The sky is full of bleating lambs
which bob above us. The rains flood
our apartment. Here no word exists
for pail no word for help.
You say I don't, I don't—
your mouth keeps moving
long after the sound stops.
There's no kindness to you now.
A small patch of light defines
your body like a plate-glass window.
I say, How can anyone not know
how to fold toothpaste?
I come to love only the night
and sounds of the orbiting lambs.
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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