I’m getting tired of not wearing underwear
and then again I like it
strolling along
feeling the wind blow softly on my genitals
though I also like them encased in something
firm, almost tight, like a projectile
at
a street corner I stop and a lamppost is
bending over the traffic pensively like a
praying mantis, not lighting anything,
just looking
who dropped that empty carton
of cracker jacks I wonder I find the favor
that’s a good sign
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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