Biggest fish I will ever see,
men caught you
and hung your death
on a tree by the river.
That night I slept in a huge bed
on a screen porch.
I heard your skull talking,
and in their skulls
the men heard you too.
No one knows exactly what you said
and continue to say.
Your bones are long gone.
The nail that held you
remains to be swallowed up
by years of bark.
It is all just water.
I believe that’s what I heard—
It is all just water—
the reason it feels so good
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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