The one resting now on a plant stem
somewhere deep in the vine-hung
interior of South America
whose wings are about to flutter
thus causing it to rain heavily
on your wedding day
several years from now
and spinning you down
a path to calamity and ruin,
is—if it's any consolation—
a gorgeous swallowtail,
a brilliant mix of bright orange
and vivid yellow with a soft
dusting of light brown along the edges.
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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