Pinafore

Posted on November 24, 2025 by John Biscello

   Let’s start with the 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 in silvery beads rolling down your skirted legs, collecting in the spaded dimples of knee-blades, your hands a pair of static birds tied down, mouth bound, and hovering above you the flashback villain of old, caped in a black shawl, top hat tilted rakishly, oil-slicked handlebar mustache, the villain greedily rubbing his sweat-greased palms together, his entire existence a rapacious glisten, and his primary ambition in life has been reduced to singular malice, to see you run over by the locomotive that will come thundering down the tracks any minute now, any minute … once this happens, he will, he believes, retire from the annals of villainy and adopt a well-respected position that ensconces him into creased folds of society, society as he sees it, an origami lawn neatly ordered, and here comes the train now, you scream as loud as you can (yet your voice has been rendered dead and screamless by the silent film predicament you find yourself in) and screamless you are run over by the train, THE END flashes in block letters on the black curtain of my closed eyes, my longing eyes, I wish I could mourn this death for a longer time, but this is only the first with many more to come.

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No One Dreams in Color

Posted on November 24, 2025 by John Biscello

Coming April 2026 from Unsolicited Press.

Synopsis:
Man Vanishes Without a Trace. This, the dramatic headline which stirs Andrew DiBenedetto’s curiosity, and initiates a life-changing course. The vanished man is Paul Kirby, whose nine-minute film, Wendigo—the only film Kirby ever made—was one of Andrew’s sacred cinematic totems. Compelled to visit Nine Peaks, the remote New Mexico town which had become Kirby’s adopted home, Andrew will discover that Kirby was one, among many, who have mysteriously vanished, and that Nine Peaks is, as claimed by one of its locals: an anomaly wrapped inside an anachronism and swallowed by a riddle. Andrew’s story quickly and irrevocably becomes entwined with the stories of others: Ali, a thirteen-year-old loner, comic book buff, and Beastie Boys fanatic, who is once again being tormented by werewolves; her mother, Callie, Paul’s lover, who has started working at the enigmatic Dream Bank; and Mack, the cameraman, who shot Wendigo with Paul up in the mountains. When the borders and barriers between dreams, memory, fiction and reality begin to dissolve, Andrew and company must navigate the shifting and unstable narratives of a weblike paradigm. Equal parts psychic noir and existential montage, No One Dreams in Color explores the mutable nature of time, identity and loss.

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Net Worth

Posted on November 21, 2025 by John Biscello

   Memory slips through one’s fingers, an aggrieved net unable to hold sea or time. Everything floats by and through as intangible, ephemeral.

   How to achieve fluency and accuracy of memory, of memory loss? I do not know.

   It could begin like this: There were four of us boys. We were all part of the same family, but also we weren’t.

   This speaks volumes about the subjective experience of family members curating their own realities, individually, within a shared network. In other words: we were all there together, but also we were there separately. Dad hitting Mom with the belt registered a different impact and separate internalized reality for each one of the brothers. In this respect, memory can never be singular. It always splinters, and in splintering it proliferates. Memory is a hutch for rabbit orgies, destined for multiples, never singularity.

   Each of us curates our own reality.

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Shard

Posted on November 21, 2025 by John Biscello

In a house of mirrors, every reflection is an indirect representation of an illusion, as misperceived recognition of the source.

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Screen Test

Posted on November 21, 2025 by John Biscello

Memory. How we amass and compile what equates to an archival collection of footage which constitutes an identity, a life … in private screening rooms, we view ourselves, scenes, episodes, and settle ourselves into what comprises identity. Yet there is a persistent illusion at play, a dogged insistence that what we’re seeing reflected back to ourselves is solid and dependable as a narrative, is fixed. This is not true.

   Consider: You have access to the content, to the archives. Images and stories cinematically reflecting parts of your life back to you no longer appear on the screen. The scenes are void of content. You sit and stare and grow terribly anxious waiting for something to appear which will serve as orientation. It doesn’t come. Or it comes irregularly, sporadically. Or the pictures cut out intermittently, offering a fragmented viewing experience. Or the screens do fill up with images, but none of them are recognizable: glyphs coded through cataracts.

   This is when identity is threatened, when red alert mode sets in—You are not who you think you are. Who you thought you were. No compass, no orientation. People, in real life, who are meant to serve and fulfill as points of orientation, as figures that can stabilize your identity, no longer enact those roles. They are just people. Everything had been connected by the tenuous threads of story, by fragile cinema. If those are gone, you are rudderless and adrift in your own life. And can you even call it your own life anymore? Isn’t it just life, life itself as it courses through you, a conduit, a conductor, an avatar void of signature?

   Who are we when the stories and cinema disappear, fade, when they are no longer accessible? Who were we to begin with? Existential dress-up comes to a close. Claims are severed. Relations become background  noise, a white din or remote humming. In our lives, we are dreamwalkers punctuated by reveries and line-breaks.  

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Straight Out of Toronto

Posted on November 21, 2025 by John Biscello

My interview on All My Books, a podcast aired on MET Radio (Toronto Metrpolitan University) is now streaming. It was fun getting to discuss creative process, indie publishing, inspiration and artistic influences, and I had an opportunity to read an excerpt from my new novel, The Last Furies, on the air.

https://www.metradio.ca/show/all-my-books/

(the interview starts about 30 minutes into the program, and is listed under: Wednesday, November 12)

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Metrics

Posted on November 20, 2025 by John Biscello

Dust is time’s response to dreaming.

