s w i f t s  &  s l o w s: a quarterly of crisscrossings

Spin Straw
 Elaine Woo & Margret Schulz Johnston

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Blood, crimson buds, dribble, seek root.

Mind distorted, smashed her face into her reflection. Mirror fractured,  ground glass.  On-job accident, once a paramedic, left her a severed rose. Petals brown, pucker.

Amanda eavesdropped on mother, who fretted to father, I don’t know where she’s coming from.  She prefers animals to people.  Animals can’t tear flesh with words, they mime their emotions, instincts.

Daughter’s torso couldn’t withstand restriction. Careful draping disguised her torso but not her vulnerability. Ribs too fragile to play baseball, she ate and ate, caged self to home.  A ball in the chest would be the end. Amanda obsessed about singer Alanis Morrisette.

Mind unable to unscramble routes.  Not fit to drive. Freedom,  a forgotten word. Her dad schooled her in the use of a knife. Amanda vexed her sister-in-law, barged into her medicine cabinet, x-ray eyes parsing her pills, subjecting them to uneducated analysis.

Sirens tear through the black night. At sunrise, Uncle: We’ll tell you what happened in time.

Dawn’s elevator at the pent house suite.

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Paintings:  Margret Schulz Johnston.  Poem:  Elaine Woo.

Elaine Woo is a Canadian poet and artist.  She is the author of the collections, Put Your Hand in Mine, Signature Editions, 2019 and Cycling with the Dragon, Nightwood Editions, 2014. Her artwork is  found in Otoliths, h& (handandpoetry) and S/tick. She celebrates her first collaboration with her closest friend, Margret, with a cornucopia of summer fruit, in the hope Margret can vicariously savour, too.

Margret Schulz Johnston (1954-2018) studied art at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in northern British Columbia.  She exhibited in her native Canada.  She believed that art in its many forms can….give thought to many types of emotions in the viewer, as well as express the sheer amazement of life itself… and what we do to ourselves.  It provides an opportunity for rethinking the banal and an alternate perspective from the trite and complacent reality we tend to fall into as a collective.