It could be called Variations on Love,
how we find each other again
and again,
in different modes and phases,
nearness teased out of growth’s grinning desire
to story and multiply, to bring lives
into exquisite sync
and pulse—
This, our starstruck compass
and calling,
to find each other again
and again,
in waves of liminal enclosure.
Her body,
her body breaking in time,
a vivid stutter and scratch,
repeated in my mind’s amateur attempts
to braid or grasp
what amounts to sand in wind—
Life,
oh life,
a series of manic shutters
and twitches,
threaded to a sky’s sleepless passing
without custom or concern—
Her body,
tracked to memory
as fable and sorrow,
none of it lasting,
yet sublime nearness
when water meets its own level
in paired distances.
(Buon compleanno, Nonna Maggio!)
As a wounded bird,
forever hesitant in flight and gamble,
a parable unto your own tender cause,
your eyes gave watery way
to a trilling warble,
a brave and weary tune
that spoke soundly of hearts breaking
into smiles,
never too soon
or wasted.
(Mat ay Coney Island, way back when)
In her body,
her body,
repeatable as scorch and given grail,
I come blindly into words,
so many words,
a stunning slate of Braille and seductive run-on—
my fingers, dodo in their impossible flights,
stutter and fail to reach the inmost music
of her body,
her body,
a scratch in time
and sunny gasp in a last sentence
recursively renewed—
Desire’s immediate proof
sealed in waxing syntax
and doable lengths
of our bodies,
our bodies,
seeding singed gospel
to a chorus of roots.
Hola, community far and wide, I wanted to share the news that my sixth novel, No One Dreams in Color, has officially been released (April 14). Thank you to Unsolicited Press for playing the role of caring midwife in helping to birth this novel into the great wide world!
Here are several links to sites where the book can be purchased:
https://www.unsolicitedpress.com/shop/p/noonedreamsincolor
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/no-one-dreams-in-color-john-biscello/1149046932?ean=9781963115888
Book launch coming at the end of May, with extra-special musical guest, Heather Masse of The Wailin’ Jennys.
Here’s to indie publishing, art-making, and the sanctified spirit of the written word in all its visionary capacities and wonder.
In creative solidarity & gratitude,
J.
Buon compleanno, John Fante (April 8th)
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 round your throat, as you butted your head against the scabby base of a totem pole. You, the little wop, the fenced-in dago, red in the face, trying to dig his way to China, or the moon, or to any form of greatness that would eclipse your undermining complexes. Out of shame and want, out of fevered desire, you created Bandini, or he you. Arturo Bandini, rising star and literary godsend of John Fante’s complicated inner world, soon to be exported and appraised and adored by thousands, maybe more. Arturo Bandini would draw blood from your history and chagrin—your philandering, boozing, gambling father … your mother, begging credit to keep the family fed … your fear and loathing of Jesus and love-hate relationship with the saints. All of it would fuel Bandini’s quest to transcend your blues, your gnawing sense of lesser-than. You would become the Joe DiMaggio of the literary world, the gold-plated pride and joy of your people, or at least go down swinging. There he is, Bandini, fire-bellied, lean days of determination and hunger, a starved mongrel digesting the pits and seeds and citrus rinds and sun-tendered fronds of palm trees in 1930s L.A., an ox-driven young man, stalking fury and sound, full of himself and the words that he prayed to God would not let him down. He, John Fante, the great Arturo Bandini, gave us pages, a score of scorched pages, not enough according to him (he would go on to become a Hollywood screenwriter and malign himself as the worst kind of traitor to his soul and calling), but he left behind the Bandini Quartet, four novels, with his grit-infused masterpiece, Ask the Dust, forming its apex. Some young men mellow with age. Fante, it seems, raged until the end. His legs and sight claimed by diabetes, Fante, a blind amputee, bed-ridden, took one last spirited dive and salutary fling into the necessary world of Bandini, dictating his final novel, Dreams from Bunker Hill, to his wife, Joyce. Charles Bukowski, who had fatefully stumbled upon Fante’s work, considered him a god. The two became friends, and Bukowski would do his part to resurrect Fante for a new generation. It seems, after all, that Bandini upon a cross, grinning, scowling, dreaming of words and how to arrange them according to innate gospel, had amounted to a scarring glint upon so much favored dust.
