Some days you run out and love
every man that you can.
The wind is heard hollering
through open spaces
between the dirty sheets.
You say you are doing it
for every man who never
got the chance.
The streets are blustery
but you are there with a man
you don't even know
pretending yourself into
a story you have fashioned
of the righteousness of
whores and lovers.
Like flowers, each is beautiful,
unique, and short-lived.
Sometimes through those
open spaces, you also hear,
like strange distant sirens,
the lonesome cries of the dead.
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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