If it’s spring in the city, have the marchers,
each one with a shrieking whistle, short-circuited the streets,
their cause as grave as the dirty cabs growling at their feet?
Is Paul Taylor at the City Center? Has my architecture-
grad-student-subtenant remembered Sting, a pet squirrel
whose appearance each May on the fire escape ledge
is as celebrated as our pink dogwood’s flowering? Privileged
as she is, eating Arabian almonds all these years, if she’s early
and hears me in the shower, she knows to come right in.
Will Joe, my Italian barber still tell me what to do in life,
reading my moods in his mirror—his razor like a fruit knife
against the peach’s flesh instead of the proud artist’s chin?
Will a burglar have borrowed my red Schwinn from the rooftop,
the rusty chain foiling a smooth delirious escape?
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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