Murdered me; why I have no thoughts at all.
Run your hands along my temples where something
Beats like a sea with no land, or a cry
Timbreless, unhouselled of any throat.
For dry, dry that full April tongue will call
And only the treacherous, magian spring
Striding through the ferns with potent thigh
Will hear, subtle with ear of ram and stoat.
What did you expect to find in this head?
Some center, some knowledgable grace,
The hierachy of custom’s sweetness?
These are sick and, murdering, have murdered me.
When you turn, sun-veiled, sun-given, to my face,
I know nothing of you except that nothingness
I dote on. From our chaining flesh we are free,
With all names put by, all duties dead.
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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