Standing in the ladies’ room line,
in the temple basement, the woman in front of me
said, “I’ve been sitting behind you, admiring
your hair.” “Thank you! White for Rosh
Hashanah!” I say, and then, “It was
a gift from my mother.” I love to say
my mother to someone I imagine as a normal
person—though who knows. And I love
to see cut flowers age—we are cut
flowers, when they sever the cord, we begin
our dying. She lived to be eighty-five,
I needed every hour of it.
Each time I made her laugh on the phone,
that warm gurgle—and she couldn’t reach out with her
long curved polished nails, to stroke me—
we were making something together, like a
girl-made mountain stream among
Sierra onion, and lupine, stonecrop
and leopard lily. And especially
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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