& with a blunt cafeteria table knife
mr macadam clerical officer bludgeons
the half poached egg that is his
on toast every while he can take it
on a disused glasgow subway stair some
old shored up harry with an empty alum-
inium cigar case stuck on his pinky howls
because just when he hoped to come across
someone purse proud frost corrugated his
brow and queues of maybe misters grew
and passed him swirled in and out of the
tube loudly cheered on by the vendors
of newspapers grapefruit and clockwork
motored poodles almost ignoring this
washed up howler in the grinding of
escalators & the moan of never answered
platform phones but they wouldnt let
him be with his empty aluminium cigar
case & his bent to & fro cane walking
stick the ticket collectors & porters
came folk with swordfish in their flies
& steelcapped ex WD boots & because he
was howling dry & didnt have anyone to
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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