Last night
At Mother Tomas’,
We danced the
Chicken-with-its-head-chopped-off,
Her hands on my buttocks,
My crotch puffed
Like a lung
And holding its breath.This wonderful woman
Stitched my neck
With kisses
And told secrets—
The silverware she stole,
Her spinster aunt
Living in Taxco, a former lover
With a heart condition.
I in turn, being educated
And a man of
Absolutely no wealth
Whispered a line
Of bad poetry
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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