Night arrives solid and heavy
more than several blocks long—to displace
its weight and float like a tanker over us.
It is because my husband is from the midwest
that he dreams of twisters. Every Spring
in his head he is running to beat the wind.
Sometimes, a child again
he is at the diningroom table over-seeing
an arrangement of baseball cards and
interrupting that satisfied moment, a sudden darkness,
false night. It is as if the moon slid its face
in front of the sun and beyond the window—leaves,
limbs, garbage can lids fly by—horizontal, gravity
seeming to nap.
He hears his dead father’s cough from the front room,
his father’s slippers hit the floor and rush for the screen door.
A garage three-doors-down is lifted,
picked up and turned ninety degrees and placed
back down on its own foundation.
This is Power—indiscriminate, unexpected — slicing
the afternoon in half.
Other nights, he finds himself an adult,
memory so accurate that it is surreal,
his first wife’s walk, his mother’s blouse,
his nephew’s first dirty word.
He is always racing against the odds—trying to
run fast through knee deep water,
hide in a cellar,
close a blown window,
latch a gate,
the funnel-cloud eating a path toward him.
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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