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
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