After the bruises subsided
came the peeling.

Skin and scar like eraser shavings
brushed off a mistake-ridden

math quiz. I imagined myself
a snake shedding a time capsule

of old mix CDs and Hot Topic
clip-on hair extensions. I imagined

the archeologist blowing away
the dead skin to reveal a whole

network of embroidered flowers
gossiping about my ancient failures:

my crooked hemlines, my hairy legs.
Not to mention, after all this trouble,

the nurse muttering You still have a lot
of breast tissue. As if the remains

outweigh the losing. My hands
in the mirror grasping my loose flesh

as it steams into a milky cloud
frothing above my straightened shoulders.

Once, at a park in Virginia, my mother
saw a rattlesnake coiled like a cut-curl

on a stone ledge. It looks soft, she said
reaching as though she might touch it.

Carrie George is a poet, teacher, and bookseller living in Akron, OH. She received her MFA from Kent State University and the Northeast Ohio MFA program. She is a program coordinator at the Wick Poetry Center and a bookshop associate at Elizabeth’s Bookshop. Her work has appeared in Hayden's Ferry Review, Cosmonauts Avenue, The Indianapolis Review, and elsewhere.

Adja Yunkers (1900–1983) was an American abstract painter and printmaker. He was born in Riga, Governorate of Livonia, Russian Empire in 1900. He studied art in Leningrad, Berlin, Paris, and London. He lived in Paris for 14 years, and then moved to Stockholm in 1939. In Stockholm, he published and edited the arts magazines ARS magazine and Creation magazine. In 1947 he moved to the United States, where he lived for the rest of his life. He held a teaching position at the New School for Social Research in New York while summers were spent teaching at the University of New Mexico. In 1949, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship. During the 1950s he primarily worked in color woodcuts, introducing brushwork into the genre. In 1960, he began producing lithographs. He produced two important series of lithographs at the Tamarind Lithography Workshop in Los Angeles―Salt (five lithographs) and Skies of Venice (ten lithographs). Yunkers died in New York City in 1983.