in my mother’s voice

Monkey crawling around the perimeter,
I do remember ice skating.
Your small hands on the rim of the rink.

All the way to Colorado
I cried for you. The wind lashing
your curls, riding your screams
along the highway and up
the mountains while you
and your brother ate
PB& Js in the back of the car.

Ladybugs and tambourines.
Rain on the windshield, sun
in the distance.

I have been called my name and more.
You, a mirror reading me back
where I came from, where I failed
to go. I thrived

with you in and out of my arms
knocking on walls of plastic bricks
blowing everything down.

You may never tell me where you’ve been,
though I know the same hands on your backside

calling for your chest and throat. I know
cold every month. What it can take.

I would have left you in those mountains,
on your knees in the center of the ice.
Would have offered that as your end
if I had known. I asked

what you remember of joy.
Once, you said, there was a big slide, red as lips.
When you glided down, your legs tucked
in a potato sack, you floated, became
wind.

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.