Continuing the Mystery of Unfound Things
Micki Blenkush In second grade I steered my best friend around the playground as though we were both on safari. We shuffled in spring boots while I pointed to trash emerging from beneath the melting snow as promised revelation. There were no ordinary gum wrappers. No arbitrary newspapers wedged beneath hapless shrubs. Each day I commented on the lean of fence posts, a half-buried glove, sticks piled beneath the slide. For two weeks just she and me alone walking the edge of the playground until a smashed can led us to the monkey bars where we climbed until the next thing steered us somewhere new. When Joann grew bored I hid a piece of bark in the teacher’s Kleenex box, then feigned surprise at the back of the room during math. I crayoned Keep Looking in blocky letters, left it under her coat. After she joined her other friends on the ordinary swings, I penciled letters on a block of wood professing love, of all things, for Ricky the neighbor boy then buried it in the sand. I denied my own script when his sister dug it up and held it high above her head. |
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About the Author: 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 appeared in a number of journals, including: Gyroscope Review, South 85 Review, Star 82 Review, Pittsburgh Poetry Review, Sequestrum, and Typishly. More can be found here: mickiblenkush.com