A few months back, we went down to Huelva
to clean our graveyard—condoms hung
from the saplings shooting up from the dead:
British fighter pilots mainly, and an American.
My bishop chainsawed brush and got welts
from the sap. I followed in a wheelbarrow.
Dressed in my clericals.
Townsfolk laughed.
I think about my country and hope this reaches you—
as Lorca hoped his poems might reach us.
I think of Natalie’s son washing plates in the back.
I see those New Englanders brush crumbs away.
Sometimes I feel out of place, but then I think
of Katharine Lee Bates, a missionary to Spain
and closeted lesbian, who wrote our famous hymn.
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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