The traveling dissection tent is gone.
The stakes are pulled, the mason jars are cracked
and crusted with formaldehyde. The lawn
is a brown slab. I lie down. I am packed
with gauze and dusty air that lets me sail
inside myself, until I am alive,
my feet in scalpel-oil, the spicy trail
of fluid on the sheet.
We would arrive
at dusk, and stay, and watch.
Now I am cold.
I want the Lady in the Smock. She smelled
like buttermilk and almonds. Father told
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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