Welcome to Sunday Morning Lyricality, currently featuring “Light” poems by central Minnesota writers.
In this time of uncertainty, poets, artists, and other creative types have much to teach us. When we’re confused, bewildered, and questioning what we know, making art—drawing, painting, sculpture, music, dance, poetry, basketry, weaving, crafting, or any kind of creative “making—can be meaningful. When we find ourselves in unfamiliar situations, taking an open, creative approach allows us a sidelong glimpse at patterns we might, due to a primitive fear of the unknown, be incapable of observing and seeing with our rational-logical mindset.
–Tracy Rittmueller
Painted Cave
Micki Blenkush
All week I’ve been crawling
the dirt floor of memory,
trying to read flinty shapes
like calligraphy
in flickered light.
Inside-out, I move
through where I lived
before I knew of maps.
All that I think I know
can be traced to pattern.
I was primitive then,
working pigment to skin.
No-one sketches
the beasts
they already know.
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 recently appeared in: Josephine Quarterly, Gyroscope Review, Star 82 Review, West Texas Review, Postcard Poems and Prose, Metafore, The McNeese Review, Typishly, Cagibi, and Crab Creek Review. More can be found here: mickiblenkush.com
"Painted Cave" first appeared in Clemintine Unbound 5 / 17. Appears here with the permission of the author.