The cops don’t carry magnums of champagne
in the backseats of their cruisers.
In my town, seven year old kids know how to steal motorcycles,
and where they can get new serial numbers.
Watch out, keep down.
My father was the star of the Demolition Derby,
my mother sang with the Les Elgart Band until her voice gave out.
But this won’t get me a Liberty Bond Sandwich,
or a banjo good enough to carry to California.
When it gets too hard, go soak your head in a bucket of gasoline.
There isn’t a work-clothes store in this whole city
that will sell me another black t-shirt with a pocket on credit.
I can’t take it.
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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