“Wall Street says that cake sales are low”
Or to put it bluntly
“Cake is fizz”
So why is a diabetic dreaming of cake
Asked to leave a temple
Because he didn’t know that rice cakes
Were sacrament?
(He managed to jam some into his pockets)
He dreamed that Mount Diablo was a Devil’s food cake
He began to munch it down until his path was
Interrupted by his Pancreas
The Pancreas had sticklike arms and legs
It was frowning
It put up a hand and beckoned him to halt
He pushed aside the Pancreas and finished his
Meal
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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