“Is it raining there?”
your voice on the phone
wondered for no reason
right at the end.
It was, where you were.
I looked out. It wasn’t.
But after I hung up
the dumb receiver
(why couldn’t we both
have stayed off the hook?)
in a minute or two
I saw a few sprinkles,
confirming the proverb,
you might say, about
the just and the unjust.
But only just.
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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