One Poem by Marcus Whalbring

 

An Imaginary Garden with Real Toads in It

 

The entrance is brighter than you’d think

considering this garden isn’t real,

a place where winds grow out of the ground, 

where no seeds need sunlight

because it’s always night, but thankfully,

there are flowers made of smokeless fire

burning in all colours and all directions,

so you won’t get lost,

where the sections of vegetables,

orchestras of peppers, squash, and tomatoes,

stand in rows, harmonious voices

vibrating their vines like violin strings

as the pumpkins provide percussion,

where the trees making up the gate

that keep this place in place

somehow seem to make such a dance of standing still, 

while in the middle of it all, a small pond ripples,

like the head of a silver-black bass drum, as if boiling,

the lilies’ petals trembling as they’re nearly trampled

by the toads now coming out of it like mourners

who gather on the shore, breathing, it seems, in unison

the way colours on a painted wave

bend through each other to behave

like water, and so this glowing choir croaking

through the hedges and the pondweeds

have come to join the orchestra,

to shadow-sing among the blue thornless roses,

the concert now blooming

with flame-like movements that flicker

star-like amidst the night skies

that form for you every time you close your eyes.

Marcus Whalbring is the author of A Concert of Rivers from Milk & Cake Press, as well as How to Draw Fire from Finishing Line Press and Just Flowers from Crooked Steeple Press. A graduate of the MFA program at Miami University, his poems and stories have appeared or are forthcoming in, Strange Horizons, Space & Time, Haven Spec, Illumen, The Dread Machine, Abyss & Apex, Spaceports and Spidersilk, Cortland Review, Pittsburgh Quarterly, Spry, and Underwood Press, among others. He’s a high school teacher, a father, and a husband. You can connect with him via twitter at https://twitter.com/marcuswhalbring or learn more about his work at www.marcuswhalbring.com