Another fall dusk and I was out
with my son to pick up
the fallen walnuts, holding them to
his nose and
my nose to draw the bitterness in,
smearing the brown stain on our hands
when I remembered the yellow-brown whorls
of my father’s fingertips
those nights on Olmstead Street as he
poured coins
onto the glittering table, the cigarette
smoke turning
his pock-marked face blue, covering his
eyes with clouds
I could not see through. I wrapped
peanut butter
and jelly sandwiches at the white counter,
folded the waxed paper
in neat triangles the way he had taught me,
then dropped them
into the brown bag gently for the long day
of flash cards
Aisha Sabatini Sloan
Episode 22: “Form and Formlessness”
In an essay specially commissioned for the podcast, Aisha Sabatini Sloan describes rambling around Paris with her father, Lester Sloan, a longtime staff photographer for Newsweek, and a glamorous woman who befriends them. In an excerpt from The Art of Fiction no. 246, Rachel Cusk and Sheila Heti discuss how writing her first novel helped Cusk discover her “shape or identity or essence.” Next, Allan Gurganus’s reading of his story “It Had Wings,” about an arthritic woman who finds a fallen angel in her backyard, is interspersed with a version of the story rendered as a one-woman opera by the composer Bruce Saylor. The episode closes with “Dear Someone,” a poem by Deborah Landau.
Rachel Cusk photo courtesy the author.
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