The moon is sick. I fear she'll die
from lack of love, from poverty
and homelessness, lost in the sky,
our daughter dropping down the sea
of negligence. And who will glow
on walkers in the night? The moon
will glow and nobody will know
although her name and white balloon
will look the same. But she'll be gone.
Scholars will say, "She went. She was
an obscure custom of a race
of fools." The moon is sick, and on
the crackled face, a pox, a buzz
of priests are nailing her in place.
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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