#1
I’m thankful that you are not a health food product,
I don’t want to choke you down.
You can be the morning smoothie for when I’m bad
I’ll swallow you with delight
–
#2
I love you like I love my morning coffee
You are brown and tasty and I miss you if I don’t have you
I can feel you in my teeth,
Under my skin,
Especially in my face
and when I can’t sit down
Text by Louise Trueheart
Illustration by Judy Mièl
Begun in 2021, Wart Paintings is an ongoing series that is part of an ever-growing body of warts Johanna Hedva has been cultivating for years. Mysterious, recalcitrant, and oddly sentient, warts testify to an animist reality, antagonizing our belief in individual agency by forcing us to negotiate with and relate emotionally to an inanimate foreign body embedded in our own. An old wives’ tale states that warts will leave the body if you simply ask them to, as if they are listening. There is a relationship there—what is it?
