Micki Blenkush lives in St. Cloud, MN and works as a social worker. She was selected as a 2017-2018 fellow in poetry for the Loft Literary Center’s Mentor Series program and was a 2015 recipient of an Emerging Artist Grant awarded by the Central MN Arts Board. Her writing has also appeared in: Typishly, Cagibi, Crab Creek Review. More can be found here: mickiblenkush.com.
Seated in gray swivel chairs sharing teawith a friend beneath the industrial sterilityof corporate phosphorescence, she declaresthat all consciousness is lightabout which I agree but don’t want to admitbecause it means that when in dying,as my grandma shed the opaque fastenersand began to gleam, I held fastto the steal locker of my father’s pain.He wondered how anyone could havelet his… Read more →
I can see by the fresh startle in my grandmother’s eyes that she’s slipping from this earth. All my words float up and pop like bubbles before she can grasp the luster of their meaning. When I mention the needlepoint crafts she used to make, my grandma looks confused, shakes her head like she can’t imagine. My voice rises against… Read more →
I chewed raw macaroni, uncooked oats, dry field corn from a cob. Gnawed sleeves, collars, and nibbled away erasers. I pulled threads from sweaters, spun them against my mouth’s roof like dialing a compass, then pressed the acute tang of Play-Dough, its misshapen, any-colored fruit deep into my cheek. Someone later said I wouldn’t have licked a frozen metal bridge… Read more →
Backyard of garter snakes stretched down to soggy marsh. My father left slices of death behind the mower. Up a hill alone to kindergarten. Red-marked worksheets strewn free from my bag. My father’s beercan collection shelved library neat. A rusted nail passed through my shoe. Sideburns and shag carpet. Gray fuel of smoke. My mother at the sink. At the… Read more →