Right now in the rest area it’s sunny and cold. Someone
is taking a picture of the vending machine. I have
never been sad for appropriate reasons. Never
have I sat in the wet grass looking not at dark sky
but blue paper someone had carefully taken
hours to punch out in a shape invisible
until the flashlight is turned on below. Earlier
when I said everything is a switch immediately
the interlocking gears in the self-hatred mechanism
began to grind. Part of me is always about to turn
in a direction I will never go. Trucks roar
filled with things people need. Sometimes I sound
to myself like a robot. Too many times as a teen
I stared onto the surface of a mysterious
solvable multifaceted cube. I can see you don’t need
me to stretch out my hand to point to dread
and its little button. The door swings open,
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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