Tag Archives: mother

Beket

Posted on September 5, 2025 by John Biscello

My name is Beket. That’s my first name, and my last. My mother was going to name me Becky, after some character in a novel she loved, but when she saw how silent I was as a baby (she said … Continue reading →

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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 … Continue reading →

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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, … Continue reading →

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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 … Continue reading →

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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 … Continue reading →

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In the Dark

Posted on August 31, 2025 by John Biscello

I was vacant when he entered me, a ghost in a long corridor. In the distance, I heard low hissing. As if the world were losing air through a slow leak. I silently sang myself a lullaby from my childhood, … Continue reading →

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Memory and Fiction

Posted on November 10, 2024 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 … Continue reading →

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A.I.

Posted on January 10, 2024 by John Biscello

Develop an A.I. mother. Ask the A.I. mother to raise and nurture you in the way that you always imagined you should have been raised and nurtured. Discard your previous existence, the first one, and install a legend around the … Continue reading →

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Nails

Posted on January 8, 2024 by John Biscello

Paint your fingernails in the way you imagine your daughter would paint your fingernails. Have a daughter to paint your fingernails. Paint your daughter’s fingernails into tiny moons. Blow on the moons until they are dry and without worry. Compare … Continue reading →

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Mirror

Posted on October 9, 2023 by John Biscello

From the series, Japan Poems. At a distance, daughter falls in love with the sea’s lacy fringes and shoreline’s bubbling secrets, while her mother holds up the sky as an undivided mirror, in which every chanced glimmer is hosted and … Continue reading →

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