These days sleep comes
to me only through
the aid of three white pills.
Every night
I repeat the magic
words aloud—melatonin,
magnesium, ashwagandha
root and leaf extract
plus magnolia bark
extract that contains
honokiol and magnolol.
Pharmaceutical lullaby.
Charm to conjure
sleep’s sure
pure white oblivion.
I sleep so sound
I don’t remember
any dreams. Except
the recurring one in which
my brother lies dying.
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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