My Puppets
I wake up mornings snug in my bed-puppet.
Not the liveliest in my repertoire,
but wait, it gets better: next is my pants-puppet,
bandy-legged, hyperactive, true
to life, puppeting lifelike down the hall
onto my waiting elevator-puppet—
a marionette—then down, down to my bus-
puppet, puppeting all those nodding heads,
those drowsy fingers on their so-called smart phones,
and wait till you get to see my office-puppet,
a tour de force of digitalization
that makes the city flap its arms in panic.
So this must be my poem-puppet, yes?
Don’t be naive. The poem is my hand.
Can’t you feel it here inside you, friend?
It enters where it can, and reaches up,
way up behind your eyes. So realistic,
how your mouth moves like that as you read.
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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