You separated my hometown from Kentucky
And south of us you deftly touched Indiana. Ohioans drove back over you
With lower-priced (untaxed) beer and bourbon in the trunks
Of their cars to take to Cincinnati and get drunk
Less expensively than with Ohio purchases. In my teenage years
I drove over you in the other direction—to Campbell County—
To gamble, to the Hotel Licking to look at the pretty young prostitutes, and drink six-point-seven-percent Hudepohl Beer.
Your heyday had come when I was ten. We were down in the basement
To see if you were there yet. You Hooded! You overflowed your banks!
Everything was wet
For miles around you. You were in the papers, trees stood in you up to their faces. Men rowed
Boats from one side of a street to another. Doctors
Ran around the city giving typhoid shots. I kept a scrap book
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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