Summer was dry
but the farmers forget
and plow the dead stalks under.
Today the wind is lifting
the first loose dirt away.
The elms in the Mahnomen park
are striped for felling,
and sugar beets litter
the road at sharp curves.
Tree trunks lay scattered
where they landed after
the tornado of 1958.
Outside Crookston a yellow dog
just made it to the ditch
to die, and farther ahead,
a mile from the border,
old shoes line the shoulders.
Canadians are home now,
wearing new ones.
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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