John Biscello

I don’t tell him there is no such thing as Claudia Lemon, she’s invented, he knows nothing about Clarise Lermontov, my ghost, my first country, there is no Clarise, only Claudia Lemon,  and there is the young girl who loved squeezing lemon onto oysters, the oysters were still alive, eyeless, that’s what I remember about that little girl remembering, they’re eyeless, and I’d squeeze lemon onto the eyeless grammar of their forms and watch them writhe and think—this is life—lemon being squeezed onto eyeless things that will be eaten. That young girl was annoyingly philosophical. Her entire body was made of questions. 

Artwork by Linda Stojak