They seem to be gliding toward me, in dresses,
they float and turn, in summer floral, the
ladies of the fruit trees, in ruffles, in dishevel,
they are like the prettiest mother in the class.
And every bouquet on their batiste is like a
nipple, a puckered ruby, asking
for the pierce kiss. My mother seemed
to long to be dandled, she seemed terminally hungry.
Held close against her body, I was
pressed into human anguish, its blooms
and prickles and raking thorns and hazy
generalized wounders, pressed into the service
of her grieving orchards. Now, when I see
a blossom tree, I want to match
my apple or witch-hazel arms to it,
I want to be
the blossom tree,
as I wanted to be my mother, throw my little
spirit into her, to ease
the sorrow of her matter. And there were her breasts,
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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