Today is beautiful the birds singing
in the trees where they have landed or in the air when
they are going, the sun wrapping its fingers
around the earth like a lover’s nipple
and tweaking, the dirt smells of all the stock car
tracks I have ever been to and of all the fields
I have ever plowed coming up from the ground
and hanging invisible in the air with the grass smell
of all the football fields I have ever had
my face rubbed in, mingling with the heat waves
rising from car bodies in the sun like the heat
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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