Tag Archives: mother

Dinner, No Voices

Posted on November 17, 2025 by John Biscello

   I waited. We waited. A storm was coming. It had to be. He had returned from rehab several days earlier, after having been gone for two months. My father had always born pouchy bags under his eyes, but there, … Continue reading →

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Seance

Posted on September 18, 2025 by John Biscello

It was a time in her life when she was not there, not inside herself or her life. And she was pregnant. Pregnant by the wrong man, so many wrong turns and wrong men, and this one, a mislaid night … Continue reading →

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Hips

Posted on September 16, 2025 by John Biscello

I can no longer remember where I was when it happened, only that it happened, it must have happened. Sometimes we cry silent recordings in our bones, or guts, or maybe it is our hips that are the primary storehouses … Continue reading →

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Old and Young

Posted on September 12, 2025 by John Biscello

In the fairy tale the young girl slept for a long time and when she woke up she was old. She saw her old self in the mirror and was horrified, but also accepting. And a little in love. I … Continue reading →

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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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