Some say it’s pickled
(formaldehyde) in the basement
of a funeral parlor in Indiana.
Some say the mortician
had heard of Dillinger’s
legendary endowment—
the gangster’s gun molls
and cellmates talked.
When the corpse was delivered
by the FBI, the undertaker
couldn’t wait for the stiffs
great unveiling. He wasn’t
interested in bullet holes
(one in the face was
a matter for makeup).
He undertook to measure
length, circumference:
Even non-tumescent
it was monumental.
Why should such a marvel
be buried? The mortician,
with his wife’s boning knife,
carved away his fleshly
trophy. No one would know:
When laid out in his coffin
the gangster wore a suit.
Some nights as his wife
slept he crept down
to the basement, removed
the red velvet cloth
covering the pickle jar,
switched on the lamp—
the jar brilliantly backlit—
and sat admiring.
A few times he invited
cronies from his club
to come view his jar.
They joked, speculated
what woman could accommodate
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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