“Nebraska and Oklahoma have the longest contiguous border
Of any two states,” you announce.
Your hair stands up in corkscrews
Imparting the distracted air
Of a genius able to persuade anyone
That Nebraska and Oklahoma share a border
In spite of Kansas sitting in between.
I rushed to my atlas to check on this proximity.
My geography is faulty, a basic skill never properly acquired.
Like long division.
Never mind “contiguous” borders.
Let’s just get our states in order.
Our land masses organized. But this is not possible.
If I mention the Punjab, you embark upon the Humboldt Current
Which flows, to my knowledge, nowhere near Hindus.
A quirk of circuitry too brilliant to follow
Spirals you continents away
Like the cyclone that swallowed Kansas.
Our minds never meet when fact intervenes:
I know too few to counter the punctilious onslaught
Of your passion to misinform.
My only defense against your smooth wrong-headedness
Is to retreat to high ground, altering the terrain.
Esoteric facts, mostly unverifiable.
Are your slithery armies; a rude semblance
Of common sense is my recourse.
Outside this cerebral misalliance
We meet congenially, with the nearness of love, in Nebulae.
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