I hoped to find under my skin
A lump embodying that which
Powers my words invisibly—
In guts, in the devious sap
Of hormones, in grey medulla—
But failed. Therefore I trick open
That box with which we’re provided
And prize out, by main force of will:
A three-ribbed smoking prime roast beef;
Inside this, pillowed, a woman
Stripped full to the hair of her shame;
In this, sound six-percenting bonds,
Compounding, self-reproductive;
In this, butlers for indolence,
‘Not in, he won’t be in’; and boxed
In this, bound in stamped calf, my words,
Volumes gilded with my name: me.
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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