Every single one gone Even the gray ones
the color of his eyes The black one
carved from coal shade of his hair
Agates Cat's-Eyes Clickers Mag-Lites Slags
Ribbons Spanners Onyx Back to Sand
We should never have bought the slingshots
We should never have traded for baseballs
We should never have tried to float them
in the tar pit near Cuming Street
We should never have gone double or nothing
We should never have borrowed Bud Miller's
sledgehammer
We should never have looked up the word
OPHTHALMOLOGY when Mary Davis
showed us her collection of China dolls
We should never have built the campfire
We should never have discovered the robin's nest
We should never have studied sign language
We should never have followed the railroad
track to the Saddle Creek trestle
We should have learned how a sundial works
We should have heard the tone in our mother's
whisper
We should have avoided the ice-cream truck
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.
Subscribe for free: Stitcher | Apple Podcasts | Google Play