling and reflecting humans back to themselves, in their myriad theaters of being, we would always have a place in society. Not an actual place, but reality, same as life … not our thing. I was placed in bed next to another female. We were destined to be bedmates and deathmates. The man who arranged our match named us Gloria and Jean. I’m pretty sure I was Gloria, but I might have been Jean. It didn’t really matter. The names were for them, not us. I had expected to become part of a family, and be placed in the kitchen, or living room, with a husband, and a child or two. I was surprised when I was carried upstairs to a bedroom and laid out on a bed next to Jean (or Gloria). The man who had positioned me laughed and said something to another man who also laughed. Something about this arrangement, about me and Gloria/Jean in bed together, amused the men. Though I had spent an entire life, if I may hijack that word momentarily, frozen in various poses, in display windows, in galleries, in store aisles, there was something about being this close to another one, another me, and not being able to touch, which I found excruciating. I didn’t expect anything extraordinary to happen. Maybe just my hand grazing hers. A finger’s worth of intimacy. That would have been enough. I don’t know if Gloria/Jean felt the same as I did. She didn’t talk. Not all of us had developed voices (and none of us, as far as I knew, could speak aloud, only head-voices), so her silence wasn’t shocking. Yet, without touch, and knowing that hell was on its way, I longed to hear her voice in my head. The humans never taught us how to pray. I did it anyway. In my own awkward and broken way. After my prayer ended, I stared at the ceiling, unable to move my head. Or any other body part. The voice in my head was mine and mine alone. It was, as it had always been: a matter of waiting. Time is tortuously real, and not a made-up concept, for those who are locked in waiting. I could feel hell in the air, moving closer. The moments before the siege came, reversing the world, were the realest I had ever known.    

Image by Mark Rothko

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Audio Sample

Posted on September 2, 2025 by John Biscello

For those who want to tune in, a free sample of the audio book version of The Last Furies is now available on Bandcamp.

https://losttelegrampress.bandcamp.com/album/the-last-furies

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Knife

Posted on September 1, 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 earliest memories, one that became archival celluloid: my father, drunk and drugged out of his mind, chasing her and my mother down the block with a knife. My sister and mother ducked into a doorway next to the toy store around the block and hid there until the threat had passed. I don’t know where I was when this happened. My sister shared this memory so many times that I began living through it, as if I too had been there, and in moving through this memory with the propriety born from intimacy, I may have modified it. The knife, for example: Did my father have a knife when chasing my mother and sister? Or did I plant the knife in my father’s hand, based on another memory, one which belonged to an ex-girlfriend who told me that one of her first memories was of her father holding a knife to her mother’s throat. Did I combine the two fathers into one? Did I duplicate the knife and place it into my father’s hand, making me an accessory in this revised episode of violence? I had experienced my father during lunatic flights of rage, and knew very well that not only might he wield a knife during such moments, but he was also capable of slashing or carving into one of us in a blind fury. It was possible. The knife was possible. Mutilation or death … possible. When I asked my mother about the memory, she said she had no recollection of that happening. So, in her story: no chase, no knife, no husband. It was a blank screen. Whether she saw black or white in that absence, I don’t know, because I never asked.  

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Portrait

Posted on September 1, 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 I couldn’t see her face. I always felt safer when I couldn’t see faces. Faces held eyes, and eyes were too much. Mix the eyes in with mouths, noses, and everything else that formed a living portrait, and it was too much for my nerves to process. But the backs of heads: I was safe. That is, until the day my mother told me that she had eyes in the back of her head. My staring became a different pastime, fraught with anxiety. Why couldn’t I see the eyes that were seeing me? How deep were they hidden in my mother’s forest of hair? Years later, when my mother got sick and had to shave her head, I no longer believed in the eyes, but still I had to check … my mother’s head was my first temple.

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Miasma

Posted on September 1, 2025 by John Biscello

I have mimicked many voices to track and capture my mother’s theriomorphic grief, therefore my own: history pared and blood-let outside of time. Inside time, once upon a time, my mother was, as she tells it, a terrified-out-of-her-mind seventeen-year-old, not knowing what was going on, loud brassy voices and foot traffic, screaming her head off, nurses trying to calm her down, bound to a gurney, soprano squeaking of rubber wheels, drugs administered … and there, in the theater of the delivery room, it came from her, into this world, a defiant trauma and membered shock, an exile and introduction swaddled in its own reality …  the baby banged furiously on air, tiny flailing fists producing music from nowhere, from large pools of nothing. I took these large pools of nothing into my lungs, and I was initiated: I was passed around, I was wiped, I glided through air, I felt the burning of light, I was a pair of eyes just turned on. Everything, not so much new, as it was returning to me again, with a different cast, different narrative, different set of circumstances, and I, memoryless, cased in a spastic wingless body consumed with hunger.  

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Last Furies: Audio Book

Posted on August 31, 2025 by John Biscello

Early release of the audio book version of The Last Furies, available through Lost Telegram Press (or Rakuten Kobo: http://kobo.com/)

Print and digital editions coming in mid-September.

The Last Furies (audio book)
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