One boy was hard-of-hearing,
red-haired, freckled, never smiled,
another wore a white bib,
smelled of milk, and wept easily,
a third was taller than I,
taller even than I am now
with long dangling arms, pale hands;
he walked leaning to one side,
his small head pulled down between
narrow shoulders. I’d meet them
just after dawn on Sundays
behind our flat in the cobbled.
glass-strewn alley. Our task was
to break whatever had not
been broken: bottles, light bulbs,
thick, one-sided scratched records
of Caruso and Ponselle
that sailed over back fences
surrendering their music.
Once the cops came with push brooms
and made us sweep the long block
while they smoked and laughed, two large
red-faced uniformed flunkies
who hadn’t the least idea
of why the five of us had
chosen this work on Sunday
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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