Midwinter night,
Clark & Halstead brushed with this week’s snow
grill lights blinking at the corner
decades ago
Smokestack poked above roofs & watertower
standing still above the blue
lamped boulevards,
sky blacker than th’east
for all the steel smoke
settled in heaven from South.
Downtown—like Superman’s Gotham City
battleshipped with Lights,
towers winking under clouds,
police cars blinking on Avenues,
space above city misted w/fine soot
cars crawling past redlites down Avenue,
exuding white wintersmoke—
Eat Eat said the sign, so I went in the Spanish Diner
The girl at the counter, whose yellow bouffant roots
grew black over her pinch’d face,
spooned her coffee with knuckles
puncture-marked,
whose midnight wrists had needle tracks,
scars inside her arms:—
“Wanna go get a Hotel Room with me?”
The Heroin Whore
thirty years ago come haunting Chicago’s midnite streets,
me come here so late with my beard!
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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