The hospital lobby was lined with short
and long views of Audubon’s birds,
the tallest ones’ necks curved, all the way
down, to fit into the life-size space
of the double octave. When I got upstairs
to my love’s brother’s door, the curtain
was partly open, he was sitting up
on the raised bed, back in the corner
of the room, as if almost outside
the scene, at the edge of a clearing, his face
nearly empty of expression, except for
endurance and absence of hope. He was in pain
all the time now. His eyes were wide-open,
like the eyes of someone shocked—but not
the emotion of shock, but the matter of it—
and, with his round glasses and long
neck, he looked a little like a secretary bird,
backed up into a small enclosure.
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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