Dreams–desolate, unmade, spectral—wafting as winds carry out the ceremonial twitch of pallbearing.

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Last Picture Show

Posted on November 20, 2025 by John Biscello

   Does time-resin sting our eyes? Does desolation call forth our most solitary angels? Our loneliest most homesick angels? Desolation allows to become a vagrant, rooted in blessed nobody, divergently attuned to an original script. The wind writes in the air all the time, but no one deciphers the handwriting.

   Nostalgia is a death-trap, eating its own tail and leading nowhere. Now and again and again now never is nostalgia’s recipe and calling card. Nostalgia is the last picture show revived endlessly, a cinematic séance in rose-light and sepia. You whisper to nostalgia as you would a shy tender lover concealed in a shadowy niche.

   How to merge, marry, superimpose archival fragments onto your own presence and narrative in real-time? What is real-time? Was it real-time when I wrote real-time seconds ago, but now real-time is gone, and back again, as I am writing this (in real-time). Real-time never goes anywhere. It follows the irrefutable principle of orbit. Around and around but never going anywhere except around and around. It never fades or disappears. Real-time is the common nomenclature for eternity. Real-time is eternity’s signature and claim in digestible terms. Real-time is folk in its bones and surname. Eternity is a blank slate disguised as real-time.

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Interior

Posted on November 20, 2025 by John Biscello

   It was a town caught in the pinwheeling stasis between living and dying, between chrysalis and mortuary. I want to examine why it is I am drawn to places like this, why I always return to this specific feeling of haunt and desolation, want to make inquiries into the nature of my bent and predilection.

   I start by asking: do these places visually and externally correspond to a world within, to zones and aspects of my interior? If extrapolated and perceivable as place, as geography, as topography—would it match the desolate, degenerate, eroded and scarred? Do these places call to mind or call into being a deep loneliness, a call to lonely places—am I finding my ghosts in the world without?

   I believe there are cities, towns, neighborhoods, locations that are our geographical alter-egos, or replicas of our inner world, of our emotional tonescape. There’s something about, a) Time as a silent assassin, with its efficient scalpel, b) Time as a hooded ninja that no one ever sees, c) the call to lonely places, d) we are ghosts in our own lives, e) what fades, remains, f) the allure of lore, g) there is crackly resin in the air that gives ephemera its due and scroll, h) nostalgia is a death trap, i) empty motel swimming pools harbor secrets, j) You think you are arriving in a certain town and quickly realize the town doesn’t exist, because, k) you have effaced that town with a town of your own narrative and imagining, you have prematurely buried one town and in its place superimposed another town over its bones, which leads to, l) becoming a witness to a geography that is both mimic and delegate to one’s mapped fractures.

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Niche

Posted on November 19, 2025 by John Biscello

   Let me show you, she said.

   She proceeded to open her stomach, almost as if she were made from wood or metal, something not flesh, and it cleanly opened to reveal a dark chamber.

   I stood there, not sure what to do. It was the first time a woman had ever exposed her stomach in front of me.

   Look inside, she gently urged.

   I stooped down and peered into the aperture. It was too dark to see anything. I asked her if I could shed some light.

   Sure, she said.

   I withdrew a lighter from my pocket and produced a small flame. The stomach’s interior illuminated, revealing, not organs, but what looked like miniature shelving units, with square compartments, each one containing a framed photograph. The lightly not only illuminated the photos, but also seemed to be enlarging them, as if the light were generating an optical illusion of magnification.

   I saw a photo of her underwater, gagged and bound, the seltzery grammar of bubbles surrounding her, as if produced by a second mouth, an unseen one.

   This photo of you underwater…

   That’s me drowning. That’s happened a lot. My stomach has curated a ton of drowning photos.

   She stated this neutrally, no inflection whatsoever.

   Other photos showed various isolated body parts, portraits of dismemberment, if you will.

   A wrist bracketed in purple bruise. Reddened ankles. A swollen eye caked in doughy moss.

   A nipple. Broken fingernails. Winter-chapped pair of lips. A gummy earlobe.

   These body parts…

   They’re all me. All mine, that is. In different phases. Hurt, not hurt, in need of care, signifying, keeping time. The stomach has an affinity for devouring images of body parts.

   Ow, I winced, feeling the lighter-flame singe my thumb.

   I stuck my thumb into my mouth, and cooled the stinging with saliva and sucking. I was about to reignite the flame and return to her stomach, but she closed her stomach and said—That’s all for now. I don’t want this to become a perverse sideshow attraction.

   Was she kidding? How could a woman inexplicably opening her stomach not be a perverse sideshow attraction? I imagined touring the country with her, going to festivals and fairgrounds, with her charging money for people to look inside her stomach.

   I will let you see more later, she said. Not now. Later. When I decide to open up again. You’ve got to understand—you get to stand there and look at all the things inside my stomach, for you it’s a show, but for me … I have to live with the contents on my stomach. You’re a witness, but I am a bearer.

   With that statement, she left the room. I couldn’t tell if I was in trouble or not.  

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