Ate stew, shot a man,
Bandy body spraddled, so full of lead
Cabron can’t even walk uphill.
Derringer spit out of bullets
Empty as a gutted steer
Found a soiled dove
Got me some cash roll for a night.
Hacienda next dawn,
Indian scalps round my neck.
Jacal shack full of hunched men
Kicked that hut down,
Limped them with shots,
Morning to scalp them,
Noontime, sang.
Offal yarned in my satchel saddle
Prairie oyster in the other,
Quit the flats, into town
Raised on prunes and proverbs
Scorched a church,
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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