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

High Spirits
 Elaine Woo & Margret Schulz Johnston

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Nightfall veil hides prison camp’s smooth intestinal walls, toe to heel, to heal…
first crouches, second mounts his shoulders, third climbs astride second’s, and so on
until the line is comaradely veritical inter-locked Leggo blocks. Energy cooking,
back-patting whispers, they boost selves over the uvula, conspiratorial laughter
while bumping over the rounds of the lingual tonsil, spring thumbs up, stub toes
on the vallate paillae, crawl painfully over the fungiform papillae and high-five
as they fall off of tip of tongue into the sky of freedom on parachutes of saliva bubbles.

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Painting:  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 second 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.

“Two years after the loss of Margret, she and her work continue to fill the interstices of Elaine’s mind and memory.”