Thank you Cristina Deptula for this advance review of No One Dreams in Color appearing in Synchronized Chaos, an “interdisciplinary journal of art, culture, science, music, and literature.”
“Lucy said that Havana was one of her favorite haunts. I found it oddly touching that she had used the word haunt. Outside, a cold rain was falling, which made me feel like a real detective. Or rather, like a real detective from the movies. Here I was, in a café, on a rainy day, sitting across from a woman who didn’t match her name, and was the old flame of a man who had disappeared, a man whose ghost I was stalking. It was a movie I had seen before, wrapped within dozens of other movies. Except I was in it, though there was no one watching me from the cushy perspective of passive audience. Or was there? I couldn’t shake the feeling that someone was watching. Always watching. No wonder Santa Claus was such a polarizing figure.”
Excerpt from No One Dreams in Color.
Coming April 14 (Unsolicited Press).
This is a conversation between the publisher of Lost Telegram Press and two of its signed authors; John Biscello, who had his novel The Last Furies published in the fall of 2025 and Steven Mayoff who’s book At The Mercy of Our Muses: Two Novellas will be publishing in 2027.
The conversation is about the role of ego is the author’s process. We talk about Freud’s idea of the battle between the Id and the Superego as well as even the act of placing the author’s name on the cover and the importance of that.
I write longhand because I feel as if I am skipping an essential step in the process if I go straight to typing up the work. Is it better that I write longhand? Does that make the work truer? More human? It’s a choice. I could choose to skip writing by hand in notebooks and type straightaway onto my computer. And maybe one day I will. Maybe that initial first step, the one that I consider primary, will fall away. My handwriting is in a process of erosion. What marks the pages are glyphs that are getting harder and harder to decipher. I feel as if I’m laboring (with love and intent) to transcribe an alien’s handwriting. My hand is not keeping up with my mind (did it ever?), so I am writing in a state of clipped, fractured, speed-demon shorthand. I am trying to capture the music of the mind. The movements. Or so I tell myself. I sell myself hocked watches regularly, unable to gauge if they’re real or can keep time. Another part of me tells me: It is good that writing longhand forces you to slow down. Just because your mind is moving at a certain pace doesn’t mean it’s functioning at a higher level. Ask any Zen monk worth his weight in contemplative measures. Speed doesn’t necessarily equate to quality. Some claim first thought best thought, but oftentimes first thought is not really first thought, it is fifth thought wearing the mask or assuming the mantle of first thought. Measuring thoughts, particularly their order, is a shifty business to say the least. First thought best thought can also be transcribed as fifth thought what thought.
It is trying to strike the balance between following the stream fount freely and abiding the god of slowness as a grounding technique. For me, writing is a process of listening and feeling. My ear is always pressed against the silence. I hear the voices and I feel into them. I feel my way through. Hear my way through. If I am not hearing or feeling anything, or if I am hearing but not feeling, or feeling without hearing, then I am at a loss. I am often at a loss. And I am wholly dependent upon unseen cooperation. That is, cooperation from that which is unseen. I am, at my best, or most fluent, at play with invisible forces.
I choose to sit down at a desk and place words on a page. Why? I could easily choose something else. Maybe not easily, but I could, with sustained effort and resolve, choose something else. I could choose nothing. Except nothing is way too demanding. Nothing is a thrilling, exhilarating and generous concept, so long as it remains in conceptual form, at a remote distance. Nothing is never really nothing, and you know it. To long for absence is not the same as wanting absence.
The sound and feel and textural allure of a sentence does not mean I wish to realize that sentence. That is, if the sentence were to come into being as an action, it would forfeit its charm and grace and legend. Again, and always: Distance is the key. Never and always are fraternal twins. As are here and gone.
John Biscello 