Because there are things we don’t understand, we’re shaking
our heads no. But still there are acupuncture needles,
mysterious as Excalibur, in a numb chest,
working. We shake our heads no but a ten-mile fish
scratched into plateau takes fish-shape only from ten miles
up; it dates back to the Pleistocene. No. Say the ivy doesn’t
eat light, say the other nine-tenths of iceberg and two-thirds
of brain are out of sight out of mind, there was not a hailstone
soccerball-big on the roof of Old Lady Hathaway’s house
back in ’54, there is no such thing as the extrasensory yo-yo
thread growing warm, and taut, when I turn my back to you and it
pulls me facing you moist-eyed again and the sheets crease
like siamesetwin-placenta between us now and I’m in you like crazy.
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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