Sparrows disappear
As the shape of a wing is recognized;
The front door, walked to
On blue oil,
Hinges at the bottom;
Gasoline hoses wave a heavy hand;
The sky shatters like a blue shell;
Veins from the back of the right hand pull free,
And float in the air, a tree of dead blood;
And there is, suddenly, one more step
At the bottom of the stairs.
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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