I am looking at a movie
In which the monster is
Never seen—so far.
Human remains, however,
Are flagrantly on view.
Three school chums,
On their bicycles, in the
Woods, are set upon by fur
and fang; the fat boy’s
Glasses, dropping to
The ground, drip scarlet.
A lady cop dies
Electrocuted against
A giant fuse box,
Her body jerking
Lustily to the rhythm
Of shooting sparks.
A school janitor
Screams and heaves,
Impaled on a rail.
All of them lose
their eyes —bloody
Sockets smile
Where iris and cornea
Should gleam.
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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