I want my beard
To be as long as
A road,
As long as fifteen busses
Lined up side by side
To jump over.
How long? As long
As your arm,
Ten feet long.
I want it to be
A truck.
I want it to
Run over your eyes.
I want it so long
You can’t resist.
I want it back with
Just a few rough places,
Veined with grey.
I want my beard
To carry your load, hoe
A field, tow
A barge.
Let my beard go
Home with you.
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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