In her dream
the wind blew her vagina out the bedroom
down the Spanish steps
into the moonlit alleys.
There’s no need to say much
not much about such a freeflying vagina.
Tarquin Jr., son of Tarquin the Proud
stood by his draperies scratching his insomnia
thinking of poems
when it fluttered like a butterfly
gone crazy for his nose.
He grabbed it:
he only wanted to write a poem
but when he touched its soft lips
it whispered its maiden name
& he broke into nervous laughter.
Before dawn another gust returned it
to Lucrece dreaming of levitation.
Tarquin Jr., had planted kisses
& tied Turkish ribbons to each pubic hair.
The Roman republic was never quite the same.
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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