The word for childish greed
in Armenian is the same
as for an eye with a hole.
After years of collecting,
adding, rolling-up,
stuffing trinkets
into trinket boxes
all the locks snap open.
She discovers her eyes
well up and water
at flea markets.
She sneezes, sneezes.
Aunt Berta tries to empty
the bottomless,
makes presents of
dangling, tinkling
bangles. There are
never enough takers.
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.
Subscribe for free: Stitcher | Apple Podcasts | Google Play