It’s as natural to begin to age
as it is to insist
on chocking the wheels with heads of peonies
but futile to continually
glance away at the velvet landscapes
lining the clefts between Chinese mountains
and so stop short.
My age is 29, two numbers
mildly astonishing, as when
a zoo seal shakes the droplets from its lashes
to gaze on a concrete concession hut.
I own, I mean, I share
one cat, one collander, a set of sharp knives,
a view of black city rooftops that shine
as if they’d been wept upon.
No matter how relentlessly I perform this act
of piling year upon year
—which includes
my hide stiffening over the inner purple gush,
soreness, sometimes physical,
a sharpening hand,
increasing, boring desires to discourse —
explosions happen.
I lie trapped in low-ceilinged rooms
where sand drifts up against the splashboards
to drown fast in the wet grease of dreams
while outside the planets, murderously ravishing,
are sucked careening through a sky
that is ancient as the face of a newborn.
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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